Of course, Taiwanese universities have many problems, some of which have been mentioned on this thread. However, I don’t think it is fair to judge a university based on a negative experience on one course. I have done many courses at NTU - some are as you described (in which case I dropped them), but others have been excellent. Despite all the problems in Taiwanese education, it is hard to imagine the country’s leading university not being able to attract at least some outstanding teachers and researchers. Most of the NTU professors are US trained in any case.
I would advise asking your classmates about different teachers, and if you don’t like a particular course then drop it and find an alternative.
Or maybe your paper wasn’t as good as you thought it be. Students all over the world often fail to understand why they didn’t get higher marks. Quite often it is because the paper simply wasn’t very good.
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I wrote a long reply to this but it got lost and I don’t have time to write it out again. Here’s the main points:
(1) None of the professors I study with are western trained, and in fact, they think anything proposed by western scholars is wrong. My experience is probably a lot different than students studying business or sociology and such.
(2) My paper was 90% quality. I’ve written papers for this professor before. I know how he grades. I’m not an inexperienced undergrad, either. I’ve written many papers in this area (linguistics) in both English and Chinese and I’m confident I know what I’m doing. I’m certain the problem was that I showed very clearly that a certain Chinese scholar was making stuff up – it became clear during my research that this scholar wasn’t even reading the articles (by western scholars) that he was criticizing. About half of my sources were in English, as well, which this professors doesn’t acknowledge the existence of.
(3) The reason I am still in the program is because the libraries at NCCU and NTU are good. So I can pretty much do my own stuff and hope that the department accepts it. I did once ask a professor for help, though, regarding a Qing Dynasty article I was having trouble reading. His reply: “if you can’t understand it, don’t read it.” :roflmao: What a joke…
In the social sciences, around 90% of the professors are Western trained (the majority in the United States, but also some from European countries). To survive and get promoted, they have to publish in Western journals. This creates its own problems - younger faculty members tend to “play it safe” and simply follow Western methods, producing a kind of intellectual “self-colonization”. Because of the overwhelming focus on producing journal articles - other things tend to get neglected.
So I guess there is a big difference between departments dominated by American trained social scientists and locally trained linguists.
Yeah – that makes sense…I’m being too negative in my above posts. There are certain things that are taught here that are valuable and absent in the western coursework. Studying here, I think, comes down to taking the good and making up for the bad in the library. Also, I have to admit that me not being completely fluent in Chinese adds to my frustration, as I can’t always express things in class as clearly as I would like.
Yeah, there are many frustrations that come with studying in Taiwan. I have often been frustrated by a lack of fluency in Chinese as well as many other things that people in this thread have mentioned.
However, on the positive side, Taiwan has given me the opportunity to study for a PhD which would have been virtually impossible in the UK without taking out a huge loan to fund myself (which I was not willing to do given the dismal job prospects for PhDs in the UK). Here, I can both study and earn enough to save money every month. I have also benefited from a few excellent teachers and courses and a well stocked library. Another huge plus is the connections you build up during the course of your studies.
So despite the many failings of the university system here, doing postgrad study in Taiwan can definitely be worthwhile, especially if you plan to stay in Taiwan.
Too often, Taiwan people and institutions focus on the superficial trappings of education. For example, in order to be recognized as a “university,” a school must have a paved athletic track. Of course there are many other, more substantive requirements as well, but these often produce the appearance of education (students meeting in classrooms in buildings for a certain number of hours / years, then getting diplomas), without the reality. The problem is compounded by the glut of private universities, and the corresponding decline in academic standards.
I often wonder whether the situation might be better if there were no Ministry of Education to lull people into a false sense of the field being well-regulated. On the other hand, the likely result would be universities behaving even more like buxibans.
As someone who graduated from two universities within the top 50 for undergrad and grad school , I’m glad [universities] like NCCU haven’t made the cut or have been ranked very low.
They have tried to internationalize as directed by the MOE but don’t want to change their medieval habits. The telling off I got there in 2007 (when I owned an apartment a block away, I used to swim there a few times a week) for not wearing a swimming cap (had a crew cut/shaved head at the time) was brutal. Yet, they have no problem with Chinese professors coughing up phlegm and spitting in the pool every five seconds. When I pointed this out, they went ballistic and a fight almost occurred.
I think the proliferation of substandard private universities and the performance of Taiwan’s top public universities are separate issues.
At least they give Taiwan’s huge number of PhDs employment opportunities.
The huge number of substandard unaccredited institutions and diploma mills in the US doesn’t stop it also having the best universities in the world.
Most the foreign students I’ve met know what they’re doing. In fact, they seem more prepared than most grad students back home at my former university (within the top 20 internationally) doing the same thing – for example, back home most students have only taken four years of Chinese language coursework, which doesn’t mean much, while here they are functionally fluent – that is, doing everything in Chinese successfully. One of my classmates last year (American) has a full ride at Harvard now for his PhD. But anyways, I shouldn’t reply to your post as you don’t really get the situation here: (1) the students working at the pool are paid to make sure people follow the rules; (2) mandatory swimming caps are an island-wide cultural thing, not a rule related to NCCU specifically. And lastly, your anecdote is completely unrelated to the caliber of research/teaching going on at the school.
In the USA, the government doesn’t actually do much regulating of the universities. There are “great books” colleges, religious schools of all sorts (many of the Ivy Leagues began as religious schools), experimental or alternative programs, and God knows what else.
In Taiwan, universities are governed by the MOE, which wants all them all to offer more or less the same sort of thing. Even the salaries are standardized. And the model that they’ve been standardized to fit is authoritarian, test-driven, and not very internationalized. National universities have the least incentive of all to change.
Taiwan has terrible trouble attracting and keeping worthwhile talent as their salaries are abysmal, they have a poor policy of insisting on a diverse range of post doctoral positions in overseas universities before making the grade to get on faculty, they don’t teach in English anywhere near enough, they don’t attract enough US and European research money onto their campuses, and they have a bloated system of easy university entry and a shocking record of not failing enough people. And the degrees of the good students get undervalued by the millions of piss-poor grads who can barely tie their shoelaces, let alone for constructive criticism or put two unique thoughts together in a sentence.
But those are just small things, really. You don’t need that if you can make your own rankings.
Just see the many Asian based rankings machines that routinely put Peking top of the pecking order (based on number of hits to their website, for example, or other such risible metrics).
If you click on the link, it says NTU only got 20.7 points for International Outlook, whatever that means. (Maybe there’s a plot by China to undermine it! Ha.)
Their research still ranks high.
Wikipedia: “The university also produced one Nobel prize laureate, Lee Yuan-tseh…” but that was back in 1986.
Last year, they ranked 115, but they also received a lot more citations than this year.
You can game the rankings by throwing piles of money at it, hiring researchers with large numbers of citations, one or two Nobel Laureates etc. It’s mainly related to how much money you can invest in a given university. What does ranking mean anyway, I mean if I study Russian at MIT what does that mean? There’s no point patting yourself on the back for a ranking that’s nothing much to do with you personally. Look at the original nationality of most Nobel Prize Winners (who still tend to work in US academic institutions due to history and funding opportunities). You can also buy your way into a degree in most of these universities.
As for education rankings, look at this silly article. Passing standardised tests and excluding migrant workers kids (50% of the youth population) until recently is seen as "Winning the School Race’’. bbc.co.uk/news/business-14812822
I know, what an inane article. It’s more of the “China is the Best” mantra that the Western media cannot get enough of right now. The article mentions that Shanghai has 1% of China’s population, and that figures for the whole of China aren’t available, yet the title of the article is “How China is Winning the School Race”. :loco:
This passes for journalism? Actually, if the writer of this article is indicative of the average high school graduate in the West, then China might just be winning the school race. Christ!
Interestingly (or at least I find it interesting), according to Wikipedia, QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) used to do the rankings for Times Higher Education (I take it Times refers to the Times of London, which I recall as having the hardest damn crossword puzzles in the English-speaking world), but QS and Times Higher Education parted ways in 2010, and Times Higher Education now does its rankings with help from Thomson Reuters.
Here’s the Wikipedia article on the QS rankings:
Here’s the Wikipedia article on the Times Higher Education rankings:
for undergrad and grad school , I’m glad [universities] like NCCU haven’t made the cut or have been ranked very low. 
