I did rather poorly in an ethics class because I realized moral relativism was rather obviously right and any form of realism logically indefensible (without an axiom—if you admit you have an unprovable assumption underlying your moral framework, then it’s morally real-ish, but it isn’t totally objectively correct, because of that assumption). There is also a real risk of relying on concepts that the reader is not familiar with, but that’s usually pretty easy to screen, especially if you have a friend to read a draft.
The thing is, when I say, “rather poorly,” I mean a B (possibly +), and this was at a top public university. In a math class (having not taken math in five years), I realized shortly before an exam that I had been taking derivatives when I should have been integrating. This would have had a rather more pronounced effect on my grade had I not caught it.
I did rather poorly in an ethics class because I realized moral relativism was rather obviously right and any form of realism logically indefensible (without an axiom—if you admit you have an unprovable assumption underlying your moral framework, then it’s morally real-ish, but it isn’t totally objectively correct, because of that assumption). There is also a real risk of relying on concepts that the reader is not familiar with, but that’s usually pretty easy to screen, especially if you have a friend to read a draft.
The thing is, when I say, “rather poorly,” I mean a B (possibly +), and this was at a top public university. In a math class (having not taken math in five years), I realized shortly before an exam that I had been taking derivatives when I should have been integrating. This would have had a rather more pronounced effect on my grade had I not caught it.