Wednesday, April 9, 2008!
HandWritten on; 1:33 PM
Assalamualaikum and hello again,
To the mystery responder to my first post, thank you for your response, although it is always nice if you know who you are writing to in a blog. Please be professional - thank you Hafidz for reminding us - and be accountable for your comments by indicating who you are.
There is nothing wrong with disagreeing with one's point of view. That is what higher education is all about - critical thought and scholarly discussion about important issues and ideas. At the end of the day, we can disagree with each other's ideas and still respect one another all the same. This is, in fact, an important aspect of being a professional. I certainly don't take it personally if you don't understand or agree with what I wrote. All the better, it is a sign that I have not been clear in my writing and in communicating my ideas.
I can see that some disagree with what I wrote about credentials the first time. The last critique of what I wrote was:
"Do you means that the PhD students that just graduated don't have knowledge? Do you means that some of the student including lecturer that chasing the credentials don't have a knowledge? If they all don't have a knowledge, so how come they passes all their exam and graduated? At the same time, do you mean that the C student have more knowledge than A student?"
Excellent questions! Actually, the issue I was referring to was not about GRADES per se. Grades are a necessary evil that we must employ to test whether or not students have understood and learned what was covered in the course - to determine whether the learning objectives were achieved. As such, if you graduate with straight A's, it implies that you did learn something - insha-Allah - and we entrust our system at least to the extent that we believe you really did acquire some level of knowledge based on those high grades. So, please, by all means, DO NOT take what I wrote to mean that I don't think grades are important! [They'll probably fire me :-)]
That is not the issue I am talking about. We will have to save debate about the validity of our grading system to another blog...
What I am referring to is something a bit differnt. For example, when graduate students come to us and say that they want to get their Phd quickly so that they can stick it on their name card what does that mean? That means that they are not really concerned with learning, but rather that they want to portray the image of someone who has Phd-level knowledge. There are some people that make a career out of acquiring credentials so that they can show the world how smart and accomplished they are. Whether they actually learned anything or not, only God knows, but the point is that they are not sincere, and that lack of sincerity will show later when they are asked to prove what they know.
I have heard of at least 3 cases (actually 2; 1 of them I only have a strong suspicion) of politicians using credentials like PhD and MBA, who have not yet received such degrees. Why might these individuals feel the desire to be seen as Phd's and MBA's if they never actually completed such programs? The answer is simple - image. They want people to think that they have these credentials in order to appear as people with expertise/knowledge. They want people to take what they say seriously, to have influence and power even though they didn't actually earn those degrees. Perhaps they do not feel that what they actually know is enough to earn people's respect and admiration, so they have to fake it by claiming to have something they do not.
That is the issue that I am referring to - desiring the credential rather than the actual knowledge merely to appear to be something that you are not. I am not implying that someone with credentials has no knowledge. It's a personal thing - some people seek credentials for dishonest and insincere reasons, like I just explained, while others who seek knowledge really earn their credentials. There's a very big difference. I hope and pray that we can all be the latter and not the former!
- Dr. Lateef
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