Elusive Happiness

Colleges and Universities A-Z Naval Academy - Annapolis
1

<p>Several postings have pointed out the love/hate (mostly hate) relationship that cadets have with the academy. Thought this article about student dissatisfaction at Harvard might put things into perspective. The comments about limited contact with professors and difficulty in finding places to socialize were interesting. </p>

<p>Poll: Harvard Students Mostly Unhappy </p>

<p>Tue Mar 29,11:42 AM ET U.S. National - AP </p>

<p>CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A long-held stereotype that Harvard undergraduates feel neglected by their professors and don't have as much fun as students at other colleges now has some data to back it up. </p>

<p>Student satisfaction at Harvard College ranks near the bottom of a group of 31 elite private schools, according to survey results outlined in a confidential memo obtained by The Boston Globe and reported in Tuesday's editions. </p>

<p>The group of 31 colleges, known as the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, or COFHE, includes all eight Ivy League schools, other top research universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, and liberal arts colleges like Amherst and Wellesley. </p>

<p>The 21-page memo, from staff researchers at Harvard to academic deans, documents student dissatisfaction with faculty availability, quality of instruction, quality of advising, as well as the sense of community and social life on campus. </p>

<p>"Harvard students are less satisfied with their undergraduate educations than the students at almost all of the other COFHE schools," according to the memo, dated October 2004. </p>

<p>On a five-point scale, Harvard's overall student satisfaction comes out to 3.95, compared to an average of 4.16 for the other 30 schools. Only four schools scored lower than Harvard, but the schools were not named in the memo. </p>

<p>"I think we have to concede that we are letting our students down," said Lawrence Buell, an English professor and former dean of undergraduate education. "Our standard is that Harvard shoots to be the very best. If it shoots to be the very best in terms of research productivity and the stature of its faculty, why should it not shoot to be the very best in terms of the quality of the education that it delivers?" </p>

<p>Students complain that Harvard lacks places where students can socialize and has so many rules that it is difficult to hold a party on campus, where almost all undergraduates live. </p>

<p>In the classroom, students can go through four years with limited contact with professors. Large lecture classes are divided into sections headed by graduate students. Small classes are frequently taught by temporary instructors. In many cases, advisers are graduate students, administrators or full-time advisers.</p>

2

<p>For anyone who's interested, my son's Western Civ professor( Masters and PhD at Yale and taught there for a bit) has told my son that he finds the kids at the Naval Academy are better writers than the majority of his students at Yale.</p>

3

<p>That's interesting that you say that because recently one of our English Professors at the Naval Academy recently published an article in Naval Preceedings Magazine about so called set-asides. These set-asides include napsters, recruited athletes, prior enlisted, and minorities. According to this professor anyone that falls into ANY of these groups received an unfair advantage for admission and thereby took the place of a more qualified candidate. He goes on to talk about how the midshipmen in his plebe english classes, the only required english class at USNA, are some of the worst writers he has ever seen.</p>

<p>Just something to think about.</p>

4

<p>different profs look for different things... literally half my freshman class (small libarts school) got placed into a remedial writing course. a lot of us in that course got rediculously high sat 1 and 2 scores, got 4s and 5s on the ap exams, and obviously we all wrote good enough essays to get into this college. one's "ability to write" is pretty much an opinion in any case.</p>

5

<p>Megs, I agree with you. In addition though, the current generation in college right now had the "benefit" of whole language reading, little to no phonics work, little grammar etc. They were, in my opinion, the victims of some newfangled way of reading and writing and it has impacted them in terms of writing with basic structure. Obviously this is a generalization. However, I do think it is, in part the result of these goof-ball reading/writing programs of their elementary years.
NAPS05mom</p>

6

<p>lyles is correct-
The article was published in the February issue of the Proceedings magazine. The author of the article "The Academy Can Do Better" has been an English professor at the Naval Academy for the past 18 years and also served on the admissions board for a year. His opinion is shared by others..."For years, we in the English Department have been fielding what I take to be justified complaints by serving flag officers that our graduates cannot think cogently in words." ..."This past spring, I found myself swimming even deeper than usual in papers from midshipmen that meandered about with no clear point, ended somewhere else from where they began, jerked from topic to topic and sentence to sentence, mangled the English language, and misused punctuation to the extent nobody could get the point."</p>

7

<p>Here's a link to Fleming's article.
<a href="http://www.usni.org/proceedings/Articles05/Pro02Fleming.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.usni.org/proceedings/Articles05/Pro02Fleming.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>You will need to register to view the article(no cost).</p>

<p>Although Fleming is concerned with the writing abilities of the cadets, his main criticism is that the "set aside" program for athletes, minorities and prior enlistees deprives some better qualified candidates the opportunity to attend USNA. Similarly, the program deprives the USNA(and the US Navy/Marines) of having the "best" qualified cadets and future leaders.</p>

<p>His article is more a criticism of the set-aside program than an evaluation of the relative writing skills of USNA cadets. Although he says the writing skills of some cadets are lacking, he doesn't make any statement regarding how the cadets' writing skills compare to other college students. </p>

<p>My feeling is that he would be critical of most college students' writing skills - and justifiable so.</p>