'Scuse me, Imma bitch a little bit about university...some more.
This entry's topic? Writing/Speaking Intensive courses! I get them if you're a useless waste of a degree liberal arts or business major, that's not up for debate. Being able to write and spout out long streams of bullshit is most of their future job description, assuming they don't end up at Taco Bell. But, for people that major in something useful having a job STEM fields, they're next to worthless. Your average STEM major isn't going to be writing essays, having to worry about "grabbing the audience's attention" or any of that extraneous bullshit. They aren't giving long-winded speeches about inane garbage; at most, they're doing a few minutes with a PowerPoint presentation.
Assuming I can write coherent English sentences and speak without sounding like a complete, blundering dipshit...why the fuck is this idiocy required? Fuck, why can't I test out of it? I am a computer science major, not a god damned essayist. Most of what I'm gonna end up doing is going to involve less Word documents and more sitting in my boxers eating Cheetos and yelling at Visual Studio.
I'd be willing to bet the obscene amount of moronic bullshit is why a lot of people don't get out of graduate university. They're crushed under the weight of utter nonsense. Tailor the experience to the student, or at least the major. If they don't know what they're gonna do (ie: if they're an idiot and jumped into uni as a freshman), maybe then give them some random bullshit to see what sticks. For people like me, people that know what they're doing, what they wanna do for the next several decades, why require this bullshit? Stop fucking us about with liberal arts nonsense and just make sure we can read, write, and speak coherently. The gen-eds already cover that more than adequately.
I hate writing papers.