Illiteracy at college level, how can they make it that far?

[Amaris]

Some of you would have hated the way my instructors would post assignments on the University of Phoenix boards. Oh, and for the haters, Comic Sans everywhere.
I took AP courses in high school, you know, when I thought I had a future, and I did rather well, scoring straight A's. Of course, ten years later and I'm fairly certain that edge has dulled somewhat, but I still have the basics, and I'm still an awesome speller.

My AP classes from high school didn't use letter grades. 1,2,3,4,5 only, I thought they were all like that?

Our classes did use letter grades. I thought all of them used letter grades.

 

[JonathonWally]

Some of you would have hated the way my instructors would post assignments on the University of Phoenix boards. Oh, and for the haters, Comic Sans everywhere.
I took AP courses in high school, you know, when I thought I had a future, and I did rather well, scoring straight A's. Of course, ten years later and I'm fairly certain that edge has dulled somewhat, but I still have the basics, and I'm still an awesome speller.

My AP classes from high school didn't use letter grades. 1,2,3,4,5 only, I thought they were all like that?

Our classes did use letter grades. I thought all of them used letter grades.

Our AP exam awarded a 1,2,3,4 or 5

 

[Amaris]

My AP classes from high school didn't use letter grades. 1,2,3,4,5 only, I thought they were all like that?

Our classes did use letter grades. I thought all of them used letter grades.

Our AP exam awarded a 1,2,3,4 or 5

We received letter grades throughout our entire course. I'm trying to remember if, at any time, we had numbers issued.

 

[JonathonWally]

Our classes did use letter grades. I thought all of them used letter grades.

Our AP exam awarded a 1,2,3,4 or 5

We received letter grades throughout our entire course. I'm trying to remember if, at any time, we had numbers issued.

My teachers were cruel bastards and withheld giving us any grades in our AP classes for the entire year until the AP exam in June and whatever you scored on it counted as your grade for the entire year of the class.

 

[Amaris]

Our AP exam awarded a 1,2,3,4 or 5

We received letter grades throughout our entire course. I'm trying to remember if, at any time, we had numbers issued.

My teachers were cruel bastards and withheld giving us any grades in our AP classes for the entire year until the AP exam in June and whatever you scored on it counted as your grade for the entire year of the class.

Ouch. We took quarterly exams, and they always counted for 50% of our grade, but it was never like that.

 

[MetalPants]

^Ah. You're obviously familiar with the Texas Educational System.


All those years of scoring the TAAS and the TAKS still give me nightmares.

I know all the time my teachers taught for the TAAS test still give me inghtmares.

 

[Nerdius Maximus]

One of my classes had a research paper, which we were also required to do an oral presentation on, and provide the class with a synopsis of it, this is what a girl actually handed in, I can only imagine what her actual paper read like.

This documentation which each and everyone have in their possession is an attempt to show that the current energy sources mostly used worldwide are very inappropriate cost and effective wise. This goes on to further prove that biomass has been discovered to be very effective by a few nations particularly emerging economies, the ones effective in powering numerous homes easily without causing any environmental damage. Particularly, with the amount of time put into this research paper I could comfortably say at this point, time, and place I know a lot on this topic. I can diligently make whatever assumptions I want too where necessary. Arguments made saying emerging economies have taking the lead in its consumption means it is therefore ineffective giving the size of the world power nations. This leads me to strongly justify my argument that in a few years to come, the current means or sources of energy will be obsolete. Hopefully, by the time this presentation is over I would be able to make the minds of everyone seating in this room able to take up the fight in paving the way for biomass against tomorrow’s future.

Not only did most of the class struggle to keep from laughing, but so did the professor.... and the part where she said "I can diligently make whatever assumptions I want too where necessary." opened her up to other students asking questions to fuck with her, none of which she was able to answer. The professor let us go on for a while until she stopped us, and even then she looked amused at our questions.

That doesn't surprise me at all. I've seen much worse. From graduates. With masters' degrees.

 

[RoJoHen]

We received letter grades throughout our entire course. I'm trying to remember if, at any time, we had numbers issued.

My teachers were cruel bastards and withheld giving us any grades in our AP classes for the entire year until the AP exam in June and whatever you scored on it counted as your grade for the entire year of the class.

Ouch. We took quarterly exams, and they always counted for 50% of our grade, but it was never like that.

Our AP classes were separate from our AP exams. You could take the AP class and not take the exam if you wanted. I don't know why you would, but you could. Our AP classes scored letter grades, but they were weighted heavier when calculating GPA. The exam scores were 1-5 and counted toward college credit, but they had absolutely no impact on your grade for the class.

 

[Deckerd]

Some British universities use an alpha, beta system of grading, with fine tuning as double plus, plus, minus, double minus. They have vague numeric equivalents but I firmly believe the lecturers use them according to whim. One bloke walked into the common room with an essay and asked in general "what does b equals mean?" which means he got a beta double minus, which you definitely don't want to broadcast.

 

[MNM]

Some British universities use an alpha, beta system of grading, with fine tuning as double plus, plus, minus, double minus.

Never had that at mine, just gave you a mark out of 100 (surprisingly not as a percentage just for example 72), the higher the better obviously.

I think there's a bit of self congratulatory hate in here, people claiming this is illiterate and lauding themselves with the fact that they would never write it that way, for knowing every antiquated literacy rule and that the person who wrote this paragraph doesnt. She's not illiterate, most of of it is ok, a little tweaking and it is perfectly fine.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I definitely saw worse than the OP in college. Writing competency was considered a serious problem and the university required all freshmen to take a full year of English composition. In your third year you had to take a grammar competency exam.

Anyway, I was the only person in my English comp classes that scored A's on every paper. Most everyone else got C's or lower. I wound up editing a lot of people's papers for them. It's depressing what a poor grasp of spelling, diction, and syntax many people have.

I do quite a bit of writing as a hobby, and I've gone out of my way to help fellow aspiring writers improve their craft. Several of them told me I shouldn't pay attention to their spelling mistakes and awful grammar, just the content of the story. They seemed incapable of understanding that such piss-poor technical quality destroyed the experience of reading it. I give up on people like that pretty quickly.

 

[Amaris]

Our AP classes were separate from our AP exams. You could take the AP class and not take the exam if you wanted. I don't know why you would, but you could. Our AP classes scored letter grades, but they were weighted heavier when calculating GPA. The exam scores were 1-5 and counted toward college credit, but they had absolutely no impact on your grade for the class.

That sounds far more complicated than it should be. I like our method.

Some British universities use an alpha, beta system of grading, with fine tuning as double plus, plus, minus, double minus.

Never had that at mine, just gave you a mark out of 100 (surprisingly not as a percentage just for example 72), the higher the better obviously.

I think there's a bit of self congratulatory hate in here, people claiming this is illiterate and lauding themselves with the fact that they would never write it that way, for knowing every antiquated literacy rule and that the person who wrote this paragraph doesnt. She's not illiterate, most of of it is ok, a little tweaking and it is perfectly fine.

Literacy is still a real problem in this country, particularly at the high school level.

 

[Canadave]

Well, you can use it, but you need to be able to do it well. It can be easy to overuse it if you're not careful. By learning not to use the first person when you're younger, you develop good habits. You don't want your research paper to read like a diary entry.

Dear Professor, today I researched _____. Through my research, I learned ________.

It just sounds crappy.

Opinion papers, reaction papers, compare and contrast, yes, first person is fine. But in all my college level "pure research" paper it's never been allowed, they're supposed to read like reference books.

That doesn't necessarily preclude the first person, though. For example, I did a paper for an upper-level course I took on immigration, half of which involved doing some kind of original research. I chose to look at how Chinatowns developed in North American cities, and spent a day in Toronto walking through and observing two different Chinese neighborhoods. It's hard to avoid using the first person when you've got 2000 words worth of research you did yourself.

 

[Goliath]

Well, you can use it, but you need to be able to do it well. It can be easy to overuse it if you're not careful. By learning not to use the first person when you're younger, you develop good habits. You don't want your research paper to read like a diary entry.

Dear Professor, today I researched _____. Through my research, I learned ________.

It just sounds crappy.

Opinion papers, reaction papers, compare and contrast, yes, first person is fine. But in all my college level "pure research" paper it's never been allowed, they're supposed to read like reference books.

That doesn't necessarily preclude the first person, though. For example, I did a paper for an upper-level course I took on immigration, half of which involved doing some kind of original research. I chose to look at how Chinatowns developed in North American cities, and spent a day in Toronto walking through and observing two different Chinese neighborhoods. It's hard to avoid using the first person when you've got 2000 words worth of research you did yourself.

More and more these days, when my students ask if they can use the first person, I ask them: why? Why do you want to use it? Are you the topic of your paper? No? Then why are you writing about yourself, instead of the topic?

 

[PlixTixiplik]

Some journals prohibit the use of first-person but it seems to be rarer these days; most of the places I publish allow it. I don't see that it makes much difference and in many cases the phrasing actually seems more awkward using the passive voice. When you're writing a methods section, it feels more natural to say "we processed the samples and analyzed them on a mass spectrometer," rather than "the samples were processed and analyzed on a mass spectrometer" (as if it magically happened without anyone doing it!). The choice really only comes up when writing the methods section (typically a minor part of any paper) and I agree that it's easy and more natural to avoid first-person phrasing when stating results or interpretation.

In the specific case of the OP's quote, the person's writing and use of the first person is inappropriately conversational in many places. The problem is not so much with the actual writing (although it's not great, being awkward with a bunch of grammatical errors), but that it's not the proper style of writing for a technical/scientific summary of a topic such as biofuels. The actual content of her summary could be described in a third of the space, if you took out all of the wordiness. I don't fault her much for that, as it's a particular style of writing that isn't really taught in high schools. I encounter that quite frequently with our students.

 

[Starbreaker]

The standardized tests are scored with numbers, but we always got letter grades in the actual classes.

 

[Holdfast]

Strunk & White, for example).

Strunk & White is like my Bible.

You'd both like me. I recommend Strunk & White to everyone who attends the lecture course I run on getting into university. At least that gives the poor shortlister a fighting chance of reading a halfway-coherent personal statement!

One bloke walked into the common room with an essay and asked in general "what does b equals mean?" which means he got a beta double minus, which you definitely don't want to broadcast.

Doubleplusungood, even...

 

[RJDiogenes]

I think there's a bit of self congratulatory hate in here, people claiming this is illiterate and lauding themselves with the fact that they would never write it that way, for knowing every antiquated literacy rule and that the person who wrote this paragraph doesnt. She's not illiterate, most of of it is ok, a little tweaking and it is perfectly fine.

No, it's really not. It needs far more than a little tweaking.

 

[Goliath]

So, I just started marking one of the research papers for my spring-session course, and the first line reads as follows:

Throughout Europe during the nineteenth century revolutionary ideas were on the rise, in pacers such as Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia.

 

[bluedana]

I think there's a bit of self congratulatory hate in here, people claiming this is illiterate and lauding themselves with the fact that they would never write it that way, for knowing every antiquated literacy rule and that the person who wrote this paragraph doesnt. She's not illiterate, most of of it is ok, a little tweaking and it is perfectly fine.

No, it's really not. It needs far more than a little tweaking.

Seriously. Even if you read it aloud, which takes care of the to/too and its/it's problem, and even if you put appropriate pauses where punctuation should be, it still makes no sense. It fails as a piece of communication. It's not always just a matter of archaic rules; many of these grammer and punctuation rules serve the purpose of making the words on the paper order themselves into a clearly understandable idea.