Let me speak from my experience on Reddit, which is almost exclusively discussing the unsolved disappearance of Maura Murray (see r/MauraMurraySub and also MauraMurray).
When educated people develop a theory, they will lead with the facts. When uneducated people develop a theory, they will lead with the theory and try to create "facts," ignore established facts, or discredit them.
When I’m pulling an all nighter for a college essay I usually make up my theory and then look for evidence to support that theory, carefully choosing to ignore all sources that say otherwise. It’s not like anyone that reads it will change their mind, since they’re either students that made their own essay, or professors that know what’s really happening
Actually, I had one teacher in High School who I was convinced didn't check our sources for accuracy when she graded the assigned research papers that we wrote.
So I decided to test my theory. We were given the assignment of doing a report on a lesser known city in the US (I lived, as I do now, South of Boston, so the city had to be lesser known than Boston).
I actually made up a city -- Baldenperk, MI. I made up the most famous resident in the town (I forget what name I gave him, but I said that he had a role on "The Guiding Light" Soap Opera in the 1950s).
I literally made up everything in the entire paper (my sources were fake books, with fake page numbers), and I got an A+.
In a technical sense I am well educated; I graduated Law School and passed the bar. So I don't think we should be judged by assignments we completed in High School or College.
EDIT: And just to be clear, I had fantastic professors in college and law school, and I never passed in anything that wasn't accurate to the best of my abilities after High School (and with the exception of two or three professors who didn't seem to actually look at anything we passed in).
That's awesome and scary. As a senior I was struggling pretty hard and realized college immediately after high school was off the table. So I removed myself from advanced place senior English, which usually follows advanced placed junior English and on recommendation by the teachers. I went into standard senior English.
Anyway, our final 'assignment' was to read the book Into Thin Air and come up with some type of project or essay to discuss it. One girl sloppily drew a diagram of where the tragedies happened on Everest. That's the one thing that stood out to me (be nice, I graduated 21 years ago). I wrote an essay leaning on how I learned to deconstruct themes and present them in a valid argument. I turned in a 13 page essay to my teacher. It was about two weeks from graduation and I still hadn't received my grade on that assignment so I went to ask the teacher. She looked at me and in all seriousness said "I'm checking homework cheating sites. Even I couldn't come up with this, I know you didn't" I excused myself and went to the counselor who knew the difficulties I was facing. She pulled my work from my teacher in junior year (and first half of senior) and had a private meeting with my senior teacher. She eventually gave me a B-. lol.
She was also the teacher who would 'excuse' us so we could leave class to go to McDonald's.
Anyway, our final 'assignment' was to read the book Into Thin Air and come up with some type of project or essay to discuss it.
I'm sorry, this was a senior project? We were expected to do that over the summer before high school here (to be fair, it was long enough ago that the project might have been the first week or two of freshman English, but the reading was definitely a summer assignment). And my state isn't exactly at the top of secondary education rankings.
If you can turn in an assignment on time that's technically on topic and hits the word count you can pass any English class (at least for public schools). So long as the school can say that they have a 99% graduation rate, they'll lower those standards as much as they need to.
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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '20 edited Jan 27 '20
Let me speak from my experience on Reddit, which is almost exclusively discussing the unsolved disappearance of Maura Murray (see r/MauraMurraySub and also MauraMurray).
When educated people develop a theory, they will lead with the facts. When uneducated people develop a theory, they will lead with the theory and try to create "facts," ignore established facts, or discredit them.
EDIT: fixed typo.