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Pretty sure you could get at least a passing grade from an average humanities course by just copying and pasting sentences like this, depending on the school. I
by Erik816 10y ago
Pretty sure you could get at least a passing grade from an average humanities course by just copying and pasting sentences like this, depending on the school. I say that as a philosophy/political science grad.
- andrepd 10y agoPeople often say that sort of thing, but I wonder if those claims were ever rigorously tested. Did someone ever try to test what kind of grades they got at humanities courses with made up gibberish answers like this?
- mcphilip 10y agoDepends on the skill level of the grader, I suppose, but phrases like "postsemantic nationalism" are a red flag to me as an armchair philosopher with some knowledge of the history of postmodernist thought.
- oceante 10y agoA trivial google search will weed out these papers. They wouldn't make it past even the least skilled graders at any institution I'm familiar with... and if they did I think it would be the student who was really harmed, not the field.
- CalChris 10y agoI just love that phrase postsemantic nationalism. So I Googled it and found one legit hit and I can't really tell if it's legit. http://blacky2poe.w.interiowo.pl/realismandneost/theabsurdityofn.html http://blacky2poe.w.interiowo.pl/realismandneost/theabsurdit... But it reminds me of what in chess is called a computer move, something which is contrary to the way even super-gm's think but nevertheless a good move.
- rokosbasilisk 10y agoI can confirm somewhat. I used a markov chain generator for a couple of 101 level english classes, with filters to adapt for my personal style like word choice restriction. I also gave a few passes manually to correct and cleanup things that were too ridiculous.
- SAI_Peregrinus 10y agoWell, the Sokal Affair [1] is famous for getting just such a paper accepted at a peer-reviewed postmodernist academic journal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
- FabHK 10y agoYou're familiar with the Sokal hoax [1]? Physicist Alan Sokal got a non-sensical paper [2] with the wonderful title Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity accepted and published in the journal Social Text. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [2] http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/trans...
- andrepd 10y agoI'm familiar with one instance of such a hoax being successful, yes. I'm not quite convinced it is feasible on a large scale, and that the world of humanities/liberal arts research is so ridiculous as this kinds of anecdotes paint it. I'd be curious to see this is the case.
- SkyMarshal 10y agoPossibly. One of the pretexts of postmodernism is that no privileged reading of a text exists, not even the author's. Thus the reader of a text can interpret it in any way that is internally consistent with the rest of postmodernism's rules and norms. So it doesn't really matter what you intend it to say, as long as the grader can and does interpret something consistent from it.
- jnicholasp 10y ago> So it doesn't really matter what you intend it to say, as long as the grader can and does interpret something consistent from it. Which, for any sufficiently complex and ambiguous sentence, any motivated reader will always be able to do. I won't speculate on how large a percentage it is, but some percentage of these papers are straight up Rorschach ink blots, even if the authors themselves believed they were writing something coherent and intelligible.