What's the cheapest and fastest way to get a university degree?

[Panphobia]

Where did you come from, if you don't mind me asking? Yes I know my english mark is not good, but eh I can switch to UW later if I want.

[crossley7]

Ok, well this should probably be in a different thread but I will make this comment for your benefit about the math assignments and why English is important.

First: Waterloo really stresses english because they want people that can organize thoughts and express them in a good manner and that is one thing that english teaches you (albeit not very well at times) so english marks are important. Also, for writing co-op work term reports or essays for electives you have to be able to write well or you will suffer.

On the assignments, it makes sense you are clueless right now because there is a lot of new material or material covered differently than it is in high school. They are well structured and challenging at the end of a week in which you were taught the material. I've had assignments due the following friday that I could maybe answer 1 question on but after the next 2-3 classes you have the tools or at least basic knowledge required to approach all the problems and solve most.

[Tony]

crossley7 @ Tue May 14, 2013 11:10 pm wrote:

Also, for writing co-op work term reports or essays for electives you have to be able to write well or you will suffer.

More importantly, one needs to be able to communicate their ideas well. You might have a good idea for designing and building a system, and a business around this novel software, but without being able to explain those ideas to the wider community, it would be very difficult to get far.

[Nathan4102]

Did any of your guy's English mark drop as you progressed through high school? Like I have a 88 right now, but does it get significantly harder in 11 and 12?

[mirhagk]

Yeah I really wish that the writing English course counted as an English course. It's vitally important to know how to write, and write well, but in my school we only wrote 2 things the entire year, hamburgers (ugly and horrible) style essays, and poetry. I am pretty good at writing essays and reports, but I don't like poetry, and I'm not good at memorizing all the terms for various parts of a story, so I failed on all those sections, while getting really good on the essay writing section.

I got almost perfect on the one essay we had that wasn't on critiquing another work, which is probably what they care about (I don't think it matters how well I can analyze shakespeare, or write poetry, as long as I can write essays and reports). So I had pretty much perfect for what they cared about, yet I got 60s in the course, so it looks like I can't write at all.

[Dan]

Nathan4102 @ 15th May 2013, 8:48 am wrote:

Did any of your guy's English mark drop as you progressed through high school? Like I have a 88 right now, but does it get significantly harder in 11 and 12?

For me, my english grades went up as the courses became less about spelling and grammar and more about the ideas you are trying to express (noramly as a response or criticism to a book, article, etc).

mirhagk wrote:

...but in my school we only wrote 2 things the entire year, hamburgers (ugly and horrible) style essays, and poetry. I am pretty good at writing essays and reports, but I don't like poetry, and I'm not good at memorizing all the terms for various parts of a story, so I failed on all those sections, while getting really good on the essay writing section.

What kind of highschool did you go to? The first highschool I went to (before I moved at the end of grade 11) was horrible and the english teacher had a mental breakdown in class and yet it sounds like it had a better english program than that. At the very least, your ISU should have had you writing more then two things.

[Panphobia]

Yeaa....if you went to school in Ontario and recently I don't think it is possible to only write two things, let me see. We had a 2000 word essay in the first month on a book we read, that was our ISU. Then we had an 800-900 word persuasive essay. Then we had 1000 word essay on a topic in the book Frankenstein. THEN we had a 1200 word essay on King Lear (Shakespeare). Errmmmm then we had to write like 2 argumentative essays, and for our final exam we had to write an essay, sooo we didn't even have poetry in grade 12.

[randint]

English is what is killing my average, even though my other courses are not good. But still, I do not have to take any of those in Waterloo, which helps significantly.