Yeah, to recycle a comment [0] from a few months back:
> Yeah, one of their most "effective" uses is to counterfeit signals that we have relied on--wisely or not--to estimate deeper practical truths. Stuff like "did this person invest some time into this" or "does this person have knowledge of a field" or "can they even think straight." [...]we might have to cope by saying stuff like: "Fuck it, personal essays and cover letters are meaningless now, just put down the raw bullet-points."
In other words, when the presentation means nothing, why bother?
Not to mention that if the teacher would rather read the prompt… then ask for the prompt then? This genuinely reads to me like “I asked for an apple and got an apple instead of an orange, hurr durr I’m so annoyed”.
Asking students for regurgitated info and then being annoyed because they supplied generic regurgitated info is somewhat telling an attitude no?
You're confusing the artifact with the purpose. Teachers across the nation are not trying to accumulate the largest corpus of distinct human-written reviews of The Great Gatby.
The goal is to elicit some kind of mental practice, and the classic request is for something that helps prove it occurred. The issue is that such proofs are now being counterfeited with unprecedented scale and ease.
When those indicators become debased and meaningless, we need to look for other ways of motivating and validating.
Yeah, to recycle a comment [0] from a few months back:
> Yeah, one of their most "effective" uses is to counterfeit signals that we have relied on--wisely or not--to estimate deeper practical truths. Stuff like "did this person invest some time into this" or "does this person have knowledge of a field" or "can they even think straight." [...]we might have to cope by saying stuff like: "Fuck it, personal essays and cover letters are meaningless now, just put down the raw bullet-points."
In other words, when the presentation means nothing, why bother?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41675602