Tech's identity crisis

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Re: Literature, Communication, and Culture

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Literature, Communication, and Culture Department

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Do we really have one of those?

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Yup. Good ol' LCC. Thank god I started in on a catalogue that did not include LCC 3401.

I don't know what majors LCC has. Maybe Science, Technology and Culture (STAC). Then there's History of Technology in Society (HTS) -- not sure if that dpt. has any majors. Wish I kept my old catalogue, but I might have happily burned it 1.5 years ago :).
 
Re: Literature, Communication, and Culture

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[ QUOTE ]
Literature, Communication, and Culture Department

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Do we really have one of those?

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Yup. Good ol' LCC. Thank god I started in on a catalogue that did not include LCC 3401.

I don't know what majors LCC has. Maybe Science, Technology and Culture (STAC). Then there's History of Technology in Society (HTS) -- not sure if that dpt. has any majors. Wish I kept my old catalogue, but I might have happily burned it 1.5 years ago :).

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The only undergrad degree that is offered by LCC, as far as I know, is STAC like you said. HTS is a dept to itself and offers an HTS major which is more or less history and sociology along with some political science stuff thrown in for good measure. HTS is great stuff for electives and getting away from math for a bit, LCC on the other hand is nothing more than a neccessary evil /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/puke.gif.
 
Re: Tech\'s identity crisis

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We are seen as nerds and rightfully so. Our student population is incredibly nerdy on average.

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With this background in mind, how much of an impact do you think it has on the appeal of our school to the typical football prospect (a meathead with a substantially weaker academic background than our average student and a dramatically different social and cultural background than the bulk of our student body) when guys from "the 'hood" walk across campus and through our library and CS Dept?
 
Re: Tech\'s identity crisis

I'm sure that the attitudes that some "nerds" have towards the student athletes do not help. There are kids on campus who actually say that the presence of an athletics program degrades their quality of education and waters down the value of a degree at Georgia Tech. I have heard a lot of BS in my life, but this takes the cake as far as Georgia Tech education is concerned. I could spend 12 long paragraphs ranting about the fallacies of such poor logic, but I'll sum up my thoughts by saying that these academic blowhards fail to understand that having a personality matters more at a job interview than where you got your undergraduate degree.

I fail to comprehend the attitudes that some students have and I do believe that they contribute at least a little towards the campus environment. I don't know if this is something that potential recruits notice in their visits, but I know that I am quite irritated by the way that a small population of Tech students are with their cutthroat academic pomposity.

As far as how this relates to Tech student athletes being inferior Tech students, it doesn't. For every Georgia Tech student athlete that struggles in the classroom, there is a fairly proportional amount of regular Georgia Tech students that struggle in the classroom. Go back to last summer with the flunkouts. Think of how many regular students were kicked out of school with no fanfare and compare that with all the press received by the 11 student athletes.

Since Tech recruits athletes who are good students in the first place, that in my opinion does not play as much a factor in intimidating recruits so much as the way students viciously try to claw each other's eyes out to get a passing grade. I've once had a classmate tell me he was glad that I decided to stay in a class after the drop date because I was not doing well in the class and I would "boost the curve for him."
 
Re: Tech\'s identity crisis

Are you a current student? What year are you?

You make some ill-found generalities. Applying specific mentalities to a general context is misleading. At every school, there is gonna be people who share the notion that athletics devalue their education. You make it seem as if a larger portion of the Tech population feels that way in comparison to other schools. And we all know how fictitious that is. I've been at Tech for a while, and I've never even met anyone who thought like that. I don't know who you are hanging out with, but that mentality is not widespread at Tech. Don't lead people on by stating otherwise. Most students don't detest athletics. They are just not interested.

And you bring up the cutthroat academic climate at Tech. There is no such extreme competition at Tech for grades. The competition that does exist is a product of our academic system not our student body. Most classes are curved, since most professors are forced to assign a certain percentage of each grade. If they give out a high percentage of As and Bs, they get put on probation. That's just the way it works at Tech.

You are painting Tech students in a disparaging light and assigning blame to the wrong people. You can't base an argument on a single occurrence and then generalize that mindset to the rest of our school.
 
Re: Tech\'s identity crisis

I'd have to say that our academic climate is somewhere in the middle of your viewpoints. There are definitely a lot of students who don't care about the sports teams. Mostly these people are foreign and/or they view Georgia Tech the same as they would Caltech and MIT with less academic prestige. Whiney CS nerds aside (these are rarely interested in sports no matter what school), Tech has a lot of serious students that are there for education and not for the college atmosphere. The schools academic standards are constantly improving, and the intellectual mindset promotes that. The out of state kids and especially international students rarely care. That's understandable, as Georgia Tech has no real rivals outside of UGAg anymore. That is largely a product of the switch from SEC to ACC. People have forgotten which teams (e.g. Auburn) we have a real imperative to make a big deal of games over.

I am pretty sure there are no strict guidelines at tech when I went there. Either that or there were some professors who completely ignored them. The only instance I can think of regarding this is my DiffEq prof (first semeseter @ Tech) who gave a shaft final and automatically gave an A to anyone in the class who made a B or above on it (totally unannounced plan) just to get the grade distribution the way the dept. recommended. Me? I got a 57 on the final and ended up with a B when I needed a 59 to get an A and he wouldn't change my grade. I blew it off as an assured A and concentrated on my other 5 finals and got the shaft. Oh well.
 
Re: Tech\'s identity crisis

My intent was not to paint the entire student body with that brush, though I guess it may have seemed that way. I thought I had made it clear I was talking about a small faction of students, but apparently that was not the case. In no way was I trying to imply that Tech harvests an environment that does not support the sports programs. Georgia Tech is a far cry from the types of things that have been happening at Vanderbilt.

I am a senior with a 3+ GPA. Having spent some time with the CS department, what I speak of regarding the nature of students in its lower level classes is often true. I acknowledge that is less so the case for other majors. My views are strongly slanted against the CS department because I know what goes on there and that's why my rants have mainly focused around that department. I have tried to not apply that to the rest of the student body, but the voices and the sentiments of those students who have been though the CS department, even just for introductory CS (everybody), are still widely known on campus.

All the core CS classes through sophomore year are cutthroat classes because they are considered weed-out classes. Were you aware of the cheating scandal in 2001 where over 100 students were caught cheating in the lowest-level computer science class? Were you aware that the main CS2130 professor, probably the most notorious professor in the whole department, was let go because he failed too many students? That is a case of a professor who has been reprimanded for failing too many students. Do you have knowledge of cases where the converse is true?

I have tried to make the point that this type of sentiment does not apply to most of the students on campus, but those who have a chip on their shoulder will always make more noise than the ones who are content. Now, I doubt that disgruntled students would make themselves available to talk to potential recruits, especially when those who I speak of aren't in Management, the most common student athlete major.

Tying this back to how this affects a potential recruit, it really doesn't because as I've already said, Tech won't recruit athletes who can't carry their weight in the classroom. Georgia Tech will always have a reputation for being a bigger player in academics than in athletics. However, that most definitely affects recruiting on the bigger scale and affects the type of success that this school will have in athletics. While we do a better job of it than many other schools that are forced to deal with this balancing act, just winning isn't a simple solution to the identity crisis that was brought up at the start of this thread. I am not advocating a dumbing down of the academic program and I am in fact strongly opposed to it. However, the sports culture at Georgia Tech is not as strong as that of the Florida States and Miami of Floridas to do what's necessary to establish a strong and consistent marketing identity. The non-sports people have a bigger voice here than they do at those schools and thus there isn't the same all-out effort to get the Georgia Tech brand established. There is most definitely a problem with the marketing of Georgia Tech athletics, and that can easily be seen in all the complaints people have had about the way GTAA does things.
 
Re: Tech\'s identity crisis

It was in CS1322 (Java). I was a TA for the class at the time. They might have used the same cheat finder for CS1311 though, but I know it was developed by the Java TAs.

They fired Greenlee? Really? He didn't fail that many students, but he gave away a lot of D's which is effectively the same thing.
 
Re: Tech\'s identity crisis

My heavens boys, please stop proving my point. We need to get off this esoteric crap. This board, as far as I understand it, is about sports. The academics is a given, let it go and START WINNING THE FREAKING BIG GAMES. IT IS ABOUT WINNING THE BIG GAMES. GET THE DAMN JOB DONE CLOUGH, D.B., AND EVERYONE ELSE OR GET LOST. WIN.
 
Re: Tech\'s identity crisis

Yeah, I'm aware of the CS1321/1322 cheating. But how does that prove your point of cutthroat academics? Students were working together/copying code to get a good grade. That's not an example of them clawing each others' eyes out. They were collaborating not competing.

One of the ChemE profs I had is on "probation" for having a average class GPA over 3.0. Of course, it's not official (no department head would ever admit to doing that), and there's no way of actually finding out. But that's what others have always said.

I got out of having to take CS1321, so I don't really know much about the CS department. Is there definite proof that Greenlee got fired because of failing too many? I looked up his grade distributions, and it was only for one class one semester. And only 13% failed that class. In comparison to other profs, that is not a big number. I can hardly imagine that that was the reason he got fired. If he was an incompetent teacher whom the department received a lot of complaints about, that would justify a firing.
 
Re: Tech\'s identity crisis

GO JACKETS!!!! BEAT THE **** OUT OF DEM DAWGS!!!!


Is that what you want to hear? Yeah, posts like that are really productive. There's nothing esoteric about talking about Tech's academics in order to understand how people view our school and, consequently, our athletics. This is a university with a solid athletics program, not a professional sports franchise. There will always be a relationship between sports and academics on the college level. If you completely look past Tech as a university, what separates us from UGA?
 
Re: Tech\'s identity crisis

I really should not pass on hearsay, because even though I know some people in the department, I can't be 100% sure of the accuracy of what they've told me. I apologize for that.

I'll just concede my points now since there's nothing else I can really add or say to defend my prior statements. Posting that early in the morning never leads to anything coherent upon review on the following day. I admit that my ranting was largely based on personal experience and the misfortune of having to work with those types of people to cloud my overall and broader judgment.

Sorry to hijack your thread, carson4k. I'll just shut up now.
 
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