this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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lol maybe before chatgpt was a thing
Yup. Guilty as charged. If I need two pages and I've got like 1 3/4 of a page, I'll copy/ paste my entire report into chatgpt and ask it to make it a little longer. Then go through the changes, modify the bits I like and cut out the parts I don't.
Sue me.
tbh the page/word requirements are just as dumb as using chatgpt imo. as a general guideline for how much you need to go into details, sure, but literally counting pages and scoring based on that is not really the point of those assignments, I feel
Exactly. Last 2 years of highschool all of my major writing classes understood this and didn't have minimums, just write as much as you think it's necessary to cover your topic.
Most of my college courses have a minimum and maximum. Like they want to read exactly 2-3 pages per student. Annoying.
One of my English teachers once said something like “The more you write the more I have to read. So keep it short.”
I had a professor who wanted at least five pages and wouldn't read any more than eight. If you turn in more than eight, he reads the first eight and that's it.
I can get behind the maximum requirement tbh, there is only so much one teacher can read through
I have to do this just so my dyslexic ass can read it. If its all spaced the same then it just looks like a giant wall of giberish.
For browsers there seems to be an extension that makes the starts of words bold. A colleague of mine said it helped them read better. To me, that makes sense, since dyslexics might have trouble finding where words start and end.
That's pretty cool and might be useful for a lot of people. For me it seems to just be annoyingly distracting, I might be able to get used to it though.
Works for those with ADHD too.
Font size, line spacing, margins. Slight adjustments to all of them and you're done.
Or find and replace all the periods with ones that are slightly larger font.
I did this but for all punctuation. Everything was 12pt but all punctuation was 12.5 pt.
Use times newer roman
MS Word — bad, LibreOffice Writer/Typst — good.
I have a Mac so if I wanted to use a free software I would just use Pages, but ms office is included at my college and it has useful ai features and citation extensions. Most professors also require that slideshows and spreadsheets be in excel or pp format.
Do these professors state a reason why files need to be in a proprietary formats? Or what would be done (by them to students) if files were to be in a FOSS formats? You can save in the PPTX/XLSX format with LibreOffice suite.
We only need to provide a PDF file so I can use whatever I want.
Ask professors if they know that you have to pay to use MS Office suite. So you can argue that you won't pay money to be able to make documents/spreadsheets/presentations.
I don’t have to pay for office.
Professor here: do this all you want. It's not a page requirement, it's a word requirement. And it's a maximum, not a minimum. You have some tasks to accomplish in 1,000 words or less. Anything more than 1,000 words gets deleted or (if in hardcopy) crossed out/torn off and thrown away. I grade what's left.