I came across a short article on the shortcomings of higher-education systems in UK.
He was a professor in a UK university, but after got fed up with the university system, he threw the towel and quitted.
Interestingly enough the points he delineated were strikingly the pain I felt while in graduate school. Among those:
1. The incoming students are vastly incompetent, and grades were everything according to them. I recalled I had a student who was on the borderline of 'A' and 'B', however his obsession of ensuring to score 'A' really pissed me off (for the record, he had been getting straight A's then). During the final score tally, he was a few points short of getting an 'A', and as an instructor I had 5 points to dispense for class participation. I decided to give him only 1 out of 5 and thus, he was given 'B'. He did make a lot of noise, but after an email from the grad office, he was silenced. I hope he would learn a lesson that grades aren't everything.
2. The need for papers. When I was doing my master's degree, I just felt very weird of the need to churn out papers, especially journal papers. Imagine a room full of highly-qualified, intelligent people and kept debating how much we should put in ("not too much, as we could put that in another paper" proclaimed one participant in the room) and what we should not discuss in the paper (usually weaknesses in the theory or thorny issues that were not tamed). Truth be told I highly suspect if those papers will be read by anybody except the authors and the reviewers. For myself, I doubt there was third person who ever finished reading my master's thesis. I and my advisor did and that is it. I am not even sure the rest of the committee members did.
5 comments:
Very interesting. I sometimes feel the same when I'm reading all the useless papers published which are rehashes of each another and contributes nothing.
Even papers from famous universities in the US have useless info. Let me paraphrase a results section I read before as an example, the transmit power is set to high so receivers further away can get the packets and if I set it lower, they can't receive it and if I lift the antenna higher it can transmit further. Well, it's phrased much nicer by the authors but that's the gist of the whole 3 paragraphs in the results section.
Not sure if I will continue in the field once I leave. I'm focusing more on mathematics these days. Easier to switch fields. ;)
PS. Edited some stuff. :)
Thinking about it, isn't Malaysia's problems much worse than this? All levels of government exams have inflated grades not to mention those matriculation exams. By the time these problems propagate to university, the effects will have been tremendous. It will probably take 20-30 years to improve the system even if the government acts NOW.
Can you imagine some of your classmates who couldn't even get a good credit for our SPM Modern Maths (despite the inflated grades) teaching your children in the future? Scary thoughts. 2 generations (60 years) of Malaysians will have to have suffered even if the government acts now.
One of the reasons I didn't choose to pursue Ph.D. is the need for papers, even 99.99% of those are useless. I suspect the time and effort would be mainly a waste.
Regarding to the education standards in Malaysia, well, I have nothing to say. No hope anyway... -_-
1) I agree that most papers are a waste of time to the reader. BUT, writing papers is exhilarating to the reseachers and it is a good reason to travel to exotic places for sightseeing and good coffee. Not to mention, it also gives an inflated sense of self-importance. So, we have the phenomena...
Again, not all questions are worth answering and writing into LaTeX format.
2) Grades should be binomial if the course is tailored -- experimental open questions -- in my case, info theory. But, fixed if the course is basic or standardized content -- compilers and networks.
3) Don't need Ph.D. (6) .... need More Boobs Anytime.
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