I hope that this report is read by other ITT students and those that are seeking an "education" through ITT. When I started at ITT, I was astonished in my first classes at how slow things started out. The first "math" class was all elementary math. However, this in itself is excusable, seeing as many of the students hadnt been in a classroom in a very long time.
However, things havent sped up much. With the exception of one teacher (I believe him to be an exception), all of our classes have been incredibly elementary and unhelpful. I could have taught myself the course content of an entire quarter by simply sitting down and messing with the program for a few hours.
However, this is only the least of our complaints (in our, I am speaking of a number of students that feel cheated). About ten of us got outraged to the point that we wrote a letter to the school administrator, as per ITT's own complaint procedure.
The letter had three major points. First of all, ITT advertises that you can learn all of the cutting edge technology. However, at the time of the writing of the complaint, there wasnt a single piece of software on the systems that was up to date. Not even the OS. Some of the software was 2-3 major releases behind. The discrepancies were inexcusable. Since the writing of the letter, they have updated a single piece of software on the machines (3d studio max), and we have seen no effort to do anything further.
The second issue was with removable hard drives. All of us that wrote the letter were in the multimedia course. We were ALL told by different "guidance counselors" (tour guides) that we would recieve our own personal hard drives to store all of our projects on and take them home to work on them. Turns out that was an outrageous lie. The multimedia program gets removable hard drives, but they are locked up in a cabinet during non-class time and we cannot take them home with us. Not only that, but EVERYONE in the multimedia department has access to these hard drives, and on multiple times me and my friends have lost important projects due to other students tampering with our drives.
The third issue, and perhaps the most pressing, is the introduction of NIIT books.in order to "customize the curriculum to the course content and course syllabus", ITT went and created their own publishing company, NIIT. This company is based in new delhi, india. It is likely that the authors of the books reside in india as well.
The inadequacy of these books is beyond belief. They are FULL of grevious errors, many of which are simply inexcusable. Sometimes we spend more time trying to figure out what we think they may have meant, rather than actually learning. The programming books, in particular, have errors that take up most of the class trying to resolve.
These books are written at about the fourth grade reading level, no joke. They are blatently simplistic, and innacurate. The only classes in which we learn anything, are the classes in which we dont actually use the books.in fact, on the first day of class, we in essence covered the first ten or so chapters of the book (a twelve chapter book).
The lab manuals are even more atrocious. They can be better described as pamphlets. The labs are irrelevant, and can be easily finished in three minutes or less, without learning a thing.in my current class, I have already thrown away all of my lab manuals.
When the accreditation council came by the school, the dean went into every single class and told us that we shouldnt tell the council about the books, since it really isnt their job... Right, like the accreditation council doesnt care about our curriculum. Turns out that was exactly what they wanted.
These book are not worthy of the title of textbooks. One time in class I was so disgusted with a NIIT book that I began ripping it apart, in the middle of class, in mid-quarter. The class applauded. The teacher even seemed to approve. I have come up with a strategy of simply tearing out the pages that might come in handy and putting them in a folder. I could go on for days on how awful these books are.
Anyways, we wrote a letter to the administration. They insisted on meeting with us individually, and outnumbering us, by sitting us down in a room with one student, the administrator, the dean, the assistant dean, and a program chair. These types of scare tactics should be reserved for interrogations, not business. Then they told us that the complaint had already gone straight to corporate, and that we didnt have to bother sending a letter to them. Well, we believed them, until a student called corporate on a seperate issue, and corporate told her that they had NEVER recieved a complaint from our school. Basically, the school administrator lied straight to my face.
I have two more quarters left. I am going to speak with ITT corporate to try to get the issues resolved, at least the books and the hard drives. If they dont do something in a hurry, me and many other students are considering class action legal action. We have wasted 30 grand and two years of our lives on this, time that we could have been spending out in the job market. I doubt they could ever make up for this crime. I will update you on any progress, if any.
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