Ask Slashdot: Is the Bar Being Lowered At Universities?

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?"

Comments

its normal

[Anonymous Coward]

dont you no most people dont rite good

Ummm

[Tx]

You come to Slashdot to complain about badly written blog posts? Have you even been here before? That's like going into a gay bar to bitch about homosexuality.

Re:US University Education shocked me...

[dkleinsc]

I'm sorry, most of us dumb Americans don't understand the words "lamentable" and "vociferously". Please limit yourself to monosyllables if you intend to get your point across.

Re:Betteridge's Law has been beaten

[theillien]

Then wouldn't it get harder as it gets lower?

Re:It has for undergrad, not so much for the grads

[nospam007]

"They waist 4 years of their lives,..."

Indeed, these years are wasted.

Re:US University Education shocked me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Please limit yourself to monosyllables if you intend to get your point across.

I don't know that big word you just used. please use short words.

Re:A friend of mine and I ended up in the same cla

[nospam007]

"It was atrocious. full of endless grammatical errors, punctuation etc. I had to retake the class, because let's face it English grades are subjective."

Alas, you still didn't get that punctuation thingie.

Re:It's been dropping for a long time

[stewsters]

I sincerely doubt that. I bet many collage graduates back then didn't even know how to write a blog post, let alone post videos of them doing keg stands on Vine.

Re:It's been dropping for a long time

[JWW]

but from I saw proper grammar and punctuation

:-)

Re:University Professor Here

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like a high bar to me. Do you need to get a PhD to get a classroom indoors?

Re:Wrong site

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit, a facebook icon next to a username?

I must be getting old!

Re:Wrong site

[CrimsonAvenger]

Slashdot readership (if it can really be called that, judging by how little is actually read by its posting users [slashdot.org]) is an older crowd; they are not college students. Chances are they will lament how times have changed, and then tell you to get off their lawn. Seriously, very few people here are going to be able to answer your question because they are not in college anymore.

Given the number of /.'ers who don't know the difference between "your" and "you're", or "there", "their" and "they're", or "rogue" and "rouge", I suspect that most /.'ers would consider the current levels of literacy in colleges/universities acceptably high.

Re:Betteridge's Law has been beaten

[QRDeNameland]

Then wouldn't it get harder as it gets lower?

The lower the bar gets, the harder it is to get a good ROI from a college education.

Time to call in James Cameron.