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Truth value of such an essay is hardly the point, right? If someone can make up a convincing yarn, more power to them.
No... you absolutely do not want people who make shit up to score points. Why on Earth would that be a good idea?
I suppose for power-seeking Machiavellian reasons, but if we're redesigning the college university system to not churn out bullshit indistinguishable from meaningful content, then we should start with not conditioning admissions on being able to churn out bullshit indistinguishable from meaningful content.
I have some bad news for you about major components of the college admissions system.
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Unfortunately for the school, this is exactly what it felt like I was doing every time I was tasked with an essay assignment. And the following assignments on to it only ever had it seem like they were asking me to come up with seven different ways to say exactly the same thing. That exercise in 'bullshit' was where the real mental work was. Not in a new thought space I was trying to blaze trails in.
Unironically, isn't that also what organizations like the NSA look for in new graduates? Odd as it may seem. A professional/good bullshitter in many ways is an ideal candidate. But it's a paradox. The NSA has a double mandate to uphold the security of the nation, while going after and pursuing its adversaries. They simultaneously want someone with an honest and clean background, who will lie for them and do all manner of Constitutionally underhanded things in favor of the institution's mandate and self-preservation.
On the other hand, you've got creative fiction writers.
Might depend on the position, but for the technical ones everyone associates with the NSA, no, they're looking for math nerds.
I presume that number one requirement NSA is looking for is complete political reliability, not even trace of any expressed doubt of current party line (and any previous party lines during applicant's lifetimes), plus no compromised or suspect persons among their family, friends and acquitances. One Snowden was enough.
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Seeing as the proposed admissions system has a portion that explicitly "would test a candidate’s ability to bullshit convincingly, the most important elite skill there is" I assume that's what they were going for.
I think if most students were being honest at the point of their graduation ceremony, they would realize that bullshitting was probably the only 'real' thing they learned in school. By no means am I by default, sympathetic to the administration as 'educators' either.
I have a math degree. This doesn't resonate with me at all. I think the CS, physics and chemistry majors would agree. The people who only learn how to bullshit are the people who major in bullshit things like "business administration" or "literary criticism" maybe these degrees just shouldn't exist.
Well.
The only way I can see someone bullshitting their way through a math degree, is essentially by successfully plagiarizing the work of other people. And if you bullshit your way through math in high school, you're copying someone else's answers and stealing their work. You're not going to bullshit the work itself, the hard sciences don't allow for it. You'll have to do it. And the former is probably difficult enough that makes choosing the latter easier.
If I look back at my high school experience in retrospect, the 'education' I got from it alone, should've left me back in school and I shouldn't have been allowed to graduate. What allowed me to succeed was the fact that I was an autodidact, who caught up with everything elsewhere, at a pace I enjoyed in a context that I was more passionate about. I hardly learned shit in school. And it wasn't because I was unintelligent or lazy. In fact, I was one of the better students. I just couldn't succeed in that environment.
That's exactly my point. The fact that the subject matter can't be bullshitted is exactly what gives these subjects merit. It means they have real truth content.
You're not going to see any disagreement from me there. That's not really what I was getting at. When I was in school, I didn't bullshit math. I bullshit the math 'class'. At the time I graduated high school, I was not proficient enough in mathematics such that I should've been allowed to graduate. But I did. And eventually I caught everything up very quickly through my own personal development and interest directed education. I certainly didn't get it from school.
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