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Bullshit Section Participation App Hits 6655 Users

Thanks to Particip8, students no longer have to rely on half-assed searches of Wikipedia.

Developers of Particip8, the popular iPhone and Android application for Harvard students who lack an intelligent comment to contribute to section discussion, announced yesterday that its user base had grown to 6655 students—encompassing Harvard’s entire undergraduate population.

Students regularly rely upon Particip8’s suggestions to craft their weekly, absolute bare-minimum, singular incoherent thought that somehow still merits a passing section participation grade. 

“It’s great,” said Myra Fields, a student in Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 27, Crossing Southerly Tides: Neo-Modern Allegorical References to Prehistoric Incan Culture in Beowulf’s Daytime Monologues.

“You just discreetly tap your phone during section, and it gives you something passable-enough-for-intellectual-discourse to say.”

To demonstrate, Fields tapped her phone, and the screen read: “To echo what you said earlier and kind of going off of what Professor [fill-in-the-blank] mentioned in lecture, the construction we see here manifests the character’s agency in more salient terms.” 

The app’s developers plan to release an update sometime this month that will feature improved features, such as color-coded text to indicate when a Particip8 bullshit section comment should be read ending with a slightly-inquisitive voice inflection, so that users can propose their superficial statements to the class while simultaneously distancing themselves from the dubious and disjointed claim they have just made.

Meanwhile, teaching fellows at Harvard College have observed a marked increase in the liveliness of section discussion as a result of Particip8’s proliferation.

“The other day, I prompted my students, ‘Let’s talk about the carnivalesque underpinnings for the ostensible cathartic release that Archibald’s foil experiences here on page 212,’” said Philip Reeve, a teaching fellow for Culture and Belief 10, Mythic Foundations of Therapeutic Taxidermy.

“Usually, I would expect everyone to shamefully look down in tacit acknowledgement that they hadn’t done the reading. But now, everyone quickly glances down at their smartphone screen, and a dozen hands go up, precipitating half-assed but plausible categorical conjectures like, ‘This passage intrinsically transcends observable significance and therefore we must rely upon the author’s perceived sense of social mobility to guide our perspective.’” 

While users await the latest bullshit-facilitating additions to Particip8, its developers continue to add phrases to the application’s ever-growing volume of computerized comments by selecting sentences at random from recordings of professors’ lectures.

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