Collaboration? Or Just Plain Lazy?
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Jeremy Wagstaff of Loose Wire Blog made an observation from a somewhat different point of view about how university students are apparently using borrowing appropriating stealing each other’s material when writing their student application forms. A study found that quite a large percentage used the same anecdotes and phrases, indicating a common source. (It’s worth the three minutes it will take to read his post. No worries, I’ll wait.)
While I can’t imagine anyone actually being surprised by this revelation, a little farther in the post he says,
“… in other ways, it reflects two things, one positive, one negative:
- the online world favors collaboration and cooperation. Student applicants in a very competitive environment are happy and willing to share their experiences and their material. This is a real community.
- the online world doesn’t necessarily favor originality, creativity or individuality. We have too much prior information, too much of an idea of what the benchmark and received procedure are, so what we do create tends to be bland and unoriginal.”[emphasis mine]
Yeah, right. Nothing like putting a positive spin on things to hide the reality. It’s like praising a successful bank robber because he was able to accomplish such a complex goal as robbing a bank!
Good gosh, there’s so many different ways we could go with this one, I don’t know which one to focus on first! (Augh! Brain freeze! Brain freeze!) So how about let’s start with the emphasized text above (after all, it’s WHY I super-sized emphasized it).
Is it really true that collaboration produces work that’s “bland and unoriginal”? I don’t know about you, but doesn’t that second conclusion simply cry out for debate? (To be completely candid, it really seems to beg a sharp whack on the back of the head.) Oh, but wait, there’s that little qualifier word: “necessarily”.
Now let’s consider the ludicrous conclusion: “I’d say the problem is with the personal statement approach, not unoriginal students desparate to do whatever gets them into medical school.”
Uh, excuse me? Doesn’t this seem more like a comment about the symptom and not the disease? I mean, c’mon Jeremy, why blame the university for the slack attitudes of these student applicants?
Is it really too much to ask that the students, as John Housman in the old E. F. Hutton commercial used to say, “earn it”?
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6 responses so far
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The real point to be made here is, why are students asked to write “personal statements” that are then used to decide university admissions? University admissions should be made on academics and academics alone.
Forcing potential students to jump through hoops that have absolutely nothing to do with their ongoing career is cruel and self-defeating. It is stressful to the student, who has to guess what the admissions office is looking for. It is useless to the university, who will receive thousands of variants of “I really want to do this course”. And they are deciding places based on this? Why not use a dartboard instead? That would be just as useful, not to mention time-saving.
As I stated at Loose Wire, common sense tells you that if you have something valuable, and you choose who to give it to by assessing “personal statements”, what you are going to get is spin and more spin.
The fact that universities, who ought to be run by the brightest minds in the country, have put in place such a flawed, idiotic admissions system is just depressing.
Markk, you make a strong point. Why indeed? But having been away from the university scene for awhile, is this part of the application really count for that much? (I’m asking here.)
But on the other hand, I think requiring a personal statement does reflect the “real world” (as opposed to the academic world).
For instance, when I’m interested in an applicant, I would like to know something about that person that wouldn’t necessarily show up in the resume, statistics, grades, or whatever is put on the page in front of me. I want to know how that person will fit into my team. Seems to me this might be a legitimate requirement, and we accomplish that with a personal interview. That’s not very practical when thousands are applying for a university berth.
Besides, you still didn’t address the point of my post - the lack of initiative on the part of the students. As for me, it says volumes - and you won’t find that on any grades or scores report.
It might depend on what country you’re in, but last time I applied for university, I was not asked for a personal statement.
Lack of initiative? I thought the issue was dishonesty - something I would hardly condone, but let’s face it - true trivia is hardly more useful for university admissions than false trivia. To show initiative, a student ought to refuse to participate in the personal statement charade at all! That would show real guts.
The personal statement is a poor cousin to the interview for a number of reasons, but interviews can also mislead; in my experience, employers put the most weight on phone calls to referees.
The “real world” component is far better handled by teaching students how to present themselves in an interview before they finish their course.
I think the personal statement might have been required because this was medical school. I know I never did one at my engineering school.
Lack of initiative is what, in this case, led to dishonesty. And why NOT go ahead and do it? Sometimes we just have to do things, whether we like them or not.
In my experience, like it or not, personal interviews serve one main purpose - whether or not you “fit” their concept of what they want. Not necesarily fair, but there it is.
And by the way, just because supposedly bright people run the universities (and there would probably be considerable dispute on that point from various quarters) doesn’t prevent them from doing possibly very stupid things.
On personal interviews: Pretty much. Employers have to know whether you will fit with the organisational culture that is already there. Which is fair enough, if frustrating for some applicants.
Now if I was to generalise, I would say that resumes are normally used to assess the “tech specs”, interviews are to assess personality and organisational fit, and calls to referees are to verify details, and to assess character and work ethic. In my experience, anyway.
I haven’t been an employer myself. Would you say that is accurate?
Markk, you’ve generalized it well. ‘Course, that’s how it should work… in Bizarroland! Naturally the real world can be wildly different. Any of the above can be used to screen you out, rather than check your qualifications, etc. (Real world again. Frustrating? You bet!)
But I think you’ve captured at least the spirit of each of them well.