Probably this, on the heels of: https://lemmy.world/post/8643298

So spending is probably up, but it’s just deepening the debt hole. We’ll see where the bottom of that is soon enough…

I think what they’re speaking to is how such a change may alter the course of a presidential campaign. As it stands, there’s this notion that a candidate has to try and have broad appeal; they need to spread their campaign out a bit in order to “capture” the electoral votes of a state.

Sans the electoral college, I see presidential campaigns becoming even more polarized and exclusionary. The Democrat campaign will become the “big city loop.” Continually visit Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, NYC, and Miami. Maybe they slide in a few secondary metros if it’s convenient. The candidate won’t have to worry about any non-urban messaging, and if they’re particularly incendiary could even preach “dumping those hicks in the sticks.”

Conversely, the Republican campaign (not even considering the existing insanity) becomes “everywhere else.” They can push the message of “big city Democrats want to destroy you” even more convincingly.

Such an outcome strengthens the “not my president” sentiment (on either side), and just further aggravates partisanship. I’m not saying eliminating the electoral college is a change that could never be made, but I definitely think this is a bad time. It will feel like exclusion and alienation and in politics perception is reality.

For the obvious follow-on question “when is a good time,” I don’t have a pat answer and I can’t even speculate if that will be in 4, or 12, or even 20 years. But it needs to be a time when there’s far less immediate friction between the two leading parties, or it’s just going to be another wedge opening the divide.

Being able to bring my own formula sheet (or notes) definitely helped. Two full pages of notes would be great, though I would still get some bad nerves even in those cases (the very idea that the next 60 minutes of class time decides a full 30% of the course grade just rattled me bad).

For me the ideal type of course would be the Thermodynamics of Mechanical Systems course I took. The exams were in-person but open-note and straightforward with relatively simple conceptual questions. Credit was split between the exams and bi-monthly “mini projects.” These would ask you to apply the class concepts to some larger set of related problems; parameters were provided and you would have to determine the answers using what was learned in class (for example, one project was to design a steam turbine power plant with a target output of 50MW, ambient temperature was 30C, cooling water is available at 25C. Determine the heat input needed from the boiler, choose an appropriate number of turbine stages with reheat if possible, size the condenser appropriately and add economizers if they can be used. You’d lay it all out and indicate the temperatures, pressures, power inputs and outputs, exergy of the system, etc.)

I did stellar in that class. I would have loved that format everywhere (simple concept exams + application projects).

Sure; it was Mechanical Engineering. The class was “Vibrations & Controls;” the first half of the course was vibrations / oscillatory systems, and then the second half was theory of feedback & control systems (classic “PID” controllers for the most part). The exams were pencil-and-paper, in-person, time-limited.

The first attempt we were allowed nothing except the exam and paper for answers; honestly I’m not sure what that professor was expecting.

In my second attempt the professor provided a formula sheet, but he was of the mindset of “If you know F=ma, you can derive anything you need!” so the formula sheets were sparse to put it mildly. It was just enough to keep me from fully collapsing in panic and bombing, but it was close.

I recently finished my degree, and exam-heavy courses were the bane of my existence. I could sit down with the homework, work out every problem completely with everything documented, and then sit to an exam and suddenly it’s “what’s a fluid? What’s energy? Is this a pencil?”

The worst example was a course with three exams worth 30% of the grade, attendance 5% and homework 5%. I had to take the course twice; 100% on HW each time, but barely scraped by with a 70.4% after exams on the second attempt. Courses like that took years off my life in stress. :(