Teacher here: you’re conflating course content with assessment, which is a mistake—the two are logically independent.
I assume the purpose of a course called “Survey of the Arts” is to get you to learn some content—that is, some set of facts about art movements. Because it’s a survey course it should be broad general knowledge. Survey courses often exist to allow students to dabble enough in a subject to see if they’re interested in any particular field. I did a linguistics survey class and discovered I was really interested in sociolinguistics and not very interested in phonetics. That in itself was useful.
The purpose of an assessment is to measure how much content you learned. A common assessment strategy is to try to take a sample of your knowledge. A paper can be a good sample of your knowledge even if you use your knowledge to make a bad argument—the Survey of the Arts class might not consider “making a good argument” to be a course goal.
Also, even if an assessment is bad, or if the task is assessed poorly, that doesn’t make the knowledge you gained from the course useless.
I’m a teacher and in the country where I live we had a few weeks of school in-person this September-October until the fall wave got too high and we all went home. School was run with a reduced class size and distancing rules in place, but try telling that to a sixth grader. At one point a kid jumped out of his chair and ran up to me and I had to tell him to back up and go back to his seat. Another kid asked, “Mr. Z, are you scared of coronavirus?”
What did that feel like? It felt like being offended. I sort of mentally seized up, and my chest muscles clenched. I was able, with some effort, to acknowledge that yes, coronavirus was a concern for me. I’ve thought about that moment a lot.
My theory at the time was that we’re conditioned to avoid admitting to being afraid of something, especially publicly and on short notice. At least when I was growing up, if I admitted fear, I’d generally be mocked for it, so I learned not to do it. And when someone asks me if I’m afraid—or accuses me of being afraid—I get angry at them. I want to tell them, “no, I’m not ‘afraid’ - I’m rationally concerned about bad outcomes.” I think in part the accusation of fear angers me because it implies that I am somehow being irrational, or letting my emotions get the best of me—whereas my belief is that if I’m “afraid” that means that there is real danger which is dangerous and likely enough to warrant some action to mitigate the danger. But in general, if someone asks me if I’m afraid, what it feels like is they’re accusing me of being irrational. So my impulse is to deny it, or to try to “rationalize” the fear.
But I think this is a destructive impulse—I think being afraid to admit you’re afraid leads people towards collective stupidity, like reopening schools before it is safe to do so. Speaking of which...
This Monday we’re supposed to return to in-person instruction, despite cases being almost as high now as they were when we closed. Parents are just tired of their kids, I guess. Anyway, because I have a specific risk factor, and live in a multi-generational household, I asked my principal if I could continue teaching online and just have them project me into the classroom for the seven kids at a time that will be allowed in the room in person. I ended up speaking with the director of the school yesterday and she told me I sounded scared. Without hesitation I agreed that I am indeed scared. But being able to smoothly admit that seems to have taken, let’s say, many hours over many months of introspection and reflection and mental preparation and specific resolve. Basically I had to have so much confidence that my fear was justified and that mitigating the danger was necessary that I felt like I could absorb the hit to my social status or reputation that would come from being a person who admits to being afraid. Or at least, that’s what it looks like from the inside. I know that I did the introspection and preparation, and I know that my physiological and mental reaction to being asked if I was afraid of coronavirus changed between October and February, but I obviously can’t prove that the introspection and preparation caused the change.