Confessions of a former College-University Lecturer.
Here are 3, free tips which “academics” will never tell you, and I don’t even have a tip jar, not like some dipsticks on X.
1, The Good Going Grain (T-Triple G) – The thing that will gain you good grades above all other things is going with the grain. This is for most subjects, but we all know that being in the camp of String Theory gets you buddy-buddy marks and funding and citations in physics. But let me tell you also, if you swim with the grain, you get no brain gain. Because you’re essentially becoming a zombie parrot, and soon you’ll be stood in front of an interviewer or audience repeating the same robot spiel about type 0.6 civilizations and dogs thinking they are the same as us.
2, The Teacher’s Pet Effect (TTPE)- Your relationship with the lecturer, professor or teacher is the second thing that will gain you good grades. Why do you think the teacher’s pet always get’s good grades but can’t seem to catch a bus on their own? It’s because they are being coached, helped, given answers and even directly told what to write. TTPE can massively boost your grade. You’ll be better prepared and even given the said boost of knowledge and insights before even writing a paper or handing in an assignment. But in terms of the marking process, from experience, I believe TTPE increases grades from around 10-15% on essays or papers. However, you’ll see the teacher’s pet effect working overdrive on presentations, or group tasks where it’s hard to argue against a given grade or hard to evidence that it was incorrect. The TTPE effect in presentations accounts for up to 50% of marking. If your face-fits and you turn up on time with a smile, you might leave with a first class grade having undertaken only a brief conversation, or less, depending on the workload of the lecturer.
3, Is the time of year of the External Verification (EV). After your course and grading has been Externally Verified, its go nuts time, absolutely bonkers, because they know that 90% of your course is horse shit, piled up and bulked out to last an academic year. A good week of focused and well directed learning can teach you more than a year of lectures where you’ll have to sit on a stain of some dude’s penis milk, watching all the captured TTPEs waving their hands in the air, trying to out do each other with the most ridiculous questions, written down and prepared. Said questions, of course, are constructed for self-aggrandising and to misrepresent to everyone in the lecture theatre that you know what you’re talking about. But don’t worry if you fuck up, because your professor buddy will bail you out with some exclamation which suggests that he understands the excrement spitting from your voice box.
After the External Verification, shit grades of TTPEs rise dramatically, and if they’re lucky, the lecturer might even cut modules from their curriculum and falsely claim that they don’t need to do said “surplus” modules because he managed to cross reference it from other work or he was grading them during the student’s input from lecturers and group discussions.
No shit, I’m serious, this is happening everywhere, on mass scale. But who cares because now you have a certificate which means you’re an “expert” in that field. Expert, a fucking expert… Behave will ya!
Elon Musk is a great advocate of the end of this arcane bulked out, knowledge and “Copy Me” type of education. I mean, it’s pretty much common knowledge that much of academic findings depends on who’s funding the studies, right?
Don’t forget your pumpkin latte and best fake smile!
