Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t see college as a learning experience, but as a means to an end. There seems to be an alarming trend in universities being more interested in getting than in graduating truly educated people. In this climate, giving a student a failing grade can mean more serious repercussions on the instructor than on the student. In some schools, paying the tutiton and showing up to class virtually guarantees you a diploma, regardless of the quality of your work. Instructors are just too afraid for their jobs to fail students, especially when a good portion of the class deserves it.
My husband teaches at our local university. He always gives the tests to me before administering them to the students, who are mostly adult professionals, seeking a degree to further their careers. Usually, I can get a C, just using simple logic, and reading the questions carefully, even knowing nothing at all about the subject. It’s absolutely astonishing how many of his students fail the test, some of them getting only a twenty percent. As an experiment, he used the same question on all of his tests last quarter, worded in the exact same way each time. Amazingly enough, about half of the students missed the question every time.
Students complained bitterly about the reading material for the class. Instead of a dry text book, my husband decided to use a very interesting book which used stories to illustrate each concept. (I found it to be a very entertaining read.) “But where are the bold faced words?” one woman whined. “What am I supposed to learn?” My husband explained that she should read the story carefully, and the concepts would be explained, but reading comprehension was totally foreign to these students. Most of them admitted that they didn’t even read the text, but were outraged when they recieved poor grades.
That was the book I was referring to in my previous post. A gloomy assessment of our culture, indeed, but it gave me a great deal to think about.