Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>Two observations about cognitive and communicative abilities of the students
>are in order:
>(i) foreign born students were admittedly better qualified to teach math and
>science than native students; and
>
The way I heard it when I was dating guys in the Ph.D. program in
electrical engineering at Berkeley was that there were very few American
applicants to the Ph.D. program because a Ph.D. made very little
difference to earning potential after graduation. So the Americans went
into the labor market right after the B.S. or the M.S, and the spots in
grad school were wide open for the foreigners.
>(ii) native born college students had problems understanding somebody
>speaking their own language with an accent; one might expect that of an
>uneducated burger flipper, but college students are supposed to have
>superior cognitive and communicative abilities, at least according to the
>official standards of admission.
>
Wait a second, I make my living working with foreign-born engineers
(mostly from China and India). They are hard to understand, and it's
not because I'm stupid or badly educated. For example, it's almost
impossible to understand over the phone. But even in person, it's very
hard because I am trying to do two things at once: grok the technical
content of their communication and understand the words. This puts me in
an identical position to an undergraduate. The problem with Indian
speakers is that they speak much more rapidly than English speakers and
the cadence of the speech is very different. The accent itself is
beautiful. The problem with Chinese speakers is a certain "mushiness" of
some sounds and a different intonation. When you're trying to
understand calculus, physics, overloaded operators, transport protocols,
etc., it's hard, hard, hard.
Joanna
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