self-directed learning.
This was Spring ‘05. Second semester of college, I distinctly remember sitting around my single dorm in Ilima reading the book. Anyway…
UH had some weird classes, I forget the special name they gave them, but basically it was a “teach yourself” kind of deal. They were all 100-level courses that I guess were basic requirement/core classes, and rather than pay professors to actually teach things that most students weren’t going to give two shits about, they worked out this newfangled system to let students do it themselves.
One of these classes was Psychology 100. It was pretty “advanced”, you had to buy a brand new, expensive book that contained a code. You registered this code with an account you created on this website. The website contained quizzes for each chapter. The quizzes were 10-questions, multiple-choice.
Basically, to pass the course, you had to pass a certain amount of these quizzes before the semester was up. You could do it at your own pace, if you were a super genius you could pretty much go jam it all out in like one week if you wanted to, or leave it all until the end like most people probably did.
I can’t remember a lot of the specifics on how it worked, but it was all set up so you couldn’t easily game the system. Like, I think you had to get 9 out of 10 to pass, and the questions weren’t easy, they were very specific random things about the chapter so that in theory you’d have to really read it and study it. If you failed, you couldn’t just retake the test, it was a progressive thing. Like, the first time you failed, you had to wait two hours to retake it, then if you failed it the second time, the wait time until the third increased to one day, and then on the 4th or subsequent attempts you had to talk to someone who worked in the lab, i.e. to prevent people from just sitting there and taking it day after day until the same questions would eventually pop up and they could pass it.
Oh, and yeah, that was another thing, you had to go to a special computer lab. You couldn’t just do it at home. I remember the pain in the ass of not passing a test and yet wanting to just pass it to get that information out of my head, and having to walk all the way back up to campus to that dumb lab. The staff at the lab would check your ID I guess so you couldn’t just send some smart person (or someone who already took it) in to take your test, although they never actually verified that you signed into your account so I suppose as long as you and your ringer were both registered at the same time, taking another person’s test was possible.
They were also there to deter and catch cheaters, which, from what I heard was actually quite common, and commonly retarded (like people trying to sneak open the book in their backpack or something). The greatest thing about it was, even though it was a dumbass 100-level course, they automatically referred anyone caught cheating to the dean, which pretty much meant expulsion. Imagine telling your parents you got caught cheating on a dumb 10-question multiple choice exam for PSY-100 and you were now kicked out of UH after one semester or something.
There were a bunch of other weird rules. Like, if you aced a quiz (10/10), you got a bonus point that could then be later applied to another quiz where you got 8/10 to still pass. That was pretty sweet, because as I recall, getting 8 out of 10 seemed to be a hell of a lot easier than 9. There were a few times throughout the semester where they gave bonus points for participating in some PSY department research project or something, too.
Finally, I guess to try and legitimize the “class” aspect of it, there was this little discussion group that was once a week for fifty minutes. It was a total joke, like 10 students, “taught” by a senior majoring in psychology, and you just talked about some random stuff in the book since there was no way to gauge where everyone actually was in the course at any given point in time. Plus, nothing about those discussion classes counted aside from showing up. You got there, signed in on a sheet of paper, and just said nothing for an hour, and that was it.
I remember that was actually a problem. Aimee and Alex were in the same class as John and I, and one time Aimee came without Alex. She signed in for him, though, and no one was volunteering to speak, so our “teacher” went through the sign in sheet to call on someone to answer. Of course, the first name she called was Alex. She got really pissed and went on this whole little diatribe about not signing in people who didn’t actually come.
I don’t remember exactly how the grading all worked out, but John and I figured out that if we attended all of the discussions up to spring break, and finished all of the chapter quizzes, that would be enough to give us an A for the course and we could just completely stop going. So it was our goal to completely finish it by spring break, and as I recall, we did so and it ruled. Indeed, we totally stopped going and it was suddenly like having one less class.
As it turned out, John went on to work in the lab next year and witnessed people cheating and whatnot—I’m sure he has a bunch of good stories from that. That was the end of my experience with these “teach yourself”-type classes, and while no doubt I didn’t learn very much at all, the same could be said for most of the 100-level classes I took only to fulfill requirements, and at least this one I could just power through and get it done easily and quickly.
I don’t really have a point, it was just a thing from college. Sorry.
