The class I'm referring to is Writing for Mass Media. Admittedly, going into it I knew I would have to write for news, broadcasting, advertising, public relations and basically cover all aspects of media writing. I didn't, however, know this class would consist of 50% writing and 50% current events knowledge.
Every class, Helena Sarkio, the professor, reads us New York Times articles for a good 45 minutes, and every two weeks we have a quiz covering the topics. That would be fine if she didn't require us to know what she told us PLUS any advances or updates. Are you serious? We're college students taking four or five other classes. This would require us to constantly be reading NYTimes.com or watching CNN, and we simply don't have time for that.
I studied my notes and read as much as I could for the first two quizzes, and got a 50% on the first quiz and a 62.5% on the second. Just to see if I could outsmart the system, I typed up all of my notes, researched the topic
s on NYTimes.com and updated all of my information, studied my notes vigorously until 2AM, and studied for a half an hour before the third quiz.
Just because we discussed the three American winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine does NOT imply that I am supposed to be an expert on every Nobel Prize winner, nor the location of the awards ceremony. Therefore, when I go in able to spell the names of the Medicine Prize winners forwards and backwards, and name the school or company they work for and teach at, but the questions are "What is important about Elinor winning the Nobel Prize in Economics" and "On December 10th, most Nobel Prize awards are being given out in Oslo, Norway. Where are the rest of the awards being handed out on the same day?" I said Washington D.C. because God knows we never covered location, but then answer is Sweden.
When we were going over the quiz, the teacher so kindly called me out and said "Sara, where are the Nobel Prizes being handed out besides Oslo?" I shrugged and said "D.C.?" She literally scoffed at me and said "Come on, everyone knows they're handed out in Sweden, that question was supposed to be a free point." Are you serious? If it's "common sense," why put it on the quiz at all?
Another outrageous question was "Which food should you NOT avoid when trying to prevent risks of food poisoning?" There was "Caesar salad, Ben & Jerry's, tomato and mozzarella salad, Big Mac" as choices. We discussed in class how salad, tomatoes, ground beef, and cheeses can be risky when talking about food poisoning and other food born illnesses. Naturally, I chose Ben & Jerry's. The answer was Big Mac, and the entire class yelled in protest and she goes "Hm, I suppose that is sort of tricky, oh well, sorry, moving on!" Are you serious? Admit it when you're wrong and maybe we won't all hate you as much.
Moral of the story is that I don't believe it's reasonable to test students on current events unless the class is a current events course. Students simply do not have enough time in the day to successfully know everything that's going on in the world. Actually, a stay-at-home mom probably doesn't even have enough time to keep up to date on the same amount of topics. Screw it.
Picture of the day:
Stand up for yourself, Sara.
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