To Oregon and Michigan droll lists.

Posted earlier in this thread without mentioning any school

I gave you my definition here, but if you do not like it and you get no others then I guess you will have to move on to other sources. I'm sorry if you did not get what you are looking for. Why don't you try the regional accreditors sites?

 

Greetings Mike1957.

I think part of the problem here is you posted your question in the middle of this topic. You may get better results and more responses from other people if you start your own thread with your own title. Just a suggestion.

I didn't see your question simply because I took several days to view this thread and didn't know it was here.

RXI

 

That's good advice. Follow it.

 

Re: survey

If you are looking for a definition of 'substandard education', you might start out by trying to understand what 'standard education' means. Presumably degrees from place like the University of North Carolina have some kind of meaning. So what is it that they communicate both to specialists and to the broader public? What do students typically have to learn, what do they typically have to demonstrate, in order to earn normal non-controversial degrees?

Once you get a feeling for what higher education is doing in non-controversial cases, then you can define 'substandard' as the the situation that occurs when those kind of expectations aren't met.

 

Oops! Didn't think about the thread. You are right guys. Thanks.

Like this site. Very informative! Thought provoking. Never realized there was so much going on with this topic about dl. Most likely because I have never been involved with it.

Again, thanks for the info.

Mike

 

Mr. Dayson

I respect your opinion about establishing what a "standard" education means. However, unknowing to me in too much detail, there is a controversy boiling away about the "standard" and the "substandard" in education quality as it relates to schools on the net and b&m. My professor informs me that this is currently a hot topic and has the opinion that it will be interesting to find out what the population describes a "substandard education". I have my own opinion about what a standard and substandard education is. However, I have not been requested to give my personal opinion about the subject. So, I will continue to chip away until I get enough info that I can put a paper together that has some relevance to the subject, whether it is way off base or not. From what I have gathered thus far, there is a question about how different schools inact procedures in assessing a student's knowledge in given subjects. Some require a multitude of academic work, i.e. out of class assignments, projects, several quizzes/exams, and term papers. Others my require mid-term and final or a research project or a term paper or readings or just a final comp exam to acquire credit for a course or courses or a combination of these. So the question is what is considered standard and what is considered substandard in assessing knowledge in subjects/courses to earn a degree? I know this quasi research will be full of holes. The external threats to validity are many. But the intent is to establish what the sample population describes or defines a substandard education to be. It is a very fluid term.

Has a "standard education" ever been defined in concrete terms? What are the variables? Reliability? Relationship? and on and on.

Warm regards

Mike

 

I still think that the concept 'substandard' is parasitic on 'standard'. 'Substandard' literally means 'below (sub) standard'. So if we haven't any idea what 'standard' means, then we can't very well characterize what fails to reach it.

Besides, courses, programs, schools and so on can plunge to the depths of substandardness in countless different ways. We are limited only by our imaginations in listing them.

You don't have to get into a big philosophical argument with your professor about what 'standard' should be. A de-facto standard is no less a standard because it is arbitrary. So just go look at some college catalogs for heaven's sake.

How many units do they require for a particular degree? If bachelors degrees typically require 120 units, but a certain program only requires 30, then it might be substandard.

What course titles are typically prescribed in degree syllabi? If a physics BS doesn't require that students learn calculus or take lab courses, then the program may be substandard.

What material is typically covered in a particular class? If a class covers significantly less material than other schools cover in classes with the same title, or treats it in a more elementary manner, then that might be substandard.

How is prior-learning credit handled? If the typical method is to allow challenge examinations and some exam credit on a course by course basis, then knocking off years of work simply for submitting a resume showing an employment history might be substandard.

The thing is, there ISN'T any simple pat definition of "substandard". It's an open-ended category.

So how does one recognize what's substandard, as opposed to just variant or even innovative and creative? By understanding not only what universities are actually doing in practice, but WHY they do it. You need to understand the rationale behind the requirements. If you know that, then you can evaluate whether changes and variations preserve what needs to be preserved, or whether something crucial is being lost.

Some deviations from the norm are obviously substandard. These unambiguous failings are usually what allow us to label degree-mills. But some deviations are more iffy, more debatable, more difficult to characterize. That's when you have to do some work, presenting arguments why the practice is either substandard or sound.

There's gonna be lots of evaluation involvd in some cases. I'm not sure if you can treat all of this stuff as if it were science, it might be more like aesthetics.

 

Your comments are very appreciated. Being that this "research" I am conducting is pretty much a "survey" of what the general population considers substandard as compared to what is considered standard is debatable.

I have been online and pulled over one hundred college and university catalogs. I have two samples - the totally online college and the b&m and the combination of the two.

I have also requested info from the accreditation agencies. I did find that these agencies may deny accreditation to schools because of the make up of the race of enrolled students i.e. ratio of minorities to white students, and other issues that do not account for quality of "standard" education. I find this to be interesting. But that is another topic all together.

Thanks again for your input.

Mike

 

An excellent and a well-dressed move Alan.

 

Hi, Mike. I have pointed this out as well as an example of the somewhat arbitrary standards of the holy grail of regional accreditation. To think that a school could lose its accreditation simply because the right percentage of minorities was not attending. This kind of standard dilutes accreditation by placing political correctness above educational quality.

Thanks for your post and good luck with your research.

 

It wasn't the accrediting body that placed the racial standards. A government body did that - blame them if you do not think it is appropriate, not the RA body,

According to the LA Times, the commission gave the following reasons