The reason i set theleavingcert.com up in 2006 was because i wanted to offload all of my notes online. I felt that by burning them or dumping them it was a huge waste. I also couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that every year, 60,000 students finished the leaving cert and all of their material just seemed to vanish, year after year. Why wasn’t it being published? Why couldn’t i access it? These are the questions i asked myself and i took matters in to my own hands by setting up theleavingcert.com…
Today, i find myself asking the same questions about college. Why don’t colleges publish all information they have on file? Why don’t we have a place to review modules and review our course or college? Surely that is extremely useful information for new students looking at certain courses and colleges?
Exam Papers & Solutions
Right now if i want to access past exam papers, i have to (a) pay to get them (b) order them and wait at least a few days. Now let’s think about this for a second…. i complete exams each year and come out of the exam hall with the exam paper. What do i do with it? Bin it. Yet next year, people are PAYING for that paper. It doesn’t make sense.
Not only that, but students prepare notes every year for all exams. I do it. What do i do with those notes after exams? Delete them. Nuke them. And yet again, come this time next year, the poor suckers who have to study the same stuff i’m studying will have to come up with their own notes.
There is something very wrong here. Every assignment submitted for every course should be online and accessible if not by the public, at least by the students attending that college. It just makes sense.
Why are we in college?
We’re in college to learn. More information = more knowledge. I feel all assignments, by all students should be published online along with the grades achieved. All made anonymous. It would benefit students next year and the year after. They would then know what to expect, they know where the bar is, they know how stuff is marked. Would i pay for that information? Definitely.
Most of us will spend at least 3 or 4 years in college so we also get to know the place quite well. This knowledge, again goes missing after we leave. We have opinions on the courses, the modules, the facilities… everything. But there’s no place to discuss them (in public).
Think about a new student looking at colleges & courses. What are they thinking? They want to know what the course is about, what the college is like etc… You can go to an open day or visit a website and get a feel for the place but in my view, that’s all false. It’s not reality.
No college is going to hurt itself or call it as it is. You need to talk to people with no connections to the college in order to get proper feedback on courses and those people are students. It’s the same with a business… or a person… you don’t ask a person what they’re like, you talk to their friends / family / enemies for an all round balanced view…
Yes, yes, yes! I’m all for this. Sharing information like that in colleges would help cut down on the amount of time students spend preparing to learn so they can get down to actual learning and coming up with creative solutions.
Found your blog a few days ago. Keep up the good work.