Has the quality of college students changed?

In My Humble Opinion
41

[QUOTE=treis]
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.
[/QUOTE]

Untrue. Many AP teachers (and students, like me) have noted that the difficulty of AP tests has decreased over the years. The change in the AP Literature exam is particularly noticable. The curve for the Physics C exam is such that answering only 50% of the questions can still get you a 5.

42

There was a time when people read the newspaper every day and read books. Do not ask the youth how long since they read a book. It will upset you. However they do a lot of reading off a computer screen.

43

[QUOTE=Khadaji]
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.)
[/QUOTE]

But the question is whether, on average, students are getting worse. The SAT’s answer to that question, is unequivocally “no.” I think it’s probably true that there are different trends across the spectrum. Perhaps while elite schools are increasing their standards, less competitive schools are lowering theirs. That doesn’t strike me as evidence of the phenomenon being questioned by the OP.

44

[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.

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?
[/QUOTE]

Look. I don’t know how common it was in past years, but my coworkers who’ve been librarians since before I was born say it’s getting worse. I’m a periodicals librarian and I help a lot of people do research for school. I think it’s fair to say that I get more parents than kids coming in to do work. “My daughters needs three magazine articles and one from a newspaper on…” Well, no wonder the kids get to college and have no idea how to do any research and they never end up learning! This is when you’re supposed to learn to do it, and their parents are always doing it for them. It’s disgusting. Every so often, say, once a month, I get a parent who prods the kid to talk to me and find out how to do it themselves. “Ask the lady to explain it to you so you can do it yourself.” I want to give them a medal.

45

[QUOTE=athelas]
Untrue. Many AP teachers (and students, like me) have noted that the difficulty of AP tests has decreased over the years. The change in the AP Literature exam is particularly noticable. The curve for the Physics C exam is such that answering only 50% of the questions can still get you a 5.
[/QUOTE]

Do you have a cite for the AP tests getting easier?

46

[QUOTE=athelas]
Untrue. Many AP teachers (and students, like me) have noted that the difficulty of AP tests has decreased over the years. The change in the AP Literature exam is particularly noticable. The curve for the Physics C exam is such that answering only 50% of the questions can still get you a 5.
[/QUOTE]

I am skeptical of this anecdotal evidence. AP scores are tied to, among other things, actual grades in college. The College Board does statistical analysis to correlate a score of 5 with the knowledge necessary to get an A in the relevant course. To learn more, go here. And while grade inflation does occur at some colleges (and by no means all), the hard sciences are notorious for resisting this trend.

On the subject of grade inflation, it is also worth noting that it is by no means a recent phenomenon. Some scholars have traced it back to the Vietnam draft.

47

[QUOTE=Richard Parker]
On the subject of grade inflation, it is also worth noting that it is by no means a recent phenomenon. Some scholars have traced it back to the Vietnam draft.
[/QUOTE]

Grade inflation is also being corrected downward. When I taught classes at Dartmouth 10 years ago, I was instructed to give half the students A’s on all assignments and the the other half B’s. I asked what I should do if they deserved lower than either and I was told that Ivy League students don’t get where they are by making less than B’s.

This has since been addressed at several top schools including Harvard. Harvard re-centered grading a few years ago because an alarming number of graduates were graduating with honors and graduate schools did not know how to differentiate students based on that,

If you want more anecdotal evidence (don’t we all), I work in business systems analysis for large corporations. This field combines lots of specialities including system design, consulting, business presentation, technical writing, and intensive problem solving. It is very much a young person’s game because, to phrase it through experience, older people, even those over 40 are stupid. We try and try to find anyone over 35 that can do it and I have only seen a handful that can. We have 7 positions open right now and the chances of someone 23 years old having all the prerequisite skills including great writing ability are about 10X that of someone who is 43. Our interviews are extremely straitforward and I would take someone who is 103 and has what it takes in a heartbeat because we are desperate for people. It isn’t a case of age discrimination. We have two people on our team over 40 but we all know that the skills are hard to find in an older population.

48

I found this to be an interesting article on AP. It confirms my own suspicions of the program: that it may give students a false sense of security, leaving them unprepared for actual college courses.

I took a couple of AP courses in high school. I did fairly well on my exams and could have used my scores to exempt out of intros, but I was pragmatic. I knew that if my APs had indeed prepared me well, then I was guaranteed As in those classes. And since I was taking some mean classes, I would need every friggin’ A I could get! So I took the classes, enjoyed them because they were easy for me, and I got As. Meanwhile, I saw other classmates exempt, move on to upper-level courses, and do poorly because they weren’t ready.

I also think AP courses encourage cockiness, especially in calculus and chemistry. I didn’t take calc in high school, so I started my college career competing with kids who’d taken super-duper AP Calc. There are umptity-ump levels of AP Calc you can take, and my classes were filled with folks who’d taken all of them. But they did no better than I did, having just taken trigonometry. I don’t think these kids were dumb (their SAT scores certainly blew mine out of the water). But I think they learned to do calculus differently than the way they teach in college. I had an advantage because I was a blank slate, whereas they were still thinking in terms of how they had done stuff in Ms. So-and-So’s fifth period class. And because they had high AP scores to “prove” to them they could do calculus, they weren’t willing to adjust.

So if I saw a high school kid who was gloating about all the AP classes they’ve taken, I would have no doubt about the kid’s intelligence, but I would also remind that kid he’s not in college yet.

49

[QUOTE=monstro]
I found this to be an interesting article on AP. It confirms my own suspicions of the program: that it may give students a false sense of security, leaving them unprepared for actual college courses.

I took a couple of AP courses in high school. I did fairly well on my exams and could have used my scores to exempt out of intros, but I was pragmatic. I knew that if my APs had indeed prepared me well, then I was guaranteed As in those classes. And since I was taking some mean classes, I would need every friggin’ A I could get! So I took the classes, enjoyed them because they were easy for me, and I got As. Meanwhile, I saw other classmates exempt, move on to upper-level courses, and do poorly because they weren’t ready.

I also think AP courses encourage cockiness, especially in calculus and chemistry. I didn’t take calc in high school, so I started my college career competing with kids who’d taken super-duper AP Calc. There are umptity-ump levels of AP Calc you can take, and my classes were filled with folks who’d taken all of them. But they did no better than I did, having just taken trigonometry. I don’t think these kids were dumb (their SAT scores certainly blew mine out of the water). But I think they learned to do calculus differently than the way they teach in college. I had an advantage because I was a blank slate, whereas they were still thinking in terms of how they had done stuff in Ms. So-and-So’s fifth period class. And because they had high AP scores to “prove” to them they could do calculus, they weren’t willing to adjust.

So if I saw a high school kid who was gloating about all the AP classes they’ve taken, I would have no doubt about the kid’s intelligence, but I would also remind that kid he’s not in college yet.
[/QUOTE]

I think that might all be true. But it doesn’t counter the point that was being made about AP tests, which is that they are indeed a measure of knowledge and even writing ability and by that measure students are getting smarter, not dumber. That it is an imperfect match to the rigor of a college course doesn’t bear one way or another on that point.

50

[QUOTE=Zsofia]
Look. I don’t know how common it was in past years, but my coworkers who’ve been librarians since before I was born say it’s getting worse. I’m a periodicals librarian and I help a lot of people do research for school. I think it’s fair to say that I get more parents than kids coming in to do work. “My daughters needs three magazine articles and one from a newspaper on…” Well, no wonder the kids get to college and have no idea how to do any research and they never end up learning! This is when you’re supposed to learn to do it, and their parents are always doing it for them. It’s disgusting. Every so often, say, once a month, I get a parent who prods the kid to talk to me and find out how to do it themselves. “Ask the lady to explain it to you so you can do it yourself.” I want to give them a medal.
[/QUOTE]
Oh, that’s all true. And then you get college kids who “have to do a paper on World War II, for Monday.” (It’s Saturday.) And the grandmothers during school hours, doing their grandkids’ homework. And the people who want you to write their bibliographies for them, and don’t know whether they’re supposed to use MLA or APA, or even what those things might be, because they haven’t read their assignment anyway.

Er. This may have turned into more of a rant than an actual post with a point. Sorry.

51

From an inside standpoint, I can certainly relate to the “how did you get here!?” mentality. People who seem to have no grasp of vocabulary, poor conceptions of math and science, almost no history knowledge, and terrible writing skills.
Take Captain_C for example, who claims to be a terrible writer. Despite that claim, in that one post he varies his sentence structure and length, and uses commas and words with more than a few syllables, like “Hypothesis”. He creates an introduction to a topic, fills in details succinctly, and uses inference from outside knowledge to create a conclusion.
I just read over a paper written on how Freud affected a famous play actor (i think it was) where none of that was evident. The sentence structure was repetitive and dull, the vocabulary was atrocious, the entire paper was stiff, and it read, In my Estimation, at approximately a middle school level.
In high school I used to shake my head and wonder how some of the people in my HS (and I had a top rate public education) would get by in college and the real world, and it was shocking to find that in college I encountered the same thing. An incredible number of people seem to be scraping by with huge amounts of study hours to cram for an exam and no actual knowledge of the course material. Critical thinking, hell, even basic logical connections seem to escape a huge number of people, and reading comprehension and retention is poor. I can’t say if it’s worse or better than before, but it seems like the “average person” will have a difficult time in the real world (either that or this explains all the incredibly stupid decision businesses and governments seem to make daily)

52

Richard Parker writes:

> Perhaps while elite schools are increasing their standards, less competitive
> schools are lowering theirs.

I suspect this is closest to the truth. To look over the past, say, 60 years, there have been two trends going on. First, as a proportion of people of college age, about five times as many people are now going to college as were 60 years ago. Given that people aren’t hugely [1] more intelligent than they were 60 years ago, the average college student is thus somewhat less intelligent (assuming that it’s even possible to measure such a thing) and hence on average less well prepared for college.

On the other hand, the most elite colleges have been able to increase their standards over the same period. They now have a much wider spectrum of people applying to them. People who wouldn’t have applied 60 years ago because they thought they were not rich enough, or the wrong race, or the wrong sex, now will apply to the most competitive colleges. (It wasn’t until about 1960 that most of the competitive colleges began accepting women.) The elite colleges now are willing to turn down the not very good students whom they would have accepted 60 years ago merely because their parents were rich or famous or just alumni.

Both of these trends have been slowly going on for at least 60 years now, not just recently. They have actually been fairly slow trends, but when they last for at least 60 years, they make a lot of difference. There’s a third trend going on over this period that most people don’t think about much. A smaller proportion of college degrees these days are in liberal arts subjects. A liberal arts degree is one in the sciences (math, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) or humanities (English, foreign languages, etc.) or social sciences (sociology, history, anthropology, etc.) Indeed, despite the increase in the number of college students over the past 35 years, there are no more students graduating with degrees in any liberal arts subject except for psychology and biology. The increase in the number of college students has been in non-liberal arts subjects like education, engineering, nursing, medical technology, pharmacy, music performance, business, etc. Non-liberal arts college students are more likely to think of themselves as getting a degree to learn a specific technical discipline rather than getting a degree to “become educated” in any general sense.

A harder question is whether the average 18-year-old is any better prepared for college today than 60 years ago. Certainly more of them, proportionally, have graduated from high school, since 60 years ago only about 50% of them would have a high school degree or would eventually got a G.E.D. Today the proportion is at least 85%. I don’t know of any accurate, non-anecdotal survey that compares the average 18-year-old today with the average 18-year-old 60 years ago on their academic abilities (writing, math, etc.).

[1] Actually, because of the Flynn Effect, they are somewhat more intelligent on average, but it’s not enough to make up for the huge increase in the proportion of people going to college.

53

[QUOTE=elfkin477]
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…

[/QUOTE]

I didn’t say that Millennials had cornered the market on requiring handholding. My guess is that the older employees required handholding because the material or technology is new and unfamiliar to them. It’s like teaching my mom the internet. She just doesn’t “get it”.

The Millennials require handholding because they need your constant approval that they are doing it correctly. Mine come up to me with a status update or follow up so often that I sometimes have to put my headset on and pretend like I’m on the phone. At that point, they will hover over me until I click my earpiece and wave them away. I appreciate the eagerness (not really) but if someone monopolizes my attention that much, I should fire them and just do the job myself.

The other problem is their constant “teamwork” which consists of 3+ people hanging over the same workstation. I grew up with the “divide and conquer” style of teamwork where each person works on their piece and then we periodically put it together. I have to break up their “swarms” and tell them YOU work on this task, YOU work on that task.

I don’t know. The Millennials are like a swarm of drones. The Gen-Xers are individualistic, creative and lazy. The Boomers are flaky and self-centered. All of them SUCK if you ask me! Just in different ways! :mad:

54

msmith537 writes:

> The Millennials are like a swarm of drones. The Gen-Xers are individualistic,
> creative and lazy. The Boomers are flaky and self-centered.

These are, at the least, wild overgeneralizations. Indeed, in my observations, they just aren’t true at all. I would say that you need to think in other terms than generational ones.

55

[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
msmith537 writes:

> The Millennials are like a swarm of drones. The Gen-Xers are individualistic,
> creative and lazy. The Boomers are flaky and self-centered.

These are, at the least, wild overgeneralizations. Indeed, in my observations, they just aren’t true at all. I would say that you need to think in other terms than generational ones.
[/QUOTE]

In his defense, the thread topic requires such generalisations. All I know is that as long as you stay away from baby boomers, almost anyone can be a good employee.

56

I suspect it depends on the college. Students in general may be worse, but those at top colleges are probably better. A few years ago the director of admissions at MIT said that students today were much smarter than in my year (1973) and I believe it. We had only 15% coeds, so boys today have it tougher in a more equal society. (Only fair.)

She did say that the professors said our class was a lot more interesting - we did riots better. :wink:

I’m talking 38 years ago, but we only had a few AP tests we could take - calculus, history, English, maybe Physics? My high school was gigantic, and one of the best in NY, but they only gave official AP History and Calculus classes, though English kind of qualified. I’d not be surprised if AP scores mean less, since I don’t see how anyone in high school can take 4 AP classes and have them mean anything.

57

I think a large part of the whole writing issue is the perception that you can either be good at writing, or good at math and science, but never the twain shall meet. (The social science people have enough of a grip on writing that they don’t matter quite so much, at least in my experience.) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to slog through some scientific genius’s idea of “writing”, said genius having convinced himself that writing doesn’t matter in science.

As a corollary, there are those whose notion of good writing is the fixed five-paragraph essay they learned in their college writing course, where few words are repeated lest the reader get bored, contractions are unacceptable, and the language is formal. Nothing against college writing (or college writing teachers), but too many people are so married to this style that their work is unreadable because so much of it is boring. It’s to the point where I have to tell the people I tutor to forget what they learned in college writing. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.

Robin

58

[QUOTE=Voyager]
I’d not be surprised if AP scores mean less, since I don’t see how anyone in high school can take 4 AP classes and have them mean anything.
[/QUOTE]

Why not?

59

[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.

[/QUOTE]

I graduated in 1994 and I didn’t know how to write a description. I did know how to write a scientific report; I could use active and passive voices; I could use the subjunctive (which is more prevalent in Spanish than in English) and all the impersonal variants. But I didn’t know how to write a description. Most of my “the last movie I watched” essays came back marked “poor descriptions,” but when I asked how to enrichen them, no useful response was ever forthcoming.

All those years of “the last book I’ve read”, and I was taught how to write descriptions - by an English computer programmer, writing for an internet-based game!

I had college classmates whose perfect High School grades had been so inflated it’s a wonder they didn’t fly away by themselves.

The current Spanish pre-college system is “pass 'em all, poor babies could be traumatized if you fail 'em;” college professors are complaining that this is producing students who do not comprehend the F they’ve gotten on a class whose exams they didn’t bother to take. This stems in part from the notion that “everybody who wants to be an engineer should be one!” (ehr… no?) or even worse, that “everybody should be a college graduate”; there’s a counter-wave that’s most definitely not coming from the Ministry of Education, of people who say they’d rather their kid got trained as a plumber and worked fixing bathrooms than got trained as a lawyer and worked cleaning streets (I know real examples of both).

It’s not new; it varies a lot by school; it varies a lot by parents. It may be getting more prevalent, but this I can’t really tell.

60

I’ll offer the same anecdote I have offered in similar threads in the past.

My wife has taught 3 business law classes at the local community college for 10-15 years. She has noted a significant drop off in her students’ performance over the past 3-5 years. She went to multiple choice tests many years ago primarily because a large portion of her students could not write intelligible essays or paragraphs.

It used to be that the essays of the ESL students were the hardest to understand, but now it seems as tho there is little difference between native and learned English speakers.

Tho she has taught similar material this entire time and given similar tests, it is now common for more than half of her classes to get less than 50% correct on each test. Whereas before less than 10% would score so poorly.

Having said this, I note that this community college is not likely to get the “best and the brightest.” Also, a significant phenomenom is for kids to enroll in school primarily to remain on their parents’ insurance.

If college performance is in fact lower, I think at least some “blame” needs to go to “whole language”, which was a common curriculum for teaching reading and writing over the past 2 decades. I am highly critical of that curriculum, and am glad to see it seems to be losing its support in many school districts. But I believe it significantly hampered a generation’s ability to communicate effectively. Especially when combined with the growing influence of “computer chatspeak.”