Posted on 08/26/2010 4:04:46 PM PDT by ATOMIC_PUNK
Harvard Makes an Eye-Popping Change
Harvard students will no longer take final examinations. In fact, if a Harvard professor wants to give a final to a specific class, that prof actually has to notify the university he or she will be giving a final exam!
The Christian Science Monitor reports this is a huge change. In the not-so-distant past, Harvard professors who opted to skip the final were required to obtain approval from the university. Some are jumping on the Ivy League school, decrying the policy.
"Harvard is yielding to education's most primitive temptation: lowering standards and waiving measurements for the sake of convenience," wrote Chester Finn and Micky Muldoon, both Harvard graduates, in a widely circulated article for National Review Online.
Some insist that a no-final policy is actually a step forward in education, since doing well on such tests is usually a matter of just memorizing facts--most of which are promptly forgotten when the final is over.
"By discouraging exams, then, Harvard is hardly forsaking academic rigor. Instead, it's clearing the way for a more engaging, challenging and truly educative college experience," writes Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at New York University, in The Christian Science Monitor.
Instead of final exams, Zimmerman encourages professors to give writing assignments that require students to master factual knowledge and apply that to form an educated opinion and analysis.
Excellent. I hope more universities do this. Pretty soon, their prestige will decline to where it really ought to be.
Soon a Harvard diploma will be unacceptable as toilet paper.
William Buckley put it like this, He had more confidence in picking 20 names at random from a phone book than in the Harvard faculty.
The Ivy League should be called the Slacker League.
Be still my heart. I was sure when I read that thread title it meant Harvard was going to start supporting the USA. Silly me.
Harvard lowered its standards a long time ago.
“Soon a Harvard diploma will be unacceptable as toilet paper.”
At 55,000 a crack.
The elite simply don’t want to be tested and are creating a royal class you simply went you are part of the elite club.
“Soon a Harvard diploma will be unacceptable as toilet paper.”
At 55,000 a year at a crack.
The elite simply don’t want to be tested and are creating a royal class you simply went you are part of the elite club.
One could understand the Harvard Law school faculty and student body advancing a Barak Obama to presidency of the Harvard Law Review and carrying them through that experience and no doubt through his courses, but are they turning out doctors this way too?
One could understand the Harvard Law school faculty and student body advancing a Barak Obama to presidency of the Harvard Law Review and carrying them through that experience and no doubt through his courses, but are they turning out doctors this way too?
And every student will get a participation trophy! Don’t worry Mom, little Johnny will still get a trophy, even if he spends his entire college career attached to a beer bong.
A liberal school comes out as a play camp for overprivileged youth and trust babies.
I do hiring for my company and I’ve known for a long time that the ones coming out of Ivy League schools these days are entitled snooty morons, and the ones from state colleges or trade schools have a ton of drive and smarts.
So much for an Ivy League education. This will raise the graduation rate for all those affirmative action students at Harvard.
When your student body consists of the lazy, stupid, spoiled children of the ruling class (with a token amount of minorities thrown in the mix) you can’t expect them to actually perform can you?
It reminds me of the way European royalty bred itself into moronic, homely, shells of human beings (see Prince Charles) because they refuse to mix with the commoners.
An Ivy League diploma certifies that you are an idiot.
They all graduate with straight A's already. You can even get on the Law Revue by affirmative action.
Once again, being able to create a convincing argument is more important than getting results.
Be still my heart. I was sure when I read that thread title it meant Harvard was going to start supporting the USA. Silly me.
It said "Eye-Popping" not Stroke Inducing.
Why can a writing assignment not be given as a final? Seems to be a pretty good way to see if they have mastered the material beyond just memorization.
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