My rant for today is with the uneven playing fields that exist everywhere. I'm working on this presentation for my IOE/ME/MFG 583 "Science Base for Reconfigurable Manufacturing" course, with three graduate students and one fifth-year senior. Generally speaking, our levels of engineering competence are fairly similar, but when it comes to preparing a presentation, we're all over the place. One person did their slides in straight black and white, plain white background, and one font size. Another used no background but made up for it with clip art at the rate of 2-3 per page and included entire paragraphs of text. I made a template and used some pictures around straightforward text. Who knows what the fourth person will do? My point is this: if four upper-level engineering students have such different standards, how on earth can NCLB ever hope to bring everybody up to one set of standards? The goal is simply unachievable; Hitler tried it and we all know how that went.

posted at 3:38 PM - comments