Academic Hours

Hi guys, a bit that I don't post here...

I have a quick question:
This type of course:
UAHuntsville - Liberal Arts - Foreign Language and Literature Programs - FLIT: Foreign Language International Trade

That is just 63 hours il told to give a Bachelor of Arts. It is that possible? Are hours in USA an academic way to say something else? do you will definite it a good academic degree?

 

Degrees from American unis, especially Bachelor-level, are throw-away pieces of paper compared to the entire rest of the first world. They also have stupidly high rates of grade inflation, so an American GPA of 4.0 is about as much worth as 2.0 to 2.2 from a European uni. The only exception to this rule would be Ivy League graduates, but even then I am not sure whether the exception applies to all of them.

Master's from the US you can take more seriously.

As you can tell, I don't really value the American education system and what they collective consider as "difficult". I look at interviews of postgraduates, even from Ivy League unis, and I think: "Who the fuck gave them their grades?" Then I look at some German and Aussie uni students/graduates I know and you have to wonder at the massive educational discrepancy between everyone and the Americans.

I'm gonna end my rant here.

EDIT: Stupidity from tiredness removed.

 

Ivory League.

 

Yes I'm sorry about that... I knew (I've been a visiting scholar to Yale for some time now, and I know the level of B.Sc, even in Ivy league, compared to Italian ones). but what I want to know is if that course is a standard-academiclevel (whatever it is in US and in that university in particular) full time employment for 3/4 years or is just a 60+ hours of lessons with a piece of paper at the end.

Because an acquaintance say that "hours" are not lessons hours or whatever, just a unit of fatigue... but it is seems improbable to me and never heard of stuff like this in Yale (yes, sometimes "hours" are not a precise unit of measurement, and sometimes the lessons, expecially in lab instead of being 2 hours becomes 2.5, 3...etc...) or other US academia I visited. Or maybe in order to have the B.A. you usually have to combine many of this "modules".

 

Fuck.

There's also a Black Ivory League.

Had a look at the link you provided. Looks like they mean 63 credit hours.

My current uni has the same system, and it simply seems to be another term for credits. So, when you do two courses with 4 credit hours each in a given semester, you have done 8 credits when passing the courses. You'll have to accumulate 63 of these credits hours in order to be eligible for the FLIT certification/diploma/whatever it is.

 

Thanks!

 

Well frankly our "Bachelor-Level" degree is in general more demanding in terms of vastity and deepness of programs.
Some reference textbook that we use in second year "Bachelor" are more often used as textbook for first year graduate school in the States, but our system is different, people graduate older (the B.Sc or B.A. is 3 years, but high school is 5 years, so if you do everything by time you graduate to 21/22) and often there is an over-age graduation (is common to take an year more... the average year for graduation is 23.
And conversely the number of people with the degree is really low compared to the U.S. and the number of college dropouts is huge.
The issue in perspective is that they are trying graduate more people and have a more "anglosaxon" graduation rate (actually in italy should be 20% for young population. 20 years ago was around 10! U.S. is more than double!), by decreasing the level... not a very smart move if you ask me... hope for a reconsideration in the future...

IMHO, up to now, the real weakpoint in Italy respect to U.S. is on the average level of PhD. There are very good PhD schools and programs, but more ofter are just 2 years of useless master and 3 years of even more useless PhD school.

The problem is that, for historical reason, the most appreciated degree for work is the Master (without Master you cannot be an apprentice engineer, start the training for high school teacher...etc...) that is an overkilling for many things and that also gets down the level and value of the master itself (in order to do it and do it fast many students are just sloppy, many professors even more sloppy, and since you start a different degree many things are repetitions...etc...).

From what I see in my experience with U.S. academia (as a visiting researcher, not as a former student) is that the level in bachelor is still pretty low, even in super-high-rated Ivy League school, compared to the one in Italy.
Or, to better put, is the education system that is completely different and is less demanding from a theoretical and study point of view, and more focused on experience, put in practice and exchanging ideas and "living" the university (a real weakpoint in Italy). That is of course not a so much of a a plus to study e.g. Physics or Mathematics, but think about languages and you are light years above even if the course itself is not "difficoult" or "demanding".

Then, in the graduate school, this is were things start to get serious. With tops and bottoms, but generally on a completely different academic level.

 

undergraduate degrees are worth what you make them.

of course you can major in getting fucked up, waking up one morning during your junior year thinking o shit i need to major in something and going into something absurd like an undergrad business program, which really is a joke. or you can do something directed and learn stuff.

and the fact is that the only upside of the massive overproduction of phds---cheap labor for the neo-liberal infotainment factory dontcha know---is that very good faculty people can be found almost anywhere, so older hierarchies in fact no longer really obtain...but you have to know what you want regardless of where you go...but this is like some secret and people are mainly, it seems, somewhere between passive and stupid when they're anxious about their kids' futures in particular so seem inclined to go where it's more expensive beacause they imagine expensive=better. but the reality is that if you don't know what you want as a student, it hardly matters where you go. i know lots of idiots with such symbolic capital, for example, lots of george w. bushes.

so no, remixer is wrong that an undergrad degree in the states is a waste of time necessarily except in the way it can be made into a waste of time, which is something that 18 year olds seem really adept at fashioning, the waste of time, which is one reason among millions that university should start later, like at 20-21, i think, after teaching in universities for a bunch of years.

credit hours are arbitrary, expressions of standardized value within particular universities. 4 credits does not mean more than 3...both are subdivisions of the total number of credits required for graduation over the standard duration of a degree program.

"low-residency" masters programs are good revenue engines for infotainment factories. you pay, you don't show up for much of anything, you get a credential. the next logical step is to just sell the credentials like you can buy anything else.

there's a real problem with extending consumer-cult logic into university education. consumer cult is an idiot's game...it's about validation of one's affective sense of self and providing commodities that can fit with that affective sense of self and encouraging expression of that sense of self in the purchase of those commodities. debt is, of course, the central enabling engine. education is a service-delivery operation; information a commodity. what teaching becomes in such a context is quite strange---infotainment delivery systems---what it's about is revenue for the institutions---try to imagine a farce on the order of a mooc outside such a logic.

but i digress.

 

In the time it took me to compose this, roachboy did it better. Nevertheless:

I'm not going to go out of my way to defend the US system of higher education, because it's fucked in a lot of ways. I will say that it's the type of system where you learn in proportion to the amount of effort you put in and that there isn't always much of an incentive to learn more than the bare minimum. I did fairly well in my undergrad, better than many of my peers, and I attribute this to the fact that I actually wanted to be there and the fact that I was fascinated by the subject matter. Many of my classmates were there for the paycheck associated with the postgraduate job and their lack of passion for the curriculum corresponded to lackluster academic effort. They all still graduated with better B averages because of the curving system used by most of the faculty (which isn't to imply that curving isn't useful in some contexts).

After having been through an MS program, I can't say that the state of MS programs is much different than that of the bachelor degree programs. Many academic departments are mainly concerned with producing quality research before producing quality PhDs. Somewhere far below lies their concern for producing quality MS students. The MS degree is a cash cow: you can have PhDs candidates take on most of the work of teaching the MS classes, you don't have to fund MS students to the same degree that you do PhD students. Like bachelor's degrees, you get out of an MS what you put in, assuming you can meet the minimum threshold for staying in the program.

After having participated in the hiring process for my organization for both MS and PhD level candidates, I can say that there doesn't seem to be a lot of difference in apparent candidate quality between ivy league vs. non ivy league and domestic vs foreign candidate quality. Maybe that's a function of the type of positions we're looking to fill. In either case, the more desirable candidates are the ones who seem excited by what they do and show that excitement in their applications and during interviews.


As for the OP's question, I could award you a bachelor's degree for starting this thread. It wouldn't be worth much, and anyone who is good at hiring people would probably see through it in a second. A lot of employers only care about degrees from accredited universities. In other words, yes, you can get a bachelor's degree in a matter of hours, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything.

 

I love how the American respondents in this thread completely glossed over the fact that I specifically compared Bachelor's from the US with Bachelor's from the rest of the first world.

Of course the time spent studying is as much of a development as the motivation, drive and discipline the student has to absorb the material. Nothing spectacular in that observation, and has little relevance to the comparison provided.

American students in general don't measure up even closely to European/Aussie undergrads. The American system has a massively flawed concept of forcing two years, half the entire Bachelor degree, on General Studies... due to the simple fact that US high schools are incapable to cover the GE areas, so universities have to compensate for this gross incompetence and pass it off to international/exchange students as "broad knowledge enrichment ensuring a better understanding of the field of study through peripherals".

Meanwhile European/Aussie curriculi focus entirely on the subject matter the students have chosen to study, with peripheral subjects covered where relevant, rather than the US copy/paste practice. As Raghner pointed out, many European undergrads cover areas and topics that in the US only graduate students get into.

Then there's the massive issue of grade inflation, where professors are happy to make it easy for students to end up with GPAs of 4.0 while not doing all that much. Or that hilarious retardation in US unis called "grading on a curve" in 100- and 200-level courses, calculating the average scores and awarding As to the top bracket. Courses in German unis often have 40 to 85% failure rates, because an uncompromising attitude towards quality has been taken. Your system? A fucking joke to attach any credibility to much of it. So yes, many (for the politically-sensitive here) Bachelor degrees from the US are pieces of paper of little worth. For most the only worth is derived from the reputation of their universities, and how potential employers view them.

It's mind-blowing that you can sit there and say I am wrong while entirely failing to address the higher level of knowledge and competence of European/Aussie Bachelor graduates vs. American. You're not addressing it by verging into professional life and hiring procedures/interviews. Why they were brought up at all, when education systems are the topic, is a mystery to me.

Disclaimer: I agree with any notion brought up above regarding the importance of motivation for excellence of a candidate, no matter whether they're from an elite or no-name uni, or from the US or any other country.

 

Remixer, your feelings of persecution are disproportionate to any actual disagreement with your position. No one here has said that the US system isn't massively flawed. I think that your characterization of US undergraduate education system falls short where you imply that it is completely worthless relative to some vague, pan-white-people-who-aren't-in-the-US (why the focus on just europe and australia? surely we're worse than some asian countries too) undergraduate education system. Especially given that the two systems have different foci, i.e. liberal arts focused US education (which predates the looting of the US primary education system) vs. more major-focused euro/aussie systems.

Plus, when you imply that liberal arts are emphasized in bachelor degrees because US high schools suck you betray your own ignorance about US undergraduate education.

 

I was considering bringing some specific Asian examples (Japan, Singapore) into it as well, but I figured, the audience being NA/EU/AU and all, it would be more efficient to leave them out.

I would love to be enlightened regarding the US undergrad system. I've been to two American unis so far, and am well-acquainted with a few others, and the only reasoning for the 2-year GE requirement I have been able to gather from students, senior administrators, and professors ranging from MIT/Harvard all the way to UCLA/Stanford, as well as an Oxford PhD, all boiled down to this: "broad knowledge enrichment ensuring a better understanding of the field of study through peripherals".

Which was quickly debunked by simply mentioning that "broad knowledge" is what primary and secondary education tiers are for. If you're still doing the same as you enter tertiary education, there's something wrong. In years 11 and 12 of high school I studied material I am still "learning" in 300-level courses at my uni, and I know the same applies to people who finished British and/or German secondary education.

Nevertheless, I would love to hear an actual reason for the way things are handled currently.

And seeing as snowy does both secondary and tertiary education, I would love to see her take on this matter as well.