Explanation of the Free Will Test

I have discovered that there is a serious problem with the topic of free will. Most people don't know how "free will" is different from "freedom." Heck, most people don't know that "free will" is different from "freedom." I tried dealing with this by warning students that they shouldn't do this topic if they didn't know how "free will" is different from "freedom," but several students who assumed that "free will" and "freedom" were the same thing went ahead and ignored my warnings and wrote papers that assumed that "free will" was just another word for "freedom."

THEY GOT VERY BAD GRADES

"Free will" is not another word for "freedom." They are different words and mean different things. Some students who failed to grasp that they are two different things wrote papers arguing that freedom existed. Since the existance or nonexistance of freedom is a very, very trivial question, and hence not an odyssey topic, these papers could not fulfil the odyssey requirement.

THEY GOT VERY, VERY BAD GRADES

To make it worse, some students wrote papers about freedom and called it "free will," thus hiding from themselves the fact that they were not doing the odyssey assignment.

THEY GOT VERY, VERY, VERY BAD GRADES

I really don't want to give out bad grades. Especially not to students who have made a sort-of understandable mistake. But I can't give good grades to students who don't even address the question they think they're answering, so I wrote these test pages to filter out the students who don't understand the difference, and steer them to a topic where they will have a better chance of getting a good grade.

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