This morning I had my first experience to walk in a lecture theatre jam-packed with students at ASU. I am sitting on the sixth row, sandwiched by two blond hulks. There are at least 200 heads in the room. Boy, I haven't had this experience for a LONG LONG time. The feeling of sitting at the back of the row, catching a glimpse of the lecturer's head only through the gaps of the heads before me is........I don't know, so undergraduate. The most unbearable element of this class is the way the material is presented: course requirement, assessment scheme, grading criteria. There are no topical themes on the syllabus, nor the due date of readings for each class meeting. I was navigating Nathan Sivin's articles the entire time this guy was talking. Nothing showed up when I googled his name (John Devlin), apparently his page was re-directed to some guy named Gerald Marsh who got a MA from ASU in 2006. I don't know how much credential Devlin got. Should I call him a "Dr."?
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against teaching staff without doctoral agrees, but all he did throughout the 50 min is nothing but BSing. He even showed the average mean differentials on GRE, GMAT and LSAT tests from 1977-1982 and showed that philosophy majors scored the best in these standard tests. I wonder what happened with the scores after 1982, and I was born after 1982, I don't see the significance of this statistic reports. I finally walked out of the classroom.
I almost forgot, this is a 300 level Philosophy class. Can you imagine what it's like for a 100 level class?
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