The essay What College Rankings Really Tell Us was created by Malcolm Gladwell, who has a BA in history from the University of Toronto. In the essay, he states that though the college ranking system is heterogeneous and comprehensive, but rankings is benign because it is really difficult to evaluate and rank a university. The system is heterogeneous because it is able to compare two universities, such as Pen State and Yeshiva University, which are totally different. The system is also comprehensive since it considers various dimension about a school, and takes statistics on each of them and then analyzes them. However, U.S. News has to work on the variable with proxies, the result is puzzling and not absolute. It may also miss something important.
After reading the article, the student engagement reminds me lot. Actually, I really care of the engagement. Compare to a good or bad result, the process and what I experience is more important. In my country, most parents plan to let their children stay in a high school with high college enrollment rate, they never consider about what the life is in the school. Indeed, some schools have excellent college-going rate, but the school life is very hard for their students, even like a nightmare! Students in these school have to follow the mechanical assignments every and they are alive as a robot. In this case, I prefer more free study style, I prefer the study style that I can plan my time and life.
Malcolm uses a lot of Assumption to explain the negative part of ranking system. In my opinion, the ranking system is made by the people who have strong ideology to evaluate a university. But those students who has the different or even opposite thoughts with these experts may miss some good school. Since the ranking system makers considered some distinctive dimensions which they believe are more valuable, they miss some basic aspects, such as price, which public groups care more. The best universities should care these qualified students who can not afford their college fee because these students can help the school gain more great academic result. The students graduated from prestigious is usually more popular with companies. To have a better future, a bright high-school senior chooses the highly selective university can create more chance to have an enviable job.
To the college value, it can help individuals improve themselves and make success in the future. It can also make some research results to improve social life quality.
Sunday, January 24, 2016
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Academic Writing English
This is the first time that I create my blog, at first I am going to share my feelings. I am really excited that I can start my blog now. Actually, I planed to writing something like blog long ago, but I always miss it due to various reasons. And to my surprise, I haven't expected that I would writing my first blog in English!
I chose English 151 because of the requirement of my college, Art and Science. I have to take two courses about academic writing. Since academic writing is a challenge to me, and English 151 helps international students form the base of academic writing, I decided to take English 151 which may help my improve this part.
I have a lot of experience of academic English writing. Before I come to America, to be honest, I knew English from early age. At that time, academic writing asked me to write a paragraph for a topic or describe a picture in English. I remembered the academic writing was always the last part of English exam. In recently two years, I had this experience in English class, history class and drama class. I wrote evaluations for drama plays; I wrote essays for different topics in English class; I wrote several history papers(It was the most troublesome works because I had to read a whole book for each paper).
In English 151, I hope I can feel free to writing English. I hope I can do better at organizing my essays with logic in order to persuade readers. Meanwhile, I hope I can feel free to use many references in my paper. However, the biggest challenge in academic writing is that I can not freely express or explain my ideas and thoughts in English. In this case, writing papers always takes me a lot of time. Also, I am easily tired when I read an essay where there are many new words or complicated sentences.
I chose English 151 because of the requirement of my college, Art and Science. I have to take two courses about academic writing. Since academic writing is a challenge to me, and English 151 helps international students form the base of academic writing, I decided to take English 151 which may help my improve this part.
I have a lot of experience of academic English writing. Before I come to America, to be honest, I knew English from early age. At that time, academic writing asked me to write a paragraph for a topic or describe a picture in English. I remembered the academic writing was always the last part of English exam. In recently two years, I had this experience in English class, history class and drama class. I wrote evaluations for drama plays; I wrote essays for different topics in English class; I wrote several history papers(It was the most troublesome works because I had to read a whole book for each paper).
In English 151, I hope I can feel free to writing English. I hope I can do better at organizing my essays with logic in order to persuade readers. Meanwhile, I hope I can feel free to use many references in my paper. However, the biggest challenge in academic writing is that I can not freely express or explain my ideas and thoughts in English. In this case, writing papers always takes me a lot of time. Also, I am easily tired when I read an essay where there are many new words or complicated sentences.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)