Looking back at years gone by – things didn’t seem to be as bad, I mean the stuff that happen was inexcusable, but at least there was a point of expression.

There is a saying, If you can do, if you can’t teach, there are a lot of teachers and professors that I admire and respect for their teaching style and aversion to the crap that is sent their way, people at Westlands will know the people I’m talking about, those few teachers earn respect from their students because they exude qualities of genuinely nice people, the others that have attitude problems and a myriad of other personality disorders never have and never will have my respect and are what is wrong with the teaching profession.

The joke in this story is that the people we expect to teach us in a university are at times worse than the people in state education.

For the most part professors are good, there are the exceptions of course, some of them you have to wonder why they bothered coming to work in the morning because their focus defiantly isn’t on getting people to learn – but 99% of them are genuinely passionate about their work, to the people who are the rest of this post isn’t referring to them.

Right here, right now, I’m bringing into question the role of the so called ‘teaching assistants’ that lecturers seem to have here.

Teaching Assistants (if we can call them assistants) seem to be regular students that are taking the course, and have an interest in either becoming a teacher or just showing off their over sized ‘I know everything’ ego. Not only do they think they know it all but they also think everyone else should – one in particular – my only question to him is WHY are we at university in the first place: to learn….

So here are the items on the charge sheet:

1. TA ignores me and Shane and helps everyone else – meaning that at the end of our final project evaluation he hadn’t seen ours, so we had no mark, despite the fact we had it ready a full 2 hours before everyone else.

2. He grades Lloyds lower than it should have been and decides that he’s going to have an attitude problem when Lloyd asks a question

3. He then proceeds to walk off

4. After his evaluation deadline, he tells us that if he hasn’t looked at it then its ‘tough’ and we get a 0 – forgetting of course that we’d been waiting 2 hours for him to come over.

5. When he realised that we had been waiting he gave us 3/10 for a project that he hadn’t even seen, which was less than we should (and would have got) if he had a clue and bothered to come over.

The guy is a moron and quite frankly shouldn’t be anything to do with teaching.

The funniest thing of all is that he obviously hasn’t read our files, we have a track record of “rocking boats” where things like this are concerned.

This post has been tagged: America, Rants, University

Accommodation Status: Allocated

Previous Entries to the Saga:

Part 1: First Class incompetence from First Class organisations
Part 1: Progress Update: The Revenge of the Call Centre

The god of accommodation has shone upon me, all of the issues regarding both my grades disappearing act and the secondary problem of ‘LackOfAccommodationAllocationItus’, of which the only known cure is to curse loudly at the person on the other end of the phone have now been resolved, just in time for the Christmas break.

All of the phone calls, emails and headaches have paid off, for a while back there I wondered if I had enough strength to carry on the demanding task of directing the people at the various organisations that I had to deal with in order to pull them together and come towards a common goal, namely my University Application.

At times it felt like everyone I spoke to had developed an acute strain of amnesia whenever I asked more than a simple yes or no question. But in the end, something must have jolted them back into reality and made them remember all of the things that they were supposed to do when dealing with the applications.

Me: “Hi my names Myles, we spoke yesterday”

Her: “Um, did we??”

Me: “Yeah, you told me to ring back today”

Her: Internal thought: um, um, um, oh yeah, he’s the one that has had his application screwed up and keeps on phoning every 20 minutes “Oh yeah, Myles right?”

Me: Internal Thought: Well done, I believe I said that when you answered the phone – Yeah……”

Just one of the many conversations that occurred over the gut wrenching 62 hours

Also it seems like my grades have been upgraded by AQA from a BB to an AA, that’s right, I have successfully got 2 A’s in AVCE ICT

It looks like things are coming back on track, with all this stuff behind me now, all that is left to do is walk along the bumpy road over the next 3 weeks and 1 day until I depart.

This post has been tagged: Rants, University

Ok, this is probably the first in many sub part 1 posts that I will be posting in the coming days as new information becomes available and the situation unfolds further.

If you missed the first instalment titled “Part 1: First Class incompetence from First Class organisations” then you will not know what the hell this post is about, so I would suggest at least familiarising yourself with the sorry mess of a situation.

Ok, now onto the real meat of the post: today’s little drama….

It turns out that Kingston received my revised results and then got in contact with UCAS and ‘advised’ them to change me back to my original course (of course ‘advised’ is really an acronym for “what the hell did you change it for you freaking idiots, change it back and then fire whatever poor sod made the mistake of changing it in the first place”), this of course was confirmed on phone call number 1 of 50 to both Kingston and UCAS, so, that is where things end right?? the results have been changed and the offer has been revised to reflect the real course that the original application stated, but wait…there is another snag, because of all the problems, I haven’t received the confirmation letter from UCAS which means that Kingston’s Accommodation Department haven’t allocated me a place in the halls of residence.

So I tap in the UCAS number into the phone, a few seconds later I am greeted with someone’s voice saying that I am ‘in a queue’ (you can guess where this stories going can’t you) this was followed by Spiller – Groove Jet gently fading up from the background. After at least 20 minutes of waiting and listening to the same song, interrupted by the same guys dreary voice every minute or so I finally got through to a human, After several attempts at rewording the same thing sentence “Is there any way of getting the form than through the post” to try and get the woman to understand what I meant, the only words offered were “no…”

So off I went to one of the many numbers that I now have for Kingston Uni, (I have about 8 or 9 in a text document all given to me at different times for different reasons) to ask them if there is any way I can confirm my place without having the letter, the first time I tried, I was told no, but then I tried again, and the second person I asked said “we need it in writing….You could send an email”

Halleluiah – Finally something that can be done electronically and thus instantly, so off I run to my trusty Outlook 2003 mail client and compose a nice professional email explaining the situation and confirming that I would be accepting the unconditional firm offer and sent it off.

Once again I phoned Kingston to see if they had received it, it was here I was told that it wasn’t in front of the woman I spoke to so that meant that it had been dealt with (I’m still not sure if I believe her), I was then passed from department to department like a viral infection and ended up being phoned back by the Faculty Admissions Coordinator, who said that the she couldn’t find out but that I shouldn’t worry because all of the systems should be updated tomorrow.

All of the above doesn’t take into account the dozen or so other phone calls that I made to Kingston and UCAS for other minor reasons to do with the situation.

This is where today’s saga ends, tomorrow there will be more phone calls to track down the whereabouts of the missing email.

From what I can see, from the outside looking in, is that all of the systems are interdependent, and for some reason they don’t get synchronised on a regular basis, I’ve had quite a lot of fun trying to reverse engineer Kingston’s internal application procedures just to try and find out which parts are affected by other organisations, this coupled with the fragmented form that the information is moving around both UCAS and Kingston in it makes the situation 100 times worse, I feel like my mind is going to explode with the amount of information and counter information that I have received yesterday afternoon and today.

This is a common problem in situations like this, you talk to someone, and then the next time you phone you have a different person answer, so you have to explain the situation, which in my case takes about 5 minutes of the total time spent on the phone.

So there you have it….

Side Note: Shane. If I haven’t spoken to you before you read this, give me a ring, I’ll inform you of the things that you need to do

This post has been tagged: Rants, University

Today was supposed to be a happy day, right from 00:00, today there were only going to be one of two outcomes, either fail, or pass.

Each outcome came with its own inherent problems, what happened at 10.30 on the 18th August 2005 would directly affect the rest of my life. The last 7 years of secondary education pivoted on this 1 day, just the few seconds it took to open the envelope and work out what the sheet in front of me was supposed to mean.

Of course, no exam related gathering would be complete with the customary piece of “HAHA….we’re AQA and we like screwing up all of you’re lives” pie in our faces, although by now I was more than ready for this ritual, which may I say, although it brings absolutely no comfort to the situation, AQA seem to have done a fine job not messing up all of the units, instead they just messed up 3 of the units, but we can cut them some slack since we all know they are morons that for some reason are graced with the responsibility and trust that I would rather give to a 3 year old (which incidentally would have been a lot better since even though they can’t count, would probably still manage to get it right).

In traditional AQA style, 1 of the units (Communications and Networks) was completely un-graded, another 2 units (Interactive Multimedia Presentation and Systems Analysis (resubmitted units) were lower than the first time we submitted them, despite the fact that we did more work to them, and didn’t change the underlying work that got us the original mark), in short, they messed up again….

I saw this on the side of the road, I’m not sure when it was put up, but it wasn’t there when I went past a few days before, I think it speaks for itself….

I do have one question though: Does AQA get bailed out by the government, because that’s the only way I can see that they can actually keep the company as a viable business, seeing as they have such an incompetent board of directors and an army of examiners who are equally as stupid

Anyway, I digress, the upshot of the story is that I got the grades (by some act of god) that I need to get into Kingston Uni, however, Kingston didn’t know that….because they were never sent the IT results, just the Business Studies ones, which on their own aren’t enough to get me into a farm, let alone a university.

After several hours of phone calls – most of which were spent waiting for someone to answer, I finally managed to get through to someone at Kingston, who confirmed that they didn’t have all of the results and asked me to fax or post them to the university….which for something that was supposed to be done automatically, is quite funny really. But I must say, it isn’t Kingston’s fault, and they are trying to rectify both mine and Shane’s problems (since we both have the same issue)

So all is not happy, and all is not finished, I still have to make some sense out of the situation and sort all this mess out, unfortunately it will take time, and I don’t want to wait, this is something that I have been building up to for months now, only for it to be partially crushed at the final hurdle.

And in case you were wondering, yes I am annoyed and yes AQA are to blame, as are all of the administrations from Westlands School right up to the University and College Application Service otherwise known as UCAS, each one made mistakes that cascaded down through the system and left me with the mess that I am in at the moment.

This post has been tagged: Rants, University