Most courses at my uni have their own forum that is moderated by the course coordinator. An angry chink just posted this:
>Assignment 2, Petty Marking
>Dear Dr. [professor]
>In the assignment feedback to my previous submission, I have lost one mark due to, in the words of [Grad student who marked it]: "Don't need to go quoting exotic theorems like this. Everything you need to answer assignment questions is in lectures/lecture notes. In this case, just need to recognise that extrema can occur at critical points and/or on the boundary of the domain. See solution. -1"
>But how is this a valid reason to take marks away from my assignment when I have clearly demonstrated the required understanding, as can be seen from the assignment solutions? Clearly, from my arguments, it is in fact, possible for the maximal\minimal point to exist on a critical point on the restraint surface, just that simply such is not a requirement.
>I hope you are agreeable to my concerns, since this "university", and some of its markers, have demonstrated to be increasingly petty and shallow in their marking. It is almost as if I am marked down simply for accidentally inflaming their own mathematical insecurities, and in order to combat their own mathematical insecurities, they could abuse their authority by hand waving away my mathematical arguments. Why should I be perpetually penalized for someone else's insecurities?
>I will upload my assignment here, and I will also send you an email.
>[Link to the pdf]
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>Furthermore, if you don't mind, please explain, in a serious and professional manner, as opposed to just simply hand waving my arguments away and trying to gaslight me into thinking I'm "doing too much", why I have lost a mark in question 2. (b).
>Note that if I were to actually write too much, I would write up 50 or 100 pages to resolve the issue. Again, clearly, I have stayed within the bounds of the assignment.
The professor running the course concurs with the grad students marking decision.
Pajeet, a fellow student, claims to know the grad student through the tutorials. He defends the grad student and tells the chink "we all make mistakes" type stuff in an effort to comfort him. This goes back and forth a few times. Chinky responds with the following:
>You evidently did imply that the staff members are the authoritative voices of mathematics, by failing to apply the notion of fallibility to the staff members themselves. No, not only can you or I screw up, but so can they. Implicit in your suggestion is that they don't screw up, but it is only us.
>Otherwise, this is real life, and we belong to the Universe. This is not a rigorously stupid artificial intelligence that fails to identify the image of a dog because of a few rules that were violated. For instance, a neuro-network may come to learn that a dog must have 4 limbs, and that a dog, lacking all limbs, from a certain angle, may fail to look like a dog. Should the artificial intelligence thus identify the limbless dog as a log of wood if, say, the poor dog has accidentally fallen into an automated wood chipping system?
>Is this the philosophy that we want to to adopt for our societies? Societies of aging populations around the world that must utilize artificial intelligence in the future? If I see a limbless dog in an automated wood chipper, can't I make an exception?
>Are the markers nothing more than autistically insistent artificial intelligence algorithms who are unable to make their own judgement calls?
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>And otherwise, you cannot claim the low probability of feeling insecure as a fact - since I was a child, insecure reactions is what I've seen consistently whether I were to be in Kindergarten, primary school, secondary school, and even having seen insecurity as exhibited on mathematics discussion forums and from this so called "university". From my perspective, the probability is very high, at least when I take a frequentist's perspective of probability theory.
>In fact, as an explicit example, a number of staff members, including [a different professor] from the "Optimizastion" course, exhibited obvious signs of imposter syndrome when I was merely attempting to discuss issues of mathematics in a Zoom call (leading up to the notion of defining pathological functions over fractals, e.g., Cantor function defined over the Cantor set fractal as an example, etc.).
I've redacted the names and the link using square brackets. The rest is all him.
I've posted about a third of what he has written in the thread. This chink is out of control.