You don’t know that one either. You meant (I presume) incredible.
Credible = capable of being believed, can be a thing or event (an incredible feat) or a person (a credible witness).
Credulous = apt to believe anything one hears, gullible. Said of people.
Incredible and incredulous are their opposites, respectively.
Sorry to be on you like this, but you see, I, myself, actually made an apostrophe error upthread, so I have to resubstantiate my Grammar Nazi credentials.
I have only two anecdotes about Communications majors;
The student who gave us the tour of Boston College when my son was considering going there for degrees in math and classical languages. As we toured around campus she pointed to a large building and said “That’s our library. I’ve been told there are lots of books there, but I can’t say so for sure because I’ve never been inside.” She was graduating at the end of the semester. :eek:
I can’t talk about because it’s a relative. 
I’m not sure about Pennsylvania, but I had similar experience in my English classes, so I immediately withdrew and took the CLEP to test out of them. I got credit for the test (basic grammar questions and then 45 minutes to write an essay- all in all it’s about 2 hours of your life). It’s a pass/fail sort of grade so it’s not so useful if you need to boost your GPA, but they offer the CLEP in just about everything- history, calculus, foreign languages. You can get rid of a couple of semesters in about 12 hours if the gen ed classes are really that bad.
Here you go. Made my school experience a lot less boring.
No sweat.
Don’t let one bad professor drive you out of a field you like. All of us who have college degrees had to endure some classes taught by bad professors to get them. And major classes aren’t immune- I was an astronomy major, and I certainly had some bad professors for some of my astronomy classes.
I think a well done Hamlet/Lethal Weapon comparison might be worth an A. (Tortured main character, loss of loved one, thoughts of suicide, untrustworthy authority figures) - depending on the class, of course.
There are people who don’t care about things like this and have no desire to learn them. Try explaining the difference between an Outlook mailbox and an offline archive (pst file) to an end user sometime. They don’t want to know nor do they care to know. They just want it to work the way they want it to and then get on with the job they are being paid to perform.
Most people only care about finding the information they are looking for. They don’t care about the systems used to do this. And if those systems are more complicated than they need to be (and most computer systems are), they are even less inclined to spend the time learning them. Instead they go to the gatekeepers of the information or systems for help. In this case: You. Luckily you seem to be the type of gatekeeper who wants to share the information you, uh, protect. Unfortunately, quite a few gatekeepers seem to think if you don’t know their obscure languages and customs then they have the right to impede, or deny access to, the information they hold. I always picture Jack Black’s character in ‘High Fidelity’ as a good example of this. It gives them a sense of power and a feeling that without them the business at hand can’t continue.
I’m working on a project at work that will eliminate, or minimize, the gatekeeper’s role and give people a simple easy interface to find the data they might need and to input the data they want to share. I anticipate that there will be many objections to this. I can also identify with a high likelihood of accuracy who will be the people doing the most objecting.
I had one student, who has already irritated me by attempting to circumvent my late work policy, show up an hour late for a meeting to discuss a final paper. He sauntered up to my door, and I informed him that I had to attend a department meeting in five minutes. He proceeded to pull out all his drafts and ask me for written comments…
The real kicker is that his shirt was only half buttoned. I really just didn’t know what to say.
For the last three weeks, my office has been busy with academic advising for the summer and fall. This week, we’ve had a steady stream of students coming in to find out whether they can withdraw to try and keep the bad grades they’ve earned off their records. We call the day after our midsemester deadline for dropping classes Boohoo Day, so I’m starting to think of this as “Oh, fuck!” week.
Another librarian here. Yep, I have watched kids cut and past entire articles from wikipedia, put their name on the top, and then print them out, presumably to turn them in for a class.
I have also, when working in an academic library, had students come in during exam week, asking if there is a copy of the textbook on reserve (meaning they have somehow managed to get to the end of the semester without one), some don’t even know the name of the teacher.
My recent favorite came over our new on-line reference chat. "I need to find example of the following literary devices in *The Scarlet Letter*. Can you find (gives list of about five) for me? Yeah kid, one of the many services we provide here at the library is doing your homework for you. :dubious:If my supervisor really wanted us (meaning the TAs) to not put our students papers in boxes in the bullpen for them to pick up, she probably should have mentioned it before today. 'Cuz now it’s too late. Most people are graduating and the rest of us will be turning in our keys soon.
We’re getting those questions now, only it’s because they’ve already sold their book back to the bookstore. Before finals - hell, before classes end for the semester.
I have to wonder if that $5 or $15 is worth trying to scrounge for a textbook so they can try to study for their final.
And for even more rants, check out http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/
Of course, we have the fine MBA students at Duke to use as examples:
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/education/20070502_Cheating_scandal_at_Duke_grows.html
Yeesh. Idiots.
I just wish more schools were willing to expel for this.
Okay, I’m apparently more tired than I thought, because I read that as “… took the CLAP to test out…” and wondered just how having the clap would help. :smack:
And then there are these folks at Diablo Valley college:
A priceless moment:
Some years ago, a student in one of my basic programming courses turned in an assignment that was lifted virtually intact from the Web. He didn’t even change variable names or comments, although he did remove the copyright notice from the first line.
After the usual comments from the student (“If you fail me I’ll lose my scholarship!”, “Isn’t there something I can do for you to increase the grade?”, and my favorite: “I’ll feed your cows for a month if you pass me”), he seemed to run out of steam. I left him with this closing thought:
I teach COMPUTER SCIENCE. Why did you think you could find this program on the Web and I couldn’t?
He was speechless. He really hadn’t thought about it.
Stunning, isn’t it? In my syllabus, there is the following sentence: If you can find it on the Internet, SO CAN I.
Dammit…Over this weekend, I found four plagiarized essays that I will be reporting on Monday. It wasn’t a matter of a purloined line here or there. It was the whole damn essay lifted directly off of a free essay website and copied and pasted into the paper.
This happens every semester around this time, despite all the warnings and information given earlier.
My anecdote about a Communications major…
During my sophomore year I was visiting a friend mid-Fall-semester and went to one of her Communications classes with her to kill time. The professor was giving a quiz that day, so I took the quiz. I scored significantly higher than my friend, the Communications major, though I knew next to nothing about Communications coursework. My friend changed majors at the end of the semester.