Advanced Learning in Australia:
A UNIVERSITY graduate student abandoned the institution in frustration after a marking fiasco during which a lecturer told him to produce “more smarter writing”.
Former Queensland University of Technology Master of Business Marketing student Rohan Duggan, 38, said his nine-month ordeal included seven meetings and hundreds of pages of correspondence, some farcical.The original marking of a 2000-word paper included a comment from lecturer Edwina Luck advising Mr Duggan to present “more smarter writing”. After Ms Luck graded the paper at 65 per cent, Mr Duggan questioned the grade and Ms Luck passed it to another staffer, Dr Yunus Ali, who downgraded it to 35 per cent.
In re-marking, Dr Ali questioned the use of the terms “Yin” and “Yang”, a Chinese concept of balance, and said they should have been listed as references in the bibliography (a list of the books used as reference material). Yesterday, Dr Ali admitted he had “no idea” what the terms meant and thought they were references to people’s names….He insisted Dr Ali was “very well qualified academically”.
No doubt Dr. Ali was very well-qualified academically, that’s the entire point, isn’t it. It doesn’t much matter if you’re in the USA or Oz, this brave new world of grade inflation and dumbed-down university means its almost entirely pointless to waste 4-6 years going into debt in order to “learn”.
Note that the reporter felt the need to explain what a bibliography is. And yet, people wonder why I am so massively contemptuous of the public schools and the voting public.