Week 11: Genuine Attempts: A Controlled Experiment in Effort

Week 11 — the twist ending, where the course asks you to actually do the thing it spent ten weeks teaching you to fake

3 May 2027

Turpin and colleagues frame bullshitting ability as an honest signal of intelligence, which is the closest thing this course has to a justification for grading it at all. This week runs the other condition: an honest attempt at the assignment, as a control group, using whatever the semester actually taught you.

Outline#

• what changes when the brief is answered instead of gestured at
• which of the last ten weeks’ techniques survive contact with a genuine attempt, and which turn out to have only ever worked as bits
• getting feedback on something real, which lands differently than feedback on something you never believed in
• what “revision” means with one week left and nothing left to fake