I know I should just go to bed since I have to be up crazy early tomorrow, but I just received an email from the professor of my number theory class and I can’t stop laughing about it. It was just your basic welcome to the class email that provided a link to the syllabus in addition to informing students about a last minute change of rooms. Honestly I am glad that she emailed it out tonight since I don’t think that I would have been able to control my laughter in class on first reading of the syllabus.
To begin with the syllabus is FOUR pages long and that doesn’t even include the schedule which appears to be mostly in the “to be determined category.” Seriously a four page syllabus? I’m pretty sure this is a math course for math majors and not some sort of GEC course. I may be wrong, but my guess is that every student in the class understands how a math class works. The professor I had for combinatorics last quarter and we all managed to figure it out.
I’m sure most students upon seeing that the syllabus was four pages long did exactly what I did, skipped to the part that explained how the final grade would be calculated. There were a couple of odd things I noticed in this section. The first one being there are FIVE, 1 hour exams, but there is no final. That is just stupid! Seriously schedule a 2 hour midterm in the late afternoon and have a 2 hour final and be done with it. Or failing that cut out a couple of the exams in favor of a 2 hour final. Just anything that doesn’t have me dealing with the stress of an exam every other week.
I figured that the four page syllabus and five exams were the end of the strangeness, but it turns out I was wrong. Continuing down the list of how the grade is calculated there is the total number of points for “class participation”!! After reading this I stopped and checked that I did indeed have the syllabus for number theory and not for some random lit class. I’m not certain what “class participation” even means in the context of a math class, but it seems to be to be dangerously close to basing grades on attendance and it is my understanding that that would be against departmental policy. I’m sure I could read the syllabus to find a precise definition of “class participation”, but I’m tired and the thing is four pages long.