USMMA path to USCG

USMMA2009
Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:03:05 +0000

Not only is that my view, it is the same view as the majority of my classmates as well as many of the professors. For example, while taking an advanced tankers course, the professor asked me one day after class if I could tutor some of his students. He said that he has people failing all over the place, and he had never seen it before. Its not a hard class by any means, and the teacher was pretty embarrassed that people were having a tough time with the class. I’m convinced that the problem is not with the professor or the way he teaches (he has been teaching this course for 15+ years with no issues before, and he wrote the book) but more so with the quality of the students admitted as well as the administration. It seems to me that over the course of the last 4 years or so, there has been a stronger push to “recruit” more athletes to KP rather than students with strong academic backgrounds. A lot of these students have no idea what they are getting themselves into, and end up dragging down the rest of the class. On top of that, the administration has such a lax academic policy that many are allowed to retake a course or they are just given an academic setback. While I can’t speak for my all my classmates, there are definitely a group of people that have lost a lot of pride about KP. I used to think that graduating from KP (and on time, for that matter) was a pretty respectable thing to do, but after seeing many of my current classmates and current midshipmen barely scrape by and weasel there way through the system, it has simply become a joke to me. I think KP really needs to take a hard look at its policies as well as its administration, and start bringing in students of a higher caliber.