If you want to complain about having crappy students taking space, complain about grade inflation, and the propensity of graders to "curve." Why should everyone's grade go up because there were a lot of mediocre grades? Either you think your evaluation was unfair, in which case you need to give them a fair one, or your evaluation was fair and everyone sucked, in which case they need to get the grades they deserve.

Okay. A professor starts marking final exams and realizes that their exam was too difficult because the entire class failed*. When will this second, "fair" evaluation of the class take place? In the interim between terms? When the new semester starts? Either way, I doubt students will enjoy being called back into a class that should be over and done with because the prof made the exam too difficult, and is now obligated to give a "fair" one.

I don't know what field you TA'd in, but in physics it's bloody hard for a prof to create a "fair" exam. To make a long diatribe short, usually a prof has to either err on the side of making the exam too easy or too difficult, and they always choose "too difficult" because low marks still yield meaningful data about student capabilities. (i.e., it's hard to grade students fairly when everyone scores 100% on the final.)

So, regardless of how you feel about the matter, there's a good reason why grade curves exist.

* Not a hypothetical situation. This has happened at my university.

Here's what I want to know: who took the video? That's a huge part of the story here, and that detail is omitted. My knee-jerk reaction is that it's someone from the opposing party, trying to make the next election in Florida easier for them.

Personally, I'm more disgusted by the censorship (the black bar) than the original photo.

The article states that 25 percent of students failed the English Language Proficiency Exam (ELPE) at Waterloo 5 years ago, and that now the number is 30 percent.

Here's my question: have those numbers been normalized to the increasing numbers of students in university?

Some schools (including UW) are letting more and more students in. It's an easy way to keep the budget balanced. It stands to reason that the "extra" students who are admitted to university aren't going to be at the top of the heap, but rather students who were only on the cusp of getting in.

I think the problem isn't with Twitter or the internet. Rather, the problem is universities are letting in students who wouldn't have gotten in otherwise.

Most of the comments I've read are in the context of using cheques to pay for retail purchases. Yeah, that's bad.

I don't use cheques to pay for anything, except one item: my rent. Cheques actually solve that problem pretty well.

See, my landlord (essentially just a guy I live with) doesn't have the infrastructure set up for electronic money transfer, nor should he. So I can't pay by debit, and it would strain my withdrawal limit to hand him $425 cash every month. What to do then?

I can just leave a cheque on the fridge, and he can cash it whenever. Debit and credit are suited to retail (cashier and customer are together, money needs to be transferred now) but cheques are well suited to money transfers where both parties aren't at the same place at the same time.