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from the you-couldn't-make-this-stuff-up dept.
An Oxford graduate's failure to get a top degree cost him a lucrative legal career, the High Court has heard.
Faiz Siddiqui alleges "inadequate" teaching on his modern history course resulted in him getting a low upper second degree in June 2000. He blames staff being absent on sabbatical leave and is suing the university for £1m. Oxford denies negligence and causation and says the case is "massively" outside the legal time limit.He said: "Whilst a 2:1 degree from Oxford might rightly seem like a tremendous achievement to most, it fell significantly short of Mr Siddiqui's expectations and was, to him, a huge disappointment."
Mr Mallalieu said his employment history in legal and tax roles was "frankly poor" and he was now unemployed, rather than having a career at the tax bar in England or a major US law firm. Mr Siddiqui also said his clinical depression and insomnia have been significantly exacerbated by his "inexplicable failure". Julian Milford, for Oxford University, told the court Mr Siddiqui complained about insufficient resources, but had only described the teaching as "a little bit dull".
Perhaps he might find employment with "This is Windows calling..."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @09:09PM (11 children)
Because, believe it or not, if you can survive the tedium, getting a degree is trivial; they hand them out like candy. A substantial majority of people in these schools should not be there, since they're there for impure reasons (partying, making money, forming corrupt social connections) instead of having a deep interest in learning. The ones who do deserve to be there mostly self-educate anyway. We must get rid of the trash if we wish to improve the quality of the education.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 22 2017, @10:07PM (7 children)
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Oh, wait, were you serious? You know what they call knowledge without purpose, yes? Trivia.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @11:06PM (1 child)
Oh? I thought they called it "basic research."
Pretty much everything useful we know today was once considered useless knowledge at some point before somebody figured out how to make it useful. For example, "what possible use could there be in knowing that when you rub these two materials together, your hair starts to fritz out in funny ways?"
Surely you aren't proposing that researchers trying to detect gravitational waves or neutrinos need to explain how their research will turn a profit by 2019... are you?
(Score: 1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 22 2017, @11:22PM
Nope, we call it trivia. If your ass is going hungry because you did not think to yourself "how is spending years of time and many thousands of dollars learning X going to help me in life", it's because you either have that leisure because you're already financially secure or because you're a fool.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @11:15PM
Would that make the pursuit of knowledge without purpose a game?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @11:53PM (3 children)
Not everything is about rote memorization, which is what is usually meant by the term "trivia". If you don't understand the material at a very deep level and have simply memorized facts, then you have failed. Schools at all levels frequently fail to encourage understanding, which just shouldn't be the case.
What I'm saying is that you should be deeply interested in the subject you're supposed to be studying instead of primarily motivated by other, shallow things. Otherwise, enjoy your mediocrity (or worse, as is often the case).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23 2017, @02:23AM (1 child)
This. I'm surprised TMB wouldn't be in agreement -- don't think anybody on this site would disagree as we all learned our lessons and are therefore "self-taught".
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 23 2017, @03:21AM
That's not what I'm disagreeing with, that's just his strawman.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday November 23 2017, @02:48AM
The parents have a larger role to play than schools in "understanding," and they have failed their more recent generations miserably.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday November 23 2017, @02:46AM
Here, at least, foreign students are BIG money for the universities, and modern American universities are more businesses than they are institutions of learning, so they let them in (often to the detriment of domestic students being denied slots). And it is well-known that Chinese and Arabs (I have not witnessed Indians cheating, though, in fact the ones I've seen alongside me were very capable) cheat like a motherfucker, and yes, both the student body and professors know that.
Chinese male students are especially rotten because the ones who make it here are often not only only-children, but golden-sons. They bullshit all day over the professor, grabass, and are generally a distracting nuisance to everybody around them. Worst of all, they know that they are not going to suffer beatings or any other consequences, and even though everybody knows they cheat they also know the school needs the money from them continuing to pay tuition there, so there is nothing to stop them from shitting-up every education system they manage to get into. The best a professor can hope is that they graduate and go back to the third-world and stay there.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday November 23 2017, @09:04AM
A degree? Maybe. If you pass the entry requirements for Oxford or Cambridge the drop-out rate is so low that you are almost certainly guaranteed to get a degree. That said, degree classifications in the UK are first class, upper second class (2.1), lower second class (2.2), third class, or pass without honours. Getting a first requires a lot of work and getting a 2.1 is far from guaranteed. Most employers require a 2.1 or above.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 23 2017, @11:16AM
So what level of ignorance is acceptable just because people do things for reasons that you choose not to accept? It seems far easier to require one particular AC, that would be you, to pull their head out of their ass rather than drive millions of people to poverty and ignorance just because they don't have the proper zeal.