My
4 years at CMSU were a very mixed bag.
1.) The students and faculty were generally nice
and accessible, but in certain degree areas quality faculty was
quite lacking. I was a Computer Information Systems major (graduated),
and only two or three CIS professors could speak English
with any degree of accuracy or knew their subject matter
at all.
2.) The entire college is *very*
poorly managed and there is no effective horizontal communication between
departments. You can go to five different people and they
will tell you completely different things about the same subject.
Support staff, in general, are very rude to students and
will often flat-out lie to them to try and avoid
addressing their concern, and the support staff will put up
as much red tape as necessary to avoid addressing student
complaints about anything. Examples of issues I have dealt with:
- It took 4 months worth
of meetings with the Dean of my college to persuade
her to give me back attendance points deducted from a
professor who, by his own admission, had no attendance policy
for the class. (yes, it's exactly as you've read it)
- An Academic Advisor prepared my
senior-year schedule incorrectly resulting in my inability to take two
classes concurrently resulting in my graduation being delayed.
- In my final semester, the support staff
gave me “no credit” for a class that I had
received the highest grade. The professor himself told them that
they entered the grade wrong, and they refused to change
it. Only after a heated meeting with the Vice President
of CMSU did I get the school to honor my
grade and let me graduate.
I would also like to
share my experiences in the Honors College Program at CMSU.
Some things to understand for future students:
- They tell you that you can do
“whatever you want” with your Honors Project, but depending on
your major, that is simply a lie. The Honors College
Chair wouldn't let me do anything related to CIS or
Computer Science and that's my major. He shot down every
single idea I threw at him and ultimately basically told
me I was going to do a project that would
benefit the university's admissions department. Essentially, I discovered the “do
the project you've always wanted to do” talk was a
complete lie.
- Being in
the Honors College enables you to take different classes for
certain aspects of your Gen Eds, for example, “Sci-Fi Literature”
instead of “American Literature” for your English requirement. While this
sounds good and fine, if you ever decide to drop
out of the Honors College Program, they make you re-take
those requirements with ones the “regular” students have to take.
They are completely inflexible and unbending in this policy; for
instance, I took a senior-level history class to fulfill my
“cultural interaction” requirement, and the college made me take a
freshman music appreciation class as a senior. This is the
kind of inflexibility this college is renowned for practicing against
students, and the logic in making a senior take a
class like this when they've already taken a senior-level class
for the requirement just shows how much more this university
cares about student's money than actual education. And, no,
the Honors College doesn't make students aware of this policy
in advance in any way.
Some may read this
last point and say “well duh”, but my problem is:
the class you originally took in place of the requirement,
which is approved by the Honors College for fulfilling the
requirement, is suddenly not good enough when you drop out
of the program. By making you re-take the requirement with
a different class, they are admitting that the “honors” class
didn't teach you the “required” material. As one can see,
a logical fallacy occurs when you try to say they
make students re-take the requirement to “learn” the “required material”.
They wouldn't have learned the “required material” in the first
place if they had just taken the “honors” substitute class.
Therefore, the motive is purely financial, which I would consider
a negative to make a student take a pointless music
appreciation class as a senior when they've already taken a
senior-level history class for the same requirement.
In short,
assuming that this university will be reasonable involving student issues
or will employ common sense is a major mistake. Even
when you present empirical data proving to someone that you
are completely correct and the college is completely in the
wrong, they will somehow discover a way not to acknowledge
it.