Capella University

Date: Apr 20 2013
Major: Business - Management and Administration (This Major's Salary over time)
As a Part-Time Faculty professor in the MBA program, what I have noticed is that the majority of the students project the attitude that because they pay money for the program, they deserve a 4.0 grade on every course. Likewise, the happy students are those who are not challenged by the faculty and held to even the basic standards of writing and avoiding plagiarism, and the unhappy students are those who encounter faculty who hold the students to writing, research, and plagiarism standards. The next issue I find with both students and faculty is that the majority of the students do not know the basics of undergraduate, graduate, and post graduate writing and most of the faculty do not hold students to the writing standards (i.e., American Psychological Association (APA) standards, and 75-80% of the faculty do not hold students to the standards. - I cannot begin to describe the number of graduate (MBA) papers I have read where the level of spelling, punctuation, grammar, and knowledge of / adherence to rules about plagiarism are not up to basic high school standards. Them, when the lack of skill in writing in pointed out, based on 300+ such encounters, the three standard replies are: (1) None of the other instructors/professors have ever said anything to me about my writing; (2) I am here to learn about (name the subject of the course) not how to write; and (3) I was always told what a good/brilliant/remarkable writer I was in my undergraduate school; so you don't know what you are talking about. - The point being, in three years of instructing more than a dozen courses, 90% of the students I have encountered did not have: (1) a realistic understanding of what it takes to be successful in an online program; (2) a realistic understanding of their own abilities; (3) a willingness to accept feedback that is in any way critical; (4) a willingness to accept that just because they pay for a course does not entitle them to an automatic A (4.0); a realistic understanding of the higher cost associate with the freedom that goes with online learning. Or, in other words, the majority of online students I have encountered enter and work their programs with unrealistic expectations, and when their expectations are not realized they blame the school and instructors.