The degree they were studying for led to a job where for many of them the ability to play arpeggios in 24 keys may have been irrelevant. For example, teaching the history of music, or perhaps musical therapy.
When I studied music part of my grade was based on a singing exam. I couldn’t sing, didn’t want to sing, would never need to professionally sing, and have never sung since. Make no mistake- it was scored on the quality of singing. But I couldn’t avoid it being part of the exam system.
Imagine someone studying for a computer science degree majoring in chip design. They cheat in Programming 101 by studying only one Sorting Algorithm, not 24 of them, since they can influence which algorithm they are assigned at exam time. Perhaps there is a better example but you get the drift.
Of course if you’re not a signer and aren’t interested in singing then the aesthetic quality of singing shouldn’t be scored, and hopefully they were also teaching you a little bit about how to sing, or maybe you just got unlucky (sometimes there are crappy teachers, bad exams, unfair situations, it does happen unfortunately). Singing really is a very useful skill to have when playing instruments or teaching music though. I wasn’t interesting in signing when I was younger, but now I wish I’d spent more time learning how and didn’t have to hide in private to be comfortable singing. It does something very interesting to sing & play at the same time, it’s hard but I think it makes playing the instrument easier.
There are some problems with complaining you’ll never use a certain skill teachers are trying to teach. Specifically, you don’t know in advance that you will never need it professionally. More generally and more importantly, the whole point of a university education is to give the student a broad base foundation in the subject, to teach you more than a small set of specific interests, and more than is required for a specific job. It is intentionally designed not to be strictly vocational training, it is not an apprenticeship.
I made this mistake when I was young, and complained in a math class, joking loudly and publicly, that the teacher was wasting our collective time forcing us to learn esoteric things we’d never use. I don’t remember what it was exactly, I think maybe matrix determinants, and the joke’s on me because I use determinants and everything else the teacher was teaching in my job professionally.
BTW, I work in chip design and all the hardware people know and use sorting algorithms, and not just the kind you learn in CS 101, they are experts in parallel sorting algorithms. Put the death of Moore’s law on top and the fact that algorithms and efficiency and power consumption are becoming more important every day. These foundations that students assume aren’t relevant to the future actually are important to their future prospects, they just don’t know it yet.
Yes I understood the point of the singing part of the exams and tried my best (which wasn’t that good). Like you say, a broad base with specialities. I was empathising with how the cheaters must have felt - but I took another direction when faced with the feeling.
The chip design analogy was clumsy but the point was similar - not every student has the motivation to learn enough about the broad base and it’s value for ultimately improving your specialism.
I get that people don't want to waste time, but you lose a lot from taking this attitude.
When I went to school we had a lot of kids who were only temporarily in the country. Their parents were diplomats or corporate expats. The government still made the kids learn the local language, with the predictable outcome that these kids had no motivation whatsoever to learn the language.
Now with the debate in America being the way it is, a lot of these kids would actually have had a place to go back to, if they only spoke the language.
Similarly with a lot of things you learn in education, most of them seem to be of no use, but it's only because you don't learn them properly they are of no use.
The late Mihai Patrascu (brilliant CS researcher for those who don't know), outspoken as he was, said data faking skills were essential to keeping his sanity in some courses. [1]
Cheating just means you're not satisfying some random persons bureaucratic needs of assigning a number to your performance. But such a one-dimensional measure cannot really capture anyone's potential.
For some reason few people ponder why people cheat and if the reasons perhaps are valid. Go to that party, if it helps you develop yourself!
Cheating solves a problem for the cheater, but has the side-effect of entrenching the selection criteria for everyone who comes after. If a genuinely good student, who the professors recognize as good, cannot pass a particular criterion, this motivates the professors to eliminate, or at least discount, the criterion. If the student does pass, then the professors see no harm in continuing to use the criterion for all future students at its current grade weighting.
In addition to this, for those students who will not cheat, they are then required to spend their effort developing a skill which they may never use again, at the expense of developing skills they will use again. And also at the expense of their placement in the class. Patrascu may have been a brilliant researcher, but was he as brilliant as the person who didn't make the cut because he made the cut instead?
But I think they only apply in contexts where people realize cheating is going on (Patrascu was an outlier claiming it publicly, but he was an outlier in many things) and also your grading is done on a relative scale (which I think is much worde than an absolute one, where one's better grade doesn't imply another person's lower grade).
> Patrascu may have been a brilliant researcher, but was he as brilliant as the person who didn't make the cut because he made the cut instead?
I would love it if he were among us to give on of his characteristically snarky answers :D [1]
He would probably have said something along the lines of "not as brilliant, more brilliant; which the fact that the other poor chap who wasn't capable of cheating clearly shows".
All grading is done on a relative scale. It's relative to the questions the professors thought to ask, or that the accreditation boards required them to ask.
Too late for the edit window, so I'll reply to add:
If a person gets in the habit of cheating because they don't think the thing they are cheating on is important, then they have to develop the skill of always knowing what is important, and what isn't, or they risk cheating on something with serious consequences. Patrascu died at the age of 29 from brain cancer. I wonder if he ignored any symptoms because he didn't think they were consequential.
You make it sound as if Patrascu was a serial cheater, which wasn't the case.
If you look long enough only you will come across stories of how his disease went: there weren't any symptoms.
Such diseases are dangerous things and shouldn't be joked about lightly, for many cancers the medical literature is clear you won't know until it's too late.
This seems more along the lines of studying only one basis in which to implement fizzbuzz. You're not really supposed to need to prepare your scales and arpeggios.
When I studied music part of my grade was based on a singing exam. I couldn’t sing, didn’t want to sing, would never need to professionally sing, and have never sung since. Make no mistake- it was scored on the quality of singing. But I couldn’t avoid it being part of the exam system.
Imagine someone studying for a computer science degree majoring in chip design. They cheat in Programming 101 by studying only one Sorting Algorithm, not 24 of them, since they can influence which algorithm they are assigned at exam time. Perhaps there is a better example but you get the drift.