snerk I actually know a few people that drive from AV every day to come to school at CSUB- crazy! Something about the classes they need not being offered over there.
But yeah, the car thing is insane. I can understand them needing ONE car, just in case they need to arrest someone, but there is no way that they need an entire fleet of top of the line vehicles for the fat, rude traffic cops (that give us tickets if our permit is turned funny or even if it is turned properly).
Yours only stick to the parking lot? Ours pull people over for speeding in surrounding neighborhoods. I always wonder about the legality of it, and whether it’s actually a good use of public money.
Whoa! Our campus is pretty self contained, just due to its construction, but the outlying streets are actual major streets that are regularly patrolled by real city police officers. In fact, there is a real PD right now the road from the school, so I don’t think anyone would let that fly.
It’s the whole fucking Cal State system. I graduated from the San Bernardino campus. I promptly enrolled in a graduate program. Finished that. Went back a few years later to work on my Master’s. No such luck. They want me to resubmit all of my undergradute transcripts (from 13 different colleges!) Why?, I ask. To make sure you have the requisite GPA, they reply. Well, says I, you already let me into the most stringent graduate program you offer, so I must have it. Besides, just look at my records from the last time I was here. No, says they. We don’t keep those. But what if I was applying to a UC school and wanted my transcripts sent to them from here? Oh, says they.
Long silence.
You have to resubmit all transcripts…
I never did go back for my Master’s.
My school had the same problem but with the dumbass Chemistry department.
Every test was on a Tuesday night at 6:00PM, regardless of your class time. Had another class at that time? Too bad. Worked? Too bad. They offered no other alternative times to take the exam. You made it or you got a zero.
Students complained. They didn’t care. Other professors running late classes complained about students being pulled out of their classes. They didn’t care. That’s how they wanted it (less work for them) and everyone it caused problems for…sucks to be you.
Only time they’ve ever been bested was when my music group scheduled a week long performance tour. The tour was approved a year or two in advance so when they scheduled a Chemistry test that week and told people to be there or else, the dean told them it was a “sanctioned school activity” and they had no choice but to either move the whole date (along with hundreds of other students) or allow those missing an opportunity to take the test at a better time. They were pissed. My music teacher was a reluctant hero.
If you were at the same school as smiling bandit, this would be known as the Big Orange Screw.
(I did my grad work at that university, so I can talk shit about it. The one I work at now - the University of Arizona - I don’t know well enough to do such a thing).
I encountered some of it at the U of A, but it wasn’t nearly as big an issue as hawksgirl’s. They were generally good about making sure undergrads had at least one choice for required classes each semester, even if it was a class you’d rather not take. (I was on a tight schedule, trying to graduate in four years despite switching majors in my second year, and had to take Chinese Linguistics because the Japanese class wasn’t being taught a particular semester. Not knowing Chinese, that made for an interesting semester.)
I’ve hated every goddamn math teacher I’ve ever had in college. What the fuck, they’re supposed to be teaching me college algebra and business math and shit…and they fuck up basic arithmetic?
How the hell am I supposed to learn anything when they repeatedly make simple mistakes with addition or subtraction and shit like that when they’re trying to explain how to do a problem on the board, and have to start over again to figure out what they did wrong?
3 math classes, 3 incompetent teachers. And none of them spoke English as a primary language.
What the fuck.
University of Utah? You’ve been absolutely wonderful. A few iffy classes, but generally more my fault, taking a math class that was above my level, say. You have TONS of online and television courses; I love this. You also have four distant sites, two very close to my house, where I can take regular classes at as well, at night. You have some very high tier anthropology and psychology classes, which are awesome in every way.
Except this one I’m taking now.
Development of Infancy. Sounds normal. Description of it involves the physical and mental hurdles children go through from fetusoidness to toddler. That’s fine.
But now you spring this pseudoscience Feldenkrais bullshit on me? This was totally unprepared for. Thank cod I’m taking this class as an online course, so I can do the exercises at home. And then rant about them being ineffectual or just plain weird. (“Early Movement” = “Make sucking faces for half an hour omg you are a baby now”…later we get to pretend how to learn how to walk!) And no, prenatal memories can’t exist. Stop focusing on how we should be reliving our prenatal lives by sitting and meditating to your mp3s. And the textbook is all into this shit too!
And you aren’t even grading our fucking work? Every week we do a page-long paper on a question about the textbook, and do our floor-wiggle-spaz exercises and write a page-long paper on how that felt and all. We submit it to some “Groupware” site that puts us into groups and we students grade each others papers. Then we grade their grades? What? All you do, teacher, is grade our final exam.
And you make us BLOG. WEEKLY. Making our OWN topics and replying to others! All this is teaching me is that the people in this course are all fucknut insane! One douchetard wrote an extremely long blog entry about how individualization is ruining America, and in the process quoted first Abraham Lincoln, then quoted his very own version of the same quote! It had NOTHING to do with babies or infants or anything…and the teacher praised him!? And she chastised me for writing part of a paper on how I thought the Feldenkrais stuff, and other pseudoscience ‘therapies’ that involve pretending to be a baby, wouldn’t work and probably would harm me at least financially and why would I bother when there are tons of other definitely-real therapies around.
I’m not in a fucking Californian Community College here. Spread your bullshit classes there, not in this school.
And my edit window JUST expired, wanted to add: She claimed that I should be open to “holistic therapies” which these are obviously not, as “what if one of them actually worked?” The creepiest fake therapy involved lying in a warm pool while the therapist would bend you into a fetal position, then lift you up with one arm under your knees, one arm behind your back, hug you up against him, then rock you back and forth. That’s not therapy! That’s a step away from molestation!
I’m almost done professional school, albeit at the same university I did my undergrad at, so this is not really an educational rant, but: I’m furious at my university for closing the Architecture Café. No, it wasn’t enough to eliminate nearly all of the student-run businesses, was it? You had to get every. Single. Last. One.
That café served the best baked goods on campus, fair-trade coffee for fifty cents if you brought your own mug, heavenly patties and calzones and samosas. A teeny, tiny space in that huge pile of a building, that was always full to bursting with a line out the door, and yet somehow a spot always materialized right when I got to the end of the line - I’d sit and read the Daily or study while I recharged, or just grab my coffee and run off to the library or Queer McGill. It is just about the only thing I could truthfully say is one of those wonderful, lasting memories of university, the sort people look back on and say Yeah, wasn’t that wonderful?
And you CLOSED IT. Not the students. YOU. You ordered it to be closed. You lied and said it was for “health oversight reasons,” when its health oversight was just fine – it had a health certificate and inspections from the city like every other restaurant in Montreal, and never had the slightest problem.
You want to put in A STARBUCK’S. Run by the evil metastatizing megacorporation that now runs all of the other food services on campus.
You realize it’s going to fail, right? The reason the Arch Café was doing such a roaring trade was because EVERYONE LOVED IT because it was the goddamn ARCH CAFÉ. Nobody is going to go spelunking into the farthest reaches of the architecture building’s basement to find a fucking Starfuck’s. It’s going to close, and it won’t matter, because the Arch Café will still be dead.
Assholes.
My gripes in this thread aside, do you seriously know a thing about the California Community College system?
Not to go against the spirit of the thread, but I’d just like to say that in one instance my university ombudsman was able to help me out of a ridiculous jam:
On a break from my first university, I took an enrichment course at a Local U. Well, I was the only one signed up, so the class was cancelled. So they told me. I got back my pittance of ‘tuition’ and forgot all about it.
Fast forward a handful of years- I’m going back to school, at the good old Local U. I’m anticipating graduating in ~a year and a half, getting my transcripts together for grad school, but there’s a big old fat ‘F’ way back from that cancelled enrichment course. I tried to resolve it for months- talked to my advisor, he said to talk to the college that listed the course. Talked to them, they said they needed documentation from the professor, who at this time had been gone for over 4 years. Back and forth, back and forth, until I sat down with the ombudsman. She took one look at the situation and said, and I quote, ‘this is a bunch of horseshit!’
Turns out that was the last semester that professor taught, and that was the only class, so he somehow finagled it to keep the class on the roster, with just me in it, so he could get paid. Now, if he had given me an A, I probably wouldn’t have said anything. But an F???
Well it’s mostly just a joke, Queen Bruin; my best friend goes to an apparently good one (I can’t judge myself) and consistently has terrible, terrible tales of what his teachers are teaching him, like that humans evolved and spread across the globe while it was “still one big continent.” Teachers that despite being male will call all the males very, very nasty names and flatter all the females to “show how evil anti-female culture is and how anti-female America is.” Teachers that will speak in a crazy Spanglish that is not understandable to people who speak either language. These exercises seem like something I’d hear of HIM having in HIS school. So granted it was a bit of a personal joke and my apologies if you took it badly.
“My apologies if you took it badly” my ass. Non-apology apologies are a hallmark of complete assholes who feel not a bit sorry. Community colleges are a cornerstone of California’s brilliant Master Plan for Higher Education (which sadly has been undermined by recent legislative idiocy), and they generally provide the HIGHEST quality of undergraduate education. Universities and their professors prefer to focus on grad students, and the highest-ranked universities often provide abysmal experiences for freshman students. It’s at a university that an ideologically blinkered nutcase can get tenure and a nationally-recognized soapbox for insane, hateful opinions on race, class, society, or what-have-you; stories from ONE of California’s 109 community colleges don’t get you a pass, fuckwad.
So large universities and community colleges are the only places to get an undergrad education? I and millions of other small liberal arts college alumnae would argue that neither “provide[s] the HIGHEST quality of undergraduate education”.
Sadly, this I have been on the side of asking for those transripts. Let me tell you why:
We have to shred those transcripts after a period of time. Privacy laws get in the way.
Some admissions folks will ignore some of the data, so to cover our own ass we have to ask for all-new transcripts. I have personally caught people applying to a graduate program who had never actually earned their BA. These SAME people had gotten into other schools who had not bothered with checking out all of the paperwork.
Different schools have different methods for calculating GPA as well (wipe out classes re-taken, ignore sailing grades, GPA in major, GPA of quant classes, etc.).
I will run a “ask the former grad school admissions officer” thread one of these days if there is demand.
Problem here is that native English speakers don’t seem to want to get advanced degrees in math anymore. This then fills the lower level classes with foreign grad students. Officially they have passed the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), but that is far from sufficient.
Heh, I’m at the U too. I think the majority of the math department here are incompetent dumbfucks. I haven’t had a decent prof/teacher yet - neither has anyone I’ve known.
I don’t know about Toaster, and I don’t know about California as a whole (since I was born and raised in SoCal and that’s what I’m most familiar with) but I know quite a lot about Los Angeles Community College District, and frankly he isn’t exactly wrong with what he said. There are plenty of “bullshit” classes to found, and plenty of “bullshit” professors.
Reading this actually gave me a good chuckle. They’re a cornerstone of California’s “brilliant” plan for higher education, because California’s high schools/middle schools suck so bad that many people need what amounts to High School 2.0.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I took classes at a few CCs so I could transfer to a full university. They were cheap and I didn’t have much money, but don’t try to pretend that they provide anywhere near the “highest” levels of education. They don’t. Of the three campuses I took classes at in LACCD, I’ve had exactly ONE professor who believed in providing the “highest” level of education he could manage - my Spanish professor.
Everyone else, including many if not most of the profs at those campuses, treated it like High School reincarnated.
In short, nine months ago, I made a mistake in registering for a class. My professor repeatedly told me she’d take care of it. In long, well, here’s my grade appeal letter from late July:
To Whom it May Concern:
I registered as a non-degree student at City Tech in Spring 2007. I’m trying to take several prerequisite classes in order to apply for a nursing program that starts in early 2008. When I registered, I saw the the evening sections for the Microbiology class that I wanted to take had been filled already. I was told by the registration office that some students would drop the class, so I went to the first class session of section 3080 on the first Monday of classes. This was the only one that would accommodate my work schedule at the time.
After class, I asked the professor, Dr. B***, if there were any empty seats and if I could enroll if so. She was very cooperative and explained to me that if I wanted to be in her class, she would allow me to take it. Though there was an empty seat for me, and not all registered students attended class, I was told the class was still full when I attempted to register. The next week, I asked Dr. B*** what I should do, and she told me to register for any open section and she would turn in my grade to the other professor. She explained that some students have different professors for lab and lecture, so the professors turn grades in to each other all the time, and that it would not be a problem if she did the same for me. I registered for section 3082, Professor D***'s class.
Dr. B*** was very helpful and told me repeatedly that my grade would be turned in just fine. When my mid-semester report came in and showed that I had not been attending classes, she took down my information and told me she would sort it out at the end of the semester. At the semester’s end, Dr. B*** and I exchanged phone numbers. She called me after she had submitted the grades to tell me that I had earned an A and that she had turned it in to the other professor. I did not think that Professor D*** would refuse to pass the grade that I had earned on to the registrar. However, the official grade on my transcript remains a “WU.”
Given the efforts I’ve made during and following this class, this seems an unreasonable outcome. I will take whatever necessary steps in order to receive the grade that I earned. I will provide copies of all of my class work and tests upon request. I’ve already spoken to Dr. B***, who says that there is nothing more she can do, and Professor D***'s secretary, who is unable to set up an appointment for me even after several phone calls. I have just learned from Dean B**** that Professor D*** will return on August 13th, and that I will have to wait until she returns, so I will be checking on the status of this appeal at that time.
I am currently taking my third course at City Tech, and have maintained a 4.0 so far, including the grade that Dr. B*** assigned me. This unresolved issue is holding up my application at R*** University, and if I do not receive credit for this course, I will have to wait another full year to enroll at this school. The final, extended deadline to turn in my transcript is August 24th. I hope you recognize the urgency of my dilemma, and how frustrated I am in light of the hard work I have done at City Tech. I appreciate your prompt consideration and will follow up with your office in the next couple weeks. Please feel free to contact me if you require any further information.
Sincerely,
Millit
SO…I submitted the grade appeal. It was denied. I finally spoke to Prof. D*** over the phone (after she stood me up in person), who is not only the chair of the department, but a complete and utter spiteful bitch who is taking my mistake personally for whatever reason. I apologized. She told me I was disrespectful for dropping her class. I apologized again and told her I’ve been doing things correctly ever since. Does she really want me to re-take the class and spend another year waiting to go to nursing school? She’s just offended that Dr. B*** broke the rules and she’s taking it out on me by not passing the A on to the registrar. I’m almost ready to give in and just let her keep me from going to nursing school–it was only by begging the committee to consider me and promising them I’ll get this straightened out by December that they didn’t throw my whole application out. Fuck this. I’m sick of fighting with everyone at this goddamn school–even the dean is sick of me and won’t help me anymore. 