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The Plate Archive21 charts

School and Study: Charts About Exams, Degrees and Homework

Charts drawn by people who were being examined at the time.

Twenty-one charts, and almost all of them were drawn by somebody who was supposed to be doing something else. That is the collection’s defining quality and it shows in the subject matter: essays in progress, exam weeks, degree choices being second guessed, and the recurring suspicion that the syllabus and the world have very little to do with each other.

The syllabus versus the world

Math topics I will actually NEED to use is the loudest version of the argument and the one that circulated most. Uses of geometry to a middle school student makes the same case earlier in the curriculum. What I learned in Accounting Class vs Level of Importance, filed under Office Life, is the vocational version.

What is interesting is how consistently the argument is made in the visual language of the thing being dismissed. A chart complaining that mathematics is useless is a mathematical object, drawn on axes, with proportions that have to add up. Nobody in the collection seems to have noticed, and that unselfconscious irony is more durable than any of the jokes.

Exams and the shape of a term

Final Exams is linked from two sites, and plots what a term does to a week. Components of a Calculus Problem is the best-constructed chart here: it divides one problem into setting up the equation, algebra, solving it, and a fourth slice, labelled MAGIC, which takes most of the circle. That is the joke, and it is also the honest answer no syllabus admits.

Study and Time spent making an essay both plot procrastination as a distribution rather than a moral failing. Types of sources university students use when doing an assignment is the collection’s most quietly damning entry, a ranking of source types, drawn in 2010, that a librarian could have used in a seminar without changing a thing.

Degrees, chosen and regretted

Reasons for Attending Graduate School is a decision audit. You’re getting a PhD in Math? plots a conversation rather than a decision, and holds two referring domains for it. Why I Am Majoring in Physics answers the same question positively, also with two. Reasons for Taking Japanese in Section 001 narrows it to one class of one course, which is the most specific chart in the archive and, oddly, one of the more legible.

Where A Philosophy Degree Gets You In Real Life, published separately as a plate, is the genre’s canonical entry.

Knowledge, plotted as a quantity

Four charts here treat understanding as a measurable volume: All Knowledge In The Universe, How I Obtain Knowledge, What I Know About Science and What I know about Buddhism. Each divides the reader’s own ignorance into slices, which is a harder joke to make about yourself than about a syllabus, and only one of the four — All Knowledge In The Universe — holds more than a single linking site.

Average 12-Year-Old’s Vocabulary and Bad Lessons for Children look at the other end of education, and What I Remember From My Childhood closes the collection in August 2010 with the image already lost, a chart about memory whose own record is now a title and a date.

Plotting knowledge as a quantity is a joke because the y-axis cannot be measured. It is worth noting where that stops being true: return to player is a percentage that genuinely is measured, audited and filed, which is why it can carry a chart at all.

Charts here
21
Images recovered
11
Published as plates
1
Referring domains
28
First posted
Mar 2008
Last posted
Aug 2010

The charts

In publication order. Sides run in tens, the way a record does. A chart marked as a plate has its own page and its own retrospective; the rest are published here, at the addresses they held when they were posted.

  1. A1

    You’re getting a PhD in Math?

    · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  2. A2

    Reasons for Taking Japanese in Section 001

    · Drawn by Mattobear

  3. A3

    Uses of geometry to a middle school student

    · Drawn by Robert · image not recovered

  4. A4

    Reasons for Attending Graduate School

    · Drawn by Blip Blip

  5. A5

    Things One Can Have While in College

    · Drawn by glenntg · image not recovered

  6. A6

    Components of a Calculus Problem

    · Drawn by Tabbykat417

  7. A7

    What I Know About Science

    · image not recovered

  8. A8

    How I Obtain Knowledge

    · Drawn by pasi · image not recovered

  9. A9

    What I know about Buddhism

    · Drawn by Yoshermon · image not recovered

  10. A10

    Final Exams

    · Drawn by jonbca · 2 domains still link here

  11. Side B
  12. B1

    Math topics I will actually NEED to use

    · Drawn by writerm · image not recovered

  13. B2

    Where A Philosophy Degree Gets You In Real Life

    · Drawn by ryanmtaylor · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  14. B3

    Bad Lessons for Children

    · Drawn by bsl35

  15. B4

    Study

  16. B5

    All Knowledge In The Universe

    · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  17. B6

    Things my school spends money on

    · image not recovered

  18. B7

    Time spent making an essay

  19. B8

    Average 12-Year-Old’s Vocabulary

    · 2 domains still link here

  20. B9

    Why I Am Majoring in Physics

    · Drawn by greenlantern1416 · 2 domains still link here

  21. B10

    Types of sources university students use when doing an assignment

    · Drawn by JAWS86

  22. Side C
  23. C1

    What I Remember From My Childhood

    · Drawn by inkytabitha · image not recovered

Queries answered

Who drew the charts in this collection?

Students, mostly, between March 2008 and August 2010. The internal evidence is strong: the subjects are coursework, exam weeks and degree choices, and several were plainly drawn instead of the work they describe.

What is the best-known chart here?

Where A Philosophy Degree Gets You In Real Life, from June 2009, which is published as its own plate. It is linked from three sites, and belongs to a genre of degree-value jokes that has not aged at all.

Is there a chart about maths you will never use?

Yes — Math topics I will actually NEED to use, from May 2009. It is the single most reprinted claim in student humour and it is wrong in an interesting way, since the topics it dismisses are the ones underneath everything it takes for granted.

Why do these charts use so much pie?

Because coursework has a fixed total. A term, an exam, an essay and a degree are all whole things that get divided up, and a pie chart is the correct format for a whole thing divided up, which makes this one of the few collections here where the format choice is defensible.

Why are some entries listed without an image?

Every original chart image was hosted on a service that now errors. Eachdid not survive on its original host. Where no copy survived the entry keeps its title, date and address.