Mark a survey and Inform Staff

Peer Review:

Statistical Analyzer: DUPLICATE,

I am a current student at the U of A. I have been attending since I was in High School through the CCP program. It's cheap and close to home (so no housing fees). There are many complaints I have about this school. One prominent one is the parking conditions. This school thrives off of commuter students. This school doesn't have many classes that meet on Fridays (so ultimately less students on campus on Fridays). So of course this place decides to host public events on normal school days and allow anyone to park in the parking garages and lots the students pay a seperate fee of $100 to use (stonks!). Also, they decide to do construction on parking garages during the busiest semester of the entire year (fall) instead of during either the spring or summer semesters (which are notoriously less busy as students are dropping out, graduating, or choosing to not attend). The academics are exceptionally easy in many cases with the professors/graders being very biased towards methods of doing things or certain topics. If you write papers that pander to them then they will automatically pass you, regardless of any mistakes. Conversely, they will arbitrarily take points off if you go against their opinions or preferences. For example, I had a teacher take a point off of a paper simply because I used the word "whilst" instead of "while" (which was used correctly mind you). Point is that the academics feel less like they are trying to push their students to achieve higher level academic skills or to build a solid foundation in research capabilities and more like they want students to just cater to them. This is present across the different fields I have explored while here. This creates a sort of "coasting" attitude in students; we don't have any investment or thrill, just fear of failing because of arbitrary grader feelings. Most of the work you do feels like busy work from high school. The technology used here is worse than most high schools. High schools have Smart boards and teachers that use new, innovative ways of teaching. Here teachers use blackboards and just give half-hearted lectures that they've been reusing for the past decade (most powerpoints reference the previous website used for schoolwork, which hasn't been used in over 3 years). It makes me wonder where my tuition went. Books, parking passes, "special" organizations, most workshops, many exclusive events, online resources (especially in science and math classes), etc. are paid independently. Some instructors don't give any feedback on your papers or assignments, which isn't helpful in the slightest. Some don't even provide a rubric and just sort of "eyeball" a general grade and arbitrarily remove points without any explanation or empirical grading scale. Some courses are money traps. They aim to make as many students as possible retake them in order to get them to spend more money on the course; most of the people in my current math class have failed it previously. For example, some math courses will have ridiculous stakes on simple quizzes, tests, and exams. Some exams (which usually count for approx. 1/4 of the course grade each exam) will have 5 to 10 questions in total but count for over a hundred points, meaning that if you miss one question you go down a full letter grade. The professors are a mixed bag; some are really nice and some are really awful. Some genuinely care about you as a person and as a student, and others try their hardest to fail you and couldn't care less about you. Regardless, all professors complain about how the university has cut a bunch of majors for E-Sports (which currently has no scholarships and lacks any relevant majors surrounding it) and how the budget is being spent on useless things, such as the always-failing football team (while the actually renowned track team lacks funding). I would say that the campus is not all that safe, aside from it being placed in the garbage-dump known as the city of Akron, simply because no one (especially the police) knows how to drive. They will speed through the 25 mph zones and crosswalks, they will make illegal turns (especially if the sign telling them to not turn left is in front of them), they will go the wrong way in a parking garage (speeding at the same time) and they will run you off the road because they can't read a sign that says the left lane is ending. The campus also features an absurd amount of fanatics. From being harassed by wanna-be gurus in the student union building who force books into your hands and try to make you pay a premium for their "enlightenment", to the hateful cult/church outside shouting anti-everything propaganda and showing pictures of aborted fetuses (yes this actually happened, to many students' dismay) the campus is overrun with exceptionally forceful, nearly violent, nutjobs. The campus doesn't feel safe with these crazy people screaming at you and chasing you down just to get you to buy their nonsense or to forcefully hand you a hate manifesto. I wouldn't even care if they were on campus if they would be regulated to having a booth that students, willingly, approach and also respected personal space and used inside voices. Overall, the University lacks many majors and requires you to take a ton of pointless classes that have no bearing on your major (why do you need a language course if you're an art major or why do you need a language course if you're a science major?). The university doesn't help you aspire to your career, many resources are hidden or only mentioned in obscure ways, the university is designed to be obnoxious (let's put the math classes, half the language classes and computer related majors in a building downtown, then make the student either run or drive to the other side of town for an art history class, all within 15-20 minutes!), some classes are very limited with some only having a single meeting time, which causes a lot of conflict in scheduling, some courses change rooms after your schedule them; you can schedule a bunch of your classes together and choose a reasonable time between to then have one class to be switched to a building across campus, and the academics are relatively easy in terms of effort but are difficult simply because of uncertain expectations.