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College doing the opposite of preparing you for a job

Discussion in 'Whatnots' started by SlickRCBD, Jan 15, 2025 at 11:46 PM.

  1. SlickRCBD Gems: 29/31
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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.

    * * *

    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.
     
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