PLZ SEE ME RE: LAST EXAM - BAD GRADE, NOT PAYING ATTN :-(

Babson college professor Kara Miller throws down the gauntlet to American college students who want to flirt and text and daydream.

And she is 100% correct that foreign students work much harder than us and do much better, even with a language gap.  That's because they value higher education and want to succeed through it, while American students see their four years as a time to party and socialize (among other things), and then once they get their first job, they are woefully unprepared.

If you want to know the bane of managers and supervisors, it's escorting the underperforming employee to the Human Resources department to tell them their services are no longer required.  In college, it's called the academic dismissal.

Full disclosure and addendum: While I was in college, I garnered a 3.2 grade point average.  That's a high B, almost near B+ average.  There were times where I should have been more proactive in getting my work done, but when I left graduate school (and didn't return), I had two C's; the minimum grade is a B.  I would have been put on academic probation the next semester.  If I had gotten another C, I would have been academically dismissed.  If you're a A or B student who works hard and grabs the concepts well, then professors notice it.  When you're a C or D student who doesn't try (or tries too hard in the drinking and hooking up department) then the professors know it isn't their subject matter that's the problem - it's you.

Control freaks at Johns Hopkins University

The worst type of control freak is one who is put out by the slightest millimeter of offense, and then proclaims numbers of "acts" to gain back forgiveness. These are the types of people who are so insecure, so afraid of incivility, so afraid to offend, that they display their fit of pique in a way the Marquis of Sade would implore them to stop.

Witness the self-flagellation and acts of Job that the professors of Johns Hopkins attempted to put through this student (advice: read thoroughly re: Baltimore, please!) before the public and FIRE* screamed blue murder.

The extreme overreaction at JH screams academic totalitarianism - more worthy of the Soviet Union than at a college that pledges "diversity, tolerance, and understanding." Not when those three are at the discretion of very narrow minds.

*the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education