Dang! That’s a bad grading scale. If my pharmacy school had that I would probably have failed out a long time ago! In my pharmacy school, 65-69 is a D, <64 is an F. We were allowed two D’s during school, the third got us in front of the progressions committee. If our system was like yours, my class would be a lot smaller then it is!
This sounds like a problem with the school administration and faculty to me. I’ve had some of the same complaints at my school (when you have to figure out which teacher wrote a question to know how to answer it, you know there is a problem), but at least the teachers who were there for awhile were good, and we could voice our complaints and get the worst ones straightened out. If your school isn’t even talking to y’all, then it is definably a school problem.
If your students were going to fail more and more advanced exams anyway, why didn’t you teach what they needed to know regardless of what the government told you to do? Did they sit in your class and watch you teach?
The no-child-left-behind travesty of a program is why I dropped out of the secondary education degree I was pursuing.
I’m in a speech therapy graduate program and this hasn’t been my experience at all. Maybe it’s because it’s at the graduate level or maybe it’s because the program is highly ranked, but out of 25 in our class, there’s only 1-2 that I’d classify as not too bright. For the most part, it’s full of type A overachievers, very hardworking and smart.
Now, I have had some interactions with the undergrads in the major and a lot more of them seem like lazy idiots. I don’t know what happens to them when they graduate, because they aren’t showing up in my program: maybe they go to worse programs or don’t get in at all?
In the particular class I’m talking about, I team taught with a Bulgarian teacher. She was kind of in charge (it was my first year teaching) and I couldn’t just go off and teach whatever I wanted. It was frustrating. Trust me, if I hadn’t been working with someone else who was insistent we follow these rules, I would have made up my own curriculum.
My second year, I still did some team teaching, but I also had some classes to myself, and I often did go off track when I thought the textbook lesson was a waste of time, or if I thought I could teach the same lesson more effectively without the book.
How much absenteeism is there? Is anyone making As or Bs?
The grading scale seems generous to me. When I was in school, 74 was a failing grade. To make an A, you had to score 93 or above.
In my university, five errors in any paper submitted in an English class was an automatic F. We scoured those papers to check and double check every comma, sentence construction, and spelling. That is how we learned the rules for writing. You can certainly tell that I’ve become rather lax.)
But we also had teachers who didn’t know HOW to teach. It’s not as easy as it looks. You have the right to require that your teachers know what they are supposed to be doing.
Do many of the students ask the teachers for help outside of the classroom?
I certainly hope that the situation improves at your school!
I don’t think it’s really meaningful to compare grading scales, because the assessments will be designed with the grading scales in mind. I mean, if my district made 75 passing instead of 70, I think tests would drift towards being a little easier until we reached more or less the same equilibrium. Most AP exams only require 50-60% correct to pass, but that doesn’t make them easier.
As far as the pass rate goes, I’d have to look at several years. Sometimes you just get a bum class. The group that graduated from my high school last year was just a bum year, and it created a terrible synergy–there wasn’t a true academic in the lot, and they pulled each other down. The year before that was incredible: 4 got into the Ivy League, a dozen went to tier 2 schools, 8 eagle Scouts, amazing test scores year after year. For example, in AP economics I had 8 of the 2009 kids (out of 50) get a 5 on the AP exam, and in 2010, I had 2. The teaching stayed the same. The quality of the students shifted dramatically.
Yeah, I’d imagine all bets are off at the graduate level, since you have to do reasonably well in undergrad to go to grad school, whereas any fool with a 16 on the ACTs and a 2.5 high school GPA can enroll at my university and declare an undergraduate major.
I had one class in college with a greater than 30% fail rate - Advanced Managerial Accounting. The issue there was pretty simple. But problematic because it was a Senior year course.
I didn’t go to a challenging school, so a lot of Accounting majors who shouldn’t have been Accounting majors didn’t fail out - or get good advice to change their major - when they were in the intro courses. Instructors babied them along, passing them with Cs for what seemed like basic comprehension, giving extra credit to get over the hurdle.
Then we got into Advanced Managerial Accounting - only taught by one Prof - who had a “take no prisoners” approach to teaching. You were going to have competence in the subject to pass her course. There was no extra credit. There was no partial credit for understanding the mechanics of the problem, but slipping a digit.
Honestly, it wasn’t a bad way to teach - but it was a horrible way to teach Seniors who had invested 3 years into a program only to find a hurdle they couldn’t get over. Weed out classes for a program should happen during the first year, not the fourth year. If I were designing that program, I’d let Accounting majors who got an A in the first of the Accounting courses be an Accounting major without questions - anyone with a B would be talking to their adviser about whether this is the career path for them - with a definite “this gets harder” message, anyone with a C would be counseled to consider a different major. (Finance majors apparently had a similar program - the first finance course is easy to pass because all business majors take it - Finance majors not pulling an A in a Finance course designed for HR majors to pass - should be reconsidering Finance.)
On business majors - there were a LOT of lazy idiots in a bachelors program. Finance had the least, with Accounting and Econ right behind - math heavy majors seemed to scare the true connoisseurs of leisure away. But the HR majors - in general business classes NEVER do group work with an HR major…odds are good they didn’t bother to learn anything about business getting their business degree. And Marketing was also a risk.
I am not an educator, but I challenge your premise. Why is anyone at fault? Is the fact that 90% of the runners in a 10 person race don’t win mean that someone is at fault? I contend that the proper question isn’t how many are failing, but how well-educated are the ones who aren’t failing. Is the program training successful nurses? Even one? If so, and I assume the answer is yes, then the question comes down to how well the faculty teaches the students, how well the admissions office screened the applicants and how well the students selected a program they can be successful in. One can probably work out the degree of responsibility among the groups, but I don’t think it is anyone’s fault. If the faculty is a failure, why didn’t the students see that early and leave? If too many unqualified students were granted entry, why didn’t the faculty flunk those people out in the first year? Why didn’t admissions understand the academic needs of the school and only let in successful students? You see my point. It isn’t a fault. No part of the system is perfect. Each part needs to do the best it can.
What can be asked, are there pressures put on components of the system that prevent that component from do the best it can? Is admissions pressured to let in unqualified students? Are students discouraged from transferring to another program/school? Is the faculty pressured to pass students just to keep the numbers up? All are real possibilities and those would be faults in my mind.
Have the admission standards been lowered. Often schools need money in bad economic times. One way to get it is to let anyone in. They pay the money and fail and the school gets the money and the student is out on his butt with student loans to pay off.
It could be a large number of things, but any program where 1/3 of the students are failing has problems. It could be anything from low admission standards to bad teachers.
It could be them, but in a good way. I was a tutor for various liberal arts while still an undergrad (I tutored undergrads and grad students alike in English, History, Philosophy, and… well, whatever they needed that didn’t require much math).
There was a brilliant professor who taught grammar at the school - too brilliant for most, in fact; he often lost his train of thought and would wander down etymological paths, or areas of grammar more suited to grad/PhD work than undergrad. I had taken his course and received almost perfect grades. The following semester, he discussed with me the issue of something like a 75% failing rate, and was concerned that he wasn’t connecting with students properly.
I started running twice-weekly 2-hour study groups for his students. Darn near every one of them came every time (it was at this time that I invented “studying grammar by asking 'what would Yoda say?” - and it was very effective in identifying parts of speech).
So, anecdote aside, it’s possible that there’s an awesome professor in play, who is speaking a language that many students don’t understand… sometimes, too much knowledge is a dangerous thing (for the students).
Given there are some teachers whose skills/motivation are poor. Given that a very young child is at a disadvantage if he has a series of these educators.
I’m of the opinion that it takes very little money to educate a child if the teacher is a good one. A book, paper and pencil will work for many subjects. And with the advent of computers the information is accessable.
So, approaching adulthood, a student is a consumer. He is seeking something, maybe paying for it (or someone is) and the onus is on him to a large degree to see that he receives it. That means developing some self-discipline and developing habits which will help him succeed.
An educator can supply him with the information he needs to do this. But it is his responsibility to do it. Many failing students are sort of like a person who wants to develop muscles going to the gym, doubting the information he is given, wasting his time with the social life there, not following his program and then complaining that his muscles didn’t improve. Learning how to do something requires cooperation between the student and the teacher. It’s not an either/or.
If the majority of his educators can’t supply him with the information he needs then there are many alternate resources. In fact there are more resources available, I dare say, than at any other time in history. I believe all children of any level of ability are capable of learning if they are willing.
Another anecdote here. Being in the military I’ve worked with people from all walks of life and I can say, in my experience, the worst female troops I’ve had working for me have all had “big plans” to go to school for nursing when they separate. Generally the laziest, phone it in performers have made this claim. No idea why they all gravitate towards nursing. Granted I guess thats only 5 girls over a 15 year career, but invariably the worst performing females believe that they will make a career change into nursing when they leave the military.
FWIW I see almost as many poor performing males talking up Dentistry or PA.
I think these people are delusional about how hard it is to finish those schools. I truly think they don’t have a clue what they are in for, if they can even get through the first year of school.
It is entirely possible that this policy was implemented as a result of a decrease in applicant quality. In other words, they may not have been able to fill the class using the previous minimum requirements. By going to a point system, as long as they have at least one applicant for each space, the class will always be full. Perhaps you could ask the administration what percentage of the students accepted under the point system would also have been accepted under the minimum requirements system? (Unfortunately, they are unlikely to answer.)
If the quality of the students has decreased, it is possible that the lower pass rate is reasonable. In this case, misleading the students into thinking the quality of the students has increased is leading the students to think that the teachers must be at fault. These kind of situations tend to feed on themselves, as once students (or any group) feel they are being treated unfairly they often go out of their way to find supporting examples.
Regardless of what is going on, keep doing your best - it will be worthwhile in the long run.
Half my MSc-Translation class flunked, as in “was not allowed to undertake the dissertation”. Then you have to add those like me who did it, submitted it, and need to tweak and resubmit. And then you have those who got accepted for thr dissertation but did not deliver it.
Some of the students should never have been accepted into the program. More than half the Chinese students could not carry our a daily conversation in English. They also had problems with concepts such as “to ‘compare’ something, you need a minimum of two ‘somethings’, you can’t compare one thing by itself”.
Some of the teachers were just plain bad. For example, the teacher who claimed that “scientists start from a theory, you need to start from observation”. I would have ripped her a new hole or three, only she still had to grade me…
The program wasn’t clearly defined, lots of missing information, the requirements we were given did not agree with the evaluations received; there were instances where some students got grade taken off for leaving out an optional comma in a quotation format while other students whose submissions had been graded by a different teacher got points taken off for having that same optional comma. Speaking of evaluations, my advisor (name used out of politeness, as she didn’t have to be available while I did my dissertation, nor to check it before evaluating it) has not given me an in-depth evaluation of my dissertation, she hasn’t gone into any kind of detail. The whole course has been more like being back to 6th-grade “Language” (Spanish grammar, lit and composition) than to college or graduate school. And yes, 6th grade, not 10th or 12th: my high school teachers gave much more detail in their evaluations.
IT lag, and again bad information. Papers had 4 hours to be handed in (this includes dissertations); you could not hand one in ahead of time. If you were submitting your dissertation from abroad, you were supposed to email it as well, but the email address was not provided, and the mailboxes are tiny anyway. Only two of the teachers were any good at providing and accepting electronic documents: everything else, hardcopy all the way for a field where hardcopy has become a rarity. This isn’t a cause, but it’s a symptom of a serious disengage between the professors and administrators at the school and the world outside their windows.
Of course, it’s possible, but doubtful. They still have 1 seat for every 10 applicants, and they didn’t reduce the entrance requirements any. The difference is that now we have people with more college experience than past classes.
(I got a 91% on the last OB test, which I’m satisfied with. Due to technical difficulties, we couldn’t take the test written for our class, we took a prior year’s exam, so there were a few things on there that even our teachers admitted weren’t mentioned this time around, so I’m pretty happy with how I did on that one.)
Here’s an example of our latest syllabus, written not by our teacher, but by the district (they’re trying to centralize everything now.):
See the kinds of stupid problems here? How many contact hours? How many credit hours? This is just sloppiness, and it’s indicative of the kind of sloppy and contradictory information we’re presented with. This particular example isn’t terribly important, of course, but it’s the kind of thing that tells me multiple people are working on documents and no one is proofreading them or checking them for accuracy. In reality, we’re in lecture for 6 hours a week and at clinical for 12 hours per week for, I believe, 7 credit hours - *all *of the numbers in the syllabus are wrong.
