I am not against higher education, but I am against universities. What is meant by this is quite simple: universities, a product of the high middle ages (12th century A.D.) have changed somewhat from their early pioneers, but their structure has grown stale and become more of a hindrance to providing our society with the best education possible than a help. The rise of community colleges and those institutions’ recent degree programs is but one example of our quite realization of this. We still need to come a long way though before either reform or removal affects university institutions as we are all well-versed in the propaganda that if we mess with the system countries like India, China, and in the Middle East will overtake our local economies and wilt away our massive wealth.

After stories like students being ostracized by Ryerson University in Toronto for setting up the online version of a study group, I think we at least owe it to ourselves and our children to investigate other ways of delivering essential life skills. Having graduated within the last five years, I know well the tag that many professors would add to assignments stating that there could be no collaboration.

At least where I went to school, this rule was never enforced. For example, physics professors after class would visit the study lounge on a social call, see groups of students working together on the assignment he stated was to be done alone and sometimes even offer hints to the solutions to help the group along. In first year, it was well known that a conglomerate of students would book the residential study lounges around the clock so that they always had a private, taxpayer and tuition-funded room between the ten of them; the administration turned a blind eye when it was pointed out that the same names had the room booked from January through April. Put simply, any professor at Waterloo who honestly expected either independent assignment completion or an unnetworked mob of students in his/her class to try and use the power of numbers to their advantage was just being plain naive!

If a professor or university is going to impose such a rule on its classes (one again that I don’t see much merit for as tests are structurally designed to show individual work, while assignments are always cited as learning tools), shouldn’t it work both ways? In other words, if the student is obligated to do the work independently then the university should ensure the student fair competition from his/her classmates by designing an assignment that can only be done independently without intentional and manipulative cheating. It’s only fair that Ryerson and other schools provide this in exchange as many schools, especially engineering schools like the one this troubled student is currently in, now work through a bell-curve system where it’s not about how well you do on your assignment but how you rank in comparison with your classmates. If the school is going to turn a blind eye to some forms of group work (eg. study lounge groups, going to knowledgeable friends/family) then it can’t assume to go after internet work because at least these cases have evidence prepackaged.

Of course, the former examples are unenforceable, as they should be, so again I ask why universities would even dare to set guidelines on assignments that collectively are only worth 10% of the mark because the prof knows they’re not good gauges of knowledge anyway? I wish the student now in trouble with his school all the best, and if things don’t go his way today I hope that he considers a long-term fight over this where the university will come under public scrutiny over their ridiculous rules. Maybe then, with its own reputation on the line, Ryerson will be more keen to come into the 21st century, and leave the 12th!