To wonder how the HELL some people get into university?

[SayYuleNowSayWhipTheReindeer]

I'm currently doing a degree as a mature student alongside work, and am just amazed at the stupidity lack of knowledge some of my fellow students have. For instance, nearly all of them - on a fecking ENGLISH LANGUAGE degree course - mix up "your" and you're", "there" and "their", and use the spelling "definately".

I overheard a conversation today that involved several students talking about how they didn't know their times tables above 5 or 6.

AIBU to seriously wonder if it's even worth doing a degree if this is the standard they're allowing in at the moment?

You could (if you could be arsed) sue someone for not making 'reasonable adjustment' for dyslexia if you don't spell well and they won't let you use a dictionary/spellcheck/tape recorder in an appropriate situation.

I know someone who did threaten to take her employer to court for discrimination - the employer backed down.

I don't know how common this is though, or how easy in practice it is to make the adjustments. And of course it doesn't help for people who're not dyslexic but never learned to spell anyhow. I'm just commenting.

I know it's simpler LeQueen - I did make that point a bit ago.

But it's not essential. And that is important.

Without looking it up, in an exam, I can mis-spell 'the', let alone the words I avoid because I know I can't spell them (receive? recieve? Resieve?) But I get by and so do plenty of others.

'I then in later life was involved in selecting graduates for a well-known retailer .....In addition a single spelling or grammatical error in either CV or letter and the application was binned without readng on.'

Quite right - but not because it necessarily matters whether someone can routinely spell correctly, but because a graduate who can't be arsed to get a CV right in this age of spelling and grammar checkers really isn't trying very hard. My severely dyslexic friend would have got someone to proofread his.

Sorry, posting too many posts ... my gingerbread is distracting me.

Pendeen, yes it is possible to get an English degree without spelling. It's not unusual - my statistic of 1 in 10 people being dyslexic is, now I check, what the university quoted to us on our teaching course. I think fewer than that do English (self selection), but you'd still expect to come across one every couple of classes I think? And there are also people who just never seem to master their spelling but you just teach them to proofread and use a dictionary (now that is a skill that is worth learning!)

A student on my degree course (environmental health) thought that sparrows were baby pigeons.

The ScaryJessie, I completely agree. I have tried several times to make that point through this thread but you have put it so much better than me. LeQueen, your earlier post saying why teach geography, history etc. shows you have completely misunderstood what I was saying. I did not say I wouldn't expect undergraduates to know anything about anything, all I was trying to say was that not being able to repeat times tables would not impact on their English degree. I myself cannot recite my tables, I do however have a good grasp of basic maths (A* at GCSE) and it does not mean I can't do simple calculations. Im sure at age 8 I could recite my tables, as I was taught them at that age, but I could not do it now and it has never held me back.

In my original post I did acknowledge that I thought standards were slipping, but that I didn't think not knowing tables was the best example to demonstrate this. Mature students are not necessarily always superior, on my course we had quite a few and some really struggled. A lot of this I thought, was due to their attitude that they knew best all the time, and an inability to adapt to new ideas and ways of learning.

I worked in a shop that had just opened during my gap year 2 years ago and used to get loads of CVs handed to me at the till. I probably shouldn't have been reading them but they killed some time...one that sticks in my mind is one boy who was 18 or so who didn't even capitalise his own name - nevermind his Is, his schools, etc. That just seems very strange to me - if he was typing it on anything but Notepad the software probably would have automatically done it for him so he must have either gone to the effort of stopping it from doing so or was going old school with his choice of word processor

'DH is old-school-stylee, grammar-school boy with absolutely no time for people who can't be bothered to check their work thoroughly.'

Yes, I think that is the real world, which is why it is so important for children to be taught the basics.

LRD, that is shocking.

You are joking, please tell me you are.

How on earth could a candidate for a degree in English pass the examinations?

Why is it shocking? I passed the exam because spelling is not necessary to being any good at English Lit. I have a 2:1 from Cambridge, a distinction in my masters from Oxford, and I'm nearly done with a PhD. If you think I'm really crap and don't deserve those things because I have to use a dictionary, you are really missing the point of what English at university is about.

People who think this stuff make me see red. What would you like me to do, leave school at 16 and go sweep teh streets just because you want to feel smug because you can spell and I can't?

No. Why would I be? What would it tell the examiners about my ability to do English Lit?

I did my exams on a computer, FWIW, because my writing is illegible.

Mind you, no non-dyslexic student is penalized more than a couple of marks for SPAG and you can't drop a class boundary for it.

It is actually quite insulting to imply that a university subgect might be mostly about something you could look up in a dictionary.

Backtobedlam

Unfortunately, many people have funny ideas about memorisation. It took an inspirational Maths teacher when I was 16 to break down my mother and grandmother's indoctrination that "only the basics", i.e. times tables constituted worthwhile abilities. Until I was 16, I thought that all the areas, such as algebra, that I genuinely enjoyed, were worthless, "pointless" party tricks that "no-one used in real-life".

Actually no it doesn't-I dont constantly go and look up times tables I just calculate it in my head. Maybe it takes 30seconds longer, but it's hardly life changing. This doesn't mean I have no knowledge of Geography, History, Science, English, or indeed other areas of maths. I think we'll just have to disagree on this one though

It's ok LeQ, I was posting in a rush and didn't say.

FWIW, I would always check something like a CV carefully, and of course I do make my students do the same with their essays. But I also accept that this is mostly to do with the fact spelling is a useful skill, and doesn't really tell me a great deal about their ability in my subject. Sometimes the brainiest ones have the worst spelling!

LeQueen, are you actually trying to say only rote-recall counts as "accessing it via your brain"? Or am I mistakenly inferring that?

LRD sorry, did I miss in your posts that you are dyslexic? I didn't realise, sorry.

The interesting point here is that you wouldn't spot from LRDs posts that she's dyslexic (other than when her posts explicitly say so) because she deals with it - uses technology, avoids tricky words etc. She can clearly analyse text and construct and communicate an argument. So yes, of course she can do an Eng. Lit degree or three.

Thanks grimma - and thanks for saying you can't spot it!

I think this is the crucial point: at university, people are still learning how to overcome this sort of thing (whether they're dyslexic or not, IMO). But they can learn.

That they've not done so before might be laziness (yes, not good ... but, well, it happens), or it might be bad teaching, or a difficult childhood, or any number of things ... not just stupidity.

Christ this thread has moved on!

Great discussion.

V. interesting discussion. I am an editor and am frequently surprised by how many writers I encounter (including some academics) are perfectly capable at spelling etc (maybe they just use a spell-checker) but can't construct a clear argument to save their lives. This seems to me much more serious on a day-to-day basis as there are no easy ways round it.

Also, if you are the sort of person who absorbs information like a sponge (as I suspect most people on this thread are) it is always shocking to discover how weak many people's general knowledge is... maybe they are just not as interested in the world around them.