The need for skills support for students- a worrying development.

Ken-Dodds-Hairy-Knodule

tr3mor wrote:

What does it matter if it was a history course? Anyone in Britain who doesn't know when the 2nd World War started is obviously a vacuous self obsessed moron!

Or maybe, just maybe they aren't a war obsessed idiot..

For the generation before mine the war was a big deal and everyone remembers it. My generation less so, the one after me doesn't need to know the date of it - the years it occured are not significant to them.

Who now remembers the dates of the boer war? A few generations ago everyone would have. in 50 years the date of the war on the Gulf will be as irrelevant to most people as the date of the 2nd war in Europe is now.

Compound_2

tr3mor wrote:

It depends what you're writing. An academic essay should be more rigorous in obeying the rules of grammar. Authors can use artistic licence if they wish.

I took 'It is not wrong to begin a sentence with a conjunction' from Oxford’s guide to good English. It’s important to separate the rules from the myths.

tr3mor

Ken-Dodds-Hairy-Knodule wrote:

Or maybe, just maybe they aren't a war obsessed idiot..

For the generation before mine the war was a big deal and everyone remembers it. My generation less so, the one after me doesn't need to know the date of it - the years it occured are not significant to them.

Who now remembers the dates of the boer war? A few generations ago everyone would have. in 50 years the date of the war on the Gulf will be as irrelevant to most people as the date of the 2nd war in Europe is now.

Absolute rubbish. A war in Europe, killing people on our own soil, is a damned sight more important than any far flung fling in the name of empire, be it in South Africa or Iraq.

I take it you'll not be wearing your poppy with pride!

tr3mor

Compound wrote:

I took 'It is not wrong to begin a sentence with a conjunction' from Oxford’s guide to good English. It’s important to separate the rules from the myths.

Be it myth or not, if my supervisor takes it as gospel then I'll pay attention to it

Ken-Dodds-Hairy-Knodule

tr3mor wrote:

Absolute rubbish. A war in Europe, killing people on our own soil, is a damned sight more important than any far flung fling in the name of empire, be it in South Africa or Iraq.

People are people.

Britons (wether they be decent ones, or the far more common inbred redneck idiot type) are no more (nor less) important than africans or iraqis.

I take it you'll not be wearing your poppy with pride!

I'll be wearing my white poppy (although certainly not with pride - if I was to feel pride it definitely wouldn't be about a piece of fabric/plastic - I like to think I'm not so shallow).

Karnam

tr3mor wrote:

It depends what you're writing. An academic essay should be more rigorous in obeying the rules of grammar. Authors can use artistic licence if they wish.

actually technically there are no rules for grammer or english. the real myth is 'standard' english. anyone with even a passing interest in english language nos this

Diminutive

For the record as an 19-year-old completely British student, I have no idea of the exact date/year of the Second World War. I'm not in the slightest ashamed of this nor do I consider my self to be a self obsessed moron. I do, however, have a poppy this year, as I have had every year. I know what happened in the wars, both of them (meaning the "world wars"). I know who fought and why they fought and I know the events that took place in the war. I have great respect for everyone who fought in the war and for those who stayed home and kept the country going. I have been to Ypres and the Menin Gate to pay my respects to the memory of those lost. As well as visiting the final resting places of both ally and enemy soldiers, that's something I will never forget.

Anyway, my point? What does a date matter if you know about the actual war. Knowing when something happened is irrelevant if you don't know Why it happened or how it actually happened.


On to the point of the post. My course has a fair amount of maths, nothing too complicated, just statistics (being a business course). The university split us into those who have A level maths and those who don't. We also have statistics workshops for those who aren't following. Does this mean that their secondary school education wasn't enough? Well, yes actually it does... they aren't teaching university level material in secondary schools. Considering those in the non A level maths group would have not done maths for 2 years (3 if they took a gap year). The support groups/workshops aren't there because students are idiots with no mathematical skills, they are there because they need more maths knowledge than they did when they were 16.

Everyone is whining that young people these days don't know this or don't know that, why don't you take a look at yourselves, try taking a few A levels yourself. It really annoys me. As a student, throughout my academic life I have worked extremely hard and consider myself to be an intelligent individual. Admittedly I still have a long way to go but I am in no way stupid. Yet, GCSEs are now apparently "too easy"... wonderful, now my two years of hard work to get them means nothing. Same story with A levels too... wonderful. Now you're picking on universities, saying the standards have gone down? How arrogant of the older generations to look down on the younger generations and judge them as stupid. Let's not forget its your generation teaching the younger generations. Its easy to sit on the outside looking in and judge that standards are falling.

lisa_75

Diminutive wrote:

How arrogant of the older generations to look down on the younger generations and judge them as stupid. Let's not forget its your generation teaching the younger generations. Its easy to sit on the outside looking in and judge that standards are falling.

I don’t look down on anyone. I also consider myself to be part of the younger generation. As a student, however, I am concerned about the value of my degree. The standards of some of the work I see (when doing group work for example) is sometimes pretty shocking, whether the student be 19 or 39.

My marks have always been high. It puzzled me for a while as I don’t consider myself to be particularly bright, I got mainly B’s at GCSE. When I started to see some of the standard of the work of other students it all clicked why my marks were so high.

I consider the work I do to be “average”. Therefore I should be in line for a 2:2. I am not, I am actually heading for a first. Why is that? Is it because standards are low?

I am not saying students don’t work hard. Some of my friend work really hard to get 45% in an essay. However, if you have to work so hard to barely pass, should you even be at uni?

[Deleted User]

I'd agree about the not knowing the date of WW2 bit... i've got a couple of degrees to my name and I don't know when we declared war on germany. I know roughly, but i've not studied history since i was 14 (dropped it for geography at school). My grandpa was a military policeman, went to france on the 2nd day of D-day and was part of teams set up to decomission Belsen concentration camp.

I've become quite facinated with ww2 recently, after reading a few books and visiting Prague. Do I care when it started.. not really, i'll leave the date and year to historians while i get on learning about the reasons why it started.

Compound_2

tr3mor wrote:

Be it myth or not, if my supervisor takes it as gospel then I'll pay attention to it

One skill that is lacking among new university students is critical thinking. Do not take anything as gospel, even if your supervisor says so. For example, if your tutor is a Marxist, there’s no reason why you can’t reject this view in your essays. Engage in debate – this is what universities are all about. Karnam’s post ‘there are no rules’ was an excellent response. Of course, I wouldn’t agree entirely by following the conclusion through. The important thing is that a lot of thought should have gone into your writing. This is what is often lacking. When reading, critically analyse the material rather than swallow it all memorizing dates. This is the difference between university and traditional school education.