College doing the opposite of preparing you for a job

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I just had some interesting conversations about college educations at times being counter-productive for preparing you for the workplace.
In some instances colleges taught entirely the wrong lesson compared to the workplace.

One is the "issue" of self-plagiarism. Namely that it is wrong to recycle all or part of an assignment from a previous class to save time and effort in another class.
My college of the defunct ITT actually laid a trap to catch people commuting the "sin" of self-plagiarism. They had two classes, one was a prerequisite to another, and they had a mandatory assignment near the end of one class.
Then near the start of the next class, they give an assignment for another paper with the exact same assignment only with the course name and number on it changed. Apparently they had the teachers from the previous class keep a copy of the assignment turned in to catch students who simply call up the saved copy of the assignment from the previous semester (at this point everything was typed on the computer) and altered the header at the top to put the new course info on it and printed it out without making any changes (I already got an A on it).
This was considered WRONG because it was something called "Self-plagiarism" and all forms of plagiarism is "academic dishonesty" in academia and a severe crime.

This is the complete opposite of what we do in the business world when we reuse plans and research for previous customers for new customers. "Why reinvent the wheel?" is a common phrase. Templates are commonplace, and time is money. If you did research for one client and another client with the same requirement comes in a couple months later, you are expected to reuse your old research instead of doing everything from scratch to save time.

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Another stupid thing they did in college was sometimes assigning a paper to research a solution to a problem "In 1,500-2,000 words" or "in at least 1,500 words". I'd do the research, type up the paper, hit the "word count" button in Word or OO/LO Writer and get 1,100-1,300 words. Once I actually got 880 words and felt the answer was complete for the question asked. That was a real challenge to pad it out and I got a B with a comment about "being rambling", nothing about insufficient content or not supporting my points.
Then I'd have to go back and figure out how to pad the paper with unnecessary stuff.
In the real world every one of my bosses who would assign such research would have preferred the brevity, and when I showed the shorter paper to the teacher who marked me down for "rambling" the teacher said "Yes, in the real world a manager would probably prefer the shorter version with a good summary, but I'd have had to mark you down for not meeting the assigned length. I didn't make the assignment, it was part of the unified curriculum made up for all teachers."
Again, in the real world the managers prefer brevity and often will only read the summaries or the intro and skip tot the conclusion if it lacks a summary of whatever is submitted and might glance at other parts if they want clarification, but often they'll just ask whoever wrote it.
Time is valuable, and the manager wants me to get them the information as efficiently as possible, and prefers the shortest word count (reading time) possible. Heck, I've been told to summaries something and make it less wordy far more often even when I'm working at the level that would have had me padding word counts in college.
Those are just two examples, I won't even get started on math class and showing work. In some ways, I feel college does the exact opposite of preparing people for the workforce because of nonsensical stuff like this. Often new grads have to be trained out of "time/resource wasting" or "bad habits" that they were taught in school.

 

"Time is money" is an aphorism that will forever hold true in the business world and, while that's something that they'll often teach you in school, basically none of the education systems will take it to heart. And it doesn't stop at college either; these practices quite often rear their ugly heads down the line. I recently went through a great number of job interviews, in which a common step for our trade is to complete an assignment based on a set of requirements that they give you. In quite a few cases, I was graded poorly on certain tasks because I didn't do something that wasn't part of the requirements (i.e. "go above and beyond"). While it's understandable that doing so might be a sign of talent in a person, it's actually not a positive trait for your employees to have in most cases. Going "above and beyond" is also known as "overengineering", which results in a waste of resources and time for both the company and your clients.

Generally speaking, the education system in our country, as well as many others, does a very poor job of preparing the students both for their jobs and for life in general. I find it a minor miracle that most people land on their feet once the education system spits them out.

 

My experience with engineering college is that it is the equivalent of math boot camp. The idea is to churn out people able to solve high cost, potentially high risk technical problems so professors will throw all sorts of requirements ranging from technical writing/essays (where self-plagiarism is indeed a thing) and a Marianas' Trench worth of technical assignments and exams at you in an attempt to drill diligence and critical thinking into students. We usually get the scariest professors because of this and it understandably burns a lot of people out. People who thrive in this sort of environment (ie, get good grades) often get the most attention from the school.

In the real world though, success in engineering is a lot less about your grades (although having good grades helps) and more about how long you've worked in the field and what projects you've worked on. It is because of this I think that the engineers I've met are a very colorful and diverse group of people, because there's so many ways you can get the experience you need to be considered "successful" in the field as long as you meet a certain baseline (usually just a good foundation of technical knowledge and a personal drive for improvement). Some just have a knack for technical troubleshooting, some are very charismatic, some have a gift for project management and organization, some are just very easy to work with, etc.

 

I graduated with honors from high school

 

I agree about regular plagiarism of stealing another's work wholeheartedly, but not the self-plagiarism.
Another example of being dinged for self-plagiarism was using a previous assignment as a base and simply expanding it to complete a new assignment that might have been similar but with a few minor differences or a few additions. Such as you're asked to write a paper on how you would set up a network. Then you get another assignment a few weeks later where you are asked to set up essentially the same network, but with some additional requirements. So I'd pull up the paper for the previous assignment that earned an "A" and modify it to meet the additional requirements. This is EXACTLY what I did in the real world, but got me nailed for "self-plagiarism" because I copied large parts of my previous paper verbatim and did not repeat the research from a month earlier.
I should also point out that I went into the workforce with only an associates degree, and I didn't return to get my bachelor's degree until ten years later.
So this is EXACTLY what I had done in the real world, but I got dinged for "self-plagiarism" because I recycled and modified an old assignment to fit the new one.
What was worse was the assignment was to theoretically do something I had actually done for real, and the revising and expanding an earlier project was also something I had done for real.

 

They sort of did in the "Academic Honesty Policy" that all students had to read and sign on Orientation Day.
The trap was to see if they were following it after the first semester.
Lots of people realized it was the exact same assignment, and if you already got an A on it, why reinvent the wheel?
On the other hand, lots who did not get an "A" on it took it as a second chance to get that "A", using teacher's comments as a guide, but still used the old assignment as a base.

The previous paper was the student doing the work, repeating the work is just a waste of time as the person isn't going to learn anything from that and nobody does that in the real world.
In fact, it is not only teaching the wrong lesson, but teaching them that this is a bad practice to reuse earlier work will give them bad habits for when they joint the work force.
The point for 90% of the people in seeking a college education is to prepare them to get good-paying jobs, the colleges should be teaching stuff to help them succeed, not sabotaging them by teaching them ridiculous stuff like the "evils" of recycling an old assignment to save time and effort not repeating work you already did.

Maybe I could see it in something geared to prepare them for a career in academia, but even then teachers should be prepared for teaching students to succeed in the real world outside academia.