www.uq.net.au/~zzdonsi/standards.html
Not so Obvious * Doors to buildings (offices, restaurants etc) open outwards. I must admit that it took a few trips to get it straight -- ND (Mar 2000) The uni I went to (in Aus) had a new building attached to the old building. The old building used the English system and the new one used the US system. Most tall buildings I've been in on the East Coast do have G and B on the elevator. I've never even heard of starting a basement or ground-floor at 1. More likely, it's a California thing, they're always trying to be like Europe. Only rarely will the "European" usage be followed, with the first floor one floor up. The floor closest to ground level is almost always considered one. However hotels, especially, often do funny things with this, and may well have a G (or L, for lobby) either instead of, or in addition to, the number one. I also went to a school where the "first" floor was almost fully a basement. If it is a government building, that floor may well be called number 1, for parallelism among the room numbers, where the floor is a prefix to the room. So you can find both 1-200 and B-200 for a room in the basement. You also can also see B2 (and even B3) in very large buildings with many basements. The most COMMON system is still starting with 1 and going through all the numbers. I did stay at a hotel last week which skipped 13, though, for the first time I have seen that in some time. It was mostly dropped after WW2 (the skipping of number 13). Consequently they are about 2-6 years behind the rest of the world in the time it takes to get a professional qualification. Their Year 12 is about equivalent to an Australian Year 10. The American Bachelor Degree is a 4 year general degree where the "major" accounts for only one quarter of the work and is equivalent, in many cases, to the work which Australians do in Years 11 and 12. What Australians study in professional Bachelor degrees Americans study in doctoral degrees: medicine, dentistry, vetinary science, chiropractic, law, etc. American PhD's are 3-5 years in length and include course work and substantial internships. Australian PhD's are 2-3 years in length, are purely research orientated and include little or no course work or internships. Unfortunately almost all Americans equate foreign degrees with their own on a "same-name equals same-level" basis. Most American credential evaluation businesses and academic institutions will do the same. If you need your degree or HSC properly equaluated then you must provide these people with lots of disconfirming evidence. Prior to leaving home we had heard both on a personal and professional level (I'm a teacher) that Americans are behind Australia educationally. As our boys are extremely bright and as we arrived mid year (for America) we argued very strongly that they go to the next year level up, rather than repeat. The intermediate school obliged and one son has been finding the standard of work reasonable, but challenging. Older son was not allowed to start half way through Year 11 and so is repeating the last half of Year 10, much to his disgust. From what I am seeing, though there may be some transitional and emotional effects in play, the actual work he is being asked to do is again of a very similar level/standard as at home and in some cases quite advanced. For the first time in his schooling he is not getting all "A"s. The other big difference I've noticed over here is the apparent lack of computer equipment for students. Although we have only been here a few months, it seems to me that education, within this area at least, is of a very similar standard to Australia. I guess the other factor in all this is that education over here is local and in Australia it is run at a state level. The US has a four-year High School sequence, Australia has a 6-year sequence. A US High School graduate will rarely have more than 4 years of study in the same language, and usually a lot less than that. An Australian student will have up to six years of study in the same language. There are similar examples in Mathematics and Sciences subjects. The US NCES (National Center for Educational Statistics) acknowledges that US students are about 2 years behind the rest of the developed world from about Year 7. They believe the problem is contained in the Middle School years. These years have been described by the researchers of the TIMSS as containing material which is "a mile wide and an inch deep". Because the US educational system uses the Bachelor degree to complete general education, professional education is provided in degrees labelled "Masters" and "Doctorates". Because the "PhD" is used to provide basic professional education, research work of the type done in Australian PhD degrees is undertaken in "post-doctoral research programs". Unfortunately the degree evaluators in the US do not acknowledge this difference in terminology usage. The end result is that professional programs which are accredited by Australian professional bodies for the purposes of a license to practice the profession are not recognised by US credential evaluators who insist that they are not at the right "level". The US assessors will only evaluate professional degrees which are named "Masters" or "Doctorate". All material studied in the Bachelor degree is excluded! This results in the US prescribing degrees such as a research PhD which are not professionally accredited in Australia, while proscribing those which are accredited such as professional Bachelor and Masters degrees . Currently, the only way to practise your profession in the US is to do a course of study which won't get you registered in Australia, or to do a very expensive US degree with a Masters or Doctoral name-tag, which will not be accepted in Australia as being any higher than the qualification which the US won't accept. If Australia applied the same "name" logic to American qualifications all American professionals with PhD's would be excluded from practising in Australia. Professional evaluation in the US is done, in the first instance, by commercial bodies with vested financial interests in down-grading "foreign" qualifications and, only then, by members of the profession in question. Professional licensing boards and Academic Admissions offices generally specify the use of the NACES group of credential evaluators who are affiliated with College Admissions Boards and/or provide their own "up-grade" courses . The NACES group, and the professional licensing boards are under the mistaken belief that NOOSR the Australian Government's National Office of Overseas Skills Recognition is responsible for the evaluation and accreditation of professional qualifications in Australia. NOOSR evaluates and accredits overseas qualifications only for immigration purposes and for placement in non-professional employment. The Australian professional associations are responsible for setting standards and evaluating international professional qualifications. These are the very groups which the US evaluators ignore - because they are not government bodies! They work from "offices" instead of "surgeries" because the MD, unlike the Aussie double Bachelor Medicine AND Surgery does not include training in surgery. If you need minor surgery eg a bone set, a papaloma burnt off, a piece of glass removed from your foot you have to front up to a hospital Emergency Room (ER) or wait for weeks to see a specialist. If your child is ill you have to book him in to see a Paediatrician. Like American professional training in general, medicine is a set of hyper-focused specialities obtained on the top of a very narrow general basis. You have to know a lot about your particular disorder so that you can figure out which specialist you should be seeing. Since they know very little about the rest of medicine you can sit in front of one and die of a heart-attack before they realise you are having one unless they happen to be a cardiac surgeon . According to one of the primary articles of the US National Faith the US has the best doctors and everything else in the world. The results from the last 28 years of the Australian Medical Council overse...
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