My wife is a lecturer and had a related experience with a student.
Sometime early in the semester after the course outline had been presented to her students, my wife received an email in which a student put forward his plan on how he was going to game the course to get a pass with the minimum amount of work. It went something like this:
According to the course outline, I plan to just read the poetry and one of the books. If I do essays 1 on the poetry, essays 3 and 4 comparing the book to the poetry, skip essay 3 and get 50% on the exam then, by my calculations I should get a pass. Could you tell me if this plan will work?
I've heard of time management but I'd never seen such a blatant disregard for actually wanting to learn anything in a course before. It didn't occur to the student that telling a lecturer that her course was just an obstacle course to be rushed through as efficiently as possible was a little disrespectful?
There is nothing disrespectful here. It is simply a symptom of how universities operate. It's even more blatantly obvious in lower division math classes.
Universities often to require students to take lots of filler courses, unrelated to their chosen field, taught simply to raise funds for the department providing the filler.
So that english course could easily be nothing but an obstacle in the way of an engineering or business major graduating. And it might be an obstacle which exists solely to get some of the student's money.
The point is not that the course might be mandatory for a business student (it wasn't - the student picked it as an elective), nor that he shouldn't make and execute such a plan if he thinks it is in his best interests.
The disrespect was in telling the lecturer, "we both know this is a waste of my time so tell me how to get it over with as easily as possible".
It's like constantly checking your phone while talking to someone in person. Even if you are listening to what they are saying, you are signalling to that person that there are more interesting things than them which demand your attention.
I hate to break it to you, but school is just not that important. Getting a degree is a stepping stone (or as you say, obstacle course) to something that people actually want.
Sometime early in the semester after the course outline had been presented to her students, my wife received an email in which a student put forward his plan on how he was going to game the course to get a pass with the minimum amount of work. It went something like this:
According to the course outline, I plan to just read the poetry and one of the books. If I do essays 1 on the poetry, essays 3 and 4 comparing the book to the poetry, skip essay 3 and get 50% on the exam then, by my calculations I should get a pass. Could you tell me if this plan will work?
I've heard of time management but I'd never seen such a blatant disregard for actually wanting to learn anything in a course before. It didn't occur to the student that telling a lecturer that her course was just an obstacle course to be rushed through as efficiently as possible was a little disrespectful?