Re: Relevant and accessible?
I have a maths degree.
My uni ran "Baby Maths" courses in the first year, where lecturers would give out sheets starting at literally "2+2" and going to simple calculus and simultaneous equations over the course of the year. You didn't need to do them, but it was pointed out that you SHOULD ALREADY BE ABLE TO DO IT ALL, that you've either been taught it before or you desperately need to learn it very quickly, that there should be no wrong answers and that you will have needed all this BEFORE YOU EVEN START at uni.
It was necessary even then, nearly 20 years ago. People go to uni and think they can just vaguely remember their GCSE and be hand-fed everything through to degree. I know someone who works as a maths lecturer in London, the same stuff still happens. He's appalled by it, being European, and sees it as an embarrassment that people even try to go to uni with that level of appreciation of the subject they are studying.
But the uni's have stopped caring. So long as you're paying for the year, who cares if you pass or fail or take up the lecturer's time. Those who want to succeed will do so anyway. Those who don't work still pay fees to the uni and then disappear NEXT year when another lot come in and do the same again. Lecturers get paid the same, courses are run the same, and sometimes even the courses are dumbed down to provide dumbed-down degrees which are laughed out of any foreign university.
It's rife.
The US - and, because of its perception as following a "US-style" education system - the UK are laughed at in international circles by PhD's and the like. You go there, realise it's a sham, but you can't tell anyone because you just spent three years getting that degree (that might take five elsewhere) and it would then make you look a fool to denigrate it. You go back home, the universities accept the UK degree, and then you do the REAL work over there.
My girlfriend is a PhD in genetics, so she often got asked to coach PhD students in various biologies, including forensics etc. She once had a PhD candidate ask her what a shoulder was. Another told her - with a straight face - that you knew if a skeleton was male or female because there was one less rib. Only in Bible school, darling. But these people had MEDICAL DEGREES from UK universities and were going for doctorates.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
