Dodged the Stoopid

[draconis]

I received a letter in the mail this week from my college, informing me that I had "been selected as part of a sample of seniors to take a General Education exam to complete your graduation requirements." The letter included the dates and times when the exam would be conducted (Monday and Tuesday of next week), and the name of the building and the room where they would be held.

Which is all well and good, except that I'm an off-campus student.

As in, I've only ever set foot on the physical campus a handful of times, and most of those were because of First Friday Star Parties with the school's Astronomy club.

And then there's the fact that I'm a transfer student -- I haven't taken a single General Education course from this school, so testing me on them would be invalid (in the sense of the test not measuring what it is supposed to)... but apparently that doesn't matter.

So I called their office to find out if this was actually a new requirement for me to be able to graduate, and was told that it was. I pointed out that I'm not an on-campus student, and the bit about not taking any of their GE courses, and was told that if I'd been selected, then unless I was beyond a certain distance from the campus, I was required to come and take the exam if I wanted to graduate.

Stoopid.

So I asked her for directions to the building/room where the test would be held, but the directions she gives me are all campus-based references. When I pointed out to her that I'm not an on-campus student and didn't know any of those references, she stammered for a moment, then suddenly decided that Nashville was a lot farther away than she had previously thought, and exempted me from the test.

Comments

[rhi]

:::groan::: Too gorram stupid to be in education!!! {{hugs}}

[alysswolf.livejournal.com]

Something tells me that they should first administer a General Education test to their own employees.

Actually, I'm not sure they can actually *require* that anyone take this test. I'm sure that they would like to make you think that, but this is essentially adding another criteria to the graduation requirements you signed in on and that's usually a no-no. I suspect the test is strongly recommended, but not actually mandatory. A good adviser would have a field day batting this one back into the faces of the administrator who thought it up. ::evil grin::

[unmisha.livejournal.com]

Whew! Close call!
Good thing she finally realized... hey, not from 'round here... :)