domain:acoup.blog
SkoomaDentist
42m ago
I did engineering but the grading guide for such questions was generally "A perfect answer should cover almost all of [a list of points]". A question might be something like "Explain FIR and IIR filters and compare their advantages and disadvantages" (I specialized in signal processing). You can fit quite a lot of points in two pages if you don't spend the majority of it on pointless waffling like Scott always does.
Another way to look at it is that if four pages of writing is enough to get me a conference paper (and thus effectively counts as a course's worth of credits with a perfect grade), why should I spend more than half of that on an essay worth 25% of exam points?
Sure, it's different if you're studying literature or something similar where the writing itself is the point but for the vast majority of topics the point of such essay answers is simply to show that you understand the topic, not to make the grader suffer through your poorly filtered stream of consciousness.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
59m ago
It would have been better if it'd happened differently, but I think Bubbles is better off. I know I found it really freeing when I realized the competitive and performance-focused environment of WoW wasn't for me and started playing other games.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
To a first approximation, every STEM course I took in undergrad was curved, and every humanities course was not.
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
Lol. Sounds a bit painful.
This makes me think that groups should be more sorted by skill. I remember being in a team vs team game clan that was more "social" and carried a few horrendous players. It affected my enjoyment.
BlindDeafRat
1hr ago
What is "keyboard turning"?
You can turn your character with A and D, or you can do it with your mouse. Mouse is much, much faster and more precise. It's easier to dodge mechanics and have better awareness if you use your mouse.
A some people (usually beginners) also click on their abilities instead of using hotkeys. So their mouse is too busy to focus on turning.
It's a sign of not playing in an optimal way.
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
I believe it works the same way in most of Northern Europe. Multiple canteens operated by companies providing subsidized meals for students and below market rate rental housing owned by various non-profit foundations and student unions, all with loose association with the universities (ie. you have to be a student in one of them to live in the housing / receive subsidization but the universities have no control over any of that).
ABigGuy4U
2hr ago
Why would it get dark
Because the people who control 99 percent of the wealth of the planet (which no longer requires human consumers or employees), and 100 percent of the military resources (which no longer require human soldiers) will decide that they don’t need 7.9 billion useless eaters crapping up their planet.
sockpuppet2
2hr ago
Or just compare standardized grad school admissions test scores to SAT scores. The problem is getting the data.
Alabasata
3hr ago
I like to hope that graphical calculators are not a thing any more
Go to any office supply store near you. Are TI-83s still for sale?
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
3hr ago
Grading on the curve has always been a mark of intellectual laziness/lack of rigor in a feild.
It's nothing more than a means of convincing people with high verbal IQs and low mathematical literacy that students and professors dont actually have to do thier jobs (learn and teach respectively) to be "good" students or professors.
TowardsPanna
4hr ago
It's interesting that Blossom manages to be everyone's friend while being a highly skilled (I assume that's what "absolute gamer" means) player who gets held back by others, assumedly.
But at the same time it makes sense that the dead average player becomes abusive.
What is "keyboard turning"?
What did you cognize and conclude after being part of that group?
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
4hr ago
That would require work and intellectual rigor on the part of the professors. Intelligent rigourous people with good work ethic don't go into academia, they go into buisiness.
lagrangian
4hr ago
How about MIT or Caltech?
What'd be really fun is if we could also access performance reviews over time, to better assess job performance rather than interview performance.
dr_analog
razorboy
4hr ago
So many tech companies have recruiting databases that could probably tell you pretty easily the fail rate of candidates by CS degree from each university.
Based on my experience interviewing, CMU and Stanford are the most solid. But this is mid-2010s era.
anti_dan
4hr ago
While I dont doubt this is true, I doubt it is the driving force behind universities stressing graded coursework over exams. Instead I think that is a student-driven phenomenon, particularly female students who are now the vast majority at 4 year universities. Students are the customers for these courses, and this is a demographic that largely loathes high stakes exams. They vastly prefer being able to submit some homework 20 times over a semester and receive 20 grades rather than risk it all on a 90 minute final. In addition, no one grading homework gives out failing grades for completed assignments, so these students also perceive that this method ensures they get a good grade in their courses.
bonsaii
4hr ago
Don't these mechanisms already exist? Internships are just an extended practical test for potential hires, graduate schools use GRE and other tests, law grads still need to take the bar, medicine grads still need to take their boards, etc.
No_one
5hr ago
(Also, I really don't expect to see decent neuralink tech by 2030. It's just too damn hard.)
AI researchers and if US becomes progressive about getting value out of the dregs of society, there's like 50,000 heavily tattooed but basically healthy people fit for human testing down at CECOT.
SnapDragon
5hr ago
Well, based on what I know of the Canadian indigenous peoples (who the current PC treadmill calls the "First Nations"), there's a lot of crime, misery, and unrest as a result. But hey, people addicted to videogames are less destructive than people addicted to alcohol, so we'll see.
(Also, I really don't expect to see decent neuralink tech by 2030. It's just too damn hard.)
SnapDragon
5hr ago
Definitely an important point. I agree that there is a real possibility of societal breakdown under those kinds of conditions. Hopefully, even if UBI efforts never go anywhere, people will still somehow scrounge up enough to eat and immerse themselves in videogames. (We're kind of halfway there today, to be honest, judging from most of my friends.) Somehow society and the economy survived the insane COVID shutdowns (surprising me). I have hope they'll be resilient enough to survive this too. But there's no historical precedent we can point to...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
I'm not actually American but in Australia for humanities/law/essay-writing exams, you're effectively rewarded for how many points you can make as well as their quality and I'm pretty confident it's the same there. Maybe you do maths or something where there's only a single answer and simplicity is rewarded, idk...
Two pages seems quite short to me for an essay.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
None of them give you all that much more in the face of the tyranny of the rocket equation.
I'm pretty sure antimatter gives you a lot more power than chemical rockets, by any reasonable definition. You can get a decent fraction of c with antimatter.
Also, there's a huge difference between 'bird', 'propeller plane', 'rocket' and 'atomic rocket' in any realistic sense, with regards to what we're dealing with now. Is superintelligence capable of rewriting the fundamental laws of the universe like a real deity? No. Is that necessary to make vast changes to our lifestyle and existence? Absolutely not, just like you don't need intergalactic travel to totally transform our spaceflight scene.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
5hr ago
Hear hear!
I've tried to refrain from commenting on this myself but I found the middle of the WoT books to be tedious as often as not. I'm one of the ones that bogged down hard for the first time right around the bloody menagerie in TFoH. Nor did I particularly care for the style of rapid-fire exposition endings that were then revisited in excruciating detail in a subsequent book that evolved around that time, either, but Brandon Sanderson finished out the series so strongly that I liked it enough overall to go back for a re-read.
Which was a mistake that I was making because once again, I bogged down at the bloody menagerie and realized that regardless of how much I liked the series as a whole, life was too short for me to force myself to slog through those middle books all over again. I still think that the first four and last three books are tightly plotted and well written despite their length and I can only wonder at what might have been if Jordan had never gotten deathly ill with amyloidosis.
zeke5123a
5hr ago
The risk for the student is that they put off college for six months (hell they could apply for the following year). But having this fellowship would probably be a pretty big leg up on admissions. Is it that big of a risk for a student?
No_one
5hr ago
China is not stronger than the (hypothetical at this point) US-aligned alliance of democracies,
I have doubts about this. Much of that 'alliance of democracies' is EU and EU is an utterly hopeless project which would require a STEM-pilled / bureaucracy hating Stalin purging tens of thousands of people with extreme prejudice.
Chinese don't seem to be mired in bureaucracy and can 'just build things'.
Eugyppius recently noted a bridge that crashed in Dresden is not expected to be replaced until 2035! One fucking bridge over a shallow river, the kind that an engineering unit would build in 2 days! 2035! So when half or third of your 'strength' is in this kind of state, you have problems.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with US infrastructure issues, but it's not pretty either with e.g. Golden Gate bridge, where the new 'suicide nets' installed (400 million) cost a substantial fraction of the inflation adjusted cost of the entire bridge (supposedly 700 million $).
Yes, but their status relative to their husband will be lower, and even if they don't care about that then the things you have to do to marry someone high status and stay married to them are very different from the things you have to do to have your own achievements and gain status through them. One is much more agentic and less dependent on other people so it will be the preferred method.
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