Shagnasty writes:
> In his defense, the thread topic requires such generalisations.
So we should give up on facts and just offer the first half-baked thought in our heads? I thought the motto for the SDMB was “Fighting ignorance since 1973.” There’s a high nonsense to fact ratio in this thread.
I TA’ed at the college level for a few years-and I also noted the poor performance
quoted above. But we pretty much had to then grade the course on a curve, or
I’d imagine the parents (and the registrar) would never let us hear the end of it-
flunking half the class that is. Do the current profs here have to grade on curves
to “compensate” for the poor performance of their students, more at least than
you used to?
To elaborate upon the admittedly isolated datapoint of my wife’s experience, she is very troubled by the decrease in her students’ performance. She has questioned whether it reflects a change in how she has taught the course, but after considerable examination we do not believe it does.
She still gets a few intelligent, interested, and hard-working students each semester (maybe 5 out of 30), but a increasing percentage (50% or more) seem to put essentially no effort into the class. Admittedly, as a teacher it can be difficult to distinguish a student who cannot do the work from one who simply does not put forth the effort.
A couple of other factors my wife comments about regarding the students she sees:
-teaching business law, she often tries to come up with examples such as contracts to which the students can relate. She has ceased being surprised at how many of them still live at home and are completely dependant on their parents for everything including car and cellphone payments.
-she also is surprised at the “unprofessional/unrealistic” attitude she sees so often. Students simply fail to show for tests and then request make-up exams, expect the instructor to post her notes on-line, and other actions suggestive of a desire to be “spoon-fed”.
-many of her failing students claim a desire to transfer to a 4-year college - often NIU. If they are unable to pass a class at this community college, they have little chance of succeeding at a more demanding institution.
The combination of these factors makes my wife wonder what places in today’s/tomorrow’s competitive economy exist for these people.
Final point, the community college in question is in a relatively well off county west of Chicago, just in case anyone is ondering if the student body is made up of low income, underprivileged folk.
As other posters have pointed out, more students than ever before are going to college, so you’re getting a wider spectrum, not just the best and brightest. I also think that because going to college has become an unquestioned event for students in the middle and upper middle class students’ attitudes have changed. Going to college is seen as less of a privilege and a chance to make something of oneself and more of an expected rite of passage (or in some cases, the chance to party and screw around for 4 years). Consequently, there’s less incentive to bust your ass while in college. I see students all the time who are perfectly bright, but totally unmotivated or willing to work hard. They really don’t need to be in college right now, but the thought that they might be better off doing something else never occured to them or their parents.
Huh? What did you mean by this?
I took
US History
Computer Science (the last year it was C++)
Government
Calculus BC
Physics C
English
I took both English tests (Literature and Mechanics, I believe), and Both Physics tests (Mechanics and E+M)
I passed all of them with 4s and 5s except for the BC portion of the calc test (3) and the physics E+M test (2).
I practically tested out of Freshman year which turned out to have saved my ass because I ended up STILL not understanding E+M in college (I guess I just don’t get it) and intentionally retook Calc 2 (because I knew I didn’t get it yet) and ended up dropping physics and calc 3, and changing majors a bunch of times, which ended up leaving me on track for still graduating in four years.
Point is, I took a lot of AP tests and I don’t think I lost any value to my college education and it fact it saved me a lot of grief in taking additional time to graduate while I tried to concentrate on my major courses and discovered I really wasn’t cut out for engineering (as demonstrated by high-level math and physics) and changed majors before finding something I really wanted to do.
I grew up in a well-off suburban county, too, with few low income underprivileged folk. But that didn’t mean they were well off academically; – half the kids in my high school were stupid. (In 10th grade geometry they couldn’t understand concepts like 2 parallel lines never cross, or that a plane surface is infinite in all directions.And they couldnt write an paragraph whose first sentence was connected to next two.)
But— this was in the 1970’s, so those kids didn’t go on to college. They made good middle class wages as blue collar workers or retail managers, or got salesman jobs without going to college.
Today, those kids go to community college or 4-year universities.
My question to your wife the teacher: has the number of unqualified students jumped rapidly over the past 3 years, or has it been a gradual process over 10-15 years?
That’s my point. My daughter got a 4 in Calc BC, and still (wisely) decided to take it in college. I got a 4 38 years ago, and had no trouble skipping the first term of calculus. I had a very good teacher, and the whole class put a lot of work into it, work we wouldn’t have time for if we had many classes.
You took AP US history and government. There was not government AP test when I was in high school - AP US history covered it. In my AP history class we read a very excellent text (Morrison and Comager, The Growth of the American Republic) which was enough for everyone to do well on the test. My daughter’s AP history class was awful - at the end I got her a good history book, she read it, and she did well on the test. Splitting history and government seems to be a way for ETS to make money more than anything.
I’m dubious that many high schools today have enough top notch teachers to teach 8 different college level classes. There will certainly be kids who can handle it, but enough to fill this many classes? Perhaps we’re seeing dumbed down AP classes to match dumbed down college classes.
As a computer scientists, I wonder how many high school teachers could teach the concepts behind C++, as opposed to the syntax of the language. It really helps to understand data structures first.
This I don’t dispute. If you’re forced to take classes that don’t do it for you, take them in high school. However, lots of top schools give little or no credit for AP (though it helps in getting in.) When my daughter was looking at Harvard, I don’t think they let you place anything. When I was at MIT, you got out of first term calculus (half the entering freshman did this) but no other AP class did anything for you, even history and certainly not Physics or Chemistry.
I don’t blame anyone for taking all these classes, since colleges seem to pressure people into doing it. I blame ETS for expanding the number available to be able to sell more tests.
And, as for the OP’s issue, how could the quality of student go down if the number of AP classes taken has gone up?
I’ll ask her tonight. But I recall recently she was going over her old test results to answer this very question, and it seemed that about 3 years ago the number of kids who would fail tests increased significantly.
In Japan, there’s a common perception among university students that college is a time to slack after working so hard in high school. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if many, many college students in the US feel the same way, especially since some (especially upper-middle class) high school students are being pushed so hard to take umpteen AP classes, have just the right extracurriculars, do community service, etc., just to get into college. Once they’re there, they probably feel that they’ve achieved their goal and deserve a break. There’s a big difference between just being smart and being smart and willing to push yourself.
I don’t know – I have not had sex with one in many years.
We keep putting the blame on the students or high school education, but if colleges are indeed churning out a poorer quality product, maybe some of the blame should go to professors too?
The university where I work is struggling to make a big name for itself within the realm of Research I universities. Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen a couple of professors denied tenure, despite having glowing reputations for their teaching abilities. Rarely do you find an awesome instructor who has an equally awesome research program. There seems to be a trade-off involved with teaching and research. Perhaps as more and more universities vie for limited researching funding and big-name researchers, they squeeze out their best instructors. And the students suffer.
My favorite grad school professor was an older guy, who’d been hired back when my university was smaller and less known for its research. He had a number of first-authored papers, but it wasn’t an impressive number. He didn’t know the latest discoveries in our field (rarely did he attend departmental seminars), but he knew his natural history. Every semester, he loaded the department vans with students and schleped them all over. As his TA, I tagged along on field trips to local botanical gardens and parks. As a student in his paleobotany class, we drove up to New Brunswick, Canada (my first visit to that country) and went fossil-collecting. He didn’t know the big names in ecology, but he could kill you with his knowledge of plants. I learned more from him than all my other professors combined–including the most world-reknowned community ecologist at my university. His kind is an endangered species in research universities.
I’m not saying my other professors sucked, but they didn’t see themselves as teachers. They saw themselves as researchers, first and foremost. That has to affect the quality of education they’re providing.
More anecdotal evidence about writing ability (yahoo!)
I’m a history major, which means I read a lot, and my exams are essays. Here’s 5 questions; pick 2 (or 3) and write coherent essays in 3 (or fewer) hours. For my most recent midterm, I was expected to write 2 full essays (not paragraphs- intro, body, conclusion) coherently, with specific evidence to support my argument, in 3 hours. I did not prepare well enough for this exam. I had skipped some of the reading, and was only slightly prepared to write on 2 of the topics that could have come up. When I took the exam, luckily the questions I had hoped would be on the exam in fact were. However, since I spent most of my “studying” catching up on the reading when I usually would have outlined potential arguments, I had to spend some of my precious writing time creating an outline.
I totally screwed up. After wasting time writing an outline, I spent too much time going into too much detail on the first one. I didn’t write a conclusion, thinking I’d come back to it if I had time. I had to rush the second one, and even though I had a great intro planned, I made no outline for this one so it jumped all over the place and didn’t flow the way it normally would have. I was the last person to finish, at the end of the 3 hours, and didn’t get to conclude either essay. Neither were as long as my longest (and best) essay exam (8 pages on 1 question, in less than an hour). The first was well-organized and acceptable by my standards, though it lacked a conclusion. The second one was, IMO, the worst thing I have ever written in college, including the one essay on the Council of Trent I pulled out of my ass because I hadn’t read the chapter that discussed the Council of Trent (thank Og I’m Catholic).
I worried about it. I knew I wouldn’t fail it, I had at least made some good (if poorly written) points. But I only have 3 grades in the class- midterm, final, and paper. Screw one up, and you screw up your grade. I just checked (he posts the grades online) and guess what I got?
A 96. A 96?! I produced better essays in my freshman year of high school!! But some of the students finished in 15 minutes, and most were gone in an hour. And I’m not even verbose. In fact, I’d characterize my writing as concise. But I have never, ever, been able to fully, coherently answer the questions I was given in 15 minutes, even fully prepared. These kids must have written a paragraph or two and called it a night. No wonder I got a 96- I must look like Shakespeare compared to these kids.
That seems to be the norm, and I don’t even go to a community college. I have a very intelligent friend who attended a prestigious private high school, and he sends me his papers to look over before he turns them in. His punctuation is atrocious and he uses incredibly complicated phrases and excess verbiage to explain simple ideas. Usually, I’ll call him several times while I’m reading, and have to ask him to explain a phrase or sentence. Sometimes I can’t comprehend an entire paragraph, because he apparently ignores all rules of logic and syntax while writing. If I didn’t rewrite (and I mean rewrite) his papers for him, he’d fail. I’m not exaggerating at all.
I took an Expository Writing class (recommended for history majors, required for journalism) and we’d help proofread each others’ papers. I couldn’t understand how these kids managed to communicate at all. I wrote better papers in middle school, and they were taking a junior level writing class. Unfortunately, as others have mentioned, reading is abandoned in favor of video games and chat rooms, and text messaging has rendered proper English all but obsolete to teenagers. It’s terrible. I mean, some people aren’t great writers- just like I am terrible at trig. But native English speakers seem unable to compose a coherent sentence, let alone a paragraph. WTF?
This has been a complaint for at least 30 years. The fact is, researchers bring in money, and thus get power. I’ve been to dinner with two friends of mine, professors, who were comparing notes on how much money you had to get to cut down your teaching load. On one hand I agree, that good teachers are great, but on the other the greatest motivation I got in college was hearing front line reports from professors who were well known researchers.
I don’t think this explains the problem, not because it isn’t an issue, but just because it has been a constant.
I teach at a college and have to agree; about 30% of the students are practically illiterate and it doesn’t bother them an iota. They freely admit they have not read a book since 5th grade, never read newspapers and occasionally read People Magazine while waiting in a doctor’s office. My guess is that they struggle with reading and understanding even that publication.
I blame a very sick, under-financed and poorly administrated educational system. To paraphrase a quote I recently read, “The US will be a far better place when schools are fully financed and the Pentagon is holding bake sales to buy jet fighter planes.”
Nobody bats an eye when $billions are spent on frivolous pork barrel additions to legislative bills, but godforbid an extra nickel is “wasted” in schools. It seems the “no child left behind” concept has ensured that every kid in the US will be handed a high school diploma if they basically just show up for a few classes every once in awhile.
I don’t blame the students - they got their HS diploma and now they expect to get their college degree the same way - just show up occasionally and everything else is handed to you. They are shocked and get pissed off when you fail them for not turning in any assignments and not even bothering to take the final exam! “But I only missed half the classes!”
If I sound a little bitter it is because it only seems to be getting more widespread. I can understand the frustration of employers who hire a person with a college degree and then find out they cannot write a simple memo, know nothing of basic math and have the attention span of a moth.
RedRosesForMe writes:
> If I didn’t rewrite (and I mean rewrite) his papers for him, he’d fail.
Why are you doing this? How’s he going to learn anything if you do his work for him? Let him fail. It will teach him that he has to do his own work.
I agree with every word you’ve written here. I have had experiences similar to those that Dinsdale wrote about in regard to his wife; I have taught for 16.5 years.
I’ve also noted a decline in civility and consideration. Now, we have to tell students not to mess around with their camera phones or iPods in class, not to turn the classroom into their personal dining room, not to let the door slam shut behind them, not to chatter away while the instructor is lecturing or another student is answering a question, not to play hacky sack in the hallway right outside a room where a class is in session, etc.
“Under-financed”? The United States is near the top in per capita primary school spending, far higher than Japan, France, Britain, or Germany. Schools aren’t under-financed, they’re under-performing.
While I think your basic point, that money does not equal good performance, is right, I don’t think per capita spending is a particularly good statistic for a few reasons. First, while the US per capita spending is high, the inequality is vast – I’m quite sure that schools in East Saint Louis are not getting as much money as they need. And second, the US spends vastly more on special ed than most other countries.
I would be curious to see how the median and bottom quarter compare to other countries. There are no doubt some underperforming schools that need changes other than more money, but there are also underperforming schools in which more money would help quite a bit.
Perhaps under-financed might be the wrong word - but poorly financed all the same. Teacher salaries are not competitive in the job market, every teacher I know has to buy supplies for their class, schools are cutting back on any extra curricular activities, libraries have books that are woefully out of date, textbooks are scarce and also out of date, school buildings have not been renovated in ages, school districts are imposing archaic laws (evolution, like global warming, is just a theory, after all), and bureaucracy is forcing teachers to spend hours filling out forms and fudging facts just to qualify for basic funding.
Go ahead - sign up to be a substitute teacher for a day, or a week - and then we’ll talk again about how wonderful our per capita spending is doing at the classroom level.
Spoke with my wife about this yesterday. The following paragraphs are admittedly nothing more than the opinions of one person who has 3 teenagers and has taught at a single cummunity college for 10+ years.
Ms. D said there was a dramatic decrease in her students’ test scores between 2-3 years ago. In her opinion, that corresponds with the introduction of the “Whole Language” approach for teaching reading and writing in the grade schools maybe 10-12 years earlier.
Our eldest is a college freshman. When she started grade school, she was taught phonics and such. When she was in 2d grade or so, and when her younger siblings were beginning school, our local schools were making a big deal out of introducing “whole language.” New books and materials, new curricula, and such.
In Ms. D’s opinion, whole language not only fails kids in terms of not teaching them how to read and write effectively, but she believes it is not an “analytical” approach and, as such, it does not help kids develop good analytical skills that they could apply in diverse aspects of college - and life.
IME, as engaged parents we were able to counteract/supplement whole language by working with our kids, reviewing their assignments, encouraging them to read, etc. But a good percentage of parents aren’t willing or able to be involved to that extend.
As a parent, I was shocked to see my kids receive high grades on assignments that contained blatant grammatical errors, misspellings, and the like. Not to mention awkward stylistic choices, uncreative phrasing, etc. Outside of spelling tests or grammar worksheets, it would be extremely rare for spelling/grammar to factor into the grading of a writing assignment - even through honors/AP HS classes. And IMO way too many English and history assignments more closely resembled “arts and crafts projects,” than exercises at effectively communicating through writing.
My kids generally take honors sections when available. My assumption is that the regular and remedial classes are even less rigorous in teaching the kids how to analyze matters and effectively express their views.