The spotlight effect is the finding that people overestimate the extent to which their actions and appearance are noted and remembered by others.
For example, researchers had participants wear an embarrassing t-shirt and then walk through a classroom. When it comes to speaking up in class then, even if you ask a question you think is foolish, more likely than not, no one will ever remember you even asking it.
My guess is not very well. Gilovich, T. Journal of personality and social psychology , 78 2 , Prentice, D. Pluralistic ignorance. Vohs Eds. Savitsky, K. That's it. No word count or anything. Just a review. One of the guys in my class plagiarized a review he found online.
The homework is to go somewhere, eat some stuff, and write about it. Thats the opposite of hard. This was just a one time thing, because this kid is a pretty sharp student otherwise. Im a flight instructor and was trying to teach my student how to find your groundspeed while flying. To do this, you take two points towns usually that you know the distance between and time how long it takes to fly between them. The distance is 10 nautical miles, what is our groundspeed?
CaptValentine Report. Two stories, same guy: "What does 'colonialism' mean? Double checked with his athletic counselor and yes, English is his first language. He's been taking this class for months now. And damned if he didn't graduate with the same degree as me. We walked next to each other at graduation. Not a professor but in my statistics class a girl asked if changing the minus to a plus would change the answer.
Not a negative to a positive, like she wasn't questioning how negatives worked. She sincerely wanted to know if changing from subtraction to addition would change the answer.
To the professors credit she answered with a kind yes and only a slight pause. Not a professor but a fellow classmates of mine was in my chemistry course. They would go on rants about "Energies" I was very confused as I tried to deduce what energies they meant Kinetic, Thermal, etc. Turns out they are believe in some magic spirits despite majoring in sciences.
Not a professor, but during orientation someone mentioned the writing assignment that was due for students in a specific first year program. One guy asked, genuinely, "Hey, do we really have to write that paper or can we have someone write that for us? I have the money to just pay some guy.
That's what I did in high school, pssh. Cometstarlight Report. I was a TA for an ecology course. I was trying to explain complete metamorphosis by talking about butterflies. The student didn't know caterpillars turned into butterflies. I suppose you could go through life without knowing, but this was an upper division course at a prestigious university She did not come to a single class the entire semester.
She never once contacted me, never once responded to my emails, never turned in a paper or any assignment. I was having office hours between the final class and when their exams were due, and she comes to me and asks what she needs to do to get at least a B-. A girl in my earth science class asked "do the oceans go to the center of the earth? Not a professor, and it didn't happen in college as well. But in my fourth year of highschool VWO for all the Dutch people here a girl asked the teacher what nazi's were.
Note that we had already discussed the second World War in second year of highschool and this is the Netherlands where the second World War is often discussed in all kind of schools during our remembrance day.
WinterBrooks Report. I'm a dane learning dutch. It always leads to confusion in class when talking about "nation states" as it in dutch really sounds like nazi states". My teacher has to say it in danish too every time in order to avoid confusion! I am a non-traditional read: really a lot older than my cohort student and the bulk of my classes are online. Nearly every one has discussion board posts or peer review assignments that count towards a hefty percentage of grades.
I am appalled at the writing skills of some of these people who are taking upper division classes. Not just typos and misspells From native English speakers. She had been provided with reading material by the professor a few weeks in advance. On the day of the presentation, she walked in front of the class, unpacked her things, seemed to be preparing, then sat down in front of us and proceeded to do absolutely nothing. After a few moments of silence, the professor asked what the problem was, and she said, "The texts were in English.
I only speak German. I'm not sure why she bothered to position herself in front of us, knowing that she didn't have anything to present anyway, nor do I know why she didn't inform the professor of the language barrier, let alone why she had signed up for a course that worked exclusively with English material in the first place.
I do know, however, that it took a few more minutes of her just sitting there quietly before the professor told her to go back to her seat.
Hazelrigg Report. Most Germans speak English better than most Americans admittedly not saying a whole hell of a lot.
But it sounds like she decided to play the "I'm a poor foreigner. Pity me. I'm not a professor, but my roommate freshman year of college was pretty dumb. We were at a private liberal arts university, and part of our frosh seminar class was attending one of the "deans' lectures" and writing a paper about it. It was a gimme A. She decided not to attend any of the deans' lectures.
She elected not to watch anything, just pick a title of one and write about it. I don't think she ever did. A few semesters ago, I had two students in a statistics course not know how to do division using a calculator -- they didn't know what order to press the buttons in.
Talking about Somali Pirates. Student couldn't believe they wielded ak47s and used pontoon boats, thought they were the flagship-and-cannonball types straight from Pirates of the Caribbean. AychB Report. But back when i took drivers ed, the teacher asked if anyone knew what the raised bumps between lanes were in the roads. The teacher had this look on his face like, dafuck?
He never raised his hand in class again. So you're telling me you can't drive if you're blind even with a dog in the passenger seat?? One person's argument was hilarious, I have a screenshot somewhere in the depths of my Gyazo account but one paragraph his argument was talking about how the economy would collapse from weed becoming legal cause everyone would be so high all the time they couldn't work.
I'm pretty sure he just wrote some last minute shit essay to get some marks since the final draft has the most marks but it was so hilariously bad. Not a professor but a TA. I don't think I ever had genuinely dumb students, it's just that some people adjust more easily when moving from high school to university than others. In particular, if you were "naturally" smart, you could just coast through high school. Material was presented slowly and frequently enough that missing a class here or there didn't really matter.
Not so in university. For a Physics lab course for pre-med students, this one student regularly came 45 minutes late to a 2-hour lab. So he'd miss the discussion at the beginning of the lab session where I'd discuss the task at hand and common pitfalls to avoid.
Then he'd wonder why he wasn't able to finish on time and why he struggled figuring out why his lab experiment didn't turn out the way he expected. A few years ago, I had a student turn in a term paper titled "Mental Disroders. Just a thought but the student might be dyslexic. Not everyone gets diagnosed and the type of dyslexia can vary. Spell check is not always much help if they can't see what is wrong with the word. A student once threatened to sue me over the definition of the terms necessary and sufficient that he had mixed up in an exam.
No biggie to mix them up actually, for a math major it might be , but loudly threatening to sue me over an age old textbook definition in an exam review session was kind of stupid. It did entertain all other students who where present. Another student once requested letters of recommendation for 5 of the top 10 masters programs in Europe while being the second worst in his class of several hundred graduates. I sympathized with the second student.
I'll probably try the same thing too. Who knows what luck brings? I'm not a teacher but my dad is a college professor and he often has pretty funny tales. However this last semester of Psychology in sports students have been a whole new level of dumb. He showed them how to use APA, then he did it for them for the different chapters of the book, all they had to do was literally copy and paste the reference he made for the chapter they used. Dummy proof you would think right? One student copied the wrong chapters One student copied all of the references.
One student made changes to the references!!! That one I saw big red question marks beside and he noted 'I did it for you? As a student in a class, this girl, who somehow managed to be tertiary, would ask an average of 20 questions per 40 minutes session. Since we knew the statistics final would be a project, my friend and I recorded the number of questions she asked compared to the rest of the class. It came out that on average she asked at least 3x as many questions as the class on average.
Aeromile Report. I didn't have any particularly dumb student also not a Professor, but a graduate teaching assistant , but I did mark one essay that began so eloquently with "Do we born with intelligent? One of my fellow PhD student marked an essay once which came in at 2 pages it was a 6 page limit , and half of the essay, so one page, discussed Mowgli from the Disney animated version of the Jungle Book the topic was Developmental Psychology.
I heard this story from my professor dad: once, during the week of a final paper, he found an office voicemail from a student claiming it was midnight and he has to drive two hours to a major city in the because his friend needed emergency appendectomy surgery.
The student forgot that, in those days, voice mails spoke the recording time, which was AM. Not a professor but we once jokingly asked my classmate when the third world war happened, she told us she didn't knew the exact date. RecklessYouu Report. I had a teacher ask a boy who was distracted how long the years war.
I understand he might have thought it was a trick question, but I would have at least tried years. Took my Intro English requirement as the online class, part of which included a discussion forum.
When you went to the site, the most recent entry was highlighted, so imagine my surprise to see my words highlighted for a post I'd put in weeks before - with someone else's name and an added sentence at the end. I checked into it, and for each assignment she'd gone onto the forum and straight up copied another student's answer, added a sentence somewhere, and submitted it as her own.
Told her if there was such a thing as accidental copy-paste-post, it wouldn't have been edited 3 times , and if it was so accidental that she'd never noticed, then why didn't she ever post her actual assignment answers?
Never heard back. I taught calculus in college. I told the class I'd give them extra credit for doing any of the "advanced" problems at the end of the chapters. This guy turns in elegant, concise, handwritten solutions for all of them. That'd be hard even for me. He even knew how to do epsilon-delta proofs!
That's not something I taught. One of the problems involved a variable D and an epsilon-delta argument. He was copying from an instructor's solution manual without knowing the meaning of the symbols. I suppose this isn't dumb so much as shameless. I'm a film student and we were asked to make up our own ten rules to follow when making a film, much like the Dogma 95 Manifesto, an specifically had us refer to us as a Manifesto.
This one student submitted the Communist Manifesto instead. According to my lecturer, that student didn't do very well and is now a forklift operator. HFXmer Report. The student that decided to plagiarize his entire 5 page paper.
First, the whole class had been working on this paper for the entire semester the only paper due , we had library days on how cite things and find the information you needed, and they were going to be turning it in through an online paper checker that would give them feedback on plagiarism. They could revise and resubmit the paper as many times as they wanted and this dipshit turned it in with every single thing but his name highlighted in neon colors.
He then had the balls to say he didn't do anything wrong and trashed my desk because he failed. Not my story, but in a test where you could bring solved questions with you, a student brought a question identical to the one the test paper has, instead of just copying the answer and getting an A, he glued the solution which he brought with him with a glue stick, all he had to do is not being lazy.
I remember when a guy in my class legit sat throughout the whole period staring at the glue and paper in his hand He didn't take of the cap The struggle is real with this one. I told him this, but he insisted he was in my section. Soon, he stopped coming to section altogether, but did insist on handing his exams and papers back to me in lecture. After the final exam which he handed in to me! This was more of a slip-up than this person actually being dumb, but I was in an Ancient Greece history class and the professor was showing us images of pottery in which most of the humans depicted were black I assume it had to do with the clay they used or something.
My classmate raised his hand and asked, "Are the people on the pottery black because of the clay? Or were all Greeks African-American? I had a student who wrote an evaluation of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In Math class I said there was 36 letters to the alphabet without really thinking.
Not a professor but I am in graduate school. We are in a hybrid program which means we do part online and we go to class five Saturdays a semester.
One guy came to the first class then never came back until the last class. He slept thru the final. Even snored a few times and almost fell out of his chair. When I was grading some assignments, I saw that the student submitted the file with only the name changed and didn't bother to look over the assignment at all.
The assignment was the same as the previous years, but the test variables were changed to different values and this student didn't even bother to do that and just assumed the assignment was the exact same. Empty-ss Report. We had a girl this semester who handed in an assignment she had gotten from a student who did the course last year. All she did was change the name. Problem is, we change the assignment completely each year to avoid this very problem happening.
Those monsters! His identity remains anonymous behind a face shield, double mask and several unravelled rolls of toilet paper obscuring any remaining exposed skin. Who could have possibly predicted that when we brought together thousands of freshmen—a demographic notorious for making poor decisions—that they would make poor decisions? Put me down for 7 dead, 21 hospitalized!
Administrators were surprisingly candid with me, likely due to their aggressive binge-drinking, liberal usage of psychedelic drugs and cavalier experimentation with a smorgasbord of amphetamines while constructing the plan for this semester. This might just change how you view your own professors in the future: after all, you might be fans of the same online communities! The anonymity that Reddit provides means that the professors can share their stories pretty much without any chance of others finding out who they are.
It also lets these educators vent about their students without exposing their identities either. I once got an exam essay that mentioned how much Mandela hated the Jews. My wife has had multiple students who are fundamentally technologically illiterate. Numerous students have had no idea how to use Word or Excel--including one who used their email as a word processor the University provides students with Office.
There have also been students who struggle with installing programs on computers. What's disconcerting is it's becoming an increasingly common issue--as an older millennial, the idea that kids are becoming less technologically proficient is so bizarre. Once had identical twin sisters who turned in identical essays.
Both were directly plagiarized from a Google search and received identical zeroes. Some educators were and still are so magnificent that I miss their lectures like Harry Potter misses Quidditch. Meanwhile, others were petty, bureaucratic, and concerned only about following the curriculum instead of being beacons of knowledge. On one side we have young adults who are diligent, ambitious, and see education as a gateway to bettering themselves into veritable giants of intelligence.
I had a girl come in with a research paper bibliography that listed "my mom" as a source several times.
When I pressed, she told me her mom looked up everything and sent it to her and she just She told me she had always done it that way. SalemScout , Tirachard Kumtanom Report. One student wrote in a discussion board about Lord of the Flies, 'I like how they saved all the flies.
That was my favorite part. Being a bad student is as easy as gobbling down a greasy kebab or slice of pizza after a fun night out. Stepping up, taking charge, and being a good student is much, much harder, however. I had a student include numerous emojis in a term paper. A different student came to my office a week after the final, and asked me why she had failed the course.
All the comments so far are about the second student not doing jack sh1t. I'm still tickled over the emoji student!! I had a student put in their presentation, 'Women's suffrage has destroyed the American family structure,' and 'feminism has turned women away from their naturally obedient nature. He has soooooo many stories, from multiple people showing up with roadkill for him to identify, asking advice on growing weed and shrooms, and thinking he was a medical doctor.
The one that sticks out to me was a poor girl who lingered after class to ask "if pregnancy tests can ever be wrong, because I took a bunch this morning". He explained about human growth hormone and told her false negatives are possible, but not false positives. He said her face just kept falling as it slowly dawned on her. She told him, "three were negative".
He asked if any were positive and she said yeah You need to go see a doctor". She came back a couple semesters later and let my dad meet her very adorable baby. What do you do? Do you put it off until literally the last moment, working through the night and pounding energy drink after energy drink, only to turn the paper in ten minutes before the deadline? I had a football player in class, and he could barely write on the sentence-level.
I think he had just never been expected to learn how to write since he was an athlete. When he failed his first paper, he came to me and asked how to improve. I pulled him aside and asked him about his process this time around. With absolutely no guile, he told me that he told his brother what he wanted to say, and his brother wrote it down for him. I was bound by the Honors Council and a sense of duty to my other students to do what I saw as the ethical thing, which was to fail him, but I do think about him sometimes and that was 20 years ago.
He tripped at the very last step. True-Establishment16 , William Iven Report. That's a shame and maybe down to a lack of self confidence on the student's part. One student wrote a paper about the causes of the Salem Witch Trials. She sided with the accusers because she'd 'seen some stuff,' clearly not understanding the assignment. I was a graduate instructor for a scientific writing class, where students were trained in how to consume and report on research in the form of a literature review.
One student kept quiet the whole semester and declined help when I reached out to him periodically throughout. His term paper came in with the rest, but it was…uh…markedly different. Included in the paper was a snippet of an interview he conducted with his pastor. I gave a failing grade on the paper and recommended to him that he change majors to religious studies or something. CurveOfTheUniverse , cottonbro Report. Excelling in your studies requires discipline and having structure in your life.
My old History of Modern Art prof loves to tell the story about an exam essay featuring the topic of "the male gays" instead of "the male gaze". I have taught numerous students who are unable to read for meaning. They can read the words on a page out loud to you, but ask them to explain what they just read, they will repeat the words on the page.
Our country's education system is very broken. Smart-Connection , Thought Catalog Report. Teaching an English subject on academic writing, including the structure and importance of paragraphs, and a student then handed in a first essay that looked more like poetry - one sentence per line. When queried, she insisted "they don't have paragraphs where I come from".
Turns out she was British Schezzi , Sarah Shaffer Report. The more orderly and less chaotic your schedule, the easier it will be to focus on your studies. Pssst , this works for everything, not just devouring books and articles for your studies.
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