Ask Slashdot: Is the Bar Being Lowered At Universities?

Posted by Soulskill on Friday February 15, 2013 @05:32AM from the students-probably-making-good-use-of-the-bars dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I am in my late 20s, live in the U.S., work in the IT industry, and am going to school to upgrade from an associate's degree to a bachelor's degree. One of my classes is a web-based course that requires students to write blogs. I am not attending one of those questionable for-profit schools. This is a large, state-funded, public university. In this course I have noticed poor writing skills are the norm rather than the exception. It is a 3rd year course, so students should have successfully completed some sort of writing course prior to this one. Blog posts, which students are graded on, tend to be very poorly written. They are not organized into paragraphs, have multiple run-on sentences, and sometimes don't make sense. I do not know what grades they are receiving for these posts. Slashdot, is what I am seeing the exception, or the norm? Is the bar being lowered for university students, or am I just expecting too much?"

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Re:Betteridge's Law has been beaten by N0Man74 · 2013-02-15 06:46 · Score: -1, Flamebait

I think the bar was lowered to soak up all the cash the various levels of government have been dumping into the institutions' coffers. The governments appropriate more money, the schools have to dig up more students to get the bucks.
It's the natural result of letting free market principals guide education.
Run Government like a business, right?