a question for teachers here?

have you ever had a student use a "fair and balanced" source like OxyRush, Hannity, or Worldnetdaily?

Seriously. It was a paper concerning Middle Eastern politics, and Yasser Arafat was interviewed by Playboy and made some salient remarks.

Sorry for the threadjacking. :-)

the entire department has set rigourous standards for acceptable support in defense of academic material. Nothing in the realm you refer to makes the cut.

When I needed some information about the details of how something worked. Sometimes the teachers would circle it and write "interesting source" but I was never penalized for it.

said in their Poly Sci Research Methods syllabus "FoxNews is so biased it is not acceptable."

?

I voted against a business major's honors thesis (which had as its theme the idea that government programs depress the savings rate, so they should be eliminated (!)) because she had used only right-wing sources. When I pointed this out to the other committee members, they voted with me.

The student and her professor got mad and said that we were showing political bias. We countered that the student could hold any opinion she wanted, but that in academic writing, she had to arrive at it after giving fair consideration to both sides and refuting the ideas that she disagreed with. I asked her if she knew that the savings rate in Germany is much higher than here, despite very generous social welfare programs. She did not, and claimed that she had used left-wing sources: she had cited one article from the New Republic.

Anyway, her thesis was rejected, and her professor was furious at us. He should have noticed her lack of balance, but I found in my three years on the honors committee that business professors let a lot of sloppy work get past them.

I had a student whose choice of topics for a research paper was "family values." After I picked myself up off the floor from laughing, I said, "Are you aware that "family values" is just republican propaganda?"


Cher