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.
Sums it up best. Thank you.
Harvard students.....will come out without the ability at living life to it’s fullest...HA...how dumb
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!In fact, why not just mail out the transcripts a suitable interval after enrollment, and save on payroll? Thanks ATOMIC_PUNK.
IOW, in ten years, you may as well wipe your a$$ with a Harvard diploma.
They’ll be shoveling out Baracks and Moochelles by the wheel barrel.
Thomas Sowell wrote a great indictment of what’s wrong with higher education in one of his recent books (sorry, I forget offhand which one it was...). He ~really~ tore into the “Ivy league” and other sorts of prestigious schools, even including his very own Stanford in the indictment.
Basically, according to Sowell, these schools are trading entirely on reputation and have for many years been delivering a low quality product. He said that there are “lesser” state schools, private colleges, and even online colleges that actually deliver a far better education. He specifically called out Phoenix University as being perhaps one of the best colleges in the country, even though it is almost entirely online.
I'd say their standards went to the dogs somewhere between the time Bush graduated and Obama entered.
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