That’s interesting. Thanks for sharing that. Sounds nice, honestly, not to have so much pressure to take the right classes and have the right extracurriculars, etc., etc., etc.
As FlyingRamenMonster said, universities in Australia aren’t really ranked quite as rigidly as they are in the US. Some of the older, longer established ones (e.g. the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne) carry a bit of extra prestige, but only with respect to certain faculties. Newer universities would carry a little less prestige. However I know that when we recruit graduates, we concentrate on the results that the graduate has achieved. We don’t care about the uni. And the vast bulk of students go to a uni that’s in their home city/state anyway.
And as for getting a place at uni - for most undergraduate degrees it’s generally determined solely by your final results in the HSC exams (or equivalent in other states). Some courses (such as engineering) may require that the student has completed certain subjects e.g. maths. But generally there aren’t any prerequisites. I got into my first degree (Economics/Actuarial Studies) without having studied economics at school.
I’m a little confused by your terminology here (specifically, what “at school” means). Do you mean that you hadn’t studied economics in high school before you studied it in university? Because that doesn’t strike me as odd at all. My bachelor’s degree is in anthropology. As anthropology is not a typical subject taught in high school, I’m sure it not surprising that I never took any classes in it prior to starting university. The prerequisites I was mentioning earlier in the US system don’t have anything to do with your college major - they’re just prerequisites for entrance for all students, no matter what they are planning on studying. They don’t require that you’ve taken XYZ in high school to study ABC in college.
Anyway, could you really just take easy classes and avoid whatever you didn’t like and still get into a university? I’m just a little blown away by this. I’m terrible at math and would have loved to drop it and take more English or French or…whatever, anything, but I had to take four years of it so I could get into a good school after high school.
Once again I’m only speaking for WA here, but you could take easy classes if you wanted, but all the TEE subjects were considered reasonably to very challenging. You could if you wanted to take the minimum of four TEE subjects and two blow-off subjects to fill out your course but serious students didn’t tend to do this, because your final ranking is calculated using the average score of your four or five best subjects (so if you took 6 TEE subjects and didn’t do well on one or two, they wouldn’t factor into your ranking, but if you only do four you’d better be damn confident about your marks).
A lot of courses required a TEE math class, though, so in that case you’d have to do at least applicable math and introductory calculus. On the other hand, if you really hate math that much you probably wouldn’t be doing a math-related course in uni in which case yes, you could get into uni without doing TEE maths.
One important difference between our system and the American system is that you don’t apply to schools, you apply to their individual departments for the course you want to study. We also don’t have a foundation year - when I started doing design at my university, we did learn basic design concepts in our first year before choosing our major but we didn’t have to take any English, math, history etc classes. It was all design, all the time. I never got why they did that in the US, anyway - isn’t that what high school is for?
Yes, ‘at school’ means at high school. The term ‘school’ in Australia refers only to compulsory primary and secondary education, for children. We don’t use the term ‘school’ to refer to optional, tertiary education at university.
In theory yes. But also, the underlying theory of the HSC is that all the subjects are equally ‘hard’, since they’re testing the students after 12 years of schooling in that subject. Some of my best friends at (high) school studied only humanities in their final two HSC years: English, Latin, French, History etc and then went on to graduate in law. They didn’t do any maths, because it’s not a compulsory HSC subject. Would you consider that they did only ‘soft’ subjects? Some of them achieved final HSC results that would also have secured them a university place studying something like Engineering. But without maths, they’d never have passed the first year courses in Engineering. And anyway, as FlyingRamenMonster points out, if they disliked maths so much that they avoided it at school, they would never have been applying for places at uni in courses that required maths.
Oh, and the way our system worked was they had “list 1” and “list 2” subjects, with list 1 being arts/humanities and list 2 being math/science. So you didn’t have to do math, but if you wanted to go to uni you’d have to do chemistry or something to make up for it. Not sure if they still make the distinction.
“native speakers” weren’t allowed to take the class, but those that had Chinese as a mother tongue / cradle language could not be singled out though. That’s one thing that stands out for me about the Chinese as a culture, I find that they tend to maintain Chinese cultural identity a lot more than I saw other cultures doing growing up - and in particular speaking the mother tongue was one part of this.
Not sure about the writing profiency part - but I do know that at age 5 my daughter can already write more characters than I could at the end of my one year of Chinese.
If it’s anything like having “intermediate ability” in Chinese, then pardon me while I fall down laughing. Being able to order restaurant dishes and talk about movies in a foreign language won’t do much for ya, son. Again, speaking from my experience with Chinese: until you can read a newspaper or business report quickly without turning to a dictionary for every fifth word, then intermediate ability in a language is an interesting little multicultural brownie point that might get thirty seconds worth of discussion in a job interview before turning to the real questions relating of “what can you do for me now?” After all, if the ability to speak Chinese is a critical aspect of the job, why shouldn’t they simply hire someone from China?
Sorry, don’t mean to bust ya bubble, but being middle aged and experienced means you get to gripe about these things.
When I was at High School in NZ, your Foreign Language Options were:
A) French
B) Japanese
C) German
D) Maybe Mandarin Chinese, But Probably Not.
I took four years of French and it’s been very, very useful in my travels- the last time I was in Mexico, for example, I could read all the signs and notices, which was fascinating.
I’ll chime in with the other Aussies and say that we don’t have “Ivy League” universities here for the most part- there are some Universities that have a reputation for being specialists in a particular field (QUT and Bond University both have well-respected Law schools, for example) but generally a degree from one University here is as good as the same degree from another. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the State and Federal Governments keep a pretty close eye on Universities and their teaching standards, and you’ve got to be specially accredited by the Government to call yourself a “University”.
No offense, and I don’t know your Chinese abilities, but I strongly suspect I’ll be able to accomplish more, and more quickly in Russian, than you are in Chinese. I speak fluent Bulgarian, which is fairly closely related to Russian, and am so far finding it extremely easy. (With very, very little studying, the lowest grade I’ve gotten on any test or quiz is a 95.) When I said “intermediate”, I was imaging a lot more skills that being able to order in a restaurant or chat about movies.
BTW, I don’t know what line of work you’re in, but language skills are important in mine (international development). There is no way having that background won’t help me out. Also, I have to say that I’m not a huge fan of being called son.
Cunctator and Flying Ramen Monster, thanks for the explanations. I think we’ve hit on the difference between the US and Australian university systems. The US liberal arts college ideal is that all students be “well-rounded”, so it would be seen as quite a poor reflection on you as a student to only take humanities, even if they were all very challenging. Almost all universities in the US require that students fulfill a core of general education requirements that often have nothing to do with one’s main course of study. My university required that everyone, irrespective of major, took at least two introductory-level humanities classes, two science classes, two social science classes, and then a topical class in each category as well (so, an introductory social science course would be like, Introduction to Psychology, but then as a topical course you could take Psychology of Religion, which was still lower-division and had no prerequisites), AND a few other random requirements, too, once of which was a quantitative course. I took Introduction to Astronomy, which fulfilled both one of my introductory science courses and my quantitative requirement, and then a theoretical physics class for my topical science course. Sometimes these classes are kind of a joke, just easy things so people are bad at math can complete the requirement, but I liked my science classes.
This is quite an interesting difference between our two countries’ university systems- in fact, as I mentioned in a similar current thread on the subject, you generally can’t take “unrelated” subjects here at undergraduate university level without an extremely good reason and a dispensation from the Course Convenor.
Universities here are generally geared towards getting you a job from your degree- becoming a “well-rounded person” is something you can do in your own time if you’re that way inclined, for the most part.
How long does it usually take to get a BA, then? I feel like it must be less time than in the US.
Three years, usually.
It is. 3 years in the UK, too, though most people take a “gap year” where they travel the world or feed the homeless or work a minimum-wage job that pays just enough to cover dope.
Most people take a gap year? I’d be curious to see that statistics on that.
Yeah. That is shorter. A standard BA in the US takes 4 years, although it’s not uncommon to take 5 years, especially if you switch majors or something.
I did this with German and French, and had three semesters in high school where the two languages overlapped. It wasn’t that bad.
I guess instead of “native speakers” I should have used “people whose families speak [X language] with them at home”, as some of them would not necessarily be fluent, even with regular familial interaction in said language. I find that, though it may not necessarily be evident with the Chinese speakers that you know, I have met several native speakers of languages other than English (who also speak English) who are illiterate in their other language.
In the UK, yes, though I can only find statistics for pre-university gap years (elected by 24% of students, give or take).
Nobody seems to bother tracking 2nd- or 3rd-year gap leavers, which is what my brother did… possibly because it’s difficult to track actual gap years as opposed to people who are supposedly taking a gap year but really just dropping out.
The numbers might also have changed a bit now that university isn’t free.
Ha! I did it with French, Spanish and Latin, and it wasn’t even by choice- and now I can’t do anything but read in any of the three.
It’s certainly a common enough occurrence here that it’s been a major factor in the row over the Government’s plans to change Youth Allowance entitlements and eligibilities, FWIW.
In New Zealand it was very common to take a year off after High School and do an “O.E.” (Overseas Experience), which typically involved working in a London pub or an American/Canadian ski field for a year, with lots of sightseeing and backpacker-y type stuff thrown in.
Latin is the ur-language that unites a lot of languages used in the west. If it’s true, as is claimed on Wikipedia, that the study of Interlingua helps one puzzle through Spanish better than the same amount of time spent actually studying Spanish, then Latin would be at least that useful, since Interlingua is basically Latin without inflectional endings.
It has also been mentioned that Latin helps with learning biological nomenclature. Of course, you can also just study the nomenclature by itself. Most do. Those, however, don’t end up learning much about Latin. The person who studies Latin, on the other hand, gets way out ahead in the study of scientific nomenclature and is in the enviable position of not merely memorizing, but understanding. Note that this advantage is cumulative with the advantage discussed above.
Latin is often cited as a good way to build up verbal scores in standardized tests, and not without evidence. But in fact, it simply stands to reason. 60% of English words come from Latin, and that jumps to 80% when you look at words of three or more syllables. How many syllables on average are you expecting per word in the SAT? Furthermore, those English words from Latin mean what they mean because of morphological rules that are not themselves carried over into English morphology, so English doesn’t teach you how to decode them. You can just study the English vocabulary directly, but the same amount of effort in Latin vocabulary plus derivational rules yields a rich English vocabulary as well. It’s also possible to just study the cheat sheet on Latin derivation, which will certainly help. But you won’t get any of the advantages mentioned in the previous two paragraphs, which are cumulative.
Latin is also a highly ordered and logical language, and is traditionally promoted as part of a complete curriculum that exercises rational faculties. Of course, you can and should study logic itself as well as mathematics and rhetoric. But it’s not as though the advantages of all these approaches to analytic training don’t stack. They are cumulative with those of Latin, which includes all the above discussed advantages as a free bonus.
It’s true that you don’t come out of a Latin class with the ability to communicate with living people (ignoring for the moment that the spoken Latin community is growing now that the internet is here to connect them). But let’s not pretend that high schools are cranking out fluent second language speakers either. You can parlay your halting high school French into continuing studies, but most people don’t. They let it wither and fade, and the advantage in principle that it’s an actual living language is rarely an advantage in fact. The opportunity cost for that advantage that never manifested is all the things above that Latin teaches you, which are cumulative.
Latin builds a diverse intellectual portfolio which pays reliable dividends however the market changes. Modern languages are high-yield investments with little liquidity.
I took 4 years of French and 3 years of Spanish so I ended up studying both at the same time in grades 10-12. I wanted to take both freshman year, but the guidence counselor wouldn’t let me. Granted in practice French III and French IV were the same class because there weren’t enough students interested to have seperate classes (my French III consisted 6 juniors and the one girl who took French IV). In theory Mme X was supposed to give the IVs additional course work, but in practice we all did the same stuff. Next year 3 of us from French III took French IV (which we shared with French III).