A former 40 year Atheist analyzes Atheism, without resorting to theism, deism, or fantasy. *** If You Don't Value Truth, Then What DO You Value? *** If we say that the sane can be coaxed and persuaded to rationality, and we say that rationality presupposes logic, then what can we say of those who actively reject logic? *** Atheists have an obligation to give reasons in the form of logic and evidence for rejecting Theist theories.
Monday, December 16, 2013
You Don't Actually Have To Go To Harvard...
...to get all A- grades there. I should request my transcript. I might even have several PhD's that I don't know about.
As you might recall, my son recently began attending Pacific University in Oregon. He is taking a Psychology class and really likes it a lot. He studies hard and turns in all the homework.
I asked him about a recent exam he'd taken, one for which he had been studying hard. He said they gave an hour and a half to complete the exam. I asked how long he'd taken.
Ten minutes. And then, because it was an early morning class, he went back to the dorm to get more sleep.
You can imagine my surprise. I asked him how he'd done on the test (it had been a week since he'd taken it), and he told me he'd scored a 77.
Out of 75.
I asked how one could score more than 100% on a test (outside of extra credit, which had been an artifact of high school) and he told me that the grading curve the instructor used to shift grades upward tended to break the scoring system for people who'd done very well.
No one cared. Everyone was above average, even though, shifted downwards, they probably do very well.
College classes increasingly appear to be of the type where the 'reality' of the grades (which reflect on the instructor as well as his students) can be altered at will. No wonder liberal types deny objective reality so much.
I am told things are different in schools where hard sciences are taught. One hopes they are.
(I disabused the boy of any ideas that 'evolutionary psychology' actually meant something related to verifiable science. Just-so stories are fiction no matter who is doing the telling.)
Since the public school system have been producing abysmal grades and graduation rates, especially when compared with private schools and home schooling, a lot of pressure is put on the school administrators to find ways to fudge the numbers and bolster their own image. My opinion: colleges have turned into overly expensive brand names, bastions of liberal-socialism.
I read a week or so ago about how a black English teacher was using her classroom as a platform to spew about affirmative action, discussing how the whites have had it good for too long while minorities suffered, etc. A couple white students began complaining and she told them that if they had a problem to go file charges, so they did. To no surprise, she filed a counter-suit for, if memory serves me correctly, discrimination. It's a friggin' joke. The PC movement has fostered a society where certain people have special rights not afforded to the majority, but I'm digressing.
Yes, certain people do have special rights. If a white bumps into a white in an aisle at Walmart, it's an accident. If a white bumps into a black in an aisle at Walmart, it is a Hate Crime, if the black wants it to be.
While I'm not against immigration with strict limits and guidelines, opening the floodgates and granting universal amnesty (shades of Roman Empire before collapse) will only serve to destroy the American culture ...or what's left of it. It seems that in every predominantly Anglo-saxon civilization that there's this humanist-socialist agenda to push for expansive immigration policies. Most other ethnic-centric countries such as Japan, India, Israel, China and so forth have strict immigration policies, but if white nations want the same for ours, we're somehow racist.
Our national identity, our right to self-determination, is thrown under the bus.
4 comments:
As you might recall, my son recently began attending Pacific University in Oregon. He is taking a Psychology class and really likes it a lot. He studies hard and turns in all the homework.
I asked him about a recent exam he'd taken, one for which he had been studying hard. He said they gave an hour and a half to complete the exam. I asked how long he'd taken.
Ten minutes. And then, because it was an early morning class, he went back to the dorm to get more sleep.
You can imagine my surprise. I asked him how he'd done on the test (it had been a week since he'd taken it), and he told me he'd scored a 77.
Out of 75.
I asked how one could score more than 100% on a test (outside of extra credit, which had been an artifact of high school) and he told me that the grading curve the instructor used to shift grades upward tended to break the scoring system for people who'd done very well.
No one cared. Everyone was above average, even though, shifted downwards, they probably do very well.
College classes increasingly appear to be of the type where the 'reality' of the grades (which reflect on the instructor as well as his students) can be altered at will. No wonder liberal types deny objective reality so much.
I am told things are different in schools where hard sciences are taught. One hopes they are.
(I disabused the boy of any ideas that 'evolutionary psychology' actually meant something related to verifiable science. Just-so stories are fiction no matter who is doing the telling.)
Since the public school system have been producing abysmal grades and graduation rates, especially when compared with private schools and home schooling, a lot of pressure is put on the school administrators to find ways to fudge the numbers and bolster their own image. My opinion: colleges have turned into overly expensive brand names, bastions of liberal-socialism.
I read a week or so ago about how a black English teacher was using her classroom as a platform to spew about affirmative action, discussing how the whites have had it good for too long while minorities suffered, etc. A couple white students began complaining and she told them that if they had a problem to go file charges, so they did. To no surprise, she filed a counter-suit for, if memory serves me correctly, discrimination. It's a friggin' joke. The PC movement has fostered a society where certain people have special rights not afforded to the majority, but I'm digressing.
Yes, certain people do have special rights. If a white bumps into a white in an aisle at Walmart, it's an accident. If a white bumps into a black in an aisle at Walmart, it is a Hate Crime, if the black wants it to be.
While I'm not against immigration with strict limits and guidelines, opening the floodgates and granting universal amnesty (shades of Roman Empire before collapse) will only serve to destroy the American culture ...or what's left of it. It seems that in every predominantly Anglo-saxon civilization that there's this humanist-socialist agenda to push for expansive immigration policies. Most other ethnic-centric countries such as Japan, India, Israel, China and so forth have strict immigration policies, but if white nations want the same for ours, we're somehow racist.
Our national identity, our right to self-determination, is thrown under the bus.
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