That relationship of a teacher being an obstacle to a grade that signals institutional approval, it is totally broken. This is gamefied "education," where the c

That relationship of a teacher being an obstacle to a grade that signals institutional approval, it is totally broken. This is gamefied "education," where the course material and even the instructors recognition doesn't persuasively have intrinsic value. I'm dealing with something now outside academia, where there is absurd bureaucracy, and I'm sidestepping and shortcutting it because I see the mission outcome as separate from the prescribed process, and the trickling and breadcrumbing of details is an abuse of my time, so I sympathize with the student perspective - but in an educational setting, the prescribed process is essentially a sacrificial cost that enables you to "become," a person who has mastered it, as it makes the skill the effect of a skill, and not just the affect of the outcome. Education is necessarily transformative, otherwise it's just rote training. Example would be, I take music lessons, I'm difficult to teach because I really like Bach and Chopin and I can play some simple preludes by ear, but my sight reading is maybe at a gr. 2 level, which is just enough to get the pieces under my fingers with a hill climbing struggle, but makes me useless as an actual musician, and probably very irritating to musicians whose performances are the effect of their years of real skills, and not the affect of hackery or savantism that an unskilled observer can't easily distinguish. Even if we played the same piece, comparing them to me would be insulting and debasing to them because it's like saying a recording of something is the same as a performance of it, so it's very diminishing. In the case of the temperature monitoring circuit in the article, the process is designed to facilitate a mental transformation of exercising elementary skills, and being educated means being able to commit to that process of being molded by the experience. The details are to force commitment to the process and filter out those who aren't. Unfortuately, credentialism incentivises this affect of skills and drives enrollment, so if you are doing a job oriented degree, you're basically trained and not really educated through a process of becoming. It would almost make sense to offer students a deal, where they can choose a training track that leads to a 52% / C- grade and do the minimum, which takes them out of the way of the TAs, they don't participate in discussions, and they can coast and draft others, maybe date each other and say they went there, but they can't impose costs, where others can elect to aim higher and choose the education track with an understanding of what that means.