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I just wasted an hour listening to my geriatric Intro to College Chemistry professor yammer on about significant figures, rounding numbers, approximate versus exact measurements, and other bullshit I learned in the seventh grade. My sanity was just starting to slip away when it dawned on me: College prerequisite courses are bullshit.
College is expensive, and it doesn't help that the old fucks who run this goddamn state refuse to pay more money on their taxes so broke people can go to college tuition-free. Since we have to pay tuition, and tuition is paid per credit hour, it makes sense that we should try to get the most education for our buck. Enter the prerequisite courses.
Unless you're an idiot, you don't really need prerequisite courses. Read the goddamn book and you'll be fine. But if colleges allowed people who don't deserve to wear a dunce cap to bypass the prerequisite courses (through a test, for example), they would get fewer tuition dollars.
And I'm not saying that these prerequisite classes are bullshit to make it sound like I'm better than everyone else. Here are a few examples of prerequisite courses, their cost, and what they cover:
- Introduction to College Chemsitry (CHM 2025/L) ($475.44)
Covers basic laboratory safety, scientific notation, an overview of commonly used chemical elements, elementary school level chemical formulas, stochiometry, and everything else your high school chemistry teacher covered in the first semester.
- Microcomputing Skills (CGS 1100) ($316.96)
One might look at the name of this course and be misled into believing it might cover how to use MS-DOS, RegEdit, the administrative tools in the Windows Control Panel, or maybe even Macintosh or Linux computers. Instead, it's $300 pissed away going over computer skills a lobotomy patient could perform (e.g. how to locate the start menu), and how to use Microsoft Office; because there's nothing more to computers than Microsoft Office 2007. Office is the alpha and omega of computing. What a load of bullshit. I probably know more about computers than the Microcomputing Skills instructor.
If every college provided the option to test out of those two courses, thousands of students could each save $800. That's money that could be spent stimulating the economy. HINT FUCKING HINT! But much like the greedy corporations treat the American worker, colleges rake their students over the coals for classes that don't teach them anything difficult or useful to line their own pockets. Prerequisite classes are a fucking waste of time.
* Calculated from the current $79.24 per credit hour rate for Florida residents at Edison State College.
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