I’ve given up on the Macquarie MA in creative writing and won’t bother with it again. I’ll do courses on Coursera, EdX and Masterclass instead. So here are my reasons for dropping out once and for all:

1. These courses are ridiculously expensive and I came to the conclusion they are basically cash cows for the universities.
2. The standard of writing of many of the students was appalling. (Not all, of course — some of them were quite brilliant — but others couldn’t put a sentence together.)
3. Nobody fails these courses, which is why the standards can be so low.
4. The standard of the teachers was, in some courses, poor. They are not all published outside of academia, and one of mine had appalling grammar, and ‘corrected’ mine to be as bad as his. (I worked for 25 years as a technical writer and editor, and later as an academic editor.)
5. They’re hopelessly woke, which tended to make me worry about writing anything at all. Woke = a yoke around my neck, as far as I’m concerned.
6. I’ve learned far more in free Coursera, EdX and Masterclass courses than I was learning at Uni.

This was an MA done through Open Universities, and all online. It might be different if it was on campus.

I started it because I want to improve, but also because I saw it as a way to get out of the ‘slush pile’. I came to the conclusion that editors and publishers will soon work out these online creative writing MAs are rubbish. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good and even great writers who do the courses, but they’re good or great to start with. The writers who are hopeless when they go in are just as hopeless when they come out, in my experience.

Anyway, that’s my opinion. I enjoyed the literature courses I did for the BA and graduate certificate, and learned a lot from them, but I think Ray Bradbury was right all along about creative writing courses.