I Learn Nothing at Uni After the First Two Weeks of the Semester

I'm in my fourth year of uni at the moment and for a long time I've realised I don't know shit about my degree because of how uni is structured. My main take away is that summative assessment is bad, ineffective.

The reason for this is that uni doesn't allow students to focus on any learning beyond the first two weeks of a semester. I'm a full-time student taking 5 courses this semester. And in the first two weeks you have time to watch lectures, attend your workshops, do the pre and post workshop work and actually focus on the content they are trying to teach you. You learn shit here because you can focus on learning shit.

Then week 3 rolls up and you realise 'Oh shit, our first round of assessment is due in 2 or 3 weeks, I better get started. So now you start working on 5 assignments, each requiring days of focus each to be able to complete and edit. So suddenly the learning from this point forward doesn't actually matter, because all of your time is taken up on assignments for the rest of the semester.

By the time you finish the first round of assessment, you realise the second round of assessment usually requires even more work than the first. So you get an early start on them because you don't want to fall behind. By the end of the unit you end up with two weeks of learning which you have forgotten by the end of the unit because you didn't have time to review any of that material.

I've been completely apathetic to my life for the last 6 years as well, so fighting my inner compulsion to not do anything adds more stress to that.

Another thing is that assessment they give us are never clear. A good example is last semester for me. We had this 2000 word assignment for a unit, and I worked hard at it for 5 weeks. I planned it out, I ensured I ticked off each of the areas of the criteria sheets that I had included in the assignment and for the first time in years I felt like I had done the work well and deserved a good result for it.

No. 39/60. How is that fucking fair? I work my ass off to achieve something and the ---- of a tutor just says no, you get 39. So criteria sheets actually only work if what your interpretation of the criteria are match that of your tutor. Otherwise they just disagree with you and give you a lower mark. They are 100% subjective bullshit. Turns out that hard work gets you nothing in life, so now I've fallen back to being apathetic again. I needed that mark to be good.