An Associates Degree is inexpensive to get, can help you toawrds a 4 year degree, & is very useful if it is a technical field.
The Math 2 year could get you an accounting clerk position.
What do you call recently?
I took my first college course in 1983, and it was called an associate’s degree then. As indicated above, it appears to date back to the late 1940s.
Oh for Christ’s sake. You know damn well what she meant. You went to U.C. Santa Cruz which does things differently in that respect. At virtually every other school, all you get is a P or an F.
As for the OP, if you want a two year degree that will best help you professionally, I’d recommend concentrating more on programming than math. That’s assuming that you don’t want to eventually go for a bachelors at some point. That said, learning for the sake of learning is definitely worthwhile.
I would not hire someone as a C++ developer with this degree. Well, I wouldn’t hire someone if this was their sole qualification. However, I know several programmers who don’t have college degrees who I’d be happy to have working for me.
The degree in itself won’t necessarily make you any more employable. It’s what you do while you’re getting your degree which helps.
I tease my son constantly about his triple major: Rhetoric, Political Philosophy, and Political Science. He wouldn’t even be qualified to work at McDonald’s.
Customer: I’d like an order of fries with that.
My son: Or do you?
However, while he’s doing this, he’s restructuring the student newspaper website, leading a project to redo their internal software, a student manager of the kitchen, and has been asked to be on the executive board for the Newspaper and run for president of his living community (which is in this college more important that Student President).
In the Summer, he’s running a two summer camps (not a staff member, but running the camp), and he’s a certified EMT.
He might only have a liberal arts degree, but his job prospects are way better than those with MBAs. Remember that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, nor Michael Dell ever graduated from college. A college degree is just a piece of paper. It’s what you do while you’re getting one that’s important
Want a real computer job when you leave your Two year degree program? Work on coding a few of the open source projects that are around. Then, I’ll consider hiring you.
hajario writes:
> At virtually every other school, all you get is a P or an F.
At my undergrad school, New College in Sarasota, Florida, we also got a satisfactory/unsatisfactory for each course and a page-long written evaluation.
Did you get it or did it appear on your transcript? Only the latter matters if it has damning information.
Well, sometimes. You have to be careful about what credits will actually transfer (especially from “private” for profit schools which may or may not be accredited), and even at quality community colleges the extent of “feed and lead” type teaching may not prepare you well for a traditional four year school. Two year schools are often run like an extension of high school where you can’t actually fail if you show up; on the other hand, they are specifically dedicated to teaching rather than research. For an adult student who is working and returning to school part time they can be a good way to knock out prereqs, but for an entering student they aren’t a great introduction to the academic environment.
As for the specific question of the o.p., the answer is that no, a two year mathematics degree isn’t going to be worth anything in and of itself except as a check box on some civil servant pay scale. As others have noted, even a BS or BA in mathematics basically qualifies you to teach on the high school level. Many of the people doing applied mathematics work aren’t even trained mathematicians; there are a lot of cogsci and physics graduates and post-grads doing mathematical modeling of financial systems. Insurance companies generally hire candidates trained in actuarial science rather than general statistics. Other areas in which mathematics are heavily used, such as evolutionary dynamics, quantitative forensics, et cetera, researchers trained in those areas learn the math and tools needed to do the work. The courses listed by the o.p. basically prepare a student to take more math, science, and engineering courses rather than equip one to do work itself. It’s been a long time since I’ve drawn down on a triple integral or homogeneous second order differential equation (except for fun) but I calculate statistics and use computer tools to model analytical non-linear time-varying systems on a regular basis, which are well beyond anything in the curricula mentioned by the o.p.
Stranger
I’m not surprised that there are a few others but my point still stands, there are very few schools where they do the evaluation thing. even sven’s school is noteworthy because of that.
No, I have no idea what she meant, and statements like this work against us who worked our butts off in rigorous programs that work on a pass/fail system. UC Santa Cruz is no longer on a pass/fail system, and that is in a large part due to knee jerk reactions from people who assume “pass/fail” automatically equals “slacker.” I will call out this piece of ignorance wherever I see it, because it’s wrong in a way that affects me personally.
Yeah, just a handful of irrelevant schools like Yale Law School, Oxford and Brown. Pass/fail grading is often a part of a rigorous evaluation system that is very much as difficult as any letter grade system. To smear it as promoting lower standards is the worst kind of ignorance- the kind of ignorance that makes other people’s lives worse.
I won’t go as far as to say “slacker” but it’s correct 99.9% of the time that pass/fail is just that. UCSC is a fine university and the way that it does/did pass/fail grades is vanishingly rare. If you’re concerned about things working against you, you could explain that there are a few exceptions instead of writing snotty posts.
You keep proving my point. You have shown a small list of schools out of the thousands that exist in this country that issue narrative grades. In at least half of that list it’s either* in addition* to letter grades, so not really pass/fail, or it’s only done on a limited basis. Oxford and Brown, for example, doesn’t do pass/fail grading. You’re the one, by the way, who said “irrelevant”, not I.
I shouldn’t have said that Oxford and Brown doesn’t do pass/fail. They probably do. The point is that the narrative is given as a supplement to a traditional letter grade.
Minor nitpick: degree programs in actuarial science are still pretty rare, and are by no means generally preferred to other technical degrees. Other than that, I agree with you.
Do you work for the National Committee for Letter Grades or something? I have no idea what your stake in this is.
I politely asked the quotee to reconsider their position on pass/fail grades, and I gave an example of when pass/fail grades are a part of a rigorous evaluation system. I have a vested interest in this, of course, because if people start thinking “yeah, pass/fail is always slacky” that has a direct effect on the value of my degree. I don’t like to see pass/fail painted with such a broad brush. You are not going to convince me that this is unreasonable.
You’re the one who flew off the handle with the snotty comments. I really don’t understand why you are so interested in fighting me on this one, so I’m just gonna leave this alone and let everyone else get on with their thread.
Trying to get back on track.
The curriculum the OP describes is clearly very heavily slanted to being an entry to a 4 year degree. If I were creating a 2 year course that most students would not take further I would tend to be much broader - even with the mathematics. I think there is much to be said for a course that teaches a wider range of mathematics. The world as a whole would benefit if more people simply had a better understanding of what mathematics is.
One thing I don’t like the look of is a couple of semesters of C++. Unless you have a background in programming, and know another language C++ is a truly dreadful language to learn in. Indeed it is simply a truly dreadful language. If you wanted ancillary programming skills that could be used in support of other professional efforts, or just wanted to write code for its own sake C++ is probably the worst language you could pick. Two semesters of C++ won’t qualify you to earn money programming in it, and you are most likely to come out confused and bitter at the experience. You will spend almost the entire time learning, not programming, but how to navigate a twisted trainwreck of a language that should have been strangled at birth.
Incidentally, I have something to contribute here since I have two one-year master’s from Oxford. The grading system used there at the postgraduate level has three grades: pass, fail, and distinction; but distinctions are sufficiently rare (depending on the degree and class maybe between 10 and 30 per cent of students) to say that a pass may still be quite an achievement and not necessarily something drawn up just “to make everyone feel good about him/herself even if s/he doesn’t accomplish anything” (personally, I had a distinction in one of my master’s and a pass in the other one, and even though I would have loved to get two distinctions, I’m not ashamed).
Individual exams are marked on a 0-100 scale, and these numbers show up on the transcript, but no overall average is computed or shown on the transcript; the overall mark is, rather, simply pass, fail, or distinction.
At the undergraduate level, Oxford uses the same grades as other British universities: First, upper second, lower second, and third class.
OldGuy writes:
> Did you get it or did it appear on your transcript? Only the latter matters if it has
> damning information.
We got the narrative evaluation. We could choose to share it with others (say, a grad school we were applying to) if we wished, but it didn’t appear on our transcript. In any case, as I said, we received S/U (satisfactory/unsatisfactory) grades for our courses. Courses in which one received a U simply didn’t appear on our transcripts. Incidentally, New College students do very well at getting into grad schools. New College ranks third (as a percentage of graduates) at getting Fulbright fellowships, for instance: