Today as I was marking some of the weekly problem sets done by my 2nd year students, it occurs to me that if their current level of competency in writing is the norm among most science students, the future of scientific progress in our nation is in deep poo poo. For one thing, I keep seeing the same mistakes over and over again from several students in the same class, which of course means they copied each other. For another thing, even when they do copy each other, their answers still makes little or no sense. The questions ask them to explain what a the reasons for certain thing or write definitions of certain things, and it's like they simply throw together whatever words they can remember from what they learned regarding those things into a sentence and hope it comes out right. Or they write such a short answer, it doesn't explain anything. Or their grammar is so atrocious, they might as well be writing Greek.
Just imagine, if someone asked you to define what is a giraffe, and a reasonably good scientific answer would be "An even-toed ungulate mammal that is the tallest living land animal, able to grow to between 16 to 18 feet tall. Has a spotted coat, short horns, lives in the African Savanna and eats tree leaves." And instead you get answers like "Very tall animal that likes Africa very much and is always ungulating". What the heck? How on earth am I suppose to give them marks if they can't even explain properly? It's not so bad if I get this from only a few students. But the whole freakin' class is giving me the same nonsense over and over again. After marking slightly more than half the problem sets, I got so sick of it, I had to come home from uni and have another chocorgasm (a.k.a. stuff myself with chocolates) to de-stress. Or else, I would've just gave up and given everyone a big fat zero. Which I still feel like doing, but I know if I do that, the Monash big shots will probably never ask me to work for them again for causing their students to fail, thus causing them to lose money from the fess they get. Quite frankly, I don't think I would really care if they did that, coz' I don't think I could tahan this torture of marking such nonsense for another semester. If Monash were really keeping up their standards, they wouldn't simply be taking in any Tom, Dick, Harry, Ah Seng and Ahmad who can afford to pay the fees even though their pre-U results are not up to par. And if they kept their standards high, poor lecturers and lab demonstrators such as myself wouldn't have to endure the torture of marking their nonsense. I've finished marking three quarters of those problem sets, and I haven't had a SINGLE student give me really good explainations or definitions to the questions, such that even a layperson who knows little about genetics could understand what they mean.... which is how they should write it. If any layperson were to read their explainations, I guarantee they will be more confused than ever. And these are 2nd year university students! In another year and a half, they will be graduating and out in the big wide world ready to apply their scientific knowledge in the working world for the benefit of the community. If they still can't think for themselves and have to copy each other, or they can't even explain things such that others can understand what they talking, how on earth are they going to thrive in the scientific community? They might as well quit Monash and go be Char Kuey Teow sellers.... at least it would be more of a benefit to the community. Yaaaaargh!!!! *Gripe moan gripe grumble moan grumble....goes back to marking problem sets...*
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