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Credentialism and the crisis of the university

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iamnotaparakeet
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05 Jan 2011, 5:06 am

techn0teen wrote:
Orwell wrote:
I wouldn't worry too much; grad school admissions officers can tell that a 3.2 in hard math/science/engineering courses means more than a 3.8 on a transcript filled with basket weaving and music appreciation. If you have any research experience, that will be more important than your coursework.


That's good to hear. I am trying to learn and not earn a grade. It just gets discouraging at times because it seems my hard work does not pay off. I want to get a 3.5 GPA because I can get into the honors society (which means I get more opportunities to do research).


There's also the other issue of competition for the opportunity cost of time between studying versus completing assignments. During my first two quarters I was so eager to learn, since I had been waiting to go to college all my life, that I was attempting to study everything (as per how I learned materials as a homeschooler) and complete all of the assignments. The instructors (I would say professors, but not all of them even have degrees... :| ) would appreciate the quality of my work, but I needed to do more of it more rapidly and during the second half of the quarter I was studying and churning out homework frantically and achieved a GPA of 4.0 initially. The second quarter, I decided to try an experiment and merely churn out the homework without studying for any of it... and managed to get straight A's. That infuriated me. It just shouldn't have been the case. For the next few quarters that I stuck around until the end of the last quarter I have been overwhelmed pervasively with a sense of disillusionment towards "higher education" and as such I've decided that I can do a better job of learning all of the subjects I could ever care to far more effectively via autodidacticism than through a 4 year money funneling contract with some business that dares to call itself a "school".