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Josiah shilling for College Plus


MrsYoungie

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My niece is starting college a year early - a four-year university. She's graduating High School at the end of her junior year. She's a hard worker and pretty smart, but she has a pretty normal life, a boyfriend, lots of friends, and after-school activities. It's not that common, but it's also not impossible. The only thing I'm worried about is that she's pretty idealistic and that the (typical) year between 16 and 17 is full of learning experiences. (But alas, she's not my child, so I have to keep my mouth shut, lol.)

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It depends on your definition of studying, I guess. I wouldn't call being able to answer those questions the result of studying literature. They're trivia questions. Knowing the answers wouldn't require any real scholarship or intellectual effort on the Duggars' part. You'd find the same questions in a game of Trivial Pursuit.

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Those questions are utterly terrifying. My sister graduated with an English degree last year, and her course covered over a thousand years of literature, famous and obscure, in great detail. She had to learn Old English and write essays on Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon; she had to learn Middle English and write essays on Chaucer; she had to get inside the heads of drugged-up American essayists from the Fifties and overwrought English philosophers from the Twenties. That's why it's a degree, that's why it takes three years, that's why they expect you to attend lectures and read background texts and submit dissertations.

Anything less is just called 'reading', which is an excellent thing to do but you don't get a bloody prize for it.

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Those questions are utterly terrifying. My sister graduated with an English degree last year, and her course covered over a thousand years of literature, famous and obscure, in great detail. She had to learn Old English and write essays on Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon; she had to learn Middle English and write essays on Chaucer; she had to get inside the heads of drugged-up American essayists from the Fifties and overwrought English philosophers from the Twenties. That's why it's a degree, that's why it takes three years, that's why they expect you to attend lectures and read background texts and submit dissertations.

Anything less is just called 'reading', which is an excellent thing to do but you don't get a bloody prize for it.

Agreed. I minored in Literature and recall routinely typing up 20 plus page essays analyzing the works of everyone from Chaucer to Kafka to Sinclair Lewis. Simply knowing that Tom Joad was a character in Grapes of Wrath is utterly meaningless whether the student is in college or in middle school.

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I have an English degree... and yes, part of the lower-division classes was learning about the major works, characters, etc. We had quizzes occasionally where we would read excerpts from the works we were studying and we had to write a paragraph identifying the text, the author, the "period" and the significance of the excerpt.

In my Shakespeare classes, where we read 10 or 15 plays, we would sometimes have small sections of the exams where we were given a list of characters and we had to identify the play in which that character appeared and what their significance was to the play.

My professors basically used those quick answer quizzes to keep us honest with the reading, and they were worth maybe 10% of our grade. The other 90% was based on our critical essays where we had to go way beyond "Elizabeth Bennett was a character in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice." My program requried classes in Middle and Old English, at least one class in literature other than English (I "cheated" and took Irish Lit :) ), and an advanced composition class, amongst other requirements.

I can't believe that a multiple choice exam like that would be considered the equivalent to a college class where you read, write, and discuss texts in a critical manner!!

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I thought I would give the math CLEP a try. They seem to have wrong answers.

4. Which of the following numbers are prime?

I. 2

II. 19

III. 57

IV. 71

II only

I, III, and IV only

I, II, and III only

I and II only

I, II, and IV only

I answered the last one (i.e. III = 57 = not prime)

I got scored as incorrect. Their answer was the second one. (i.e. 19 is not prime) On what freaking planet is 19 not a prime number????

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WTF? On what planet is 19 not prime, and on what planet is 57 prime?

You don't even have to know that 57/3=19. You just have to know the rule that if the sum of the integers in a number is divisible by three, so is the number. 5+7=12. 12 is divisible by 3, therefore 57 is too.

The question doesn't even ask you to do real math, and even if it did, on what planet is regular old division college-level work? Kids should be mastering division in fourth grade. For college credit, this should be a calculus test.

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I also had college credits under my belt when I graduated high school. The credits came from a state university. This was 20 years ago, so the concept is not exactly new. Of course, I can't imagine that JB & Michelle would have know this. They don't seem like the types to have been pushed into AP classes in high school. Hahaha...I can't say that last sentence without laughing.

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I agree; it's all about control. The Duggars' public image, and much of their living, is based on trotting all those smiling, obedient kids out before the cameras, putting them on display as a unified family. They aren't going to take any risks, and real education? That's a risky business. :ugeek:

Ideally, traveling around the world would be part of one's education--you'd learn about the places you were traveling to, the local cultures, etc. More importantly, you'd come to understand that your own knowledge and assumptions about how the world works are not universal, and that the world is a far more complicated place than you'd been led to believe. Being educated through travel isn't so much about learning lots of facts as it is about shaping a complex, nuanced worldview.

But either way, I don't see that happening with the Duggarlings. No matter where they go in the world, their experience is still tightly controlled and mediated by their parents.

It's not that he's a little douche; it's that he just doesn't know. He's a 15-year-old kid living in a highly-controlled, closed, authoritarian environment. That public school kids can earn college credit isn't something he'd know about because public school (and probably any kids who attend it) is outside of his experience. The only options he will be presented with are the ones his parents approve of--hence, CollegeMinus.

I agree traveling is a good part of education. But what I meant to say is that the Duggars need to realize that in the real world you can't play other aspects of your life around travel plans.

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Amen. I took the AP Euro exam my senior year, and the thing was a nightmare. Several hours long and lots and lots of writing. Same with my AP Lit and English Language tests. When I got to college I CLEP'd out of my American history class in about an hour. There is no comparing the two.

I took the AP European History exam as a sophomore, the AP US History exam as a junior, and an IB History Exam (SL-European) as a senior. I got a 3, a 5 and 4 on those, respectively. The IB exam required a research project that took a semester to research and write. I also took other AP/IB courses in high school (English, Spanish, Biology) that I didn't take the exams for. They all required a lot of writing, lab work and collaborative time with classmates...

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OK, be honest... what FJ-er commented on the article?

:lol:

I will take credit for the above mentioned quote in bold (hi everyone, I guess I outed myself). I love posting anti-Duggar tirades on those types of articles. Notice in the 'comments' section, the "Director of Marketing" at CollegeMinus-! wrote back to me.

*Edited because I can't figure out how to quote here on FJ properly.

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I will take credit for the above mentioned quote in bold (hi everyone, I guess I outed myself). I love posting anti-Duggar tirades on those types of articles. Notice in the 'comments' section, the "Director of Marketing" at CollegeMinus-! wrote back to me.

HAHA!!

He could have just stopped here

Yes, [muffynbear's secret identity], it's all a big huge scam.

I know we live in a new world, and maybe I am just antediluvian, but anything you have to prove with YouTube clips? Show me real colleges or employers talking about the success, sure, but YouTube?

And also, I would be pissed as a business owner if my employees were that sarcastic in response to a critic. Really not the brightest bulbs over there, eh?

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I got 5's on AP spanish, english, history, calc, and bio. Thanks GAWD i did because when I was a senior and too drunk to pass my classes, the dean nicely used them and let me graduate.

But, um, that's not a good AP story. :)

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I got 5's on AP spanish, english, history, calc, and bio. Thanks GAWD i did because when I was a senior and too drunk to pass my classes, the dean nicely used them and let me graduate.

But, um, that's not a good AP story. :)

Wait, that's not what AP credits are for? I had a ton and let me tell you - thank goodness. Senior year = :obscene-drinkingbuddies::obscene-drinkingcheers::obscene-drinkingchug::obscene-drinkingdrunk:

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Wait, that's not what AP credits are for? I had a ton and let me tell you - thank goodness. Senior year = :obscene-drinkingbuddies::obscene-drinkingcheers::obscene-drinkingchug::obscene-drinkingdrunk:

I finally found my tribe. Join me sister, and let us carouse! :text-callme:

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I answered harder questions than that playing Trivial Pursuit with my family on Thanksgiving.

I can see how these tests would be useful in some situations. I have History 101 (first semester Western Civ) on my transcript because that's how a class I took at my first college (which had nothing to do with Western Civ) transfered. If that wasn't the case, I would consider a CLEP test because I think taking 101 at this point would make me poke my eyes out.

I have 26 credits on my college transcript as a result of AP tests and SAT scores (they let you out of English 101/102 if you score high enough on the language portion). That's a year's worth of credits.

I will say that I didn't find AP classes to be truly "college level" though. Don't get me wrong, they were damn hard. But the teachers were always more focused on making sure we knew how to finagle a good score on the AP test than on whether we actually learned the material. I had one AP teacher who would tell us, at least once a week, "Just remember X because it's always on the test every year."

Not that I think APs are worthless. I loved my AP classes. I just think they're very much still high school level stuff.

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Those literature questions are scary. I never read anything in English, certainly not famous literature, and just from random conversations with people or allusions in conversation (okay, I did read "Grapes of Wrath" translated, when I was a kid) I could answer those. Scary.

We did have serious auto-scan tests for math on college entrance exams (for Japanese university, though I didn't go) though. It would be a math problem that expects a numeric answer, and then you bubble in the right answer on a multilple-row answer spot, so say it's a 4 digit number, you bubble in each digit.

Language questions for us were all about read this passage which is designed to be confusing and use complicated words, and then answer questions about it. And ALWAYS a few of the questions were "give your answer in 100 characters or less" free form writing, where you had to get the right answer AND had to word it such that you get really close to 100 characters without going over. If you answer it in 50, you're probably wrong. Those a human had to grade.

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college minus Really shows how gullible fundies are if if such things match their restricted worldviews. It's amazing how much the\y will throw away to scams if they have the same viewpoint.

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I finally found my tribe. Join me sister, and let us carouse! :text-callme:

After exams, perhaps? I'm finding grad school not so conducive to the carousing :(

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OK, be honest... what FJ-er commented on the article?

:

If Josiah Duggar said any of that, I'll eat my hat! That interview does not sound like Josiah. It sounds like it is written by the College Plus Marketing department.

I'm betting when the Duggars signed their endorsment deal they gave College Plus the right to use their childrens' likenesses in marketing materials. What we have here is JB selling out his son without Josiah even knowing about it.

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Those questions are utterly terrifying. My sister graduated with an English degree last year, and her course covered over a thousand years of literature, famous and obscure, in great detail. She had to learn Old English and write essays on Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon; she had to learn Middle English and write essays on Chaucer; she had to get inside the heads of drugged-up American essayists from the Fifties and overwrought English philosophers from the Twenties. That's why it's a degree, that's why it takes three years, that's why they expect you to attend lectures and read background texts and submit dissertations.

Anything less is just called 'reading', which is an excellent thing to do but you don't get a bloody prize for it.

I'm graded by the top English PhD candidates in the nation. This semester? 25 pages on Austen and Scott and a short paper (7-10 pp) AND a sit-down ID/essay on a course that was an awesome mix of mid-19th c. American writers (Poe to Barnum to the heavyweights). How ironic that two of the answers on that College Minus "test" came from either works (Civil Disobedience - read before) and poems (although not the snake) by writers covered this semester? Hell, to get Dickinson right on a test like that, just tell your Duggar kid to look for dashes and the theme of death. You'd think the Maxwells would dig her. :mrgreen:

Civil Disobedience? Like the fundies would touch that (or any Thoreau/Whitman...teh ghey!!!!!111) with a 10 ft. pole(cat). If they had a dictionary, they might like some aspects of Emerson, but since his experiment of self-sustenance failed, they've probably crossed him off the list as well.

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He needs something to do to earn money, you can only have so many used car lots and towing services in town.

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Nope. But he probably still has more than a CollegeMinus degree. I'm betting the Duggar kids don't ever get to be Director of anything, at least not if they stay on this educational path to nowhere.

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With 19 kids (and one on the way), I'm willing to be at least a few will escape to college. The show is exposing the kids to people they usually don't associate with such as the camera crew. The Duggar kids are traveling and meeting people for their shows, and I can only see that as a good thing. Maybe one of the Duggar girls will get into her head that she wants to be a marine biologist because she met a really awesome one. Maybe that dream of doing more than popping out babies will propel her to eventually go to college. With that many kids, there's gotta to be a few that will turn into the family black sheep, right? :D

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