I’ve made it quite clear on this blog that I am not a big fan of university rankings. Mainly because I don’t think that the rankings work well. My reasons span 3 posts!. I vastly prefer coming up with a list of universities based on what you want out of your university education.
However if you do choose to look at rankings, at least make sure you know what they are basing their judgements on: This article, How Magazine College Rankings Work, from the Chronicle of Higher Education has a …Continue

This is an article that’s being posted around the Interwebs from the New York Times: Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age.
Interesting points in it for teachers and students to keep in mind. Like Wikipedia (besides not being a serious academic source) is not common knowledge. You do have to cite it.
While reading this article I was thinking of how we teach students not to plagiarize. Usually we focus on rules and citing styles and the penalties for plagiarizing. Maybe we should focus more on why plagiarizing …Continue

An amusing little interview about university students. Acclaimed saxophonist and composer Branford Marsalis occasionally spends some time in the classroom. Here’s what he had to say about a lot of his students:Read a transcript at: Rate Your Students.

Inside Higher Ed has a great article up arguing whetherThe Bachelor’s Degree Is Obsolete.
The argument is primary economic, arguing that the amount of debt and time spent preparing for a four-year bachelor’s degree outweighs any benefits from having the degree.
The capital markets have pulled out of major segments of lending for college loans. Wouldn’t even a Finance 101 student say this exit means the capital markets are challenging the value of a college degree? The U.S. Senate Finance Committee has demanded explanations about outcomes from the wealthiest colleges and …Continue

One year ago, this blog was just starting and at the time I was focused a lot more on universities, whereas I seem to have shifted more and more towards English language learning. It was very useful to go back and look at my first posts and be reminded that I planned this blog to serve both ESL learners and international students.
Three posts that really stand out, I think, are my first post on university rankings: Rankings Part One: General Problems where I discuss the problem with relying soley …Continue

InsideHigherEd reports on an academic who briefly worked in an elite escort/prostitution ring to supplement her meager salary as a professor. Rhona Reiss, who got her PhD in 2000 from the University of North Texas, was teaching at Towson University and also working as interim department chair of Occupational Therapy at Howard University in 2001. Despite her 35 years of experience, her salary wasn’t enough to cover her debts from her doctoral programs, raising her son and the illness of a parent. So she began to work for the now …Continue

This post will help you understand how the US secondary school system works, including what students study, who governs the schools and other key issues. This is just an outline and because the US system is decentralized, it is hard to generalize accurately about all schools. If you plan to enroll in a US school, you will want to consult local resources.
Secondary Schools are usually divided into junior high (grades or forms 6-8) and high school (grades or forms 9-12). We also need to distinguish between public and private schools.
Public …Continue

The case of a professor who used a racial slur in a class at Brandeis has become a mess and from the attention it is getting may become a precedent on free speech and academic rights.
According to a report on Inside HigherEd, the professor, Donald Hindley who has tenure in the Political Science department, has yet to receive due notification of what exactly he said that qualifies as “racial harassment and/or discrimination.” A students reported to the school newspaper that he used the terms ‘wetback’ (a slur to refer to …Continue

This article is part of a series on rankings. Part 1 talked about critiques of the US News ratings. Part 2 talked about the methodology of the US New rankings and Part 3 offered alternatives for finding the university or program of your dreams without rankings.
This article will look at the methodology of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings, which rate universities all over the world and show that the ratings are based on information that for the most part is of no use to students.
A lot of talk is …Continue

A professor at Brandeis University, where I got my masters degree in 2005, is accused of using a slur against Mexican Americans. According to students in his class, Professor Hindley in the politics department, used the term ‘wetback’ which insultingly refers to illegal immigrants to the US from Mexico (i.e. having snuck over by swimming across the Rio Grande River, they have wet backs). The professor, in an interview with the Brandeis student newspaper The Justice said that his use of the term was appropriate and in the context of …Continue

I somehow missed the scandal over the new US News rankings which came out in August of this year. My views on these rankings have been made pretty clear.
First of all participation in the survey they send college and university administrators is falling to 51% return rate from 58% last year. And even 58% is pretty low, indicating that many people do not consider the rankings to be a high priority. The reputation survey asks university presidents, deans, and admissions officials to rank other universities based on their reputation. It …Continue

Just a couple of quick news stories. Students and alumni at Peking University are protesting the destruction of the Democracy Wall, a wall used as a bulletin board and meeting place for political gatherings and protesters.
And the new edition of the Academic Handbook came out and Inside Higher Ed has an interview with A. Leigh Deneef, co-writer and a professor of English and former associate dean of the Graduate School. The interview focuses on changes in Academia and is probably more interesting to faculty than students.

Rate Your Students reports on an article that seems to prove that students give higher evaluations of professors when they are bribed with candy.
But one student responds, claiming that chocolate may just raise the mood of the students, making them more likely to be nice.
What do you think about professors bribing students to get good evaluations? What if the bribe wasn’t chocolate, but instead an inflated grade?

The ETS TOEFL newsletter popped in my inbox today, and there was a short article that I thought might be of interest to some students on Applying to MBA programs. It’s just some common sense advice but for foreign students where the process is so different, it’s worth listening to. For example in Kazakhstan, starting to look for schools a year ahead of time is not common but in the US it is. Which means that admissions officials assume you have been thinking about business school (or university or another …Continue

An interesting post by Cestovatela, a teacher in the US and former ESL teacher in Japan about a surprise police search in her school and the uselessness of it. I get a lot of questions here about why kids are able to bring guns to school and her post gives an idea of how hard it is to effectively prevent these kinds of things and the kind of stupid results police get from searches–birth control pills????