Teacher here: you’re conflating course content with assessment, which is a mistake—the two are logically independent.
I assume the purpose of a course called “Survey of the Arts” is to get you to learn some content—that is, some set of facts about art movements. Because it’s a survey course it should be broad general knowledge. Survey courses often exist to allow students to dabble enough in a subject to see if they’re interested in any particular field. I did a linguistics survey class and discovered I was really interested in sociolinguistics and not very interested in phonetics. That in itself was useful.
The purpose of an assessment is to measure how much content you learned. A common assessment strategy is to try to take a sample of your knowledge. A paper can be a good sample of your knowledge even if you use your knowledge to make a bad argument—the Survey of the Arts class might not consider “making a good argument” to be a course goal.
Also, even if an assessment is bad, or if the task is assessed poorly, that doesn’t make the knowledge you gained from the course useless.
Yeah, you can replace “typically” with “often” in both papers, and there’s no problem. And presumably his paper didn’t actually do the sort of broad analysis you’d need to argue that something held in the majority of cases. So the issue is that the student wasn’t being logically rigorous and precise, and the teacher didn’t mark down or comment on that. But that really isn’t the point of the course.
Teacher here: you’re conflating course content with assessment, which is a mistake—the two are logically independent.
I assume the purpose of a course called “Survey of the Arts” is to get you to learn some content—that is, some set of facts about art movements. Because it’s a survey course it should be broad general knowledge. Survey courses often exist to allow students to dabble enough in a subject to see if they’re interested in any particular field. I did a linguistics survey class and discovered I was really interested in sociolinguistics and not very interested in phonetics. That in itself was useful.
The purpose of an assessment is to measure how much content you learned. A common assessment strategy is to try to take a sample of your knowledge. A paper can be a good sample of your knowledge even if you use your knowledge to make a bad argument—the Survey of the Arts class might not consider “making a good argument” to be a course goal.
Also, even if an assessment is bad, or if the task is assessed poorly, that doesn’t make the knowledge you gained from the course useless.
Yeah, you can replace “typically” with “often” in both papers, and there’s no problem. And presumably his paper didn’t actually do the sort of broad analysis you’d need to argue that something held in the majority of cases. So the issue is that the student wasn’t being logically rigorous and precise, and the teacher didn’t mark down or comment on that. But that really isn’t the point of the course.