Talk:Laurea

PUFFERY

Some of this is OK, but it contains some obvious puffery (see Wikipedia Style manual), e.g.: "In other countries, the old Laurea is usually considered as equivalent to a Bachelor's plus Master's degree because of the work carried out for the thesis... The reason is that the Italian laurea included high-level courses and thesis work which normally were sufficient to prepare for a career in research and academia." No evidence is given for this large claim, seriously overblown, especially considering the generally low level of many Italian universities... It should be removed and replaced with some more rational and critical comments by someone qualified. Otherwise I'll wait a few days and then cut out the principal absurdities. METRANGOLO (talk) 15:59, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

We should be careful here because we are talking about the _old_ laurea degree, which was the highest official degree many famous academics claimed in Italy. These things are very culturally specific and hard to document. I'm not sure we can say the claims are seriously overblown. Any claim of degree equivalence is bound to be highly approximate. However, the sentence you quote probably ought to read "sometimes considered equivalent" (without "as"), so by all means go ahead and improve. - phi (talk) 08:21, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

Changing the statement to “sometimes considered equivalent” is not an improvement, it’s so vague as to be meaningless. Considered an equivalent in what cases? In which countries? And what evidence is there even for this vague statement? This is meant to be an encyclopaedia and the articles are supposed to rest on verifiable statements contained in published sources. Read Wikipedia’s guidelines (See “Verifiability” and “Puffery” and “Identifying reliable sources”).METRANGOLO1 (talk) 15:55, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

The value of the old laurea outside Italy is actually very uncertain. The corresponding article in the Italian Wikipedia, gives a more balanced account. If you check the references given, it appears that the old Italian laurea is often regarded in other EU countries as equivalent to a three-year Bachelor's degree. Hence this article is seriously misleading where it says, "In other countries, the old Laurea is usually considered as equivalent to a Bachelor's plus Master's degree..." The issue of equivalence has been raised with both the Italian and European parliaments and the EU commission, but nothing has been done. See the section of the Italian Wikipedia beginning: "Un caso ben noto è quello delle lauree conferite, ancora fino a tempi recenti, secondo il cosiddetto "vecchio ordinamento", che soprattutto nei paesi anglo-sassoni e del Nord Europa possono incorrere a riconoscimento parziale...."METRANGOLO1 (talk) 09:17, 2 November 2017 (UTC)