I’m a college instructor, and I teach extremely competitive students as most are on their way to professional school. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s this - If you give people an inch, they’ll take a mile. As an instructor you cannot give into a single bit of complaining, because if you’re doing your job right the odds are the complainers only represent about 15% of the class. The other 85% are wonderful students, and I will never judge or penalize them to reward the whiners.
As an example of this - after tallying up my grades (a class of 150), I looked at all of the As and Bs. I couldn’t tell you who half of them were because they never came to see me (no need, they were excellent students), yet as I looked at the C, D, and F students, I could tell you who every single one of them was. Most had come to complain to me at some point about some aspect of the course.
It’s another symptom of our culture of entitlement.
These kids have probably had their parents do their homework for them for 12 years thru middle and high school. Or said middle and high schools were so worried about parent retaliation or not getting funding for kids failing tests, etc that all lessons are taught to the lowest common denominator.
Now they actually have to think for themselves and can’t handle it.
I salute you for being above the pettiness and realizing that you are there to learn and better yourself.
The complainers will never stop, in their world there will always be something to complain about, whether it’s school, work, winning the lottery…anything!
And Stats? Cause Stats is one of those topics that some huge portion of the population just has a mental block about. You can explain confidence intervals until you are blue in the face - or sample size calculations - and an amazing number of ordinarily pretty smart people who are trying struggle. To set yourself up by not paying attention in Stats (and to do the rest of the class the discourtesy to make it difficult for them to pay attention) is unbelievable.
I can see sitting through “Intro to Geology” or whatever “Rocks for Jocks” class fills the Science distribution and not paying attention, but Stats - even easy Stats, is not easy (except for those few people for whom it makes immediate sense to).