@Senior2016M You are complaining about a logo and I am an Emory alum…you want to talk about a boring logo?
If you are going to be a senior, maybe do not take classes with other seniors or juniors if you are choosing a seminar style course. When I had senior or junioritis but still cared about quality teaching and discussion. i chose small courses outside of my field (usually history, religion, or political science) mixed with sophomores and juniors (and the brave and token freshman or 2) and usually courses that were either offered through initiatives or were mostly for majors. When I could I also checked the syllabus to ensure that the work and reading load were conducive to discussion. And as you know by now, professor makes all the difference. I liked to take more renowned professors (in terms of teaching) because I know they knew how to employ the element of surprise (like you may walk into class after an assigned reading and then be caught off guard by being told to do a debate or something. I took an awesome but an insanely work heavy Russian history instructor and he held us accountable for the reading by making writing up and submitting discussion questions already outlined in the syllabus per reading). They were also the types of teachers that “bit back” when they disagreed with a point a student raised so they would not sit idly and let people just randomly BS a discussion. They pressed.
I liked these more aggressive classroom settings because they brought the best out of the class and kind of kept folks on their toes. I learned how to deal with this in my freshman ochem class (instructor learned all names and heavily used Socratic and even sent folks to board. We had competitions for bonus points and his Socratic method was interesting in that he would pit one student against the other by asking things like: “Y, do you agree with X”? And often he would ask more open ended questions which is how he wrote exams). Point is, I think an effective instructor can really activate a class (that ochem class was like 70 folks and my biopsych class which I took as a sophomore had 120 and that instructor used these methods as well). Unless you are committed to a course with a certain instructor due to time constraints or requirements, just read the fine details of the syllabi and feel it out. I could usually tell when a course was going to go in the direction you described (I could tell by reading and writing load along with the behavior of the professor within the A/D/S period. It was obvious when the instructor was a pushover. And when most students were older…that pushover was going to be pushed over) and would usually get out of there if it wasn’t what I was looking for. I actually took maybe like 3 social science and humanities courses where instructors gave many Cs and Ds on writing assignments (big or small) and these were among the best (the Russian History class was strong too simply because he wouldn’t really give hardly any A’s. He was kind of old school).
Basically don’t write off those bad experiences in seminar as symptoms of VU. Try to feel out the environment better before you commit and predict whether it can meet your expectations. Usually it will be the more rigorous ones if you haven’t noticed. The phenomenon you describe can happen at any elite sadly. If the instructor doesn’t put pressure on, most will take advantage and it will often result in an underwhelming experience.