Teacher's Goin' to Show You How to Get an A

I've mentioned a few times that an application for a job in philosophy includes a lot of different pieces of paper. In my continuing effort to explain how stupid aspects of this process are, I want to highlight one of those.

I discovered last year that a lot of schools require you to submit your graduate transcripts with your application. For those who might not know, these are the transcripts with your grades for the graduate courses you took before you wrote your third year exams and started writing your dissertation. They're transcripts, in other words, for courses you took (at least!) three or four years ago. They're also transcripts for a lot of courses that have nothing to do with your AOS or AOC. They're transcripts that say pretty much nothing about you as a candidate.

Look, search committees. Don't you think asking for transcripts is a little embarassing for you? Do you really think you need to know what I got in my first year proseminar? I mean, I've got nothing to hide, so it's fine if you want to know. But do you really trust my prosem prof's assessment of my abilities better than your own? Come on guys, all y'all are professors of philosophy. You can look at my CV, my letters, and my writing sample, and you can do this all on your own.