Has the quality of college students changed?

In My Humble Opinion
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[QUOTE=treis]

You have no idea what you are talking about. It doesn’t matter if you take an AP class in high school. All that matters is if you pass the AP test at the end of the year. That is rigorously controlled, and ensures that students passing the test are competent to a college level standard in the subject. What they are talking about eliminating is AP courses that do not adequately prepare students for the AP test. iIt has nothing to do with grade inflation, and I never said anything about grades.
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Your post said “They take more AP courses…”

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[QUOTE=Lamar Mundane]
We’re not talking 1941, we’re talking ten years ago. I doubt there is much of a difference in the number and quality of students taking the test between then and now.
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Uh, 1941 is when the test was initially calibrated. It hadn’t been recalibrated until 1995. Make sense?

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[QUOTE=monstro]

Have college students become dumber through the years? Or is this a big case of “back in my day, we were better!” coming from an ole fogey.

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I was surprised at how dumb some of the folks in my classes were. There were a lot of ‘how did you get here’ or ‘who let you in’ moments. This was mostly due to the fact that a lot of folks in my classes in high school who didn’t get in could mop the floor with these dullards.

It’s only been a year since I’ve been in college. I guess if you could measure someone by their credentials or resume you wouldn’t need to interview.

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[QUOTE=Lamar Mundane]
Your post said “They take more AP courses…”
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You’re right. I should have said that they earn more AP credit.

25

[QUOTE=treis]
Yup, there is no doubt the quality of college students has changed. The major University I attend has seen their best freshman class come in every year for something like the past 10 years. Incoming freshmen today are, on average, much better prepared than their predecessors even 10 years ago. They take more AP classes, taken classes at the local JC, and have higher SAT scores. There’s no doubt that your typical student today would wipe the floor with your typical student even 10 years ago.
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I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I was an older student starting a new major and I certainly didn’t have a problem keeping up. Far from it. I was in the top of most classes and I had a family, a job and commuted 50 miles one way. I pretty much wiped with floor with them, and I ain’t no Einstein. I had math classes with AP students, and when I took calc. in HS we used a slide rule so that’ll tell you how long ago it was.

26

[QUOTE=Richard Parker]
Uh, 1941 is when the test was initially calibrated. It hadn’t been recalibrated until 1995. Make sense?
[/QUOTE]

And scores have been rising since then? I don’t see any data.

When I took the test, everyone took it once, as a junior. Nowadays kids are taking it multiple times, plus a large number take courses outside school to help prepare for the test.

Nevertheless, if you extend 10 years to 15 years, average SAT scores are lower now than in 1994.

But we’re getting off topic…

27

[QUOTE=Gentle Robot]
I was surprised at how dumb some of the folks in my classes were. There were a lot of ‘how did you get here’ or ‘who let you in’ moments. This was mostly due to the fact that a lot of folks in my classes in high school who didn’t get in could mop the floor with these dullards.

[/QUOTE]

I’m with you. The stupidity was absolutely astonishing in my classes. But now that there is this push towards “self esteem”, they don’t get corrected like they should. No more telling a student their paper is crap (unless you were a student like me).

I don’t think students are worse, I think the priorities have changed. It is no longer about learning to think and write. It is about finding yourself and living in the experience bullshit. I remember reading an article in, I think, BusinessWeek that said that this generation of business people need to be coddled and given feedback constantly. What is this world coming to? :rolleyes:

28

[QUOTE=Lamar Mundane]
And scores have been rising since then? I don’t see any data.

When I took the test, everyone took it once, as a junior. Nowadays kids are taking it multiple times, plus a large number take courses outside school to help prepare for the test.

Nevertheless, if you extend 10 years to 15 years, average SAT scores are lower now than in 1994.

But we’re getting off topic…
[/QUOTE]

You’re mistaken about SAT scores. Since 1995, scores have continually risen. Up until the introduction of the new SAT in 2006, average math scores rose 14 points and verbal scores rose 3 points.

And since you seem to want to still compare to 1994, let’s recap: during the period from 1941-1995, absolute SAT scores dropped as a result of more and more people taking the test instead of the elite few who took it in 1941. So they recentered the test in 1995 to account for this. Hence, comparisons to 1994 are invalid for good reasons having everything to do with more people taking the test and nothing to do with the dumbing down of college students.

Also worth adding that every year since 1995 there has been an increase in the number of poor students taking the test. So the average went up even while more students from poorer schools were taking the test.

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[QUOTE=Elen_Luyddog]
t is no longer about learning to think and write. It is about finding yourself and living in the experience bullshit.
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Said the news in 1968…

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http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/calvin-on-scientific-law.gif

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What I want to know is, are there any college students/recent grads who would be willing to admit to not knowing how to write or think? Because whenever this topic comes up, people rush out of the woodwork talking about how dumb their classmates are or were. But no one ever says, “Hey! I’m one of the folks you’re talking about!” I understand why this is the case, but it still makes me wonder if it’s just a perception problem. That is, everyone thinks they’re smarter than everyone else, even when they’re really the dumbest person in the room.

The same thing about people brought up by over-coddling helicopter parents. Notice how both common and rare these individuals seem to be? Is it because they don’t exist, their numbers greatly exaggerated? Or do they exist, but they’re just in denial about their upbringing because of the stigma?

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I will admit that I am one of the people who can not write a english paper to save my life. The only reason I passed College English was because my wife did my papers for me. However I do really well in maths and sciences. I picked my major (pharmacy) partly because it required the classes I’m good at, and doesn’t require the classes I’m bad at. Hopefully I’ll be accepted into Pharmacy school for this fall, and if so, I won’t even be getting my degree at my current school because I don’t want to take the one class I’m missing, an English class.

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[QUOTE=monstro]
What I want to know is, are there any college students/recent grads who would be willing to admit to not knowing how to write or think? Because whenever this topic comes up, people rush out of the woodwork talking about how dumb their classmates are or were. But no one ever says, “Hey! I’m one of the folks you’re talking about!” I understand why this is the case, but it still makes me wonder if it’s just a perception problem. That is, everyone thinks they’re smarter than everyone else, even when they’re really the dumbest person in the room.
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I’ll take up the torch on this one if no one else will. I am a year and a half out of college, and I am a terrible writer. This has many downsides, as I’m sure you can imagine.

I mean, I know I am smart. Official IQ tests put me somewhere around 145 and my ACT score was 34. I have the critical thinking skills, I assure you. My boss here at work considers me his best employee because I think about 3 steps ahead of whatever problem I am tackling.

However, I sound… well… dumb. Judge it yourself: does the previous paragraph sound like it was written by a fairly intelligent college grad, or a high school student getting a B in English? Proper names elude me. Sure, I can set up syntax if coding C++ like no other, but commas and sentence structure give me headaches. Paragraphs even drive me nuts. My head doesn’t break things up, it comes in one long stream, so where do I put the paragraph breaks? Adjectives and Adverbs, forget about it. Short, simple, and to the point.

If I had to make a hypothesis on why, I would blame Instant Messaging and MMORPGs. You type as fast and direct as you can to get the message across, then get back to whatever it was that you are doing. It isn’t possible to control the mouse, arrow keys, and type all at the same time, so you have to micromanage that time. Do that for enough years and of course it affects your thought patterns on how to convey information in written format.

Man I hope I get into grad school, I am so doing my thesis on something like that. Hopefully I don’t come across as too much of a moron in the process :frowning:

34

Oh, I’ll freely admit to being the dumbest person in the room at my university. As I said above, I had a rotten high-school education, and I went to Cal Berkeley, where just about everyone was both better-educated and smarter than I was. (I did not get in because of my scores–it was a combination of coming from a small town with very few people who went to college, the fact that I had spent a year abroad, and [probably] that my parents had gone there.)

I felt myself lucky to be there at all, and learned to be very happy with B’s and a few C’s. I was a literature major with very little idea of how to analyze literature, and a slightly better idea of how to write a paper. I was good at learning languages. I am reasonably bright, but no more than that, and I can write a decent paper now, but my grasp of grammar is still more instinctive than learned. (I plan on working on that for the next few years.) Looking back now, I can see that I spent a lot of college in something of a clueless fog. It’s only recently that I’ve realized how bad my education was, and how much I missed.

Recently I visited a good friend, and we got to talking on the subject. She went to a private girls’ high school which was very academic, but her husband had a very similar experience to mine. Like me, he feels that he was a bit cheated; he missed a lot in college because he arrived so unprepared. He has his wife check over all his business correspondence for errors, because he still can’t write at the level he needs to. To listen to her talk about her high school is like hearing about an alien planet!

OK, that was something of a hijack, but I hope it answers your question a bit, monstro. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I had AP English in HS, graduated with 6 credits (in 1986) and never took another English class again. My last couple semesters in college there was a new writing requirement for the University so I wrote a few papers then, but only 3-5 pages each. I think one might have been 10. One in a math class, one in a Comp Sci class, Music History had essay questions (!!!) on the otherwise multiple choice question tests. My point being that I didn’t have much writing required of me in college let alone classes to teach writing, HS covered the basics and I read a lot.

My job requires little in the way of formal writing, mostly just emails that go to large groups. I think I do well enough, I get the point across with few errors that aren’t typos.

Now, in years past, if I’m not mistaken, didn’t colleges require “senior projects”? I remember my friends dad (who graduated college around 1950) talking about his senior project. It was sort of like writing a thesis paper. I suppose such things still exist, but not at the school I went to. I would imagine that writing such a formal paper would require greater skill than the average college student would possess.

36

It’s not a new thing, at all. My Dad was a Professor, and I well remember his lamenting, circa 1975, how piss-poor the majority of his Marine Science students were with writing skills, and articulating points, being able to produce a good study. This was all pre-any-computer languishness.

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[QUOTE=dangermom]

OK, that was something of a hijack, but I hope it answers your question a bit, monstro. :stuck_out_tongue:
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I appreciate it. It’s actually cool to hear the “other side”, since so many Dopers like to put themselves in the “smart” group.

Despite your self-described writing issues, I think you write just fine. I really doubt you were the dumbest person at your university. :wink:

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[QUOTE=msmith537]
Quite frankly, as a hiring manager at my firm, I’m sick of all the gushing I see in the media about how hardworking and motivated “Millennials” are. Yes, they are comfortible with technology, but they need constant handholding and positive feedback. They mope and shut down when you correct them. And yeah, their professional writing ability sucks.
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I don’t think that this is an entirely fair assessment. Over the past two and a half years I’ve supervised about 100 different (temporary) employees, and I do agree that many of Millennials do require constant hand-holding and positive feedback as you’ve said. But so do about half the middle-aged women I’ve supervised as well (which frustrates me given the other half are so competent in comparison). Actually, other than some of the twenty-two year olds I worked with last summer not knowing how to read cursive(!!), I’m pretty sure those older women have consistently taken up more of my time almost every project…

As for kids, I don’t see a lot of writing on the college level, but see tons of it on the high school level. (I read ~150 essays yesterday) I haven’t noticed any decline in the quality of student writing over the past six years. Though the inability to spell “maybe” has seemed to have reached tragic proportions within the past two.

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St. Petes is a major southern terminus for the snowbird migration, so it tends to be known to Kanukistanis of a certain age and income.

40

Some of my friends are college professors and they all tell me that the quality of students is declining from when I was in their classes.

However, they told me that WHEN I was in their classes too.

That doesn’t mean that things aren’t getting worse. The college I graduated from (a state run school) keeps reducing their SAT requirements. Their SAT requirements are lower now than the community colleges were when I was in school. (That statistic comes from one of said college-professor friends. I am assuming that he didn’t make it up.)