Links
Archives
Sunday, August 01, 2004
|
ENGLAND SWINGS...
....like America do, Brits are selling B.A.‘s just like me and you. Oxford University; Cambridge too, If you pay tuition, they’ll pass you on through. Yes, fellow Alliance for A’s members, it’s Janice again [for background, see UD posts beginning with 11/30/03], singing Roger Miller’s great song in a slightly different key…I don’t know about you, but if, like me, you’ve ever had a close encounter with a snooty British professor gassing on about the vulgar Yanks with their lack of academic standards, I think you’ll find this article from The Observer gratifying. Like us, British professors have figured out that universities need tuition to operate. They’ve also figured out that when you flunk a student or make his/her college life significantly unpleasant in other academic or social ways, you lose that tuition. Hence, a sensible university will both inflate grades and charge the highest tuition possible. British universities, for instance, really soak foreigners: “At the top end of the range, foreign students can pay 30,000 pounds a year to study for a business degree - six times the income received from a UK undergraduate.” And since, for a variety of reasons, foreign students may have more academic trouble than native-born, these universities must be ready to accept sometimes very bad work from them. At Swansea University, reports one researcher, “a blind eye was turned to practices ranging from direct plagiarism to lecturers doing their students’ work for them, or simply passing work that had not been examined properly.” Swansea’s recent closure of its chemistry, anthropology, and philosophy departments [Does Janice have her finger on the pulse of academic change, or does she not? Remember my communication of 5/18/04, in which I argued for the elimination of philosophy departments and their replacement by spa studies? Oh - and UD asks me to tell you to take a look back, in the larger context of this post, at the following posts as well: 6/22/04 and 7/6/04...] has some people speculating that “the decision has been made to boost the numbers of foreign students coming to study at the university’s new management school on lucrative masters’ degrees.” The happiest news for us on this side of the Atlantic who are working for all A's across the board for all American college students is that even at Oxford staff believed they were expected to give good grades to American students studying in England for credits for their courses back home. This impression has been passed to the students themselves. Gilbert Cervelli, an American theology and history student who spent six months at Oxford this year for a credit towards his American Bachelor of Arts degree said he received all A grades. “For a majority of my time at Oxford, I wondered if I could write an absolute crap essay and still have my tutor tell me it was wonderful just because I was a huge investment.” Well, wonder no more, Gilbert. With the exception of a few highly technical majors (“Science graduates who cannot do what their certificate implies,” a lecturer at Bournemouth points out, “are potentially dangerous.”), it sounds as though the tuition-greased slide through school is just as smooth over there as it is over here. Tata - Janice |