f13.net

US Student Fails Her Assignment Because Her Professor Said "Australia Isn't A Country" (https://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/australia-is-real-i-swear)



Is this a "lalala I can't hear you" thing where if you wish us away, the spiders and snakes no longer exist?

Yeah, don't worry, online education is JUST as good as anything else.

At university level, that kind of shit should be grounds for termination of your right to be a professor......

Reminds me of a similar thing that happened to me back in highschool, where my french teacher marked me wrong on a problem in one of the workbooks.  The question was in the form of a diagram, with a picture of an assembly of gears, where it asked you "if you turn gear A in this direction, what direction does gear B move in.  She marked me wrong because the fucking answer sheet in the back of the workbook had the wrong answer.  So I went home, built the fucking thing out of lego-technic, and brought the assembly to my next class to show that the book had the wrong answer.   Never liked french much, and damn sure wasn't going to lose marks because someone decided to mark shit by the book.

For-profit higher education usually doesn't even let you see who their faculty are, because it's a big mix of people who are the equivalent of the gym coach who teaches US history in high school (e.g., people teaching a subject they are manifestly not qualified to teach), people who got Ph.ds from diploma mills, people who don't even have a degree, people with actual jobs who are moonlighting against the rules of their institution (and probably barely paying attention). Not a surprise since they're paid almost nothing.

Well at least the professor didnt confuse us for a landlocked country in Europe.


mmm Southern New Hampshire huh, thats 20 minutes drive from me...I'll go slap her around with my Australian passport 'DO CONTINENTS ISSUE PASSPORTS LADY??'

Technically, she's only half wrong, as Australia is a continent, it just also happens to be a country that takes up the entire continent. So, only half a dumbass, but wholly someone who should not be teaching.

Sporcle tells me that 'Oceania' is now the continent and Sporcle is never wrong.

Without following the link to buzzfeed (thanks, but no), is it possible that the professor's point is that Australia is name of the continent that the Commonwealth of Australia (the actual name of the country) occupies, along with the Island of Tasmania and others?

If you are going to expect your professors to not be pedantic twits, you probably don't need to be going to college at all.

Nope. Prof legit had no idea Australia was a country. Student provided notes and sourcing in emails, and prof said they would have to do an independent review of material in order to regrade, but don't expect an improvement if you're going to make an easy mistake like thinking Aus was a country. It's holy fuck levels of stupid.

Blame Canada.

I would think the logical followup to her statement would have been "So, exactly what countries are found in the Continent of Australia?"

Also don't expect the faculty of Southern New Hampshire to be in Southern New Hampshire--the online instruction unit runs nearly separately from the bricks-and-mortar university (and is pretty much trashing the rep of the remaining bricks-and-mortar operation), it's got 2,000+ "faculty" who are entirely associated with the online courses and as with most of these things, they make it hard to find out who they are. You can now see the Univ. of Phoenix's faculty lists but it's buried deep in the site and there's no sorting (e.g., by department or unit). Most of them just have master's degrees, a fair number from Univ. of Phoenix itself.

Thanks for going to Buzzfeed for me, I wasn't up to that today.

So, what did he think Australia was, part of New Zealand?

 :awesome_for_real:

Has now been "replaced". (https://www.sbs.com.au/news/australia-not-a-country-professor-sacked)