I had no idea. When I was an engineering freshman, I wore a slide rule on my belt, so I can allow for some changes since then. But it wasn't like that for me, not at all, and I attended a fancy-arsed private school (back in the day when there were still serious NSF grants because of Sputnik frightening our rulers about having stupid kids). I can't think of any positive angle for this kind of competitiveness. It doesn't sound at all good from the standpoint of the employers -- and it frightens and enrages me. Universities ought to pay some attention to nurturing human beings. (dambit, I told them this could happen when they dropped the foreign language requirement).
My university's idea of nurturing at the career center after graduation was handing you the newspaper if you went in asking for help finding employment. I really hope things improve by the time my daughter's old enough for college, which, in a terrifying realization, I noticed is only 10 years from now...
Yeah, that's definitely a problem. It also doesn't help that bureaucrats and employers are just thinking everyone gets inflated grades. Any top 10 public school is going to grade real tough in STEM courses. And the flipside to this irony, MANY (but not all) Masters programs grade extremely easy. Nobody gets below a 3.0, and the class averages are in the 3.7 range. I had one professor say that everyone in his grad-level classes gets an A pretty much. Not a joke, and some schools have publicly available historical grade distributions by course that will show as much. Aside: by my last year of college, I finally started to figure out the "easy" classes. The ones with 3.5 averages. So I took a few. 4.0 in an environmental law class, 3.5 in Hebrew Studies (both sound tough, yeah? 300-level and the first course in the department for each). Math? Not so high. So I can see how any old kid could get a 3.5, 3.7 in undergrad, but they'd have to be very careful in taking the easiest GPA boosters. Again, all a game. People will be more impressed by the guy padding their GPA by .3 with fluff classes than someone who took extra classes in their major. She'll be fine. But I strongly encourage you to take an active role in helping her choose classes the first couple semesters. Make sure the schedule isn't stacked against her. Have her look for easier courses on ratemyprofessor.com to pad the GPA a bit - it can be very discouraging seeing your first-semester GPA drop by 0.5 from your HS GPA (happened to me, eventually worked it up). That and really stressing the work ethic. A lot of people think doing homework and studying a few days in advance will suffice, at least in their first semester. The 6 hours a week per 3-credit class rule is overkill - but it's important to spend a couple days a week on each class.
I'm about to sign up for a SwagBucks account, anyone have a referrer "sign-up" code they'd like me to use? Also... good morning!
Here's something to cheer everyone up. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/15/batkid-san-francisco/3588173/
I think part of the problem with college institutions right now is the very high interest rates and the fact that the learning curve, which is supposed to be motivational and push you to further your research and work ethic, is sometimes more trying then fair. For someone who owes a college money already and only has a couple of credits under his belt and hoping to go back to college for a couple of years I'm a little disappointed how money oriented higher education is then being focused on education.
This conversation is fascinating to me - it's basically what I do for a living - but one thing that seems crystal clear is that there is a wide variety of schools out there. There are tons of schools where bad grades won't make you lose your financial aid, at least not until you've had four quarters (or three semesters) in a row of them. The rules at community colleges, for example, are quite different than at private four-year schools. p.s. I have a daughter about a decade away from college-age, too
Yep, it's all a racket. The administrators have no problems wasting other peoples' money. I just found out my university has a $600 MILLION surplus, mostly made over the last few years, and they've been increasing tuition by more than 5% for the past decade. Well that's cool, can I get a refund? I'm sure they'd look at me like I'm crazy if I asked.
I think the one thing I will seriously encourage her to do, that I felt was lacking when I started college, was also encourage her to really think about what she wants to do before choosing a college to attend. There's too little focus on actual preparation for a career. GPA wise I did fine, but I floundered for a while trying to figure out what I was really interested in and there wasn't much guidance in that area either. I loved psychology, and I don't regret getting a degree in it, but I would have paired it with something else. By the time I realized what that something else was, it was too late to really go that route without having to transfer to schools very far away and that just wasn't in the cards at that point. They also like to force you to take a bunch of crap you don't need. Psych major? Yeah, time to take a calculus class. I lucked out seriously because I did NOT do well in that and a few semesters later they added a more basic math class that studied different aspects of mathematics and why they were important. They involved writing papers and doing very little actual math. If I had been able to just focus on the core classes for my major, with a little bit of other diversity built in to supplement it, I could have been done in three years easily, if not less.
Is anyone else starting to feel like maybe we're summoning a Heather Walters essay-writing HIT? *getting excited*
Talk about holding educational opportunities hostage. I feel like college is becoming a business. When education becomes a business then only those with money or special privileges get the most opportunities. Of course it's not impossible to get an education with little-to-no money but financial aid really only gets you so far. Not to mention that the majority of college students have to work to pay their way through school. So these people are literally working around the clock to pay their way through school to get a degree that isn't even guaranteed to get you a job. With the economy suffering as it is, less people are hiring and that means that the students who get a degree and are in debt and can't find a job with their degree are actually worse off then before they went to school, financially, and the whole point of getting a degree is to get a good job so you can make more money, for the most part. It's sort of making me wish that the system wasn't set up to sweep so many people into the cracks.
Alright, I'm going to take that as a NO on the swagbucks thing if I don't get someone's code in the next 5 minutes. I don't even know what it does, just figured I'd ask before moving past it.
What in the hell... Title: Decorate your face with the food from your fridge (be creative!) Requester: SG [A1J24AKRYQEYZ0] (TO) TO Ratings: ***** 5.00 Communicativity ***** 3.00 Generosity ***** 4.14 Fairness ***** 4.67 Promptness Number of Reviews: 10 (Submit a new TO rating for this requester) Description: Get wild and creative and cover your face with food and then snap a photo of it. Reward: $0.20 Qualifications: Masters has been granted One example in the HIT:
I can think of lots of math more relevant to many people than freshman calculus. I know that literacy tests for voting were just a fig-leaf cover for Jim Crow laws .. but sometimes I wonder whether knowing basic symbolic logic ought to be expected of any citizen. At the Higher Institue for Tribunehood (HIT), I hereby decree that psych and sociology freshmen may choose between statistics and game theory. Only the sophomores 'have to' take calculus. But none of y'all get into college without a smattering of foreign language. (Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Esperanto are also acceptable).
I was a psych major. Statistics was a mandatory course. I'd like to see statistics as a mandatory high school class. I met my foreign language requirement with French and Latin. EDIT: Did you mean to say into college? Or did you mean to say out of college?
Bored drunk people trolling MTurk for entertainment on Fri Night. Requester: Hey look what I made this idiot do on MTurk for 20 cents. Friend: LOLOLOLOL