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Showing posts with label undergraduate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label undergraduate. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

VCE matters: Tell us your best study tips - Education - News - Lilydale & Yarra Valley Leader

VCE matters: Tell us your best study tips - Education - News - Lilydale & Yarra Valley Leader

Every time I read an article in relation to VCE I can find at least 10 things wrong with it - and that's not even the scary part; the scary part is that in each and every new article at least one but usually more of each of those things wrong is precisely the same as in the previous article. Sadly, if you keep repeating something long enough it becomes common knowledge and therefore, inevitably, the truth.

In this article however, I am finally happy to say that that was not the case. But this is probably because the article is kind of short and only has a couple of points to make. One of those points, an important one, is that of Dr Andrew Fuller who claims that, through research, he had found that "high achieving" students were the ones who had consistent approach to studying throughout the year as opposed to those who started their revision late. While Dr Fuller has found this to be the fact he has either obviously missed the reason as to why this is the case or skillfully avoided at pointing it out. (I place "high achieving" with quotation marks because achievement in VCE is not achievement in the traditional sense of the word because achievement would mean to achieve something valuable and brute forcing exams for a year is certainly not an achievement but an exercise that reduces its undertakers IQ by say 10%. If you want to know why please read my other article "VCE Fails").

Back to Dr Fuller. So the real reason why "high achieving" students (those with higher ENTERs) are the ones with consistent approach is Not because they were putting things in perspective 20mins per subject per day, but because they were better trained at the forced exam preparation (a term I defined in the article "VCE Fails"). That's really all there is to it, as I have at length described in "VCE Fails", forced exam preparation is like a magic elixir that you drink and it makes everything better. And no paper has yet stated this fact simply because it sounds too scary to be true, even though, through careful observation and reasoning, this truth becomes rather obvious.

So off you go, and if you take in properly all my advices that you can find on this blog I can everything but guarantee you a great "success" with your VCE. Again, I use quotation marks for "success" in this case because it can mean 2 things. One - you want a high ENTER and don't care about what you learn - great, I've given a recipe for that in my main article ("VCE Fails"), or two - you want to learn a lot of useful things and want to be able to enter your desired course - great again, as I have a recipe for that too in the same article, though slightly harder to achieve but still doable.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Australian universities take a dive with Monash as their sinking anchor

Why are we not surprised? The overall performance of Australian universities has been dropping steadily in the last 5 years and possibly even longer as The Times Higher Education University Rankings started taking data only in 2004. In the latest published results Australian universities have taken a dramatic dive this year with only University of Melbourne and University of Adelaide keeping up the good work, or should I say keeping up with the rest of the world.

Monash University dropped by an astounding 133 places since 2009 while UNSW was lowered by 105. In their steps followed University of Queensland (by 40), University of Sydney (by 35), Macquarie University (by 31) and also, as shocking as it may seem, ANU dropped by 26 places! Graph below;


Figure 1 – Australian (top 10 for 2009) universities world ranking for the 2005-2010 period as based on The Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

RMIT may have dropped only 1 spot this year but that’s not to discard its somewhat steady deterioration from 82nd rank in 2005 to 224th rank in 2010. Same goes for Macquarie University which went down from 62nd position in 2005 to 220th in 2010.

It’s interesting to note that only University of Adelaide has managed to climb the ladder in 2010, albeit by only 8 spots. University of Melbourne remains strong at rank 36, also becoming Australia’s #1 university for 2010. This great performance by University of Melbourne can be traced back to their 2007/2008 university plan which was put in motion at the start of 2008. Well done University of Melbourne!

The Times Higher Education methodology for ranking universities takes into account: research income from industry against staff numbers, ratio of international to domestic students, ratio of international to domestic staff, undergraduate entrants, PhDs/undergraduate degrees awarded, reputation survey (teaching), institutional income, academic papers, citation impact, research income, research income from public sources and reputation survey (research). How each of these is weighted can be found at wiki or at The Times’ HE official website.

Now, I don’t wish to imply anything overly speculative but it seems like the whole educational system has been in steady decline for a number of years. I’m having a déjà vu here, it’s almost as if I predicted so in a previous blog post, weird. It couldn’t be that the might tertiary entrance rank is backfiring, surely. After all, these university rankings are only partly based on degrees awarded, undergraduate entrants and ratio of international to domestic students…

We can only wait and hope now, if this doesn’t teach anyone anything then maybe the next drop of 100 places might.