One reason I never went back

Academic horror story:

About a month ago I learned that the difficulty I had in registering for Summer and Fall classes was NOT due to some unresolved debt.  I was missing a pre-requisite.  You see, I had taken freshman chemistry my freshman year.  Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the course designations have changed a bit. Chem 115 is now required for science majors, not Chem 111.  This means that I can’t sign up for ANY of the upper level Oceanography courses I need until I take freshman chemistry...a two semester class...meaning in turn that I can only take the last 3-5 upper division classes AFTER next spring.

Fudge...

How, you may ask, was I able to take these 300 level courses?  Well, this is such a subtle screw up that neither the adviser nor the computer caught it until this past semester, when the ODU registration computer finally noticed...

And it gets worse, becoming a story of “well, we changed the rules so all those credits we told you would count– won’t.”

Preliminary tally..out of 120 credits needed I now have fer sure ( in theory) a mere 50...

I have an “A” in an Asian military history class that the school hasn't offered in 15 years and is not on the class list at all....but the head of the Department insists it ought to count.

The killer comment:

If I’d just dropped out 15 years ago and gone driving full time at UPS, I’d be 5 years from retirement and in the catbird seat financially.

Grant that Ken is the quintessential nontraditional student, and 15 years is a bit long to take getting a bachelor’s.^[1]  Still, were I in his position I would be giving serious consideration lawyering up, or at least threatening it:  Juries don’t like organizations that change the rules in the middle of the game, especially when the changes screw people who have paid those organizations tens of thousands of dollars, and especially when the change leaves those people with a choice between walking away with nothing, or paying tens of thousands of dollars more.

I’d really like to get Cranky’s take on this.  (And perhaps she could also weigh in on whether academic bureaucrats are more evil than the insurance variety.)

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Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 19:45:23 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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