I am utterly amazed at the lack of grammar and spelling skills in college. What goes on in high school English classes? How do these people get into college?
For my screenwriting class, we traded our work today for a peer edit. Dear Lord.
One of the ones I had to read was currently 6 pages long and, I kid you not, I made 148 corrections or comments. None of them concerned story structure. All of them were spelling, grammar and general sentence structure.
Someone misspelled a character name, making Brian into Brain.
My personal favorite section:
"I'm going to kick the bucket yet. You just worry about your self. You got to make an impression in thing word. Your always been a bright kid."
I made no typos in quoting that.
How can a person legitimately be in college, take a WRITING course, and use the wrong form of there? I'd cut a little slack if English was not the first language of these people, but they are clearly American.
brewcrew4you wrote:If any of it was dialouge, then it could have been deliberate...
haha I wish it was dialogue. The only things I fixed in the dialogue were spelling, punctuation, using the wrong form of a word, or when it made no sense whatsoever.
i know exactly what you mean. i know a lot of time on here i dont use capitalization or maybe not correct punctuation, but it's one of my biggest pet peeves when people use the wrong form of they're, there, their, your, you're etc... some people just dont have the basics i guess.
dclark0699 wrote:What goes on in high school English classes?
High school? Some of those mistakes are elementary school level... but to answer the question, very little seems to actually be taught in school these days.
Yes doctor, I am sick. Sick of those who are spineless. Sick of those who feel self-entitled. Sick of those who are hypocrites. Yes doctor, an army is forming. Yes doctor, there will be a war. Yes doctor, there will be blood.....
Madison wrote:very little seems to actually be taught in school these days.
I have noticed this a lot with my younger sister that is a sophomore in high school. Ever since I graduated from the same high school, teachers keep retiring and getting replaced by easier teachers. I don't know this for truth as I don't have any kind of statistics, but there are more and more people on the honor roll list and headmaster's(dean's) list. I'd love to think that people are getting smarter and teaching better, but I know this isn't quite the case. The effect that this has had is that more kids from my high school are getting accepted into the top schools in Virginia(VT, UVA, W&M, JMU). My high school is a small private school (and by small I mean less than 500 kids PreK-12, there were 24 in my graduating class), it's not one of the fancy upper class private school. It's more of a way of avoiding the not very good public schools in the area. Comparing our curriculum to the public schools, I always knew I was a lot smarter than people that had better grades at the public school. However, those school always got a lot more people into the best schools in Virginia. A personal example is that I did not get accepted into UVA because my GPA was 3.7, but I had a 1320 SAT score. Had I attended the public school, I have no doubt that I would've had a 4.0+ GPA, and easily gotten into UVA. All of this leads me to believe that my high school has lowered its standards so that they can get more kids into the best schools, and it has worked. I don't know what the public school standards are in other states, but in Virginia it seems like they put it low enough that they can get the kids with no futures through the system without clogging it up, at the expense of lowering the overall value of the education for the smarter kids that need to be held to a higher level so they can learn more. The effect of the public school standards has carried over to the private schools so that they can compete with getting their kids into the best schools.
KCollins1304 wrote:A personal example is that I did not get accepted into UVA because my GPA was 3.7, but I had a 1320 SAT score. Had I attended the public school, I have no doubt that I would've had a 4.0+ GPA, and easily gotten into UVA.
We got the exact same SAT score! Internet high five!
No doubt in my mind your GPA would have been way up there. I had a 4.5 in my public high school and I didn't do any work.
KCollins1304 wrote:A personal example is that I did not get accepted into UVA because my GPA was 3.7, but I had a 1320 SAT score. Had I attended the public school, I have no doubt that I would've had a 4.0+ GPA, and easily gotten into UVA.
We got the exact same SAT score! Internet high five!
No doubt in my mind your GPA would have been way up there. I had a 4.5 in my public high school and I didn't do any work.
Things have worked out great for me, I love Virginia Tech. I'm not bitter about it now, though I was at the time. I was just using it as an example of public schools being a lot easier when I was in high school, and how now the private school I went to has gone down in quality.
KCollins1304 wrote:Comparing our curriculum to the public schools, I always knew I was a lot smarter than people that had better grades at the public school. However, those school always got a lot more people into the best schools in Virginia. A personal example is that I did not get accepted into UVA because my GPA was 3.7, but I had a 1320 SAT score. Had I attended the public school, I have no doubt that I would've had a 4.0+ GPA, and easily gotten into UVA. All of this leads me to believe that my high school has lowered its standards so that they can get more kids into the best schools, and it has worked. I don't know what the public school standards are in other states, but in Virginia it seems like they put it low enough that they can get the kids with no futures through the system without clogging it up, at the expense of lowering the overall value of the education for the smarter kids that need to be held to a higher level so they can learn more. The effect of the public school standards has carried over to the private schools so that they can compete with getting their kids into the best schools.
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I tend to think so too. I knew a few friends who I had known before high school that were idiots and yet were good enough to get into UCLA. It would seem short-sighted of me to say they didn't earn it, but either they crammed their brains like crazy or they were living on easy street. If public schools were really representing the latter case, I'd think they would do so for the sake of getting better funding and not to lose prospective freshmen from going to private schools.
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by dclark0699 » Wed Nov 14, 2007 11:53 pm 
