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Comment by PuppyTailWags | Hacker News Reader

I would hate open-ended questions like that if I didn't know the professor and I didn't know the grading, because it relies on the professor's ability to evaluate what is reasonable justification. I'm sure if the professor was great, this strategy is wonderful, but it also relies on a leap of faith in terms of the student. For example, if I was a black man and the teacher was white, my essays about slavery would be not about if I learned the material but my trying to work around determining how racist a teacher might be.

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Replace professor with TA. But yea, bias on subjective questions is a thing for sure. Racism is probably the big one, though in your scenario, a white student could wonder, if you, a theoretical black student, got a better grade because the professor didn’t want to appear racist. You can drive yourself insane thinking about it.

> I'm sure if the professor was great, this strategy is wonderful, but it also relies on a leap of faith in terms of the student.

He was a quality professor who gave full marks to answers that disagreed with what he presented in class, so long as the answers were well justified.

You are right though, these types of exams can easily end up becoming a game of "can I answer how the professor wants me to answer".

>I would hate open-ended questions like that if I didn't know the professor and I didn't know the grading, because it relies on the professor's ability to evaluate what is reasonable justification.

After my first stint in college I took about a decade off before returning for graduate school. I made it a policy to research all of my professors before classes began. If they had a book published, I bought it, and read it. It gave me remarkable insight into all of my professors (at least the ones who had published) before class actually began, and made it much easier to navigate the subjective grading minefield that so often exists.

> For example, if I was a black man and the teacher was white, my essays about slavery would be not about if I learned the material but my trying to work around determining how racist a teacher might be.

That would be a valid concern regardless or your or professor’s race.

And even if we take into account that people are more biased towards opinions that elevate them, we should also take into account what an average college history teacher believes in. At that point you should probably be worried that your view isn’t Marxist enough.

That's an interesting take, one that I don't believe is backed up by the data.

Show me an economics program in the US pushing Marxist theory throughout.

We're not talking about an economics program - that would not likely have a Marxist professor - but rather a history class, which could easily have one.

Do economics programs ever push a single theory? They're supposed to teach you about the whole field, no?

While my Economics courses did offer insight into various schools of economic thought and different teachers had slightly different views on various topics, the basic premise that "Capitalism is awesome" was pretty much treated as axiomatic in every course I took.

Economics stands apart from other social sciences in its culture. It has pivoted quite heavily when it was transformed from political economy into economics during the marginal revolution. And while Marx can be jokingly referred as "a minor post-Ricardian" by some economists, he is considered a father of sociology alongside Comte, Weber, Durkheim and Spencer.

Data on Marxist self-identification among professors, table 12: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287093322_The_socia...

Or how many programs in general push Marxist theories in the US.

Quite a few undergrads come in thinking they've discovered the One True Path and of course it's—sigh—one myopic brand of libertarianism or another. Social science professors get pretty sick of that shit and I'm sure some of those students take the irritated rejection of their tired failing-to-engage-with-the-material crap as "Marxist professors pushing their ideology" but for the professors it's like if physics professors had to deal with every incoming freshman class having a few kids per hundred who are dead certain they've discovered the secret to perpetual motion, are in fact basically experts on it, and are very resistant to learning that they may not have the full picture.

They'd probably also try to temper the enthusiastic incorrectness of freshman coming in as full-on 1930s-throwback "Stalin was awesome, actually" tankies, but there just aren't that many of those. The confidently-wrong freshmen tend to all fit a similar mold, and it's not leftist.

Believe it or not, professional historians are more than capable of effectively grading undergrad essays that don't contain anticapitalist screeds.

I believe it. Why would you assume I don’t?

That's rough, since getting to the point of being able to answer and evaluate answers to those kinds of questions is, like, a really big part of working in the humanities. It's probably the single most important skill for an undergrad in humanities courses to pick up.

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