LifeHacker: Top Ten No Sympathy Lines

Here's a grumpy prof's list of no-sympathy excuses and his rebuttals for each, courtesy of the LifeHacker blog. Luis will approve, I'm sure. I've sampled my favorites and sampled fewer of his responses. They are aimed at college students, but most of them are heard in lower grades as well. Visit the full list to read them all.

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• This Course Covered Too Much Material...
Great! You got your money's worth! At over $100 a credit, you should complain about not getting a lot of information. If you take a three credit course and get $200 worth of information, you have a right to complain. If you get $500 worth, you got a bargain.

• I Disagreed With the Professor's Stand on ----
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• Do You Give Out a Study Guide?
Hmm. The textbook simplifies a vast amount of material, then I simplify it more in lecture. Then you want me to extract the most important ten per cent of that and put it on a study guide, so if you know most of it you can get an A.
So what you're saying is the cutoff grade for an A should be 10%, right?

• I Studied for Hours
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• I Know The Material - I Just Don't Do Well on Exams
Leprechauns, unicorns, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, hobbits, orcs - and students who know the material but don't do well on exams. Mythical creatures.

• I Don't Have Time For All This
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• Do I Need to Know This?
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• There Was Too Much Memorization
Sad to say, students have been victims of a cruel hoax. You've been told ever since grade school that memorization isn't important. Well, it is important, and our system wastes the years when it is easiest to learn new skills.
Memorization is not the antithesis of creativity; it is absolutely indispensable to creativity. Creative insights come at odd and unpredictable moments, not when you have all the references spread out on the table in front of you. You can't possibly hope to have creative insights unless you have memorized all the relevant information. And you can't hope to have really creative insights unless you have memorized a vast amount of information, because you have no way of knowing what might turn out to be useful.

• This Course Wasn't Relevant
If something as vast as mathematics or science or history can pass through your brain without even scraping the sides on the way through, that's a pretty big hole. Are you sure it's the course that doesn't relate to anything?

• Exams Don't Reflect Real Life
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• All I Want is the Diploma
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