Yes, I don't get it either Harold. I was recently asked to help a friend's nephew who is doing a 5 year uni course.
He's into his third year and the problem/project which he was given was something I did in a first year of an electrical engineering trade course.
I explained the problem to him and asked him questions about components to use and how to solve the task given to him.
Which he did on his own, and I really didn't give him any help.
So he knew the theory, but seemed to have no ability of how to use what he knew.
A bit like a student being able to spell, but not write a story.
My first impression is that university courses have been seriously dumbed down. The more time students spend studying, the more money they are spending. I can remember when first year university was hard, and this was to get rid of the idiots. Of course now we realise that dumb kids are a cash crop.
The second is that students are taught what to think, not how to think for themselves.
And then there is my favourite. Cheating. I was amazed at how many students cheated. Only once did I see somebody get caught and punished.
Some other students set me up. One asked for some help, which I gave him. While he distracted me, another of his friends copied my work.
A couple of weeks later the group submitted their work. The teacher knew my work and was amazed at how suddenly 8 other very similar examples of source code were submitted. His first response was to question me to see if I had let anybody copy my code. It was clearly my style of programming,
but alterations to the code were only minor. The working sections of code were identical.
Those students failed the subject that semester.
I later discovered that the same code was submitted in other classes in other terms. I then realised that an entire ethnic group was working in house.
Heheh.. yes, I was working me up to some racism
It wasn't everybody, but 90% of them that gave the other 10% the bad name.
Several classes of the same subject were held each week. One on Mondays, maybe two on each other weekday which were always really popular and one on Friday nights which only working people picks because there was no other time available.
This group of students, only one or two of them would be in Monday classes. The rest of them were during the week.
The course tests were all the same for each class. So for final exams the Monday night boys would never pass their tests, unless it was by luck.
Instead they would write down the questions, given them or sell them to the rest of the group who would then know the answers to the test.
Most of the teachers didn't care. Since large numbers of students failing looked bad on their record.
Some teachers were honestly concerned and one year one of the head teachers decided to do something about it.
He made the tests as identical as possible, but with only minor changes to the questions to give slightly different answers for each class.
More than half of the students in courses were failing. Even I was shocked at how rampant cheating was. Almost two thirds of students were cheating, and not just the original ethnic group I thought. Thankfully stupidity wasn't confined to just one race.
Even worse was that when students complained that they had failed, before they realised they had been caught in a sting. Some of the teachers stood up and said that there was a racist vendetta against some ethnic groups. Those teachers were asked by the head teachers, were they just bad students that failed or was it because of bad teaching ?
The teachers when shown the test results across classes were stunned to see the same questions had the same answers across five different classes, where the questions all had one value changed. They were asked, is cheating an indication of bad teachers or bad students.