Korean Job Discussion Forums

[slothrop]

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[seoulsucker]

Occam's Razor.

[halfmanhalfbiscuit]

[fermentation]

My father has a PhD from the US. He can communicate in English and knows tons of vocabulary, but he makes frequent grammatical mistakes. I guess I should ask him how he did it.

[Yaya]

Perhaps many falsified their degrees or never bothered to speak English much while in the U.S.

I've been in Korea 14 years and I am still amazed at the low English ability of many professors here, even the ones who graduated from top schools abroad.

[PaperTiger]

[wondobern]

In my PhD program, the profs tended to grade the native speakers much tougher on content, grammar, etc. on our papers. It was sort of an unwritten rule.

My school got to promote the fact that they had so many foreigners, and the foreigners got to win out on getting a degree from an American school.

Although you could argue that we benefited from the diversification of the student body, it did get frustrating at times, especially when you worked so much harder on the papers as well as the actual thesis than the non-native speakers.

I give them credit for getting their degree in a foreign language, but it was defnitely not a level playing field in the case of my school. (just speaking honestly, so don't mean to belittle my foreigner classmates)

One time when I was particularly frustrated with the way things were, one of the professors took me aside and told that when the Board of Credentials came to check out our school, the host professors would steer them towards the papers, publications, and theses of the native speakers, hoping they wouldn't see how poorly written the foreigners had written theirs.

Also, I was asked alot of time by my classmates to help with their papers, etc.

[Privateer]

[Silk]

I worked in a writing center for a year at my university, so within that context, it's impossible for a "tutor" to write a paper for a student, meaning that correcting grammar is not writing the paper for the student. The student creates the content, so if the student understands the assignment, and writes a thoughtful well planned paper with bad grammar, well, at that point it is just surface level errors, for purposes of the course, the student is doing the work and understanding it.

Those students could certainly make basic sentences though, so I'm sure many of the professors you're referring to have lost the use of the language over time since they likely don't need to use it on a daily basis. So even a English literature professor could be a very poor speaker/writer of English, but still be able to generate intelligent, critical discourses on any given English novel(in spoken Korean that is).

But all that begs the question of why they got the degree in the U.S. in the first place, if it isn't for language acquisition, then it is only for looks, or it is that still reoccurring phenomenon of wanting to go to the "best schools" or graduating from one of the "top schools" from America.

My ex-korean girlfriend who was smart as a whip and spoke English fluently once mentioned wanting to study in America, and asked me what the "best" school was(she didn't mean practically speaking)....culture is a powerful thing.

From the universities' point of view, it's all about money. I'm sure the professors are encouraged to go lenient on speaking/writing skills; in California foreign students pay ungodly amounts of money.

[hugekebab]

Depends if it was from a good university or not. On my politics MA course there were a Thai couple, who I have to say were clearly bright and always had salient points to make in discussions, but their English was pretty crap. They both failed at the end having paid an exorbitant foreign student fee.

[wylies99]

[wylies99]

[phoneboothface]

Their undergrad grades are great, albeit from a 대학교.

When they get to the next level, they study their ass off and do some liberal cut and pasting at the same time. And they pay full tuition usually, that helps.

And grades are based on written work more than anything, with many hiring outside help to work on their thesis with them. More writing, less talking of course.

Highlighting the weakspots in Western educational systems, something we can learn from.

[wylies99]

[Bryan]

I had an international political economy professor in grad school this semester who had just graduated from a major US state university with a PhD, maybe a year ago.

I felt she didn't even know about her field at all, but that's debatable. Anyway, I figure she probably had her thesis edited for grammar mistakes. Because she would always talk in this kind of way: "Okay, lets learn some globalization stuffs and Washington consensus kind of thing."

I dropped her class right at the end because she never taught us anything (really). Students did presentations each day for most of the class. She never had lecture notes or anything really prepared, and when I pressed her deeply on topics she got massively confused. She obviously never debated her field in English. So the classes consisted of students doing presentations for her.