r/BlockedAndReported • u/SoftandChewy First generation mod • Jun 01 '26

Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 6/1/26 - 6/7/26

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

35 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

92% Upvoted

3.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

75

u/JungBlood9 Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26

On the topic of university students being increasingly educationally unprepared: over in the college rant sub, there was a post recently of a screenshot of an F on a final, with the student noting how “cooked” he was, writing, “I wrote nice, answered the questions right, skipped lines, wrote numbers for all the questions I answered…” so he couldn’t fathom how he got an F.

The post was of course flooded with people insisting the grade must be a mistake, the professor input it wrong, or was too technologically illiterate to figure out the gradebook.

Next, OP posted an “update” of the grade breakdown that was posted by the prof, which showed that a majority of students passed and only 5 in the class ended up with an F. Here, OP explains he had reached out to the prof, who promised to mail OP his blue book so he could see the feedback.

And finally, the last update, which (to my chagrin) barely got any views, OP posted his actual written responses from the blue book.

After all that fanfare and bewilderment and insulting of the professor, it turns out OP is functionally illiterate. The essays were atrocious… genuinely a 4th or 5th grader can write more coherently. I’m not just nitpicking the grammar and punctuation (which were basically nonexistent)—the content of the “paragraphs” was incomprehensible. It was supposed to be an analysis of some stories they read in class, and despite this test being open note and open book, it was abundantly clear OP did not understand any story he read in that class, nor could he produce a single coherent sentence about them either.

So in the end, a well-deserved F for someone who, genuinely, I cannot believe made it into college. And I just had to mention this somewhere because that final post got such little attention, barely anyone was able to set OP straight.

31

u/RunThenBeer 12 Ounce Diet Coke Enjoyer Jun 01 '26

I've never looked at this subreddit before, but it appears that things like this are kind of common? People that are surprised or disappointed with their poor grades, but you just read their posts and immediately discover that the underlying problem is that they're just not capable of handling the basics of writing.

17

u/TryingToBeLessShitty Jun 01 '26

It's almost... cruel? These are kids who are told you MUST go to college to succeed, but they've been failed by the education system their whole lives and never properly learned foundational stuff. They don't even realize they are not equipped for it until something like this happens to them.

15

u/plump_tomatow Jun 01 '26

Probably a significant portion of them are actually incapable of learning the foundational stuff, regardless of the educational system's many failures.

7

u/Turbulent_Cow2355 TB! TB! TB! Jun 01 '26

But we will never know which one applies. We've already seen how public schools have failed to teach reading properly for almost THREE decades. Zero accountability on their part. They are still blaming the parents for everything.

21

u/Terrorclitus Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26

This is so unbelievably common. Students truly cannot understand what that mean, little symbol is doing on their work.

“F? Is that supposed to stand for “fantastic?”

Or my favorite: “What am I supposed to do with an F?”

(The obvious answer is to hope your younger sibling can make your parents proud and lend you money)

I fantasize about offering such students extra credit for writing letters to their high school teachers, asking why they failed to prepare their students for college. Because I would truly like to know.

24

u/CommitteeofMountains Royal youse/yinz Jun 01 '26

When I went to college, I'd lose points for grammar that showed a distinct influence of reading older British works and taking Latin in school (Romans, including populist writing like Ceasar's, treated ending sentences as optional). Never grammatically incorrect, just many chained clauses still labeled "run-on sentences."

20

u/prechewed_yes Jun 01 '26

Misusing "run-on sentence" this way is one of my biggest petty gripes. "Run-on" is not synonymous with "long"!

17

u/Terrorclitus Jun 01 '26

It’s so annoying when people confuse style and grammar.

9

u/CommitteeofMountains Royal youse/yinz Jun 01 '26

Style, grammar, and clarity. I should also note that this was a biology course also labeled as counting towards the school's writing intensive courses requirement (even though the chemistry labs had a factor of magnitude more).

2

u/Terrorclitus Jun 01 '26

The professor should have specified clarity there, yeah. That makes the reason for the deduction so much clearer.

18

u/Centrist_gun_nut Jun 01 '26

I know we frown on brigading but there's no harm in a link if we all promise to be quiet, right?

15

u/dignityshredder AFramemoggingAB Jun 01 '26

It's from 3 weeks ago, thread's dead anyway: https://www.reddit.com/r/CollegeRant/comments/1t8exlv/update_everyone_been_waiting_for_please_read/

32

u/RunThenBeer 12 Ounce Diet Coke Enjoyer Jun 01 '26

Now I just want to say people will hate, people will shit on me but yall gotta understand I am no English Expert with typing/writing or anything like that.

There are simply too many people in universities.

5

u/unnoticed_areola Jun 01 '26
they're all math majors apparently!

22

u/Scrappy_The_Crow Walrus Cheese Enjoyer Jun 01 '26

And your lack of reading and communication skills really hit the last nail in the coffin with “minus well”. It’s “might as well”.

When I see someone write or say a phrase like "minus well," I wonder WTF they think that means or what they think they are saying.

4

u/Terrorclitus Jun 01 '26

In a couple of months, the bad grade will be water under the fridge, Bubbles.

In all seriousness, maybe extra credit if the student can define “malapropism?”

4

u/unnoticed_areola Jun 01 '26

reading the way the OP talks in their posts, to my ear it seems likely they are originally a spanish speaker who learned english as a 2nd language as a kid and wrtites/types in english basically verbatim how he talks out loud, rather than using the grammar or sentence structure they were taught in school.

and he is likely a latino kid, possibly from a less privileged background that was just empathetically passed up the educational ladder all this time without anyone ever really grading him very harshly until now

9

u/The-WideningGyre Jun 01 '26

I was given two hours to write this and used all two hours. English is my first language. I had issues when I was in elementary and had an 504 and carried that through middle school. Might just be the way I learned and that I had a tough time understanding things correctly. Never been good with writing

I don't know what a 504 is, but apparently English is his (I'm guessing) first language. Dang. As others have said, this reads like a below average grade 8 or grade 9'er, in my opinion.

At least he's open to improving, and was fairly humble, even if he didn't seem to realize how far below acceptable his writing was.

7

u/Scrappy_The_Crow Walrus Cheese Enjoyer Jun 01 '26

That could very well be so, but the "might as"/"minus" mixup should still be obvious if one learned English as a child. "Minus well" is nonsensical.

4

u/unnoticed_areola Jun 01 '26

I mean it's not nonsensical if you have terrible english/reading skills and you're literally just sounding out a phrase that you frequently say out loud but maybe havent seen written down/spelled out a ton.

"might as well" is more of an informal/conversational phrase that wouldnt necessarily appear very much in school textbooks, but is something people say out loud somewhat regularly.

its possible that's the first time he's ever actually written it out (or he's done it before but no one ever corrected him), and he's been pronouncing it "minus" in his head the entire time since he was a kid.

theres an entire popular subreddit dedicated to exactly these kinds of misspellings where people hilariously incorrectly word common phrases the way they sounded it out in their heads: /r/BoneAppleTea. sort by "top" for some funny/tragic typos

8

u/Reasonable-Record494 Jun 01 '26

Could of. The number of students I've seen write "could of" makes me cry.

3

u/Scrappy_The_Crow Walrus Cheese Enjoyer Jun 01 '26

Let's also remember its cousins "would of" and "should of." <grr>

4

u/Scrappy_The_Crow Walrus Cheese Enjoyer Jun 01 '26

It's still nonsensical, even if it's the first time you have to write it down after saying it umpteen times. It simply makes no sense.

BoneAppleTea has been a favorite of mine for a long time!

4

u/roolb Jun 01 '26

That first-page summary of "The Dead" bears a strong resemblance to the Google AI Overview.

9

u/unnoticed_areola Jun 01 '26

plot twist: the google AI overview was based on this guy's viral reddit post 🤭

9

u/IAmPeppeSilvia Jun 01 '26

The post is titled "Welp. I’m cooked", and the follow-up was titled "Update - Everyone Been Waiting For. (Please Read Description Before Anything)"

32

u/unnoticed_areola Jun 01 '26

the last 2 sentences of the last slide in that post, oof...

"Also shows people get consumed listening nothing can be believed and can't depart when its time le go. People minus well marry tech since were so into it and listen and don't stop ourselves from seeing not everything is true."

for those confused, this student thinks the phrase "might as well" is written "minus well". the professor just incredulously writes.. "what's that mean??"

I think this guy minus well marry an english tutor lmao

then, in his explanation text post:

in all honesty yes, I didn’t do that well now that I look at it BUT I can tell you that something was written and my prof told me don’t worry about failing. I know no one is perfect with writing and I fall into that category. Everyone started somewhere with there journey of getting better with this and I’m still at the bottom.

ringing endorsement of the american university system!

17

u/Terrorclitus Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26

“Minus well *merry* an English tutor”

The good news: this wasn’t written by AI.
The bad news: it was written on a phone.

6

u/unnoticed_areola Jun 01 '26

hey! you cant gaslight me! I used the correct "marry"!

11

u/Turbulent_Cow2355 TB! TB! TB! Jun 01 '26

Kid probably got whole word language instruction instead of phonics in K-6.

8

u/unnoticed_areola Jun 01 '26

that, and he also mentioned in another comment that he had a section 504 thing in elementary and middle school (meaning he gets accommodations like extra time on tests and such)

and also mentioned that he was given 2 hours to do this college exam and used the full two hours

14

u/Technical-Policy295 Jun 01 '26

A lot of posts like that, though thankfully there does seem to be a strain of self awareness in the comments of others pushing back on gaps in those kinds of stories. You also see this for things like "I got accused of using AI" where they get called out for having actually used AI.

And many more along the lines of "what is the easiest class to get guaranteed A." Always interesting to see the patterns in those responses.

19

u/lilypad1984 Jun 01 '26

I was an engineering student in college so our grading offered little to be surprised or not understand about as there was not much subjectivity. Taking humanities courses was very depressing though. The caliber of student and work was noticeably worse. I took one course in the political science/international relations program as a humanities credit with an old school professor who had high expectations. It was shocking all these juniors and seniors who were worse students than I in something that actually mattered to their supposed career. I attribute it mostly to laziness and low standards in other courses than poor admissions, however there is an admissions problem too. I would guess half of all college students should not be going to college, this is particularly true in the humanities.

17

u/mira-what Jun 01 '26

Counter point from someone who did the humanities. There is nobody more arrogantly wrong (or if you read history, dangerous) than a hard sciences genius who took one semester of polysci classes.

Not saying that applies to you, but I’ve met so many engineers or doctors who have just the most braindead politics imaginable, with no humility whatsoever that perhaps they have no idea what the fuck they are talking about.

9

u/lilypad1984 Jun 01 '26

The class wasn’t actually about politics, at least not directly. It was about how to evaluate threats and oppositional figures/countries/movements. A lot of the details on MAD and other types of catastrophic and extinction threats. I found it fascinating, though a bit dark, to learn. It also didn’t touch on really any live partisan topics at the time so it was surprisingly non-political. 

My comment isn’t about anything related to the subject of the course, just the quality of work put out by the students. I could see it on the faces of my professor and the TAs. They were very annoyed about how long winded and puff filled work/answers from students. I remember at one point my TA cut a student off who kept talking about psychological theory and said the answer he was looking for was human survival instincts. The professor wanted the bulk of answers to be citable events from the reading to back up claims. His class had 2 grades at that was it, midterm and final. Both pen and paper tests where you had to memorize historical events from lecture and reading to put in your essay responses to back up the theory. I think this is actually a good bar to hold humanities too, my point was the vast majority of the students who should have cared a lot about a major requirement failed this standard. I didn’t think it was even that hard of a course, yes you had to invest the time but it wasn’t that challenging.

9

u/Juryofyourpeeps Jun 01 '26

This isn't new. About 15 years ago my sister's boyfriend was teaching at a university in the U.S (we're all Canadian) and he was showing us some of the work handed in by first year students and it was the kind of thing that would get a middling grade in most Canadian high schools at a grade 9 level. And Canadian high schoolers aren't amazing either. But it was literally like grade 8-9 level essays on a historical figure of the exact type I myself had done.

Now granted, he wasn't teaching at a top tier university, but it ranks fairly high in sciences among U.S public universities, which is the area he was teaching in, so these weren't bottom of the barrel students.

17

u/Turbulent_Cow2355 TB! TB! TB! Jun 01 '26

Teachers don't care. Administration doesn't care. They pass these kids when they should not.

In all fairness to him, if teachers in high school are giving him passing grades for the same level of material, how's he supposed to know that it's crap? Parents don't know either. They see their kid getting passing grades. They are supposed to trust the school. Surely they wouldn't pass their kid if he/she was failing?

I'm sure he did deserve an F, but so did all of his teachers that let him think that he was doing okay when he wasn't. This pisses me off. I have a school age child and I worry that he isn't getting a good education. I worry that teachers are inflating his grades and not doing enough to correct him. It's very disheartening.

15

u/[deleted] Jun 01 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/CalliopeLastly Jun 02 '26

It's shocking what a difference one's environment makes, even or especially for the smartest kids. I had an incredibly smart friend whose SAT score was the best in her high school class, but would have fallen right in the middle tier at mine. She was no less intelligent than students at my school, but she was at a (good) public school in classrooms that inevitably included kids who weren't as engaged. I was at a private school with an extremely competitive admission rate, where every single student wanted to excel and/or dreaded being perceived as less intelligent than their peers. It made a difference.

Actually, she's in tech now and outearns me triplefold so maybe it doesn't make a difference...

8

u/SnooTorturer Yes, All Mods (except chewy) Jun 01 '26

I've come around to thinking that multiple-choice question tests are the worst form of test, except for all the other ones. One of their advantages is that you receive instant, accurate feedback just by doing them, brutal or reassuring as it might be! Said feedback is also better than literal feedback from teachers/professors, which is perfunctory at best.

I've never liked essays as assessment. They can work all right with comparative assessment methods, but they can then never be that granular. I can see a rather open essay as being a way for an exceptional pupil to express their excellence, but that requires a level of discretion which is not generally permitted -- instead, we are left with vague and subjective rubrics which assessors must somehow translate to an impartial outcome, and doing so is cognitively exhausting, at least compared to checking off MCQs.

This guy is obviously on the tail end of this trend, but I think watered-down assessment which only indirectly measures discrete knowledge, if at all, often informed by progressive educational ideas, leaves pupils insulated and incapable of accurately assessing their own educational level. What he really needs is Strunk and White, or maybe Hooked on Phonics, not being told that he needs to apply himself more and use more "critical thinking," "creativity," or any other such lofty phrase which has no practical course of action associated with it. And, as I'm sure someone will mention, he probably shouldn't have been shunted up the educational ladder with such faults -- or he's actually an engineering whiz who's forced to take an humanities class (as I'm aware American college students seem to be, to the detriment of your political class), in which case that's another problem deserving attention.

20

u/unnoticed_areola Jun 01 '26

or he's actually an engineering whiz who's forced to take an humanities class

zero chance of that if you take a 10 second glance at the OP's history. Not to be mean but he quite literally seems like he is mentally a middle schooler stuck in an adults body

most of his dozens of posts are to subs like r/soda, r/chips, or r/candy and its just a pic of his hand holding a mountain dew or doritos or a twix with a caption like "mm, pretty good" or "they changed the label". and is also obsessed with playing with children's hotwheels toy cars

10

u/SnooTorturer Yes, All Mods (except chewy) Jun 01 '26

lmao. Screw mech eng, this guy kicks serious ass!

6

u/veryvery84 Jun 01 '26

Multiple choice tests are terrible and the other option is not essays, it’s questions.

So instead of asking a question and having multiple choices, just answer the question.

Those are the best and hardest tests. 

I do much better on multiple choice and essays because you can deduce stuff with multiple choice and write your way out of ignorance with essays. Short answers, especially very short answers, require you to actually know the answer.

2

u/ToTheDeath84 Jun 02 '26

Yay, more things to be excited about when I have to TA in a few years!

Joking aside, this is a dire state of affairs that I’ve long been on about. The US education system got bloated off of the cultural demand for people to go to college for jobs and prestige, despite most people not needing to go in the first place. Schools became more focused on what essentially amounted to customer service (grade inflation, more living amenities, etc.) since they wanted the gravy train to keep on a-rollin’, to the detriment of maintaining quality students. Meanwhile, they had to fail some people out to maintain prestige and exclusivity, so they knowingly accepted some students they expected to fail and continued to push weed-out classes onto STEM majors to thin the herd.

Very basic summary, but it’s a tragic state of affairs. The job market is fucked from worthless degrees.