> The university has traditionally played
> a societal role in converting callow
> youth into mature and responsible adults.

Only in our fantasies.

Wanna know how I know that?...

How I know that "the university" hasn't "played a societal role in converting callow youth into mature and responsible adults"?

Wanna know how I'm so sure that isn't real?

Because of transparently bogus wordings like "a societal role".

No one in academe has ever, EVER made a life there but for their (smart-guy!) certainty that they couldn't do better for themselves in a more rewarding (and almost certainly less administration-laden) context... Like, maybe, commerce.

Don't kid yourself. Here's proof...

Light a candle, sip the wine.

Gennilmen… Unzip your fly.

Ladies… Open your blouse.

Close your eyes for a moment, and think of something sad, like a beloved housepet in danger.

Then sit straight up, lift your lids and tell us what YOUR "SOCIETAL ROLE" is.

(In this exercise, the best responses all rhyme with "Go fuck yourself." It's the 4th's weekend, people... This country is all about liberty, not imaginary contexts of indebtedness.)

Patience with rhetoric of that kind may be the best evidence that America confuses brains with decency.


See also, the passages in Colin Powell's memoir in which he describes the wretchedness that happened in his Army when the adults responsible for teenage ne'er-do-wells decided the little goofballs should enlist in order to get their personal shit together.

Put another way: Tenured academics have chosen there own nightmare.

Don't come cryin'. Your morality was already compromised.

"I speak not of the rights granted to me by the Constitution, but instead those guaranteed to me by politicians."

And with all this, the author wonderfully misses that NO rights are GRANTED by the Constitution - they are guaranteed. Not the same thing.

When I was an undergrad thirty plus years ago, my state university had a policy of letting you retake a course as many times as you wanted to or needed to.

Once you paid the extremely reasonable full tuition, it was an all you could eat buffet, and most required courses that were difficult were offered in summer school.

Now with their plans in place to extract as much money as possible from the students, and the federal government, you pay through the nose to retake any class.
And with multiple prerequisites for every advanced engineering class, retaking anything probably sets you back a year or more.

My daughter dropped out of college less than a decade ago because after taking a semester off, the prerequisite sequence had changed. It added almost two years to the time required to complete a degree. It simply wasn't worth it.

So I can understand the increase in the begging letters. People want the credit, not the education, which the university stopped offering for any reasonable price 20 years ago.

"While studying for the final exam I spilled milk on my laptop, rendering it unusable. My father had to take me to the Apple store for repair. This whole ordeal took up most of my study time. "

So he allotted two days or at most three to study for this huge exam? He should have been studying after each period, or at least once a week, to get the material into his head. 'Oops, JUST when I thought I'd study for the test, I got hit by a bus' is just so transparent...it says 'I left all my course work till now, and can't finish/understand it in time'.

Perhaps a better course of action for the particular "victim" would be to ask how they could get the grade up (who remembers 'extra credit') or to re-take the final.
At least make the effort to take the blame.

Good luck fighting this trend. Most of these kids learn the excuse pattern early in their career and they learn it from their parents. I cannot tell you how many of my friends have complained about the math instruction at our middle school and specifically the teachers. The teachers are described as mean, uncaring, and too demanding. I also hear a lot of "They just don't teach the material." Their kids see the teachers as the enemy and have convinced their parents it is true.

This is all bull crap. We were warned that if you put your child in advanced math, he/she better be prepared to work. My child spends a lot of time on her math and my husband does occasionally help her. She says the teachers are tough, but fair and that if you do the work you will succeed. She works hard, but after 3 years she has really blossomed and come into her own. My husband has a PhD in the sciences and can testify to the quality of the instruction being provided at our public school.

Other parents, especially the ones with sports stars, are the ones who complain that their child is a genius but the teacher needs to work harder to tap that genius. I also hear this about other course work, but it is especially bad with regard to math. So the kid learns from an early age that he is not responsible for the outcome, the teacher is. If there is a failure of understanding it must come from outside of themselves bc they are perfect as they are. This is just carried forward right into college and I am not surprised.

When I attended college (I started in 99, so not THAT long ago!), there were a very few acceptable excuses for missing an exam. They were:

-death in the family
-hospitalization (not due to partying)
-anything involving illness bad enough to require an overnight stay in the health clinic DURING the time of the exam.

I actually took an exam I should have been exempted due to the first reason.

There are occasion (very occasional) legitimate reasons to give somebody a break. They involve things that are incapacitating, not electronics.

At an orientation event, the chairman of the freshman engineering program at my school told us very plainly: "The people who made you look good in high school will not be here." He was right. They weren't.

The freshman chemistry professor said, "If you don't memorize the periodic table, you'll get your but kicked on the exam!" He was right. I did.

I tell my kids I liked second semester physics so much I took it twice.

It's supposed to be hard.

"This is all bull crap. We were warned that if you put your child in advanced math, he/she better be prepared to work."

I have a buddy at work who attended MIT, majoring in math. As he tells it, since he had taken advanced classes in high school and did very well at it, he figured he would sign up for a 2nd year math class. He was shocked when he did not even recognize the fourth or fifth symbol the TA put on the board that first day, so he packed up, marched down to the registrar's office and signed up for the proper class.

If you can skate, it's not worth your time.

I want to go back to school, but apparently my credits for everything I took are "too old" to be used toward any new degree programs anymore. That means I need to retake two full years of schooling before I can even get into any of the classes necessary to continue toward my goal. None of the schools in my area will allow me to test for credit on the courses either. It's bullshit. It's all the basic english classes and all the beginning medical classes like medical terminology and anatomy and biology they want me to take again, never mind that if I didn't have this down I never would have graduated in the first place nor been able to hold down a job successfully for over a decade. It's their way of sucking more money out of people by making them do everything over.

Bunnygirl; yes, it is usually 7 years before credits can no longer be applied.

The logic in that a course taken 20 years ago might not have covered all the stuff "discovered" in that last 20 years.

However, I agree that it would be nice if the schools (especially local community colleges - whose mission is to serve the community in which they are located!) did offer something like an equivalency test and offer credit for some of the basics.

I mean, most community colleges do test for a basic level and put students into remedial classes if they test below a certain level (in my opinion, just another way to get more money from students!).

Even if they didn't offer credit, in the very least it would be nice if you took a test and tested ABOVE another level and, therefore, they exempted you from those basic courses.

It's supposed to be hard.

Right you are, RPM Daddy. I got my degree in '07, and in my experience, anyone who legitimately earns a D is never going to be an engineer anyway. There is just too much hard work, effort, and sacrifice involved. My last two years in college I pretty much did nothing but study, because that's what it takes to get an engineering degree.

Besides, do you want to fly a plane designed by the straight-C student?

> I tell my kids I liked second semester
> physics so much I took it twice.

☑

Besides, do you want to fly a plane designed by the straight-C student?

Posted by: Sosij at July 6, 2014 8:33 PM

Depends on what school it was, and what the basis for the grade was.

If the straight C student has the degree from MIT, as opposed to A's from Long Island community college, I will take my chances with the C student.

I don't think Orville and Wilber Wright went to college. They were bicycle shop owners.

I want to go back to school, but apparently my credits for everything I took are "too old" to be used toward any new degree programs anymore. That means I need to retake two full years of schooling before I can even get into any of the classes necessary to continue toward my goal. None of the schools in my area will allow me to test for credit on the courses either. It's bullshit. It's all the basic english classes and all the beginning medical classes like medical terminology and anatomy and biology they want me to take again, never mind that if I didn't have this down I never would have graduated in the first place nor been able to hold down a job successfully for over a decade. It's their way of sucking more money out of people by making them do everything over.

Posted by: BunnyGirl at July 6, 2014 6:08 PM

This is not a real college. It is a Ponzi scheme disguised to look like a real college.

"However, I agree that it would be nice if the schools (especially local community colleges - whose mission is to serve the community in which they are located!) did offer something like an equivalency test and offer credit for some of the basics."

When I was in college, you could "test out" of almost any class. I got credit for several classes because of the results of the AP exams I took. But, as Bunnygirl points out, the schools have figured out that that doesn't make them money.

And: The school I went to, at the time, did not do the loco parentis thing -- it was entirely the student's responsibility to study, do the work, and pass the exams. They did the minimum amount of policing necessary to maintain order on the campus and that was it. And I much preferred it that way.

For those saying it is the parents fault, this sounds just like K-12 to me. You can't fail. You must move ahead with everyone else no matter what. As long as you don't kill someone you get a 'C'. You don't even have to do the work. Just show up and get your trophy.

Sure their parents didn't teach them better. But excusing the public schools does no one a favor.

The old joke: A B.S. degree means that you have proven that you can put up with a lot of b.s.

Just one thing:
"The student claims to have worked hard on the course. In some instances, this may be true; but in many, I know that it is not. Too many students have a warped idea of what hard work actually entails."

The U of Maryland may be quite different than Oklahoma State where I got my degree in electrical engineering, but I very much doubt that a 2nd year engineering major would not have learned what _hard_ work is. OSU's first year engineering courses were quite obviously intended to run off any students who would not or could not spend about 12 hours a day on homework, most of which was intense mathematics. And each year after that actually was harder than the previous one, although it seemed easier as I became accustomed to the pace and increased my knowledge base.

That's not to say that this student truly worked hard on that particular class. If he didn't view it as building skills needed for upper-level engineering courses or the job after graduation, it only made sense to slack a little on it. (Math is critical to engineering, but much of the math I needed for engineering courses has not been used in the 30 years on the job since graduation. And the required Probability and Statistics course was full of theory that we never used even in engineering courses, rather than the practical applications that we needed.)

You couldn't put the effort required for core engineering classes into every course, although it's not wise to let your teacher know that you view his pet subject as low priority. But the hazard of aiming for the minimum acceptable grade on a course is that it leaves you vulnerable to miscalculations and unexpected events, e.g. this case - assuming the student is truthful about the milk-soaked laptop. I never aimed lower than a B (but didn't always hit that mark), and I kept up with every class through the semester, so at the end I could prioritize which exams to study for and rely on my general knowledge of the other subjects to do well enough on the other exams.

One other advantage of doing things that way - cramming for exams does little for permanent memory, but if you learned the subject week by week, you'll remember much more when it turns out that you _do_ need part of that unimportant subject later.