I was looking at my sons university scores. In Australia they use Pass Credit Distinction High Distinction. HD needs a score between 85 - 100. In many classes my son took very few ever got more than 92 at a top score. He made the Deans List for being the stop student in his final year of JD Law. Exams for each course made up 25% of the total score. So you can’t wing it by passing exams in Australia.
I wouldn’t quite put it as “winging it”, but yes it was the same in the US.
A lot of students from top universities in China struggle for good grades in Australia because they thought they would just need to pass exams and not have to hand in research assignments or work in teams on a project. My son would get together with chosen classmates and never allow a PRC Chinese leech in as they would be lazy and rely on others to do the written assignments and presentations.
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If study in US, have them do first 2 years in community college for stupid prerequisites of courses to graduate unrelated to their major.
Easier to apply and get accepted to state university (by then should have residency if American) for 3rd year (junior). Fuq private universities and their $50k tuition.
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My son went to a government funded university and paid not much less than that per year for post grad JD Law for three years. That’s tuition only. Books everything else not included.
Many/some state universities in US about $7-10,000 in yearly tuition.
Unless you want to stay in Taiwan, and probably some programs in some unis are good
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I went to a public university in Taiwan, and got my master’s from a “Public Ivy” in the US. I can say that my education in Taiwan was much better than what I got in the US. I had some Taiwanese collogues who only studied in Taiwan and never got any degrees in the US, but were able to find good jobs there, so apparently Taiwanese degrees are not worthless.
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In Australia nearly all universities are government funded. I think there are two private universities. So for citizens they get subsidized undergraduate degrees. It’s called HECS higher education charge. You can wait and pay of off after graduation when you start working. We opted to pay upfront at 15% discount at the time for doing so. So made the annual tuition around US$4500 a year.
ahhh. your reply above made it read like tuition there was only a bit less than 50k. So, actually, 4500 is very cheap down under
Being bilingual is important for cultural and heritage reasons. However, from a practical or economic standpoint, not so much. The amount of time spent to learn Mandarin vs. the ROI is not so great. Of course you can’t quantify the the relationships you’ll have with university level Mandarin or maybe the satisfaction of being in Taiwan and understanding your surroundings in highly nuanced way, but if you think Mandarin will improve your child’s economic future, then I think this is a pipe dream. Do really see your child’s life career in Taiwan? Maybe wage stagnation will improve…maybe the CCP will finally fail, and China opens with permanent visas like Taiwan…maybe your child is destined to be a translator and AI fails us. But I suspect a heavy investment in Mandarin with current data would suggest a low ROI. My child is completing primary school — fluent speaker and reads a fair amount. Beyond this, I’d rather he heavily invest in English which will be a much more valuable skill in other countries and for other jobs.
For post grad JD Law yes. For current undergraduate fees you can see what they are here page 13 of 24.
https://www.studyassist.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023_csp_and_hecs-help_booklet_1.pdf?v=1670215471
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Why not invest in both English and Mandarin? There is only so much English you can learn to become fluent enough for a good job, so it’s not like learning Mandarin would take away English learning time.
Well we are one year into that process, so I could possibly tell you in 12 years, although I doubt we’ll stay in Taiwan that long. I wouldn’t have that concern though…I think with English at home and the prevalence of English in their consumed media, it wouldn’t be hard to maintain fluency. I have a Taiwanese-American friend with a Taiwanese wife who speaks pretty good English (she lived in the US for around five years) and they’re very concerned. Their son’s English is not bad but heavily accented with the typical grammatical errors. At home they speak Mandarin. So they plan to move to America at some point with the intention of improving his English speaking.
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If they are that worried, why don’t they speak English at home?
So like college then, so basically grade schools in Asia are like college in the states?’
I remember in grade school I had to keep up with tests and quizzes that counted towards the final grade, hell even in college (UT Austin) they had homeworks that counted towards the final grade though the weight is not high and they dropped about 5 of them, so you could miss a few without penalty. Problem is if you don’t do the homeworks, particularly in math classes, it often meant you did poorly in the exams because homework was very good practice for the exam.
Fair question. I imagine is a combination of 1) the parents being set in their ways so it’s hard to change your habits. My friend is totally fluent in Mandarin so they’ve just always spoken Mandarin to each other and within their family 2) the wife doesn’t feel like her English is as good as it really is 3) their son is probably fairly resistant to using English with his parents. He’ll speak to my kids and others, but he obviously feels much more safe/comfortable using Mandarin with his parents.
It’s kinda the same with my sons…they’re quite resistant to speaking to me and my wife in Chinese since we spent years exclusively using English.
Huh? No. Not like US colleges at all. The opposite of US colleges. As you said yourself:
In the US professors seems to have a lot of latitude in grading, and many US college classes only have exams as grades, but not all. Many of my geology classes were like this. No homework, quizzes, or anything, just exams at regular interval and final exam counts for all. The classes were very rote memorization heavy too, which is why I didn’t do too well.
I don’t like this style of grading because homework does provide practice and it makes your exam score better. Some professors will even make it easy and make exam questions come exclusively from the homework (but randomly chosen) and so if you did your homework, you did well on the exams. Also homework while they suck, forces students to actually read the material, meaning if the questions are asked properly, this can teach a lot better than simply just reading PPT slides or textbooks.
Also it has been shown that the last minute cramming for exams do not teach students anything. As soon as the exam is over the student forgets everything.
I went to four universities in the US and never experienced a class like this. They were all required to have a mixture of homework, quizzes, attendance, papers, group work, presentations, and exams, that all counted toward the final grade.
I hated it. Could never get a break from all the constant quizzes and homework.