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Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

Spydey posted:

How many languages do you speak?

I speak Spanish, Mandarin and enough Japanese and Russian to get by when I travel. I can read Latin, (ancient) Greek, and Anglo-Saxon (a.k.a. Old English) but it's slow business.

quote:

I guess my question is, after I graduate would it be advisable to take a year or two off to go back to Japan to get my language skills down pat? Otherwise, was your advice more pointed toward getting a firm grounding in two languages other than English?

I should clarify that. You'll want two languages other than English, and you really just need them at a foundational level (i.e. good enough to translate a page of text in a couple hours and with the aid of a dictionary). You can build on those languages during your grad work, but it's usually not built into the program (that is, you'll have to find the time and money to learn outside of your course schedule and funding package).

Some programs used to want one ancient and one modern language, but I think that's been largely abandoned as English broadens its scope -- if you can read modern Spanish, you can read Colombus and Cortez easily enough, and there's not much call for fluency in Latin or Anglo-Saxon if you're specializing in 20th c. Asian Lit.

As far as the year off in Japan goes, I'd take it if I could get it. But this idea that grad. school is some kind of necessarily hellish boot camp needs revision. You should enjoy grad school, at least if you want to be an academic. Being a professor pays more, but in lots of ways it's not terribly different from being a grad student.

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Mr. Spooky
Jul 1, 2003

I was allowed this account on the condition that I never post.

Spydey posted:

How many languages do you speak? I assume you must have at least a smattering of Latin if you're reading in-depth into Milton (and, as you mentioned earlier, translating those insane memos the guy who last had your job left you with), but have you tried your tongue at anything else?

I'm in a similar situation to the above poster. The long and short of it is that I'm currently doing a double major in English and Japanese literature and maintaining an excellent GPA. Last year I finally got the chance to go to Japan to get my sea legs, and while my language skills improved immensely over that 11 month period of study abroad, I'm still not exactly what you could consider "fluent". Starting next semester, I need to switch my focus back to English literature to finish up my undergraduate, which means my Japanese is getting put on the back burner and will likely atrophy quite a bit.

I guess my question is, after I graduate would it be advisable to take a year or two off to go back to Japan to get my language skills down pat? Otherwise, was your advice more pointed toward getting a firm grounding in two languages other than English? From reading this thread, I think either way I'll have to take at least a year off to get my priorities straight before committing mentally and emotionally to something like a PhD program in English/Japanese comparative literature.

I did my undergrad in English lit with a minor in Japanese language, also involving studying in Japan. You're probably more literarily competent than you think you are. If your current focus is English, then I'd suggest studying for the fluency exams or importing a bunch of YA manga or something of the sort with furigana in order to keep your Japanese skills up. You're going to have an odd time of things in a traditional English department if you chosse to go the grad school route, but it's not completely out of the question to focus on your translation skills by doing script work with an anime subbing group or something. Every little bit helps.

Danny Cadaver
Jun 29, 2007
Who do the voodoo?

Keshik posted:

It's not that that really is my problem. It's that it's just not interesting. The central characters are prophets or the deity himself, and the deity is omnipotent - moreover, he's pretty evil. I've never read Milton (largely because I'd like to gain a better understanding of the original text first) but based solely on what I've gleaned from derivative works over the years, the idea of Satan being the protagonist of the story resonates with me. The Judeo Christian god is, to my mind, one of the great villains of literature, and I simply have trouble proceeding through a text devoted to that character when that text is not an apologetic. I've even read (some of) Aquinas and Augustine (who are dumb as poo poo), and cannot bring myself around to the idea of accepting the premise that the Judeo Christian god is a good guy. He's a bad guy, he's more malevolent and fickle than any of the Greek gods.

I'm not a professor, just an undergrad who took a class on Milton, but I'd just like to say that while Satan is really sympathetic and God really inscrutable and seemingly unfair, reducing Paradise Lost down to Satan = Good Guy and God = Bad Guy is a really simplistic reading, and one that's discounted by most contemporary critics. That said, it's entirely possible to read it like that. Also, I'm a pretty irreligious guy too, but I think you're doing yourself a disservice by dismissing all Christian literature and philosophy with a simple mantra of "God is mean"

Also OP, I really like the thread, and wish I knew more about either Miltonic and Shakepearean scholarship to ask about. One question: To me personally, the violence and sexism in Samson Agonistes seemed really transgressive compared to the portrayal of marriage and ambivalence towards war depicted in Paradise Lost. Your thoughts? Also, could you make any recommendations regarding books that came out in the last couple of years?

Perturbed Owl
May 6, 2003

Brainworm posted:

My first bit of advice is to approach the Bible like I did. Don't read it cover-to-cover or front to back. Instead, get one of the billion print or online companions to the Bible that list what stories get told and where they appear.
Thanks for this advice. Is there a particular guide/companion that you think is superior to others?

Also, this thread is definitely my favorite on the forums right now. Thanks for making it.

Perturbed Owl fucked around with this message at 20:10 on May 11, 2009

j8910
Apr 2, 2002
Hey, do you have good feedback on grademyprofessor?

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

Danny Cadaver posted:

Also OP, I really like the thread, and wish I knew more about either Miltonic and Shakepearean scholarship to ask about. One question: To me personally, the violence and sexism in Samson Agonistes seemed really transgressive compared to the portrayal of marriage and ambivalence towards war depicted in Paradise Lost. Your thoughts?

Well, transgressive how? I'll grant that marriage in Samson looks different from marriage in Paradise Lost, but in my mind what we really have are different flavors of transgression, not a matter of more or less.

One thing that might help unpack this is Milton's view of masculinity, which shows up in lots of his pamphlets, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and Tetrachordon in particular. These are both early Milton, and it's probably fair to say that both are in orbit around the same idea -- one Milton lays out in explicitly in Tetrachordon and implicitly in most of his other early works:

quote:

For nothing now-a-days is more degenerately forgotten, than the true dignity of Man, almost in every respect, but especially in this prime institution of Matrimony, wherin his native pre-eminence ought most to shine.

For Milton the issue isn't really marriage. It's how men out to act and how others ought to act toward them. Marriage, in other words, is only one battleground in a war against men's dignity. In this sense, Samson and Adam show really different and probably non-transgressive methods of recovering that dignity: revenge and forgiveness. That's the point I'd use to at least start thinking through marriage in both texts.

quote:

Also, could you make any recommendations regarding books that came out in the last couple of years?

I'll just assume these aren't books about Shakespeare and Milton. That said, I think Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park is a wonderful rewriting of Hamlet and a spectacular book in it's own right. and while I'm not a great fan of Dave Eggers as a writer, I think he makes a fantastic editor -- he's wonderful at sniffing out (or training others to sniff out) good short pieces especially.

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

Bachaao posted:

Thanks for this advice. Is there a particular guide/companion that you think is superior to others?

I don't know many of them, but the popular standard (and the one I used) seems to be Bowker's Complete Bible Handbook.

j8910 posted:

Hey, do you have good feedback on grademyprofessor?

Does anyone honestly still use RMP? I've never put much stock in informal, anonymous evaluations -- I'd take my end-of-course evaluations over what comes up anywhere else, since RMP and like sites seem to attract strong and poorly thought out opinions.

velcro shoes
Apr 17, 2001

I swear I've been a Portland fan for years. No seriously

Brainworm posted:

Does anyone honestly still use RMP? I've never put much stock in informal, anonymous evaluations -- I'd take my end-of-course evaluations over what comes up anywhere else, since RMP and like sites seem to attract strong and poorly thought out opinions.

there are devices in place for you to challenge or respond to reviews. I've used it for most professors I've had, though I like to wait 6 months or so for.. historical perspective, let's say. I think it's a good way to get a general consensus on a professor before taking their class, but hopefully it's not used in any formal review capacity.

my first undergraduate year I went to a school that did narrative evaluations in place of letter grades, is that something you'd prefer to the system at your school? I had major problems with that system but I wonder how it looks from the other side.

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

velcro shoes posted:

there are devices in place for you to challenge or respond to reviews. I've used it for most professors I've had, though I like to wait 6 months or so for.. historical perspective, let's say. I think it's a good way to get a general consensus on a professor before taking their class, but hopefully it's not used in any formal review capacity.

I should have probably elaborated.

Feedback is only useful in the context of other feedback. If you're running a class right, half the students will think it's too easy and the other half will think it's too hard. You'll see similar splits on every aspect of course design, because a class needs to accommodate different student abilities and learning styles.

But this isn't generally something students think about when they respond, even though some aspect of it are completely obvious -- that is, most students don't write feedback as though the course were designed for an average student or for a plurality of average students. That's why I don't dig on RMP.

quote:

my first undergraduate year I went to a school that did narrative evaluations in place of letter grades, is that something you'd prefer to the system at your school? I had major problems with that system but I wonder how it looks from the other side.

I'd prefer narrative evaluations, or at least the option of including narrative evaluations with grades.

Grades, as a rule, are lousy evaluative tools. At least if your goal is to compare grades across different class sections or (God forbid) across colleges. They can give you a sort of approximate read on whether a student has succeeded, but the difference between students with a 3.5 and a 3.9 is difficult to practically apply, especially if the students are from different colleges* and have had different fields of study, (even with the same major).** This is one reason why graduate program GPA requirements are over-the-bar style.

Point is, grades aren't great at the job they're allegedly designed for (comparing student success across disciplines and colleges). But the worse problem is that they're dreadfully uninformative.

This is especially true for students without collegiate expertise to draw on -- think a first generation first year student at a state college, who doesn't get any face time with most of his professors or much in the way of institutional support. If he fails, he probably doesn't have a good idea of what he did wrong, since what governs his behavior is probably what he sees (or thinks he sees) everyone else doing. It's not like his family and friends can give him useful advice on how many hours of work it takes to pass a class or what college-level writing looks like. That's a where narrative evaluation could make the difference between someone dropping out confused and frustrated and someone rallying the next semester.

* And it doesn't help that common sense leads people to terrible conclusions on this. A 2.7 freshman at a state college isn't impressive, but is generally stable and has a fair shot of adjusting upwards. A 2.7 freshman at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, etc. is a shiftless, baffling moron and almost certainly hopeless.

** People talk about the relative difficulties of different majors all the time, but different colleges take different approaches to general education, and some of these can be really rigorous.

NUMBER 1 DBZ FAN!!!
Nov 26, 2008

by Fistgrrl

Brainworm posted:

* And it doesn't help that common sense leads people to terrible conclusions on this. A 2.7 freshman at a state college isn't impressive, but is generally stable and has a fair shot of adjusting upwards. A 2.7 freshman at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, etc. is a shiftless, baffling moron and almost certainly hopeless.

Haha, why do you say this? I have known ~2.7s at state schools who were smart, but I haven't hung out with anyone from the Ivy Leagues so I wouldn't know about them.

proudfoot
Jul 17, 2006
Yak! Look! a Yak!

NUMBER 1 DBZ FAN!!! posted:

Haha, why do you say this? I have known ~2.7s at state schools who were smart, but I haven't hung out with anyone from the Ivy Leagues so I wouldn't know about them.

Grade inflation. If little Robby doesn't get a B, his parents might not donate to the Alumni fund anymore.

You have to seriously screw up to get below a B at an Ivy.

NUMBER 1 DBZ FAN!!!
Nov 26, 2008

by Fistgrrl

proudfoot posted:

Grade inflation. If little Robby doesn't get a B, his parents might not donate to the Alumni fund anymore.

You have to seriously screw up to get below a B at an Ivy.

ah, got it

Junior G-man
Sep 15, 2004

Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma


What's your opinion on the various styles or literary criticism and ways of reading? I'm currently pursuing a two-year research master program and I'm being drowned past the eyeballs with hermeneutics, semiotics, deconstruction an pretty much all the -isms.

In my opinion, I should have decent grounding in these methodologies, but I find that it's very hard at some point to relate the theory to a work of literature. For example, I was reading a discussion between Gadamer and Derrida for one of my classes and at some point I just got so fed up with the whole thing.

You get the feeling that it's only theory in response to theory, which is a really fascinating discussion, but the way in which I need to apply this to an actual reading or critique gets a little lost.

Junior G-man fucked around with this message at 21:07 on May 12, 2009

Bel_Canto
Apr 23, 2007

"Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo."

Brainworm posted:

** People talk about the relative difficulties of different majors all the time, but different colleges take different approaches to general education, and some of these can be really rigorous.

What's your take on the various approaches to general education? I've heard a lot of people weigh in on this, but very few of them have been people who deal with students firsthand.

basement jihadist
Oct 3, 2002

Junior G-man posted:

What's your opinion on the various styles or literary criticism and ways of reading? I'm currently pursuing a two-year research master program and I'm being drowned past the eyeballs with hermeneutics, semiotics, deconstruction an pretty much all the -isms.

In my opinion, I should have decent grounding in these methodologies, but I find that it's very hard at some point to relate the theory to a work of literature. For example, I was reading a discussion between Gadamer and Derrida for one of my classes and at some point I just got so fed up with the whole thing.

You get the feeling that it's only theory in response to theory, which is a really fascinating discussion, but the way in which I need to apply this to an actual reading or critique gets a little lost.

Not a professor, and I hope Brainworm answers this himself, but I have found that the best way to relate the theory to a work is to use it as something that forwards your argument, and yet not something that makes up your argument.

Derrida/Gadmer, etc., can be incredibly frustrating. But most literature is actually response to the trends that preceded it. Theorists open a dialogue, and you choose how to use the dialogue. It is generally assumed that deconstruction and hermeneutics will come into conflict, and therefore dialogue; it is not necessary that your reconcile the two or choose a side. You forward an argument by referring to the critics in a way that promotes your own rendering of the text.

As an example, I used Michel de Certeau's Walking in the City as an example of the concept of a "haunted" city to assert that Frank O'Hara was attempting to uncover a colonial legacy in Rhapsody; I concluded that the colonial legacy was the "haunting."

basement jihadist
Oct 3, 2002

Brainworm posted:

I speak Spanish, Mandarin and enough Japanese and Russian to get by when I travel. I can read Latin, (ancient) Greek, and Anglo-Saxon (a.k.a. Old English) but it's slow business.


How has Anglo-Saxon treated you? I am one of three students that have taken advanced-level courses in the language in my department. The professor who teaches it is retiring soon. I sometimes think it is a dying thing, but then again I saw it on the GRE II. It remains one of my specialties.

Basically, do they give a gently caress if I can translate The Battle of Maldon or Judith? So little survives, it's sort of sad.

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

Junior G-man posted:

What's your opinion on the various styles or literary criticism and ways of reading? I'm currently pursuing a two-year research master program and I'm being drowned past the eyeballs with hermeneutics, semiotics, deconstruction an pretty much all the -isms.

My take really depends on the theory.

What we call "high theory" has been on a popularity wane since about the mid 90s, and it's easy to see why -- much of it is cultural theory, ways of describing the context in which a text happens, And while that's interesting, it's somewhat outside the scope of English, which is ultimately about texts rather than culture (the domain of History, Sociology, Anthro, and so on).

That's another way of saying that much high theory is useful if you want to read good discussions of the cultures that surround a particular text, but somewhat less useful for reading and understanding a text as a text rather than a cultural artifact. In that sense, theory's a supplement to extensive field knowledge rather than a substitute for it. But e.g. Saussere and Derrida aren't really cultural theorists, and I think they give a useful vocabulary for a range of textual functions.

There are all kinds of other, less-high, theories (and theorists) that work with texts over cultures, though. In my field this generally means the better New Historicists (Greenblatt, Hartman, Goldberg), along with Stanley Fish -- Surprised by Sin is probably the most useful and inventive criticism of Paradise Lost I've seen.

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

Bel_Canto posted:

What's your take on the various approaches to general education? I've heard a lot of people weigh in on this, but very few of them have been people who deal with students firsthand.

Well. Gen Ed systems across the country have two things in common: they're incredibly important and almost categorically broken. So let's start there.


Why Gen Ed. Matters

The reasons we have General Education are so that college graduates can talk to people with another disciplinary focus in a useful way, and so that graduates have some rough idea of how the world's knowledge is field divided. If I'm investigating the properties of a metal I've found at a dig site, for instance, I need to know whether to look for a materials scientist, a chemist, or an electrical engineer, and I need to know how to understand what they have to say about the metal, and what questions I might want to ask any of them about it.

These kinds of broad-based consultations are really, really common in real life as well as academics, but this broad base of knowledge has more important, long-term uses. Think about your career path for a bit. If you're, say, an engineer, you're going to leave college and get a job designing housings for blender motors. And it's going to suck. So you can move from there to designing blender motors and then blenders, and then either into managing the blender design division or starting your own blender company.

Point is, moving up this ladder means consulting with people outside your field increasingly extensively. If you don't have a knowledge base that lets you consult that way, you've got two choices: stay in your first job until retirement, or retrain on the fly. Both are bad. The second one sounds easy, but part-timing some courses while you've got a family and a full-time job is a bear. Ask anyone who does it.

I could go on about why this broad knowledge base is really important for developing literate and numerate citizens, making whole persons, and blah blah blah. But if the "career training" and "job training" isn't convincing, I'm not sure arguments further off solid ground will be.


How Gen Ed's Broken

This is a long list, so I'm only going to hit the high points:

Incoherence. Long story short, the dominant strategy for navigating Gen Ed requirements seems to be to take them early, generally before declaring a major. This helps students who are undecided, since they get a taste of different fields, but it also comes at the cost of coherent semester-to-semester schedules. For instance, it would make a lot of sense to stack Restoration and Enlightenment lit, Enlightenment Philosophy, and Early American History (or 18th/19th c. British or European History) together in a semester, just as it would make sense to stack, say, courses on Ornithology or Herpetology that focus on the same or similar regions.

But this generally doesn't happen for lots of reasons. Even at colleges where there's a lot of chatter between departments about offering courses in some synchrony, advisors either don't push this or students schedule with higher priorities in mind. The result is a scattershot Gen. Ed. experience.

Department Insularity. To make a sweeping generalization, this gets worse as you approach the hard and applied sciences. And it's really two problems.

The first problem is with major design. Basically, some programs grow their majors to the point where students don't have elective credits to burn outside their major or the Gen Ed. requirements, and (usually) departments with this major design push their majors to think of Gen Ed. courses as an obstacle rather than an equally valuable part of student education.

Not to pick on engineers, but their departments are some of the worst offenders, which is bizarre considering the biggest complaints companies have about the engineers they hire: they can't (or don't) write well, and don't have functional vocabularies outside their discipline, (especially in business).

The second problem is that departments don't differentiate between Gen Ed. courses and gateway courses to their majors (usually as an underhanded way of turning a Gen Ed. requirement into a soft requirement for the major). There's a huge difference between providing non-majors with an overview of the discipline as it stands and providing majors with skills whose primary purpose is to be built up in subsequent courses.

My point is that a General Education system is ideal if it lends itself to semester-by-semester coherence and pushes departments toward course offerings consistent with the college's General Education mission. Most of the variations on Gen Ed. I've seen seem to fall well short of this mark.

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

Glowskull posted:

How has Anglo-Saxon treated you? I am one of three students that have taken advanced-level courses in the language in my department. The professor who teaches it is retiring soon. I sometimes think it is a dying thing, but then again I saw it on the GRE II. It remains one of my specialties.

Basically, do they give a gently caress if I can translate The Battle of Maldon or Judith? So little survives, it's sort of sad.

Anglo-Saxon is dying as a field of study, but it's dying the same way Latin and Greek were maybe forty or fifty years ago -- what you're going to see is decreasing demand, but a more quickly decreasing supply. This in short means A-S scholars are going to have some pretty good job prospects, especially if they can market themselves as Medievalists with a rare secondary skill.

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

proudfoot posted:

Grade inflation. If little Robby doesn't get a B, his parents might not donate to the Alumni fund anymore.

You have to seriously screw up to get below a B at an Ivy.

This, but there's also other context.

An Ivy League student will have had extensive training and preparation for how to succeed in college, and will have massive support from every direction if he or she has some kind of extra-academic problem. Also, an Ivy Leaguer will probably not need to balance work and school, will have health insurance, will have affordable and accessible tutoring in a breadth of subjects, will have access to (or an existing relationship with) whatever professionals he or she needs to manage learning disabilities or other mental health issues (or substance abuse problems), will not need to balance school against family (as in spouse and children), and so forth.

So if we're explaining a low Ivy League GPA, this crosses off a lot of the issues that weigh on low-GPA (or otherwise academically at-risk) state college students.

More simply put, all a student needs to do to succeed at an Ivy League college is work; there's tons of available expertise to tell that student what kind of work to do and when, not to mention oceans of soft support and insulation from real-world problems. So, as a rule, a student pulling a 2.7 at Harvard is pulling that 2.7 under the best possible conditions. Ergo, he's most likely a lazy idiot.

A student pulling a 2.7 at a state college could also be a lazy idiot, but there's also a fair chance he or she's juggling other commitments or will improve with whatever kind of support.

lewi
Sep 3, 2006
King

Brainworm posted:

Gen Ed rant

What do you think of the British higher education system where Gen. Ed. courses don't exist, and students apply to uni for a particular subject and study it and only it for the next 3 or 4 years?

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

lewi posted:

What do you think of the British higher education system where Gen. Ed. courses don't exist, and students apply to uni for a particular subject and study it and only it for the next 3 or 4 years?

I go back and forth on this.

As someone who chose a field relatively late in life (I was 22 when I decided to go with English over Physics or Philosophy for a PhD), I'm wary of systems that commit students to a course of study (and a de facto set of careers) while they're still in their teens.

This is one of those situations where what's good for the hive isn't necessarily good for the bee; the earlier you can get trained professionals into the workforce, the less you need to invest in them and the longer their working lives are. But as an individual, it's to my benefit to wait until I'm developmentally competent to make satisfying lifelong decisions. I'm not sure when that happens, but I'd bet at least one semivital organ it excludes most teenagers.

That's one big issue. The second big one is how a culture expects college experiences to articulate with earlier education.

Simply put, you can have a college system built on early specialization as long as you've got relatively consistent and relatively high quality primary and secondary education. I can't say much about Britain on this one, but I'll bet another semivital organ that it beats the US on both counts, even if we only consider the systems that generally produce college-bound students.

Just for instance, British education's built around a national curriculum, while the US doesn't have consistent curricula even at the state level. It also begins at somewhat an earlier age -- most students in the US start school at age five or six, while British children start at age three.* The chief implication here is that British colleges have a relatively consistent applicant pool.

In contrast, US colleges need to accommodate an appalling range of experiences. There are US districts that don't offer calculus, trigonometry, pre-calculus style algebra, or statistics (that is, high school math for college-bound students ends with algebra and geometry), while others matriculate to college with grounding in all of these (as they probably should).

This is a tangible example, but the same diversity of standards is at work in pretty much every field, which in turn makes Gen Ed. in US colleges terribly necessary; I don't like that this is true, but much Gen Ed (especially at open admissions colleges) covers necessary matter wrongly omitted from high-school curricula (calc/stats, intro psychology, basic writing, and so on).

* I'm talking publicly-funded education here. Some US parents elect to private nursery schools, but the majority do not.

PuppiesAndKitties
Jun 5, 2008
I LOVE KYASHI'S MONEY
Grimey Drawer
OP I'm loling at your asterisk denoted footnotes. Is that Chicago or APA? :)

What do you think about the role writing instruction plays in the English department? Writing is central to many disciplines, yet the English department is the one that ends up teaching most of it (Comp 1, etc.). I'm of the opinion that the English department should abandon its stranglehold on composition instruction in favor of having more specialized departmental writing instruction. Thoughts?

Marilyn Monroe
Dec 16, 2003

It's me, remember?
The tomato from upstairs.

Brainworm posted:


Also, if you want to be an academic, you can teach with either a JD or a law PhD. And law professors are in high demand and make serious, serious money.


How do you feel about a J.D. calling him/herself "Dr. _______" in an academic position totally unrelated to law? Someone at my university does this, and it feels like an insult to Ph.D.s and Ed.D.s around here.

lewi
Sep 3, 2006
King

Brainworm posted:

I go back and forth on this.

As someone who chose a field relatively late in life (I was 22 when I decided to go with English over Physics or Philosophy for a PhD), I'm wary of systems that commit students to a course of study (and a de facto set of careers) while they're still in their teens.

This is one of those situations where what's good for the hive isn't necessarily good for the bee; the earlier you can get trained professionals into the workforce, the less you need to invest in them and the longer their working lives are. But as an individual, it's to my benefit to wait until I'm developmentally competent to make satisfying lifelong decisions. I'm not sure when that happens, but I'd bet at least one semivital organ it excludes most teenagers.

This is interesting, because I think as a whole there is a bigger expectation from society in the UK that people push through their degrees and go the whole way - dropping out is not nearly as common as I believe it is in the US, even if people decide after a year and a half that they don't like what they are doing. I guess you could say that there's a stigma associated with being a dropout. This, along with the fact that people specialise early, creates an odd situation where once you pick your subject, you will bloody stick with it.

quote:

That's one big issue. The second big one is how a culture expects college experiences to articulate with earlier education.

Simply put, you can have a college system built on early specialization as long as you've got relatively consistent and relatively high quality primary and secondary education. I can't say much about Britain on this one, but I'll bet another semivital organ that it beats the US on both counts, even if we only consider the systems that generally produce college-bound students.

Just for instance, British education's built around a national curriculum, while the US doesn't have consistent curricula even at the state level. It also begins at somewhat an earlier age -- most students in the US start school at age five or six, while British children start at age three.* The chief implication here is that British colleges have a relatively consistent applicant pool.

In contrast, US colleges need to accommodate an appalling range of experiences. There are US districts that don't offer calculus, trigonometry, pre-calculus style algebra, or statistics (that is, high school math for college-bound students ends with algebra and geometry), while others matriculate to college with grounding in all of these (as they probably should).

This is a tangible example, but the same diversity of standards is at work in pretty much every field, which in turn makes Gen Ed. in US colleges terribly necessary; I don't like that this is true, but much Gen Ed (especially at open admissions colleges) covers necessary matter wrongly omitted from high-school curricula (calc/stats, intro psychology, basic writing, and so on).

* I'm talking publicly-funded education here. Some US parents elect to private nursery schools, but the majority do not.

This is to do with early specialisation again, as well as nationwide exams.
I assume you know this already, but for the benefit of anyone who doesn't, schoolchildren start specialising to a certain level when they are 14 - at this point you pick a number of subjects to study for the GCSE exams taken at age 16. This number can be anywhere between 5 and 15ish, but for most good students this is somewhere between 9 and 11. Inner city state schools will offer fewer, academically-orientated public/private schools will offer and encourage students to do more. These nearly always include Maths, English, often a foreign language, the three sciences, and some arts subjects.
Then, at 17, most students take between 3 and 5 subjects for their AS exams, and then 3 or 4 A levels at age 18.

This does mean that, in fact, the last time a lot of students will have had a maths lesson will have been for GCSEs when they were 16, and will have possibly reached the level of basic trigonometry.

The way that universities cope with this is to only admit people who are taking related A Levels to the degree - i.e. if you wish to study a science, they will look for science and maths A Levels. If you aren't taking those exams, then they simply don't give you a place.
In essence, you start aiming towards your degree from halfway through your teens, even if you don't know specifically what you want to study until you go ahead and apply. For example, I always knew that I was going to do something maths or science-related and so all my subject choices were made for me - I ended up doing Bio, Chem, Physics, Maths and Further Maths for A Level which left me with the option of studying any science I wanted at university. However, for you, this would have been less then ideal because I assume you would have gone for English, Physics, Maths with a possible additional subject, and then forced to pick at the age of 17/18 which degree to go into.

I don't really know where I'm going with this as I'm far too tired to start formulating something interesting to say, but it does provide food for thought as to how differently two of the leading nations go about the education system. I'll try to say something intelligent tomorrow.

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

ImTheWiener posted:

What do you think about the role writing instruction plays in the English department? Writing is central to many disciplines, yet the English department is the one that ends up teaching most of it (Comp 1, etc.). I'm of the opinion that the English department should abandon its stranglehold on composition instruction in favor of having more specialized departmental writing instruction. Thoughts?

Well, most places already have some combination of general and discipline-specific writing instruction. That usually looks like one or two semesters of first-year writing instruction (FY), followed by X number of classes in Gen Ed. and each major that carry a Writing-Intensive designation as part of a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiative.

Some flavor of FY+WAC has been the dominant (and preferred) model for about three decades. Colleges that put an honest effort behind FY+WAC generally don't have horrid writing programs. The horrid ones still have general-purpose first-year writing courses that don't see Gen Ed or in-major follow up -- FY by itself. That was a terrible system.

Anyway. The reason English departments house FY is that they also house Rhetoric and Composition, a subfield dedicated to writing pedagogy. You want a consistent (read: non field-specific) FY run by Rhet/Comp people for a few reasons.

The most compelling of these is assessment of individual student needs; Rhet/Comp folks are trained to spot different species of writing problems (that come out of, say ESL or LD issues) and work those problems out with students either individually or in consultation with subfield specialists. Obviously you want to start students down that road as early as you can.

The second good reason has to do with first-year experience. A non-field specific writing course taught by someone with a Rhet/Comp background emphasizes writing and reading across disciplines, which is why so many FY sequences have an interdisciplinary component. That way, post-sequence students should be familiar with writing conventions used in different fields -- not just so they can write in those fields, but so that they can read and follow up on the scholarship different fields produce.*

There are other smaller, practical reasons why FY courses aren't field-specific. Socializing first year students partly means getting them into courses representing different abilities and interests. Also, there's the (major) matter of departmental preference. Most PhDs in fields outside English don't have any training in writing instruction, and so end up reluctant to take on the task and, in many cases, are quite bad at it. WAC is difficult enough without suggesting that professors take on a second, first-year writing course that falls well outside their training and experience.

Last, there's the matter of student flexibility. From an administrative standpoint, you really want to avoid having students soft or hard-commit to a major early on. Early commits of either variety usually change their minds -- this means you've got more students on a tight schedule for graduation, frustrated because course sequencing won't allow for this or the other thing. It also ultimately nets more close-to-graduation attrition and fifth-year seniors, which doesn't help anybody.


* This trains them to see field writing conventions as implementations of principles that respond to field-specific needs, which in turn helps them think through practical writing skills. I'm not talking about grammar and style here as much real-world project writing, which generally either follows, tweaks, or develops a project-specific conventions based on project-specific needs.

cosmic gumbo
Mar 26, 2005

IMA
  1. GRIP
  2. N
  3. SIP
What are your thoughts on the quarter versus the semester system? The school I go to is on the quarter system and one of my teachers complained often that the state only does it for extra money. He felt that most classes could not be taught properly in ten weeks without shedding too much material. I personally like the quarter system because I feel that I am able to take more classes on a broader range of subjects but I can also see how I am missing out on going more in depth by losing six to eight weeks worth of extra instruction.

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

Dame Like Mame posted:

How do you feel about a J.D. calling him/herself "Dr. _______" in an academic position totally unrelated to law? Someone at my university does this, and it feels like an insult to Ph.D.s and Ed.D.s around here.

This seems fine. A J.D. is a professional (as opposed to research) doctorate, like an M.D. or a D.D.S. The real question is why he doesn't go with the much smoother sounding "________, esquire" (unless he's not a member of the bar).

j8910
Apr 2, 2002
Hey, how much grading do you do by yourself? Do you have TAs?

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

Christ Pseudoscientist posted:

What are your thoughts on the quarter versus the semester system? The school I go to is on the quarter system and one of my teachers complained often that the state only does it for extra money. He felt that most classes could not be taught properly in ten weeks without shedding too much material. I personally like the quarter system because I feel that I am able to take more classes on a broader range of subjects but I can also see how I am missing out on going more in depth by losing six to eight weeks worth of extra instruction.

The quarter system's increasingly rare, so I can see where your professor's complaint comes from -- he's thinking in semesters, so he wants to fit fifteen weeks of material into ten and doesn't like that he can't do it. That's more a matter of his training than an inherent advantage of a scheduling system.

There are some virtues of quarters that you haven't noted, though I'm with you on the breadth it allows. From a teaching perspective, a load of, say, six courses a year means you're only teaching two courses simultaneously (instead of the three you'd have on semesters). This reduces your number of simultaneous students and lets you give each one more individual attention.

Also, quarters lend themselves to Summer sessions that aren't second class. Colleges on the semester model favor a half-length-but-twice-as-many-meetings model for Summer education, which is basically unusable for advanced courses (where an amount of absolute time is required to, say, research final projects). But an extra quarter fits nicely into the Summer.

The real institutional problem with quarters is administrative complexity, which puts a heavier yearly load on professorial duties like advising. That had a lot to do with why my college moved to semesters a while ago. At the same time, the number of simultaneous classes (and simultaneous students) makes quarters sound like a good deal to me.

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

j8910 posted:

Hey, how much grading do you do by yourself? Do you have TAs?

Like most colleges without graduate programs, we don't have TAs in a conventional sense. So I grade everything myself. And I'm not sure I'd trust a TA to do that job really well, especially for first-year students (who occasionally need diagnosis).

We do have a program where senior students can work as course TAs, though. This is more for their benefit, since their duties are basically collaborating on course and assignment design, and building and teaching a few classes under supervision. It involves more work for the professor, not less. Probably obviously, these TAships are popular with aspiring teachers and those who want to build a sort of advanced independent study on top of the existing course.

Riven
Apr 22, 2002
Don't want to derail, but

Brainworm posted:

I haven't yet seen a for-profit university that wasn't either an outright scam or a short step from it, and they don't live long -- the usual practice is for the investors to rake in a couple years' worth of tuition, run the place on state loans, and shut down before accreditation problems catch up with them (like BCTI and CRI did). Or they run simpler scams, like Crown College and Florida Met.

And online programs are doubly sketchy; one thing any college administrator will tell you is that online courses are way more expensive to offer than their conventional counterparts, partly because faculty need to invest incredible amounts of time reading (or listening to) the student responses that substitute for class discussion. This is why colleges flirted with this model but haven't embraced it -- common sense suggests it should be more efficient and therefore cheaper, but it isn't.****

The way to get around this problem is (of course) to let cost drive course design. Get some adjunct to prerecord a stack of lectures, and assess using computer administered and graded multiple choice exams -- in other words, use the single worst possible combination of educational and assessment techniques. I'd bet at least one useful finger this is exactly what you get with an online class from a for-profit.

We're going to see a lot more of this, I'm sure. I'd bet another finger that this is where Antioch goes.


I wanted to give you an inside view from someone who has attended a for-profit college, University of Phoenix, for the last four years; in the on-campus program for the first two years and the online program for the remaining time.

I'll start with the disclaimer that I don't believe by any means that I am getting the same quality of education I would get at a school such as the one that employs you. However, I can say with complete confidence that I am getting a better education than I would get at the average Cal State school, because my wife has been attending San Francisco State University for the same period and I have far fewer complaints about my learning experience than she does.

There are certainly some cost-restraining practices. For example, all the instructors use a standard, university-published syllabus, which they can then modify as they see fit. However, I find this is often valuable, since I have not taken a Celtic literature class where the primary text is Dracula, as my wife has at her far more respected state university.

The instructors do put a great amount of effort into the courses, including guiding discussions. In my 3.5 years with University of Phoenix, I believe I've taken exactly 4 multiple choice exams, all for math courses. The rest of the courses rely on papers and projects that provide an opportunity to use the knowledge gained to analyze a business case that is often directly applicable to the student's current job or future job requirements. I get good feedback. In fact, your bracketing system is exactly the proof system offered by University of Phoenix, through a tutor review that is facilitated by an online submission system, so that students can improve their writing before they turn in their papers. This is useful since we usually have a 3-4 page individual paper and a 5-6 page group paper due every week. (I'll take 3/4 of a useful finger, since you were half right on the pre-made material).

I am who University of Phoenix is for. I had a horrible time in school due to learning disabilities, left high school early because of depression, worked for several years and got to a point in life where I was unable to afford to go back to a traditional school full-time. If I wanted to get a bachelor's in less than 7 years, I needed to go to University of Phoenix.

I'll agree with your point that cost can drive courses, but reversed. University of Phoenix works out to about 12,000 per year if I were attending a semester based school taking 12 units per semester. That's around the cost of UC Berkeley, which is a superior school in most aspects (though I am generally in classes of 15, and get lots of individual attention and feedback from my instructors, something I'd be unlikely to get in a 300 person lecture hall at Berkeley).

I don't consider my bachelor's to be the end of my education. I would be more regretful of the fact that I ended up at UPX if it was. I'm applying to an MBA/M.Eng. program for 2010, and would like to do a Ph.D. in Sustainability after that. But grad programs are designed for people in the middle of their lives and careers, unlike undergrad programs.

I think that you're generally right. There are a lot of very shady institutions out there and diploma mills. But implying that every for profit and online program is a worthless waste of educational resources is disrespectful and ignorant.

EDIT: As a better measure of the disparity between your expectations and mine, having read the rest of the thread: You couldn't decide until you were 22 if you wanted to get your Ph.D. in physics, English, or philosophy. I didn't think I'd ever be able to go to college, because that expectation had been pushed out of me, until I was 21. The best I was hoping for was that I would be able to work as a dental assistant (what I was doing) and maybe end up as an office manager of a big practice. The most important thing that University of Phoenix has taught me is that I can learn, and that sounds pretty close to the mission of your school, if in a different sphere.

Riven fucked around with this message at 23:13 on May 13, 2009

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

Riven posted:

I wanted to give you an inside view from someone who has attended a for-profit college, University of Phoenix, for the last four years; in the on-campus program for the first two years and the online program for the remaining time.

[+ other UPX stuff]

I'm glad you're having a good experience with UPX, but you also need to realize that most students don't. The DOE puts UPX's graduation rate at 16%.* That probably means that, at the least, they're not doing the kind of student support work you'd see in the University of California system, where the graduation rate is upwards of 75%.

That's not a categorical indictment, since there are lots of reasons students don't finish their degrees. But it's also a cause for concern. College is expensive, online or no, and it seems clear that a college therefore has some moral obligation to ensure that the students it admits have a reasonable chance of completing their degrees. I'm not sure where you draw the reasonable/unreasonable line (the national graduation rate is a depressing 55%) but I'm pretty sure 16% is on the wrong side of it.

The other thing that concerns me about UPX is their relationships with investors and the DOE, both of which have been contentious -- I'm sure you heard about the whole deal with UPX misrepresenting the results of a DOE investigation to shareholders ($280 million judgment against UPX, appealed, struck down, regrouping, ongoing), but the real matter is UPX's relationship to the DOE, where their policy seems to involve paying fines instead of complying with DOE regulations.*

Again, I'm glad you're having a good experience, because you're right: UPX is meeting a need for you that other colleges might not be able to. But that doesn't make them angels. And if you were to show me any college, for profit or no, with a one-in-six graduation rate and a record of DOE fines, I'd recommend real caution; even if you decide those are acceptable, they're certainly no good.

* We're talking about admissions and financial aid fraud which, while they don't directly affect classroom experience, do have consequences for students.

Catenoid
Mar 3, 2008

by Tiny Fistpump
I'd like to note that last time I checked, Berkeley costs pretty much the same as any UC, which is around 9k per year with health insurance (but not cost of living, which is the killer for Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB,...pretty much most of them except Davis maybe).

How do you feel about the increasing cost of college, a decreasing amount of aid for most students? I'm attending a public school, but because my private loans are being discontinued next year, I very well might have to drop out. You work at a LAC, but are your students mostly isolated from these sort of economic problems? I won't compare quality of education, but how do other schools make any attempts to ensure that their students have a chance at completing their degree requirements?

Again, I'm coming from a public university background, but how does LAC handle general education and remedial classes like HS algebra? How much of a resources sink is this? How do you feel about (public) community colleges and their roles in filling in for both of these?

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

Catenoid posted:

How do you feel about the increasing cost of college, a decreasing amount of aid for most students? I'm attending a public school, but because my private loans are being discontinued next year, I very well might have to drop out. You work at a LAC, but are your students mostly isolated from these sort of economic problems? I won't compare quality of education, but how do other schools make any attempts to ensure that their students have a chance at completing their degree requirements?

I don't like any US college and university financials, frankly. Navigating them means choosing the least terrible of lots of awful options.

But the stories are different from college to college. In general, state colleges are seeing increasing student costs and decreasing aid because of cuts in state funding, while private colleges (like mine) are increasing tuition solely for the purpose of increasing financial aid -- that is, we increase the sticker price to decrease actual out-of-pocket costs for most of our students.

We insulate most of our students by going need-blind, which I think I wrote about in an earlier post. Basically, we don't consider financial need when we admit students, and we guarantee that we'll meet the financial need of any student who decides to come. In practice, this means lots of tuition waivers, which also means that our most financially vulnerable students are insulated against rising costs. All they pay for are books and course supplies.

This policy means we need to give up lots of things. Our athletics program is a joke,* and with the exception of our libraries and labs, we don't have much in-class tech -- the smart classroom projector/document camera setups you'd see all over the place at X State U. are only in one or two classrooms per building. Dorms are spartan. We've got a nice athletics facility (nowhere near what you'd find at most colleges) but only because it's revenue generating. There's no other gym in town, so we sell memberships. You get the idea.

Point is, these and a bunch of other measures mean that we don't have students getting priced out of their education.

Most other private schools deal with this issue by carefully considering students' ability to pay before admission, which sounds shady but makes some moral sense; it's dishonest to admit students if you know they can't afford to finish their degree. And in the current financial climate, it makes sense for state colleges to start doing the same thing. I'm not sure denying admission is the way to go, but giving students a clear financial picture of what the next four years look like seems a clear responsibility (e.g., if we assume X% tuition increases you'll need to take a couple overloads, because this line of loans will only last you seven semesters).

quote:

Again, I'm coming from a public university background, but how does LAC handle general education and remedial classes like HS algebra? How much of a resources sink is this?

At most Liberal Arts colleges, everyone teaches general education courses pretty frequently, both because our Gen Eds are extensive and because breadth of education is part of our institutional mission. If I wanted to teach nothing but Shakespeare, I'd be at the wrong place.

Remedial courses are a bit tougher. Because we're selective, we can, say, only admit students who've done well in calculus-level math, which cuts our remedial need pretty sharply. But when we do need to add a remedial class, we follow the path of most colleges and offer a set of remedial Summer classes for incoming Freshmen. We don't charge for them, they're only worth one or two credits, and admission is contingent on their successful completion (with one exception, I think we do all of these Pass/Fail). There's lately been talk of partnering with another local college to offer a more extensive set of remedial classes, so we'd have more admissions flexibility on that front.

But in general, this kind of remedial offering isn't a huge resource sink. We're not pulling existing resources from other classes with this (so we don't have to add extra classrooms or hire extra staff to accommodate remedial students). But this model doesn't scale up well -- if we were twice the size we are now, we'd likely have to offer remedial courses in the Fall or Spring, which puts them in resource competition with regular offerings and so gets very expensive very quickly.

quote:

How do you feel about (public) community colleges and their roles in filling in for both of these?

I think community colleges are a great idea, and I'd like to see the community college system expand even at the expense of state and private colleges.

I've said this before, but colleges do a lousy job of balancing their teaching and research missions. Community colleges are an exception to this because they're entirely about teaching, which is really what postsecondary ed. seems to need.

The problems with CCs are obvious, though. They have trouble attracting and keeping good faculty, and similar trouble attracting and retaining good students. But there's no current reason for this, at least not that I can see -- it's a sort of holdover from the days when just about anyone could afford to go to a state school and only the desperately poor or terribly inbred had to step a rung down the ladder.

So a system of colleges designed exclusively for undergraduate education, that sought out and got the best teaching talent, and focused on attracting able and cost-conscious students could meet a need that's only likely to increase as state support for R1s shrinks.

* The only team of ours that plays in a stadium is baseball, and that's only because our town's minor-league team plays about a quarter mile from campus. We get to use their field for games.

Vladimir Putin
Mar 17, 2007

by R. Guyovich

proudfoot posted:


You have to seriously screw up to get below a B at an Ivy.

Absolutely untrue. I went to an Ivy, and when I went, most people flew into a B or C. You have to screw up royally to get a D or F, but the same applies for an A. You had to perform exceptionally to get an A. It could be that I took mainly science courses, however. I saw tons of people fail out of the engineering school. The gen-ed liberal arts courses were a different matter, as most people felt they could sleepwalk through them and manage an A. I didn't show up to 80-90% of those classes and felt upset if I got below a B.

Brainworm posted:


More simply put, all a student needs to do to succeed at an Ivy League college is work; there's tons of available expertise to tell that student what kind of work to do and when, not to mention oceans of soft support and insulation from real-world problems. So, as a rule, a student pulling a 2.7 at Harvard is pulling that 2.7 under the best possible conditions. Ergo, he's most likely a lazy idiot.


This is mostly true, but not entirely. The support system really is top notch, and they provide everything they can to help you succeed in your own insulated little world. But, you also have to consider that you are in the same class as a bunch of overachieving hyper-competitive really bright people. The competition is fierce and it's tougher to stay at the top of the pack in terms of the curve. For this reason, a ton of people would take the most hyper competitive classes at the top-50 school in the same city during the summer. The instruction was fine, but people just breezed by because of lowered expectations and non- cuthroat competition.

Vordulak
Jan 7, 2004

I put pennies in the dryer, and they make music! BEAUTIFUL MUSIC!

Vladimir Putin posted:

Absolutely untrue. I went to an Ivy, and when I went, most people flew into a B or C.

Did you go to Princeton? It is my understanding that Princeton has, at least in recent years, been genuinely trying to curb grade inflation. As opposed to, say, Brown, where you really would have to be a moron to receive less than an A.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/12/grades

Inside Higher Ed posted:

A professor who has crusaded against grade inflation by gathering and publicizing data has released his largest analysis to date -- and it suggests that grade inflation continues to be a broad problem across much of higher education. The figures may embarrass some colleges and renew a debate over whether students experience enough rigor...

...Rojstaczer says that his new study shows that it is possible to tame grade inflation. He finds that Princeton University has largely done so, by making an issue of grades and encouraging professors to give a broader distribution of grades. Further, he finds that there is one sector that has held the line against inflated grades: community colleges...

He noted that once Princeton deans said that the issue mattered and encouraged tougher grading, there was a significant change. "How difficult is this?" Rojstaczer asked. Other colleges and universities have seen the opposite trend. At Brown University last year was the first time, for example, :siren: a majority of undergraduate grades were A's :siren:, up from 42.5 percent a decade earlier.

basement jihadist
Oct 3, 2002

Riven posted:

Don't want to derail, but


I wanted to give you an inside view from someone who has attended a for-profit college, University of Phoenix, for the last four years; in the on-campus program for the first two years and the online program for the remaining time.

I'll start with the disclaimer that I don't believe by any means that I am getting the same quality of education I would get at a school such as the one that employs you. However, I can say with complete confidence that I am getting a better education than I would get at the average Cal State school, because my wife has been attending San Francisco State University for the same period and I have far fewer complaints about my learning experience than she does.

There are certainly some cost-restraining practices. For example, all the instructors use a standard, university-published syllabus, which they can then modify as they see fit. However, I find this is often valuable, since I have not taken a Celtic literature class where the primary text is Dracula, as my wife has at her far more respected state university.

The instructors do put a great amount of effort into the courses, including guiding discussions. In my 3.5 years with University of Phoenix, I believe I've taken exactly 4 multiple choice exams, all for math courses. The rest of the courses rely on papers and projects that provide an opportunity to use the knowledge gained to analyze a business case that is often directly applicable to the student's current job or future job requirements. I get good feedback. In fact, your bracketing system is exactly the proof system offered by University of Phoenix, through a tutor review that is facilitated by an online submission system, so that students can improve their writing before they turn in their papers. This is useful since we usually have a 3-4 page individual paper and a 5-6 page group paper due every week. (I'll take 3/4 of a useful finger, since you were half right on the pre-made material).

I am who University of Phoenix is for. I had a horrible time in school due to learning disabilities, left high school early because of depression, worked for several years and got to a point in life where I was unable to afford to go back to a traditional school full-time. If I wanted to get a bachelor's in less than 7 years, I needed to go to University of Phoenix.

I'll agree with your point that cost can drive courses, but reversed. University of Phoenix works out to about 12,000 per year if I were attending a semester based school taking 12 units per semester. That's around the cost of UC Berkeley, which is a superior school in most aspects (though I am generally in classes of 15, and get lots of individual attention and feedback from my instructors, something I'd be unlikely to get in a 300 person lecture hall at Berkeley).

I don't consider my bachelor's to be the end of my education. I would be more regretful of the fact that I ended up at UPX if it was. I'm applying to an MBA/M.Eng. program for 2010, and would like to do a Ph.D. in Sustainability after that. But grad programs are designed for people in the middle of their lives and careers, unlike undergrad programs.

I think that you're generally right. There are a lot of very shady institutions out there and diploma mills. But implying that every for profit and online program is a worthless waste of educational resources is disrespectful and ignorant.

EDIT: As a better measure of the disparity between your expectations and mine, having read the rest of the thread: You couldn't decide until you were 22 if you wanted to get your Ph.D. in physics, English, or philosophy. I didn't think I'd ever be able to go to college, because that expectation had been pushed out of me, until I was 21. The best I was hoping for was that I would be able to work as a dental assistant (what I was doing) and maybe end up as an office manager of a big practice. The most important thing that University of Phoenix has taught me is that I can learn, and that sounds pretty close to the mission of your school, if in a different sphere.

yeah, how does it feel to not be accredited?

Chocolate Milk
May 7, 2008

More tea, Wesley?

Brainworm posted:

Basically, we don't consider financial need when we admit students, and we guarantee that we'll meet the financial need of any student who decides to come.

I meant to ask about this when you posted earlier. I'm from a country which has seven universities, so our system is completely different. How do you measure/prove the financial need of a student?

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Cemetry Gator
Apr 3, 2007

Do you find something comical about my appearance when I'm driving my automobile?
In reply to someone asking about critical theories (I almost have my BA in English Lit so I have some knowledge) - deconstructionism sucks.

At least the ones I've read. Most of it is nonsense, like I have a hard time figuring out what they are exactly getting at. Granted, whenever I get a definition on deconstructionism, I'm always left profoundly confused as to what they are trying to argue (it has something to do with the inherent contradictions within the text, or something like that, I've never been 100% sure).

I remember telling my thesis adviser about this, and she laughed heavily. Then she explained to me that once she went to a convention, and a deconstructionist gave his presentation, and she and another professor at my school just looked at each other and asked "What's going on here? What are they trying to argue?"

The other one I'm not a huge fan of is the psychological study, but that's mostly because it appears to superimpose a lot onto the text. It can be an interesting read, but often times, they'll end up arguing something the text just has no evidence for.

Aside from that, theories with a specific bent, like queer theory (er... no pun intended), tend to annoy me since, like psychological, it is often superimposition. However, that's not to say that they can't produce quality studies, but it's when they find homoerotic undertexts in the work that they really start stretching and reaching.

But for the most part, most theories are just about finding a time and a place. For instance, I used biographical theory in my examination of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (it didn't make it into the final paper, but alas). I supported it by arguing that seeing how Twain operated with slaves would allow us to determine if Jim was a racist depiction or if there was a chance he wasn't. If you see how Twain felt about slavery and his feelings towards slaves, you would understand that the town he grew up in did not treat slaves like pure objects and abhorred the slave trader, and that he had great admiration for some slaves, which argues against the idea that Huck Finn is just racist trash (the furthest your could really go is that it is insensitive).

Just note that the more crits you read, the more bad ones you find. Seriously, I found one that argued that the Merchant of Venice was anti-Semitic, but instead, he only proved that the characters act anti-Semitically. Which makes sense when you read into Shylock's character and see his struggle against a hypocritical Christian society.

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