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To join in campus PD chat, last year at my university two people were mugged literally in the parking lot of the campus police department, which is fully lit and lies beside the third busiest street in the town. My university used to have at least one sexual assault or mugging a week on campus, due to an unlit 70ft tunnel that went under a road over to the freshman dorms, but thankfully someone in the administration had the wherewithal to brick up the tunnel and just paint a drat crosswalk across the road several years ago. The first year I was here, the university wound up on the national news after the football team, allegedly under the direction of their head coach, stole every single copy of the campus newspaper. They were trying to cover up the story about two of the football players getting a few prospective students ridiculously high on weed and pills (one of the high-schoolers had called 911 because he thought he was dying) during a visitation weekend. Neither the team or the coach received any disciplinary action. Me and several dozen other people were going to protest this gross misconduct on the part of the athletics department and university administration, but were told quite clearly that if we did so, we would all be expelled and campus PD wouldn't be gentle in breaking up our protest. I took a Modern European History course this last semester. One week we watched The Lives of Others, a fantastic film about life in 80s East Germany. One of the students, who happens to sound a lot like Kermit the Frog, groaned and moaned during every nude/sex scene in the film. Considering it's a film about police surveillance in a failing Soviet state, the sex scenes were overwhelmingly depressing and not at all erotic. Everyone in the class had to sit through Kermit groaning in arousal as a woman was coerced into having sex with a government official under threat of imprisonment, and then he began groaning again a few minutes later when you saw her nipple as she stood in the shower and cried after being raped.
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Dec 22, 2013 05:56
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 06:42 |
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Was just contacted by a university I used to attend -- after apparently taking three weeks to process the single-page form needed to send out my transcript, they called to tell me that they could not do so because of a parking citation on my record. The citation is on a car that I have never seen before and it was from last October; I haven't even lived in that town for 6 years. Called Parking and Transportation and the only way to remove the block is to pay the fine myself, and they refused to give me any details about whoever owns the car despite the person being able to buy a parking permit in my name and driver's license. I could appeal it, but it would take weeks and this transcript should have already been on file at the various graduate programs to which I'm applying. Hurrah for university bureaucracy; they'll hold my future hostage over a $60 fine but not bother to contact me when a random person from another state is registering poo poo in my name several years after I transferred away from the university.
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Feb 21, 2014 21:29
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It can really vary from place to place. My local CC's teachers were either young adjuncts at nearby universities teaching classes on the side at a CC and were awesome, or crazy fuckheads that somehow had advanced degrees but couldn't teach anywhere else. The Biology teacher was a creationist that didn't believe in evolution or germ theory. My US History to 1877 teacher spent at least 10 minutes of every lecture ranting that African-Americans were better off as chattel and that they should be grateful to white people for taking them out of Africa, and would outright deny that there was any evidence of slaves being mistreated or abused in any way. On the flip side, almost all of my university professors have been outstanding. About half of them went into academia after working in different careers, and even those that have been in academia their entire adult lives are generally from blue-collar backgrounds and are a lot more grounded than the stereotypical academic. They all grade your writing to excellent standards. You'll lose a point or two per formatting mistake, but it's not going to make a big difference in your grade unless you were just too lazy to proofread and consult your style manual. You will be heavily penalized for padding out papers though; my profs would rather you write a paper that is below their word/page requirements if your paper simply doesn't need to be that long. It both wastes their time and insults their intelligence to assume that they cannot see when someone is restating the same idea or bringing in irrelevant data to pad out a paper. Nthing the awful university administration though. No one ever seems to know what the hell is going on; you'll be bounced around from office to office just to get anything done or have simple questions answered. My university is also having the same ballooning administration and shrinking faculty problem that most American universities are experiencing, so tuition rates are rising every semester despite us having fewer professors and fewer classes.
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Feb 23, 2014 00:15
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My university has trouble retaining students, and just built (and is building more) expensive new dorms that are only about 2/3 full. Their newly announced solution to both of these problems? Require all incoming freshman to live on campus for 2 years, in dorms that cost $3300/semester for a shared one room dorm. The university is in a small Texas town with a low cost of living -- you can find 2 bedroom apartments and duplexes next to campus that will cost less than $3300/year in rent for each tenant. If you don't mind walking all of 8 blocks to campus, you can rent old, but huge and renovated, houses for even less that 4 or 5 people can easily live in. They also have to purchase full meal plans for these two years at exorbitant prices, even though there are numerous restaurants in and around campus that will give you a better meal for a lower price. The university dining hall also only cooks food at very specific hours, so if you have classes during designated meal times you can't even have a meal in there other than a tiny box of cereal and maybe some fruit if there's any left. Almost all low-level courses are scheduled during these times, so freshmen and sophomores will now essentially be paying $10/day to eat fifty cents worth of empty carbs and an apple, unless they want to buy food from a restaurant while still paying for the meal plan. There are also two grocery stores literally across the street from these dorms, which have large, shared kitchens in every wing on every floor. Surely all of this won't backfire. I know that a university with declining academic performance that charges high rent, requires you to buy meal plans you can't really use, and has ever rising tuition and fee costs despite an ever shrinking selection of courses sounds super appealing. At this point, I'm convinced that the always growing administration is just sucking the university dry before they find jobs elsewhere.
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Feb 27, 2014 23:26
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My department also has a portfolio requirement for graduation. It was never mentioned during meetings with the department advisor, by a professor in class, or in any syllabi. The only reason I even knew about it was because I recalled seeing a flyer about it in the office a couple of years ago. You have to demonstrate how well-rounded your education was with multiple submissions from several different subfields, even though the department head let students take whatever classes they wanted rather than follow the degree plan. Luckily, the other graduating students and I were able to slap together our portfolios at the last minute and brought them to the office on the day they were due, only to find out that the professor that reviews them is at a conference that day despite us being told to bring our portfolios on that day specifically. Even better, we all get an e-mail the next morning stating that our portfolios were rejected for not meeting departmental requirements; the department changed the requirements this semester without ever telling us, updating the web page, or printing out the new requirements. Now we all have to redo our portfolios to graduate even though this clusterfuck is entirely the fault of the department. I would like to file a complaint with the dean, but I'm applying for a GA position here as a safety net and the department is small enough that they'll find out who complains, so I can't unless I want to give up a job and subsidized MA.
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Apr 20, 2014 03:07
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 06:42 |
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Astrofig posted:Mine was one of them; the so-called 'weighted grade' classes made it possible to get a 5.0 but I'd never heard of it being possible to get higher than that.... I graduated as valedictorian with a GPA of 5.7. My high school went up to 5.0 for normal classes, and then tacked on another point if it was dual-credit, honors, or above your grade level. Combine that with a lovely school and apathetic teachers, and the lowest recorded grade I ever had in high school was a 97 or whatever the standard Phys. Ed. grade was. VVVVV I'm not bragging about it; it's really loving stupid that I was able to graduate with a 107 because our textbooks were decades old and our coursework never changed after elementary school. Honors-level senior english classes shouldn't be using the same grammar worksheets that we used in 5th grade. Preem Palver has a new favorite as of 18:16 on May 1, 2014 |
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May 1, 2014 17:58
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