At 12:16 AM 3/22/02 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >Dennis suggested reasons in answer to my question regarding students who are >allowed to move beyond certain points without help from their school. > >I think that all of Dennis' suggestions are probabily true but the one that >should never be true is the one he listed as number 4. > >"4. mechanisms for monitoring student progress and what faculty/programs >insist students do have declined over the years"
one example of this at penn state is, the fact that what is required in the thesis office now, is not as well monitored as it used to be because of less funding in the grad school thesis office, the amount of reading of theses at that level and comments back to the student, has substantially lessened over the years another example is that, when i first came here, there was some random checking of dissertations by external readers who, would examine dissertations and make some comments about the perceived quality of the work ... really bad cases would be called to the attention of deans/department heads and, some communications to the dissertation advisor would be had ... in some cases, faculty who were on the graduate faculty would be removed now, the MINOR professor ON the dissertation committee writes a separate report that is submitted to the graduate school. however, the minor advisor has a vested interest in the student and work so, i don't think can be as objective about the quality of the work these are just two (perhaps small) examples of how quality standards have diminished over the years ... when you sum these to many others, it makes a rather large difference Dennis Roberts, 208 Cedar Bldg., University Park PA 16802 <Emailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> WWW: http://roberts.ed.psu.edu/users/droberts/drober~1.htm AC 8148632401 . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
