I love hearing about stuff like this. Also, if the reading and other stuff that you are doing is good, and you’re a self-motivated student, there’s no reason that you can’t get a lot out of your degree. Just because the rest of them are dunderheads doesn’t mean that you are.
Here’s half the problem of graduate degrees online, as far as i’m concerned. Some of the most interesting and intellectually stimulating parts of my first couple of years of grad school, before i started working on my dissertation, were the grad seminars where about a dozen of us would be in a room with a professor talking about the books we had read. These three-hour seminars were a lot of fun, but were also incredibly intellectually rigorous. I just don’t see how an online environment can reproduce the sort of dynamic interactions we had in the seminar rooms.
Actually, it’s pretty likely that none of your colleagues would be accepted into a decent PhD program if their work is as poor as you suggest. A few might improve dramatically, to the extent that they would be accepted into a lower-tier program, but it doesn’t seem that likely to me.
When I thought you were going for a phd I was going to ask what year you were in. Just because someone is in grad school does not mean they’ll get anywhere close to being a professor.
You can bitch about it, but it’s pretty much equivalent to bitching that the $12.00 pocketknife you bought at WalMart doesn’t hold a razor sharp edge. The product you bought isn’t designed to fulfill the criteria you’re trying to apply.
According to their website, AMU doesn’t offer PhDs, so you can take solace in the fact that none of your sub-par classmates are going for those. They might think they are, being sub-par and all, but they’re not going to get 'em from AMU.
For the record, I’m in grad school right now at an Ivy League university. I mention that not as any sort of brag for myself, because it’s actually not a terribly highly regarded grad program, but because it’s relevant to my bitching about the undergrads. The undergrads ARE supposed to be the Ivy League elite types. I heard somewhere that somewhere upwards of 90% of the undergrads were high school valedictorians.
Anyway, I can only wish that my program consisted of impossible-to-fail courses. I only have to take three classes total in the whole degree. The rest is all research, which is all too easy to fail at. But I’ve TA’d some undergrad biology classes, and whew! It’s terrifying how bad even these supposedly overachieving undergrads are at writing comprehensibly. Just stringing together a coherent sentence is a major accomplishment for many of them. They can whip up a Powerpoint presentation at the drop of a hat, and generate professional-looking Excel graphs in their sleep, but simply sticking words together one after another? It’s really quite scary.
Yes, more than one realization may have come about, but clearly they are talking about one in particular. “A realization” is typically expanded upon in subsequent sentences explaining which particular realization the writer finds interesting and relevant.
And yes, realizations can form slowly - this happens all the time in individuals and in groups of people. In an individual the extent of the realization and the amount of data analyzed and firmness of conviction can be a gradual process. In groups it can represent the aggregate understanding and agreement amongst the individuals, which also may (and typically does) progress over time as more and more people are exposed to and accept a particular idea.
Don’t try taking the GRE, GMAT or any other grad school test with this attitude. A large portion of the verbal section of those exams are made up of spotting and fixing exactly that kind of “grammatically correct, but less-than-felicitously-phrased” sentences.
Agreed to a point. At this advanced level of education a student should be able to write persuasive, firm sentences without weasel words in an aggressive attack form.
But sometimes academics take this too far when the reader would understand and move on. I’m looking at you, law schools.
My realization came in the early 2000’s. I had a class for a master’s when the entire class was to write a research paper. That was it. In fact, you only had to write the first part and didn’t have to actually conduct the research. So for our midterm we had to bring in our papers to be edited. Two ditzes walk in 15 minutes late without their papers and couldn’t understand why the teacher was so upset.
Mrs. Cad’s came as she was finishing up her BS. It was online and the students had to post twice on each topic. Mrs Cad’s would be along the lines of
If another student did have an original thought it was usually be similar to
<NB: I’m pretty sure they were not thinking rational and irrational when they said “real”>
But most often the students would just reply to the original thought with
Now guess which student responses would regularly get 10/10 and which student got 8/10.
Perhaps the reality of a for-profit education system comes to some people at different times, but the longer you stick around in the system, the more likely you are going to come to this conclusion.
Ultimately, it is a business. How do businesses stay in business? Profit! Do you make profits by kicking out your paying customers? Of course not!
This dawned on me when I was getting my MBA. In one of my finance classes, there were three Chinese students. They never came on time, they never took notes, they didn’t even have a book. More importantly, I never heard them speak a word of English. But they passed! How do I know? I saw them at graduation!
And this is what they were saying to each other:
“How did Stink Fish Pot graduate? He always had to take notes and stuff even in the incredibly easy classes, sheesh”
However, just so you understand, I wasnt the only one asking this question. NO one ever heard them speak anything but Chinese, ever take notes, or ever spot them with a book, but perhaps they were taping the classes and transcribing them after.
This is a fair point but it only goes so far - you have to maintain the quality of your product too, and letting just anyone graduate will ultimately devaluate your product. Think about it - now that we know that Chessic Sense’s institution is full of morons, would we want to go there, or advise anyone to do the same? In the case of a university degree, you’re interested in keeping it moderately exclusive as the value of the product depends on how many people are able to buy it. That means having to kick out paying customers in order to make a profit. Of course, this is not a business model that all institutions of higher learning adhere too, and there’s clearly rivaling incentives (money now v. reputation in the long run), so universities might try and have it both ways - but there’s definitely good reasons for kicking underperformers out even if they’re paying customers.
That’s not a “format,” it’s a (fairly basic) guide to producing a research paper. I don’t really know what you’re complaining about here, or how it even relates to the thread.
OP disuses crappy writing from people who should have plenty of time knowing better.
I was just eluding to my first semester, although my writing was fine, they just didn’t like how it was laid out, and no one would tell me specifically how it is supposed to look.
So, after years of no one explaining what is the correct way to produce a paper, we get relative to what the OP has pitted.
