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?

FabbyChic Oxford used to give EE offers but that was if you did exceptionally well on their entrance exam! It's ridiculous to think that it is easy to get in to Oxford or Cambridge, the majority of the brightest students in each year group will be applying so they can pick the very best students. I'm relatively young so my uni experience was fairly recently and I'm pretty sure everyone in my class would have known their times tables. Not sure about spelling, mine is pretty atrocious and I do get words mixed up when I'm not paying attention. I went to a top 10 uni so maybe that makes a difference. The standard of students in Imperial will obviously be much higher than those from Leeds met.

I went to Oxford Uni - 24 years ago (shiiiit!) - and I have to say there while were some startling geniuses there, there were also people who couldn't spell, or structure an essay (they just made a string of separate statements in separate chunks of writing) and this was on the English course. I was shocked to find this and to be told I wrote well, when I thought I was just writing bogstandard essays. There were also plenty of people who came across as pretty dim to talk to, although many of them went on to be highly paid lawyers/stockbrokers/civil servants etc.

OTOH I had pretty poor A-levels - two As and a C, and one of the As was general studies - I got in by entrance exam and a 2 Es offer.

I suppose it depends on how you measure it - I don't consider myself thick but maybe some other people thought I was...

People I know who teach in universities now do say that a lot of students are almost illiterate.

I would just like to say what an interesting, erudite and civilised discussion this has been.

See - no bun-fights - in AIBU....it can be done!!

Actually, I still know quite a few people who can't really write properly, spell or understand sentence structure, including professionals - and I always think that given that, the standard on MN is incredibly high. There is a lot of erudition and great writing on here.

When my DS went to his secondary school (at 13) they spent the first term:

1.Re-learning Maths almost from scratch. The school wanted to make sure the kids understood what they could already do "by rote".
2.Learning to touch type "properly".
3.Learning/re-learning the rules of grammar and punctuation. Learning to use spell-check. Learning to use a dictionary/thesaurus etc.

The school wanted to be teaching kids who had mastered the basics. This allowed teachers to be less, not more, anal about spelling/grammar etc and to get on with the stimulating stuff. Their results in Maths and Eng Lit at iGCSE were astounding.

I just received an email from our head of area (very important bod in our company) asking "When is are next team meeting?"

This is a professional man with a degree, a masters, senior management experience etc etc.

I'm not sure what my point is here tbh, just basically - at not knowing the difference between "are" and "our" at this stage in his life.

Michael Heseltine says he wouldn't have got into Oxford now (in his day he says he just had an interview). He is dyslexic and all 4 children of his daughter Annabelle are very dyslexic.

of course most bad spellers in the UK are either thick or lazy or badly taught not dyslexic so I don't want to muddy the waters.

I also think you learn all your life and hopefully even in my 40s now I am still learning more every day and new words etc.
(I suspect the quote above was just a typo by that man)

Rather wonderful that Heseltine has made his millions in publishing.

I'm not sure I like the idea of discriminating a badly taught 18 year old any more than I like the idea of discriminating against a dyslexic one. But I can see in both cases it's not easy to stop doing it in practice.

The dyslexics I've worked with (who are very clever ones) and my elder daughter who is slightly so (by no means badly) often have a different way of working in terms of their mind and good ideas. Some employers prefer people who are left handed because of how the brain works too. It is fascinating.

Obviously if a job is all about writing words and someone is so dyslexic they cnanot do that job then it is perfectly right not to hire them just as I assume Manchester United would not hire me as their new star football player.

I never heard about employers preferring left-handers, you are right, that is fascinating!

Xenia - I'm sure you're right. I'm just noticing these things more and more now.

And yes this has been a fascinating discussion. And has just pointed out to me that I'm really not that intelligent - most of you have put your point across in a much more succinct and intelligent way than I could ever hope to.

I think I might actually be a perfect candidate for LRD's point - my SPAG is pretty good, but I am not particularly good at analysing text - in fact it bores me to tears. I love to read, and dissecting a good book just ruins it for me. To Kill A Mockingbird was never the same after having it on the reading list at school :( Hence why I'm studying Language not Literature.

Rubbish -you are intelligent and you come across as intelligent! And you would not be getting a first if you weren't.

I didn't mean to say that people who are good at SPAG and love reading are not good at analyzing text - very often they are.

Please don't feel down - I think it has come across very clearly on this thread why you are doing well on your course and why your course mates are not.

Bless you for saying so, I wasn't fishing for compliments much honest!

Total hijack here actually (can one hijack one's own thread??), but what is the actual point of reflective journals? I have NO idea what to write in them, and generally just end up describing what we learned in the lesson, which I know is not the point of them at all.

I dunno ... I suspect they're one of those things that, if you're struggling, might be helpful, but if you're doing ok, just seem a little pointless!

Reflective journals are useful if you carry them while walking down a dark road. Car drivers will spot you.

Grovel, that is about the most use I'll get out of them!

No, they don't produce stuff like that. You have assumed that if they can't spell well, tehy will also produce low quality work, eg. work that describes the subject matter of the poem instead of analyzing it.

This is incorrect.

FFS. If you honestly can't tell the difference between content and style, why on earth are you trying to argue that SPAG is important?

Your made-up piece, nicely patronizing to my students, is poor in terms of content. If you do not understand, by university level, that describing what 'happens' in a poem is not an appropriate mode of analysis, you do not deserve an English Lit degree.

If you want to imagine what my students do, imagine a first class essay with some SPAG mistakes and the occasional use of descriptions like 'starts with the same letter' instead of 'alliteration', and you've got it.

Can you answer me something honestly LeQueen? Do you think our society is so PC-gone-nuts that they gave me a PhD grant even though I was obviously thick enough to write the sort of thing you quoted in your last post?

Or do you just assume I'm making a huge fuss about nothign and could really 'man up', as you put it, and learn the tricky spellings, despite having mysteriously struggled with them for the last 20 years?

LDR and LeQ, please don't get too cross with each other. You have made this a very interesting thread and raised some intriguing issues (which I mulled over while walking the dogs).

Lequeen that post makes you look silly.

I don't know LRD but it's obvious she knows her stuff, and while not denigrating your own achievements, I'd say it's clear that she knows her stuff better than you.

Cheers, limited!!

It's usually written 'undergraduate', isn't it?