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American education

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Ancalagon
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25 Oct 2010, 12:48 am

zer0netgain wrote:
A valid point, but really, the "prerequisite" stuff is sometimes a sham...just a way to make you take more "mandatory classes" at considerable expense. When it comes to "career-relevant" course work, you take very little compared to everything else they make you take for your degree.

Prerequisites are not a perfect system, but they do work reasonably well. If you let someone who's shaky on basic algebra take a calculus class, they're going to fail, no matter how hard they try.

There's a lot I already knew about computers and programming before I started my CS degree, so if I could have simply skipped over a class or two, I'd have been fine. But if I hadn't already known that stuff from other sources, I might not have been.

Colleges and technical schools are different and have different goals. Both do a decent job at what they're actually there for.


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A350XWB
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25 Oct 2010, 3:34 pm

zer0netgain wrote:
Wombat wrote:
Could someone please explain how the American education system works?


They give you a test then put you in a box for the rest of your life.

:lol: 8O :(

Almost that bad.

Typical American education (today). Pre-school (optional...to get a kid ready for kindergarten...really just a daycare center with some education thrown in). K-5 (six years typically) is elementary education...the basics. 6-8 is "middle school" where they start teaching you more advanced stuff to prepare you for high school. 9-12 is "high school" which is supposed to produce kids ready to go to work in a vocation or go on to college. Nowadays, kids emerge from high school at the common age of 18 prepared for neither.


Blame part of it on NCLB... although I am Quebecer, I do know a few people who would claim that NCLB made schools nothing more than a place where people endlessly perform test drills.


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28 Oct 2010, 3:06 pm

Wombat wrote:
So in America you have to do a four year BA before you even start to do your three year law degree?

Wow! That sucks big time.

So a guy 25 years old is still dependent on his parents. (Can I have $50 and borrow the car so that I can take a girl to the movies?)
That is so degrading.


This is also the way the university system in Oz is now heading. For example, the University of Melbourne recently introduced the 'Melbourne Model', where you can no longer get a law degree without completing a more general bachelors degree first. Even the ol' BA here is slowly becoming less specialised and more generalised in content. Melbourne, for example, now requires Arts students to take a compulsory number of non-arts subjects each year (like accounting). When I looked at transferring to do a BA at a different university, the newly introduced course structure required students to take compulsory subjects in international relations, literature, linguistics, anthropology, history etc throughout the entire degree.

In theory, I don't think it is such a bad thing. In practice, the problem is that unlike the US, we have considerably less sources to finance education (e.g. scholarships are almost non-existent), and I suspect we probably also don't have anywhere near the same earning capacity as graduates in the US.



billybud21
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07 Nov 2010, 2:38 am

American education system:

Elementary
Middle School or Jr. High
High School
Undergraduate College (B.A. or B.S. depending on subject matter)
Graduate School
M.A. or M.S. depending on subject matter
Professional Degree (law and medicine)
Academic Degree (Ph.D., Ed.D., etc)


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