So I was a bit bored at work and thought, I know I’ll see what Jon has on his site to entertain me and I read this…hahaha! How true….

I went to TVU to do my CIM Prof. Dip in marketing, and while the standard of the students was way higher than in your class (all mature students who wanted this qualification to progress their careers) the standard of teaching wasn’t. We had some dude who was obviously very good at his marketing job but was awful at teaching. So we all failed his part of the course first time round. That was unless you did the assignment rather than the exam - if you did the assignment it was sent back to you until it was passable, even if that meant it was virtually rewritten by the tutor - got to get those pass rates up! The head of the dept. was one of our tutors and insiste that we did homework every week but we never ever got it back marked. We even had to do a 3000 wrd essay for her and when we hadn’t received it back about a month before the exams (and two months after we had written it) we asked when we were going to get it. Her response was ‘Oh sorry I haven’t got time to mark it before the exams’ - Sorry love, but how the hell are we supposed to know if we’re on the right track if you won’t even mark our work. I wish I’d gone to Bracknell and Wokingham college - they have a much better reputation.

1) Whatever the value of the peice of paper, you still have what you’ve learnt, which is the real reward for the effort you put in.

2) Didn’t you check out the course’s reputation before signing up? Did you ask reputable firms what qualification they’d like you to get?

3) Re “government agency charged with closing the nation’s skills gap”: You *can’t* solve a shortage of anything with central planning. There is no single example of this ever working anywhere. If you centrally plan the food supply, you get famine. If you centrally plan building of houses, you get a housing shortage. It’s just the way the world works. The lesson: steer clear of anything that’s tainted by government attempts to solve a “problem”. In the case of plumbing, when there’s a plumber shortage, plumbers will get more expensive. This sends out market signals which results in… Polish plumbers. (That’s the real solution to a skills shortage — market signals, not government.) Don’t complain about it; you can’t fight it.

In your case, seems like you responded to market signals (plumbers earn lots of money), but chose a course tainted with government attempts to make the numbers look good, and hence got a raw deal. On the bright side: you still have the skills and knowlege from all your effort. If you can convince someone that you’re above average and worth giving a job, all is not lost.

Final thought: what’s to stop you setting up on your own? There must be a niche for an honest plumber who charges good rates. Play it sensibly and you could expand to a regional or national brand that people trust. The model: recruit promising youngsters (or Poles) and train them up yourself. And don’t let politicians near you.

On the other hand, the library (or “Learning Recourses Centre”) is a much better working environment, and the staff are quite friendly, they’ve often given me a hand finding a book or gotten journals from the British library for me.

My department is the department if professional studies, and I didn’t find the HND in Applied Computing I did to be the “Mickey Mouse” degree you imply - a lot of people certainly dropped out, which is not a good thing but I don’t think staff were stopped form kicking people off. Obviously, if you paid £3000 for a course, the decision isn’t going to be made lightly. I have no complaints at all with regards to the faculty staff. The 3rd year as been tough, very tough. I was averaging grades of 80% on the HND, and that’s dropped to 60% this year, and god knows what it’ll go down to after the exams! Oh and please don’t blame Tony Blair for TVU’s misgivings!
Nice site anyway.