In case you missed here, here’s Part One.
In stark contrast to M-TEC and Andrews, Career Step does very little in the way of hands-on instruction. You are given dictation to do online, and when you finish, you paste the transcript into the CS website, and the computer grades the transcript automatically. You get instantaneous feedback, but that feedback isn’t always correct. Despite what every sci-fi movie portrays, computers aren’t, as of yet, as smart as people, so the computer would mark things as wrong that really weren’t. An great example of this would be the following sentence, written three different ways: “I love to work – it’s the best!” or “I love to work; it’s the best!” or “I love to work. It’s the best!” Which way is correct? All three of them. But with the computer grading, because it cannot think, it would mark one way right and the other two ways wrong, even though they aren’t actually wrong.
It takes some skill to be able to look at what is being graded wrong and understand if it is actually wrong (like spelling a word wrong or using the wrong word) or if it is just a style issue. The grader can be very frustrating, but I got used to it after a while (although I’ll freely admit it was difficult for me at first.) There is the large upside: You receive instantaneous feedback, so you know exactly how you did within seconds of submitting your work.
So there are good things and bad things about both ways. It really depends on your personality. Because M-TEC and Andrews have to hire a lot more personnel to cover all of the students, their overhead is a lot higher than at Career Step. If you are a student at CS with a question, you either go onto the school forum and ask, you e-mail CS and someone e-mails you back, or you can call CS. I usually opted for the forum when it was a simple question, and an e-mail when it was hard – I never did call them. I’m not a phone person, I suppose. I tend to be fairly independent, so I didn’t miss not having an instructor – other people are different and want that hands-on feedback. It is entirely up to you and what you need to become a successful transcriptionist.
If anyone has any other questions, please either leave them in the comment section or e-mail me at Hava L {at} Families dot com. Perhaps I will write up another blog to answer your questions. 😉 It certainly is an easy way to come up with topics! 😀
I realized I never talked about jobs going overseas which is a big factor in the MT world today, so watch for my next blog where I cover just that! Thanks for reading!
This blog is part of a series on transcription. If you haven’t read the other blogs in this series, make sure to check out the summary page for a listing of all transcription blogs.