Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is the Bar Being Lowered At Universities?
An anonymous reader writes "I am in my late 20s, live in the U.S., work in the IT industry, and am going to school to upgrade from an associate's degree to a bachelor's degree. One of my classes is a web-based course that requires students to write blogs. I am not attending one of those questionable for-profit schools. This is a large, state-funded, public university. In this course I have noticed poor writing skills are the norm rather than the exception. It is a 3rd year course, so students should have successfully completed some sort of writing course prior to this one. Blog posts, which students are graded on, tend to be very poorly written. They are not organized into paragraphs, have multiple run-on sentences, and sometimes don't make sense. I do not know what grades they are receiving for these posts. Slashdot, is what I am seeing the exception, or the norm? Is the bar being lowered for university students, or am I just expecting too much?"
Yes... the bar is being lowered, yes it is!
dont you no most people dont rite good
Slashdot readership (if it can really be called that, judging by how little is actually read by its posting users) is an older crowd; they are not college students. Chances are they will lament how times have changed, and then tell you to get off their lawn. Seriously, very few people here are going to be able to answer your question because they are not in college anymore. On top of that there are tons of trolls who will just say they have to start up arguments.
I saw it start in the 60s when profs started inflating grades to keep students from losing their student draft deferments. More and more unqualified graduates entered the workforce and many went into education. It's been in a downward spiral ever since.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
This is nothing new. Universities have a BROAD set of admissions standards. In any college you will frequently find people who you wonder how they got there. Even if they didn't someone could get in via money, lying, legacy, getting lucky, socio-economics, knowing a guy in the admissions office, you name it...
20 years ago as a first year UK student, I spent a semester at a decent US university. I participated in Masters level courses and aced them all. I was shocked at the astonishingly basic level of teaching and understanding; grading for much of the course was via multiple choice quizzes which made it ridiculously easy to achieve high marks, without proper validation of a student's understanding of the subject. At that time, UK university courses were effectively free.
You are paying handsomely for the lamentable education you are receiving. Complain. Vociferously!
You come to Slashdot to complain about badly written blog posts? Have you even been here before? That's like going into a gay bar to bitch about homosexuality.
Oh no... it's the future.
I believe your question could be phrased "are people getting dumber?" You can either believe what you hear (that they're supposedly not) or you can believe what you see with your own eyes, in which case the answer would likely be a resounding "Yes!"
you didn't accidentally enroll in a high school?
Just out of curiosity, if you were to stand up and walk to a mirror, would you say you look like this man here?
You did say IT, didn't you??
I think writing a blog implies much less formality than a traditional paper. I graduated with a BS in 2010 and never did I write a paper with improper grammar that did not receive deductions, no matter the course or the assignment. It could also be that the students are not writing this in Word, and thus can't rely on the spelling and grammar checking functions.
What kind of legit bachelors degree program has a class for juniors that requires them to write a blog?
I am a university professor. What you are witnessing is the disintegration of American secondary education. We have seen a dramatic decline in the preparation of incoming freshman. Even strong students who are very prepared on paper have major and substantial gaps in their education. Professors are struggling to manage this situation. Do you teach to the students in a way that will maximize their learning? Or do you teach the course content at a level consistent with your own notion of academic integrity and what the course catalog lists as the content of the course? Do you somehow split the difference, or if so, how? These are the questions we are trying to answer.
Classes, as well as professors, are evaluated based on the pass/fail ratio of students. Because of this, passing sub-par work is rewarded. Word gets out that a certain class is "easy" and even less talented students enroll. I don't think this is new, but yes, the bar is continuously lowered..
Common Sense (+1)
Sounds like a course for easy credits, so insert your own assumptions here and please be nice.
I finished my post-grad about a year ago at a highly ranked public university for my specific scientific field. The third/fourth year courses I taught had exceptionally bright students, where said courses were not easy credits. I would disagree with the premise of your statement based on experience, but I'm also distanced from public high schools. You may be seeing the effect of poor preparation at that level.
The bar has been lowered for everyone and everything. Universities included. Take a look around you once in a while; people are just plain dumb
Back in the day they had high standards...
Wait, did they? Do you have metrics to show it?
Eighteen year olds aren't great writers, they never have been. Maybe at Harvard or an advanced English class, you'd have to write really well. But this is a Blogging class at State school. This is clearly writing for engineers, I'm not surprised the writing is bad.
Welcome to the real world. Universities are neither miracle factories that turn out great thinkers, nor are they particularly strong filters of the caliber of people. They take in average 18 year olds and turn out average 22 year olds.
What is the point of college? Well, it's kind of arbitrary. We have more people than jobs, so we need some sort of filter to select the people for the jobs. On the other hand, the professors know Blogging 301 is just a ticket to clerical work, so they don't act harshly on tuition-paying students who just want to move on to average jobs. They can't write well, but do they really need to? Does the world really need that from them?
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
This lowered bar for having a basic grasp of grammar and spelling isn't just limited to universities. Read through any news source these days (printed or online), and you'll see the same things. Grammar and spelling errors that even a basic spell check in Word would find and correct. People are lazy, and with no one calling them out on it, there's nothing to stop it. If a news editor can't even be bothered to proofread an article before publishing it, why should a student or professor or anyone for that matter? Hopefully enough of us will hold out and maintain basic standards until the pendulum swings back.
This is the new normal. In an age of "txt messaging", "tweets" and short attention spans, basic writing skills are being lost. Those students will pass the class, many with high marks because the professor won't want to take the time to fail them. (FYI At tier 1 schools, professors put a little effort into their teaching workload as they can to get by as their performance is based on research.)
You should review your Universities policy on course failures and how the univeristy ombudsperson deals with dissagreements on grading. Professors are basically put on trial to fail students and often lose because there is insufficient documentation that the student knew they were not performing well during the course. Even with low homework scores and a syllabus defining how final grades will be determined.
I write this as a recent PhD working as a post doc at a university. I have taught a mix of undergraduate and "professional" classes. It is only getting worse.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
- George Carlin
It's not just writing, it's also in mathematics. The the worst part is that many students who do poorly in mathematics do so because of their poor writing (and hence poor reading comprehension). The main issue today is that many people feel that a higher education is essential to a "better future", and that it should be available to everyone -- and I agree with both sentiments. However, not very many people are willing to admit to the fact that many folks entering college are simply not well prepared. Almost every university offers a pre-caclulus class (and some even offer lower level mathematics courses). The problem is that such a course should really have been taken at the high school level (and usually by the sophomore year at the latest). The reality is that there are too many students who come into college and in some cases graduating with only pre-cacalculus as their highest mathematics course! The same goes with writing/reading. When email and texting has become the preferred method of communication, it is not uncommen to see textspeak in emails, with little to no proper punctuation.
I am a college instructor, and I have been for about 7 years now. I'll be upgrading to professor soon, so I can tell you first hand that your observations are quite correct. The undergraduate education system of the USA is considered to be the laughing stock of the academic world. However, our graduate schools are perceived as the best in the world. The reason for this is the utter failure of our public primary schools.
Think of it this way. The average high school graduate in the US can only read on a 6th grade reading level. They come to me, a scholar in the field of Computer Science, and I have to try to teach them complex mathematical ideas that are only truly expressible in a new language. I have a couple of options. I can either dumb down my course to give them a chance, or I can maintain my integrity and demand that they come up to speed. The answer is that I have to do a mixture of them. If I taught as I was supposed to, my student success rate would plummet and my perception scores would be low, hence I would be fired. However, if I make the course too easy, I've polluted my own field in the next generation. Instead, I try to ramp them up with basic skills, but push them just to the edge of what their minds can actually handle. I also try to encourage them in other areas of study outside my own. Most of my students consider me a very tough but fair instructor, and most are grateful for my help. However, I do fail a larger percentage of my students than other instructors. Most have gone the field pollution route.
This is a serious problem in our society. One thing we could do to fix it is stop pushing college so hard. Many of my kids would be better served in a tradeschool than a university, and yet they are pressured to come to me. They waist 4 years of their lives, learn nothing usable, and then end up back where they started.
Oh, and one last thought. About the perception of the rest of the world. If you have a Bachelor's degree, that basically brings you up to par with the high school graduates in other countries. That also brings you up to the level your grandparents in the US had when they finished High School. We need to stop the degradation of the primary schools, but we never will. No child left behind has basically ensured that all future generations of Americans will be too stupid to find their a**hole with both hands.
I am the penguin that codes in the night.
And I proofed his report for my English class. It was atrocious. full of endless grammatical errors, punctuation etc. I had to retake the class, because let's face it English grades are subjective. But guess whose paper was selected for reading and who passed it? Proving my point that any writing class is largely complete bullshit, I repeated the course with a different teacher with the same assignments. Accordingly I re-submitted the same papers (only dates changed) and passed with a very good grade.
As a scientific person I can't ever see how someone can award grades subjectively in creative subjects. Like, who could fail art school? I think for the most part it is just busy work. And if your instructor thinks you put in an adequate amount of work, you get passed.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Bad news for ya, kid. If you haven't noticed already, that "style" of written communication is just what's become the norm, regardless of age. In fact, even using proper grammar can be seen as intimidating and pompous. (Yes, I realize I used the passive voice there, but English is the only language I know where language teachers frown on the passive voice.)
I teach writing at a community college in Pennsylvania. Primarily, I teach classes for developmental students -- students who aren't ready to write at a 101 level.
At our school, it isn't an issue of lowering the bar. We're an open admission school; we accept everyone, and try to meet their needs. That means I see lots of poor quality writing, and it means that I'm always looking for ways of making a difference. I'd point to a number of reasons for why students write poorly, even after going through a university's writing series:
1. Students usually only invest in their writing when they're being graded on their writing.
2. Students tend to memorize processes rather than master concepts. They might not think that the stuff they memorized for essay writing -- like paragraphs -- applies to a blog post, even though the similarities should jump out at them.
3. Grading systems encourage students to do the bare minimum.
4. Students tend to invest less in online writing. Blogging is so similar to the way they write in social media that they let their bad habits from the one environment appear in the other.
5. Many students have a bad attitude about general studies. They think college is there to teach them the exact skills they're going to use in a specific job environment. In reality, college is really bad at this; it almost never can accomplish the same goals as on the job training. This means they undervalue their writing classes.
6. The writing process usually isn't emphasized outside of writing classes. I have students every semester who can produce passable writing as long as they participate in prewriting, draft, do a peer review activity, get feedback from the college's writing center, and then revise and submit a final draft. Outside of my class, they revert to trying to write, edit, and revise all in one session, and then wonder why their writing isn't the same quality. Blogging tends to exacerbate these problems, since the software doesn't encourage you to do multiple revisions over a period of a couple of days prior to posting.
The university I graduated from sure lowered the bar. They went from quarters to semesters even thought the student body voted against such a change. The administration claimed it would help retention while not lowering the bar. It did help retention, but of course it lowered the bar. Otherwise it would not have helped retention.
Agree with the previous posters. Grade inflation, yes. Broad admissions standards, yes.
But in a more general sense, it seems largely due to the (to me) bizarre notion that a good goal is for more people to attend university. U.S. culture nurtures the idea that if you don't get a college degree, you are worthless. Typical 'First World' wrongheaded thinking, the kind which Alexis de Tocqueville observed back in ~1835.
Which is kind of funny when you see many college graduates working (not by choice) at Starbucks or the like--just as you see see many non-graduates and even secondary school dropouts working quite ably and to great success in corporations or in businesses they themselves own.
The more I experience, the more I am convinced that--save for a relative few exceptions--people either have a basic grasp of thinking, writing, basic maths, etc., or they don't. Usually, this attainment or non-attainment preceeds the age at which one typically might attend college by approximately 10 years.
I dnt no y peeps cnt rite nemor, u wud think dat all dis tech wud hlp. The only rule I am aware of is that paragraphs have to be = 144 chars.
What's wrong with writing blogs? Journals have been a viable alternative to short papers for a long time, probably the last century at least.
Otherwise, there's not enough information here to determine if the activity is a waste of time or not. I can say that many students in online courses are resistant to discussion board posts, weblogs, asynchronous group activities; or in other words, work in general.
As far as your assessment of other students having poor writing skills, your professor is probably in agreement. You should probably keep in mind that blog writing is a personal or subjective process. It is difficult to conclude that someone has poor writing skills if the assignment allows for them to freely write whatever comes to mind without specific criteria. If you actually have to read other student's lousy blogs then I would suggest putting on some rose-colored glasses and try to find the silver lining in the muck.
In my opinion, the university stage of a person's education is simply too late to develop good writing skills, if they haven't been developed at least to some extent before then. Without intending to sound stuck up, I credit my writing ability mainly to my excellent primary and secondary school education.
You don't honestly think that most students at a typical public university with a student body that is 10k or larger could be there with the requirements of say the 1950s or earlier, do you? Set aside the bullshit racial and gender grandstanding about requirements "back in the day" which is so often used to discredit anything our forebears did, the average heterosexual white male in college today could not meet the academic requirements of most universities back then.
The very fact that there is a significant overlap between high school and college math course offerings at the lowest levels is proof of this. Algebra I in college? Really? Someone who cannot even solve basic algebra should not even be a candidate for college, but it's shocking how many people who lack even a basic understanding of freshman and sophomore high school math can make it to "respectable colleges." I say this as someone who had damn near a learning disability in math then (somehow I managed to get Bs in all of my high school math classes).
I recently received my phd in physics last year, at which time I had the unfortunate pleasure to be a TA for many physics courses. Through the years of teaching at a community college and being a TA at the university, I have seen professors significantly curve the courses due to either poor teaching or lazy students. The final two years of the program, it became common place for the physics courses for bio/chem students to be curved to the point that if you got 60% of the total points you would receive an A in the course.
The sad/funny thing about this is that many students became cocky and thought so much of their hard work for getting 60% of the points in the class. In my personal opinion, a significant part of the problem is that many students can get solutions to the work that is required for them to work on. Because of this, they never really learn how to do anything and since it is bad practice to flunk a whole class, it needs to be curved.
SIx Seasons and a Movie
Example I notice today on Slashdot: ... which students are graded on ... ... on which students are graded ...
should be:
Nate
If you were getting rich off the people, would you want them educated?
Read Upton Sinclair's books about the schools in the 1920s, about how they were corporate-controlled indoctrination centers back then. Read John Taylor Gatto's book available for free online, 'The Underground History of American Education.'
Here's a small quote from H.L. Mencken's review of Sinclair's book "The Goslings":
"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps."
The difference is this is something people post to voluntarily. They are not paying to receive a grade and credit for. The OP is referring to a course requirement.
The submitter didn't really explain the purpose of this exercise. If the purpose was to deploy and customize Wordpress to show something you had learned about PHP and MYSQL then maybe the teacher wasn't grading on grammar and most people didn't care. I myself am guilty of long sentences that, if I had more time to spend on them, I would probably trim down but I don't because that's not what I'm paid to spend time on at my job (unless it's user doc). Likewise if this was demonstration of technical skill over prose, these could have been last minute entries and afterthoughts to the assignment. Given little time, no proof reading and just put up to Lorem Ipsum up some text?
The big question: are these students docked for having poor grammar in their blog posts in a computer course? If not, then you probably shouldn't be critiquing them like they just tried to write a novel.
My work here is dung.
First, the context - I used to teach a web development course at a Canadian university. It was a side-job as a sessional instructor, brought in for knowledge in the area, and since I moved away for my day job, I stopped teaching.
While I was teaching the course, I would have the students develop a web site from scratch, with the primary focus being to showcase their ability to encorporate CSS and javascript, and follow the W3's accessibility guidelines - topic was up to them, and I frequently told the class that their content's accuracy wasn't important, as long as it was their own content being generated. (This produced some of the most entertaining things to read at times... "Reptiles of the World" was all about Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, and their political machinations.) There were always a mix of local and foreign students in the class, and frankly, while some of the foreign students hadn't actually bothered learning the local language before coming to the country (or after), their average writing skills are (and have always been) about the same as those of the local students.
Sadly, I must admit, that over the 10+ years that I taught the course, the quality of writing steadily decreased. At first, the average student was fairly literate, and I only had occasional problems with people devolving into instant-message speak. ("Can u help me?" Seriously people, the "y" and the "o" are both within an inch of the "u" on the keyboard! If you're writing a web page, you've got time to search them out and hit them!) During the later years of teaching the course, I found that more and more of the people coming into my class fell into the category I would call functionally illiterate, and sadly, all I can think of to blame for it is schools no longer actually caring if kids learn to read and write before pushing them out with diplomas.
A relative of mine's daughter in grade school came home with an "essay" she had written and received a good mark on - it was full of horrible spelling and grammar errors, which my mother and the girl's mother both made her correct - when the teacher was asked about why the spelling problems were not corrected, we were told "Oh, we don't do that anymore, we don't want to stunt their creativity."
You find all kinds.
Blog writing is pretty bad. The worst I had to do as a Computer Engineering student at a UC was take a technical writing class where they made you write fake documentation for stuff. It was actually kind of useful in the long run. Not a total waste of time.
Now the ethnic studies class, that was a different story. It's not fun being one of the only white guys in a class full of minorities when the purpose of the class is to show how white guys through history have screwed minorities. Now THAT was a total waste of time, and a little scary.
I got a lot of insight into the effects of No Child Left Behind on this very question from this Kenneth Bernstein. He makes a great argument.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/09/a-warning-to-college-profs-from-a-high-school-teacher/
> Prof: Students 'think commas are sort of like Parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words
Can find the original source for this but the OP is afflicted.
"It was atrocious. full of endless grammatical errors, punctuation etc. I had to retake the class, because let's face it English grades are subjective."
Alas, you still didn't get that punctuation thingie.
You're appalled.
However, a Victorian looking at how you write (or how I write) would also be appalled.
And an Elizabethan would no doubt terribly berate the Victorian for not using the Latin.
20 yrs fm now ur kidz w be uzin teh txt slng 2.
I don't remember you reading a novel period.
Having recently helped somebody through their Post Grad course it may be worth adding some context to this. It's quite common for courses like these to require a student to write a course diary, or in other words a blog post. This is for personal reflection on the material given and to verify with their tutor that they are understanding their lectures and other course materials.
The course materials related to the subject will be marked rigorously, but the blog posts will not require the student to maintain a high level of English in their construction.
The problem with your argument is that professors have pretty much never been trained in pedagogy. I think most people in secondary education, including the professors themselves, would agree that learning about how to teach effectively is not high on the list of priorities for most professors. There are a lot of reasons for this, some of which are problematic and should be changed. But the thing is, this has been the situation for decades. Most professors aren't good teachers. That's true today, and it was true in the past. So how do you explain declining performance of students when the quality of professor has remained constant?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Average students attending universities with admissions standards that accept them will predictably attain - hold on now - average performance.
50 years ago average students didn't go to universities to get bachelor's degrees. Now they do.
So how is it a surprise that the standards are lower?
I do believe the bar was lowered.
However, I don't blame universities; rather, the secondary education system in this country has been eroding their own standards for many years. I recently returned to an online university (not naming it, but be aware that not all are diploma mills), and the level of writing was atrocious. All of the errors the OP mentioned, as well as many others were present in the discussion forums. Professors were quick to point out the many writing aid services available to the students, and I witnessed many students' writing improve over the time I attended.
I cannot say what the causes of this erosion are, but I can say that until the US replaces its antiquated system (18th century) of fiscal support and local control of secondary education, we will experience further degradation of quality in our education.
I'm working with a few graduates and I'm amazed just how atrocious their writing skills are. Even simple points or comments don't make sense.
One fella asked if we could simplify the QA write-up to simple multiple choices instead of written points. So I put him in charge of the project. He's still scratching his head to this day on how to simplify the form.
Even my children, who are in elementary school, seem to be given the "they'll figure it out eventually" treatment. Heck, I have some notebooks that were kicking around in my parent's basement from elementary school, I compared the two, and was shocked of just how little grammar and spelling is now marked. Back then missing a letter or a misspelling was 1/2 to a whole mark off. Now it's simply a circle with little negative effect. How the heck are kids supposed to learn if there are no repercussions on their marks?
I hear you with the paragraph-less, single sentence multiple page write-up. A whole wack of "and's", very few commas, and apparently the period now ends the write-up instead of a sentence. And what do they get? "Excellent content, good points". Good points? It's only one sentence. I can spend all day complaining about writing skills of kids these days.
Functional illiteracy is considered a right on the Internet. If someone points out a grammar mistake, he or she is accused of being a "Grammar Nazi." The top post in any discussion about grammar is invariable an imbecile joke with deliberate misspellings. It is extremely difficult to find a page on the Internet today that contains user-generated content but does not contain egregious apostrophe abuse, and anyone who tries to do things correctly "is (sic) OCD." Language is simply in a state of perpetual destruction by morons, and the latest crop is simply very efficient at making it seem like this is acceptable.
If you want to have a better education, work with a professor on independent projects. If the classes are easy, it should be easy for you to impress someone enough to start working with their graduate students; even teaching universities conduct some level of research. This way you'll get a better education and, further, if the professor is at least somewhat known in their field, a strong recommendation will have great value. (I'm assuming you're at a fairly good state school; sadly, things get harder the further down you go.)
Or you can look for prestigious internships though, again, you'll need to impress them somehow. I don't know how this works since I didn't do it that way, but getting real world shit done in addition to getting good grades is probably a good plan.
Good grades have never been, strictly speaking, necessary for success (at least as long as you're not too picky about what kind of success you want...). However, today, neither are they sufficient. Although the cause of this is deplorable, I'm not sure it's a bad outcome all-in-all. This is what economic radicals call `creative destruction' (whether this is a good thing depends on which kind of radical you are). The meaning of grades has been devalued, and something else, quite possibly better, will take their place. Eventually. For now, one has to strive for vague, risky, ill-defined things because the dogma of the existing order is crumbling. It's not easy, but that's also good — it keeps away the dilettantes and hoop-jumpers.
However, I must note that your goal is to ``upgrade" to a BA, as opposed to, say, wanting to learn more about topic X. If that's all you want, what are you complaining about? Just lump it through the classes and grab your fake sheepskin in pleather case.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
The most shocking thing about my college experience was reading the gibberish my peers wrote. I don't know where the bar was set, I couldn't see it.
This is all part of The Plan. The Plan is working. We, the sheeple. Just add 30% more creationism and we're all set.
My kid takes "computer science" classes in middle school. What they TEACH is typing... I think where ever the "bar" is, it's not even relevent anymore. Unless it's that one on the corner with the kick ass happy hour. That one rocks.
Here are a few possible factors that could explain writing incompetence:
1. The assumption that written word is equivalent to spoken word, as if the two forms of communication are interchangeable (i.e. "if I hear it spoken, then it's valid as written"). This couldn't be further from the truth, and has likely been exacerbated by social media. The slang construct "needs repaired" is a good example of this (compared to the valid constructs "needs repairing" or "needs to be repaired").
2. The assumption that popularity makes right, or that other people know better (i.e. everyone else writes this way, so it must be correct). Comma splicing is a good example of this (for example "I just left, meet me there").
3. The assumption that proper writing style is unimportant or pointless. This is also wrong, for the same reason that wearing a flannel shirt to a job interview is wrong.
It's a course about blogging for fuck's sake. People taking it are probably taking it because they have to not because they want to learn how to blog. Welcome to college, where if you were interested in something a bunch of barely related and intolerable classes like that on the way to your degree will snuff it out of you.
They're all 3rd year students taking a course about blogging, none of them are sober, none of them care, 80% of them are thinking about killing themselves because life is such a joke that in order to achieve their life goals they have to listen to someone lecture to them about blogging. This class is the exact moment in time where their new-found complete lack of respect for the people telling them how to live their lives comes into focus. "This guy gets up in the morning at 6 and commutes for an hour a day to teach people who aren't paying any attention about blogging, if I try hard enough I can be just like him."
You can either say the educational sky is falling, or you can realize that no one is or should be giving a shit about a state school blogging class.
If the students were expected to write something that passes for a blog entry on the Internet today, then they should be expected to use bad grammar/structure/spelling.
Every Student Left Behind
In the mid '70s when I was in grad school there was a discussion about whether education standards had been lowered and the general opinion was "yes". It was pointed out that the average grades in particular high school and university classes had been rising and that increasing numbers of freshmen were required to take make up courses in "language arts" as they couldn't write well. It was suggested that the proficiency level in the 2nd year of university corresponded to the proficiency level of high school graduates from 20 or 30 years before. One would think that the decline would have bottomed out by now; perhaps part of this perception of decline is just perception.
On the other hand this decline appears to be correlated with the "baby boomer" explosion and the introduction television in every household.
There must still be some records around of the required proficiency in written language skill from previous decades which could be compared with today's.
Nate
As a scientific person I can't ever see how someone can award grades subjectively in creative subjects. Like, who could fail art school? I think for the most part it is just busy work. And if your instructor thinks you put in an adequate amount of work, you get passed.
Did you know you didn't write what you meant? Therein lies your problem, YOU do not understand the technical aspects of creation or writing.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
There is a widespread belief in the US that everyone should go to college. There are two problems with this. First, the economy has a certain need for skills like carpentry or auto repair. College, with some exceptions, doesn't teach those. Second, not everyone is prepared for college, due to lack of motivation or aptitude or due to a failure of secondary education.
What I think you're seeing is that these unprepared students are being channeled into the university system. Two generations ago they might have gone to secretarial school or plumbing school or what have you and then into the workforce. One generation ago there was a movement for vocational education in the US to move that kind of training into high school and get the non-college-ready students career-ready instead. For reasons I don't understand, vocational programs first became a dumping ground for students with learning disabilities and/or behavior problems, and then were de-funded. This leaves us with little middle ground between ceasing education at high school, and four-year universities.
At the same time, high schools have been struggling to keep their dropout rates down and to impart basic literacy to their graduates. They're frantic to minimally educate the bottom quartile of students. Given limited resources (and, often, a statutory requirement to spend disproportionately on special-needs students), they're just doing triage. For those students who do go on to college, there seems to be an implicit expectation that high school doesn't need to make them perfect: their deficiencies can be corrected later, in college.
Back two generations ago, a college would take a weak high-school graduate and just reject her application, and she'd shrug and go on to a (perhaps perfectly rewarding) career in hairdressing or on an assembly line. Now, with the expectation that college is for everyone, economic forces ensure that there is a college that will accept such a student.
When everyone is expected to go to college, college becomes the new high school.
Interestingly, there is a lot of political will to make college accessible, but much less to put some teeth back into the high-school curriculum so a diploma actually means something.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Most insightful comment ever. Right to the point.
Hi,
I work as a professional software developer, but do a lot (around 12 hours a week) private tutoring, mostly of university students. I continue to be shocked by the extremely poor (writing) skills of the students. Even worse, very frequently there'll be slides and labs from teachers with errors. Most of the students I teach hate IT because they find it very hard. Their primary motivation is to finish school so they get a degree. No wonder there's not a great emphasis on writing skills.
I'm a college professor, and my students seem to follow a relatively normal distribution. I have a few who can write well, a few who would have a hard time making a grocery list and a large majority that do okay. The ones who do poorly often do very *very* poorly and I think their relative impact may cause outside observers to overstate the situation. I've also noticed that, predictably, full length papers tend to be more problematic than individual discussion posts. Students who do okay in the discussion often start to go down hill when they have to put together a multi-page argument.
Wow, you don't say, people don't put the same effort into writing blog posts as they do when writing proper essays and conference/journal papers? No way.
The only evidence that universities have lowered the bar, is by letting garbage like you in. I'm not surprised you've only been able to pull an A.S. degree the first time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyyHegP255g
Skip forward to 6:00
Watch the whole speech, it is very good.
Math professors at Universities have been complaining about this same trend for a very long time, to the point that they actually created a set of non-credit classes that basically teach high school math again. You have to take an entrance test before taking a first year math course, and if you fail you have to take the non-credit course first.
Why? Because the math failure rates in first year became astronomical due to the pathetic job that high schools are doing in teaching it.
Other fields (like writing) are suffering similar problems now. Generally speaking we do a pathetic job of teaching basic skills like these in elementary and high school. But on the upside we've boosted everyone's self-esteem to the point where they don't know what failure is.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2001/4/23/the-racial-theory-of-grade-inflation/
New Economic Perspectives
For any interested in a little background, I highly recommend the book "The War Against Grammar" (Amazon link).
The basic gist of the book is that starting roughly 30 years ago, linguists and educational theorists decided that teaching grammar and prescriptive rules (arbitrary rules, they might say!) is not necessary. After all, people learn to speak without formally being taught grammar. As long as you can be understood by others, what does it matter? Communication is the key, not formal grammar. Thus being able to diagram a sentence or know the difference between a direct and indirect object became an archaism. The emergence of described (and accepted) phenomenon like Ebonics is part of this movement.
Ask college kids today how many of them had to diagram sentences in elementary school? I have asked many current college students and very, very few even knew what diagramming a sentence means. Even ten years ago, many more students would have had this emphasis on grammar in early educational.
The end results--college students who can't write to save their lives. (And no, I don't blame texting and Instant Messaging.)
It's a good book!
Colleges and universities are recruiting students from countries in which English is not the first language. The reason is money. These foreign students pay "out of state" tuition, and since in most states, state governments are now providing only ~10% of the cost of education it's a lucrative business for higher ed. Besides that, state institutions will be able to provide more financial aid to the fewer resident students necessary to fill their maximum student populations since a higher fraction of students pay high out of state tuition. Something must be done to change the degradation of public higher education funding which probably means higher taxes. We know how far that will go with the country's feelings about taxes. The result will be continued increases in the cost of a college education outpacing inflation. Eventually all public colleges and universities will become basically private schools with private school tuition levels. As long as state governments provide at least $1 to a college or university they will try to control its curriculum. Look at Missouri or Texas on how state legislatures seek to control what's taught in schools.
Check their majors. Most are probably seeking some sort of degree in a technical field, and they aren't wordsmiths. Some people can crossover but most can't, and they don't want to. It's not what they're good at.
If you've ever raged over incomplete documentation, non-existent documentation, or incomprehensible documentation that looks like it was written by someone int he midst of head injury, this is why it is this way.
I believe that I may be in the same class, and I'm being serious. I'm in a 300 level online class at a respected east coast university in the CS dept. It's a joke to say the least. In addition to the poorly worded blogs there are class materials provided for study that are at the level of 3rd grader and I am not exaggerating in the least. A section on radio contains 3 or 4 sentences and that is the 'history of radio'. The quality of the logic and grammar in the posts are poorly thought out, and I don't consider myself rite good at this ritin stuff (sic).. This will be my last class at this University, I can't drop because I'm getting reimbursed by my employer, it's either lose the money or complete the course. It's so bad I've considered just dropping it anyway.
Ugh. I found that quote and assumed it was from the review. Apparently, not. The review in its entirety from the 'American Mercury' is below:
The Little Red Schoolhouse
THE GOSLINGS: A STDUY OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOLS, by Upton Sinclair. Pasadena: Upton Sinclair.
This volume is a sort of continuation of the author's previous work, "The Goose-Step," and is devoted to the elementary, grammar and high schools of the Republic, chiefly but not exclusively those maintained at the public cost. It presents an engrossing, instructive, and, if allowance be made for the author's indignation, highly amusing record of chicanery and imbecility--a vast chronicle of wasted money, peanut politics and false pretenses. The theory behind the public schools, which cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions every year, is that they manufacture hordes of enlightened and incorruptible voters, and so safeguard and mellow democracy. The fact is that they are mainly manned by half-wits and bossed by shysters, and that their actual tendency is to reduce all their pupils to the level of Kiwanis.
Mr. Sinclair proves all this by an immense accumulation of facts. he not only toured the country, inspecting innumerable schools himself; he also entered upon relations with many rebellious schoolmarms, male and female, and so heard the details of the sad story from the inside. Furthermore, he threw himself into a scientific study of the inner operations of the National Education Association, the trades union of the higher pedagogical functionaries, and digested whole shelves of reports, statistical tables, volumes of graphs, and other such fearful documents. The result is a tale that lacks nothing in the way of circumstantial corroboration. It is, in truth, overwhelming in its plausibility, and I doubt that anyone will ever challenge successfully any essential feature of it. But under the telling of it, alas, there is an erroneous assumption, and there springs therefrom a great deal of false reasoning and vain indignation.
That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is the aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else. If any contrary theory is cherished among us it is simply because public schools are still relatively new in America, and so their true character and purpose are but little understood. The notion that they were invented by American patriotism and ingenuity, and go back, in fact, to the first days of the New England Puritans--this notion is, of course, only hollow nonsense. The early Puritan schools were not public schools at all, in our modern sense; they were what we now call church schools; their aim was to save the young from theological heresy--the exact aim of the Catholic parochial schools and Jewish Cheder schools today. The public schools, which originated in Prussia during the Eighteenth Century and did not reach the United States, save sporadically, until the middle of the century following; even in Massachusetts there was no Board of Education until 1937--,have quite the different aim of putting down political and economic heresy. Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible. How they succeeded in Prussia is well known to every student of the war papers of George Creel, Woodrow Wilson, Newell Dwight Hillis, Owen Wister and other such eminent experts. How they are
Get offa mah lahn!
What message are you replying to??
I've made a second start with my academic education, so I'm relatively old - 25. I also thought that the bar was being lowered by looking at other people's work. When I actually compared it to my own at that age, it was pretty comparable. I think you're forgetting your age advantage, you've seen stuff and applying it. A first year course will drill the freshmen only that much for writing good texts. Furthermore, I think the most important message you get in university is that you try to better your skills throughout your whole life and not ever think that you're done once you have that piece of paper.
You ask rhetorical questions like this, but you don't tell us the name of the school. Do you think US News and World Report publishes that ranking for shits and giggles?
Guess what, snowflake, you're going to a shit school. Nobody at a real school has to take a course on blogging, unless it is some silly humanities elective.
And since you've been in the real world, working in "IT", your surprise at discovering that there are lots of inarticulate people is completely disingenuous. Hell, I'm wondering if you made it all up, just to later rail against No Child Left Behind or teachers' unions or whatever your pet wharrgarbl boogieman is.
Soulskill, are you submitting fake "anonymous" posts to farm pageviews?
Professional writers on professional major news websites cannot be bothered to actually make grammar corrections when they cut & paste!
Far more people are going to college than in the past. Not everyone in public school was expected to go to college. The structure in place in the public school system has not caught up with the reality of what is expected from the schools. Also - look at the drop out rates and graduation rates: Many of those folks you are with won't graduate. So - where college was once for the elite, everyone now, seemingly, is expected to go to college. At least among the middle class. If this is true, then we need to restructure our schools to meet those goals, or expect the results we are seeing today. Also - the elite institutions are still elite and the quality there is still quite good.
Blog posts, which students are graded on, tend to be very poorly written. They are not organized into paragraphs, have multiple run-on sentences, and sometimes don't make sense.
Sounds like they're quite talented bloggers, actually.
Senior in CS at an ABET laundry listed state school here,
A number of responses to this mention taking requisite courses to fix the problem. The notion of a requisite that remedies years of habit and poor discipline, from now until the future, is ridiculous. The fact is that students relapse. Even if they effectively write in one course, this is a discipline that breaks down in future ones. This doesn't happen in writing alone, but is also applicable to math. Studies have shown that as much as %40 of what math students have studied is lost by verification of fourth year examination. The problem is that many Universities today focus on a laundry list of courses to complete, rather than a quality outcome that is a product of integrated course-work. It isn't "kids these days". It's a systematic educational quality problem. Degree quality and course integration is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about, because it requires administrators to actually think about what they choose to teach, rather then accept a laundry listed guideline of what is mandated in a course by a questionable certification group (*cough* ABET *cough*).
I am 32 years old, also finishing a degree in IT at a large, well respected state college. I went to college in my early twenties before joining the military, so I have seen the ten year gap between then and now...I can absolutely say that for my college, the standards have been drastically lowered. The difference is shocking. Even the junior college I attended in 1999 was far more difficult than my senior level classes are now.
It seems to me that someone can write a decent sentence and paragraph if they read regularly. If someone reads well written articles, columns, stories, histories, novels, etc; then that person will usually have an "inherent" ability to write a passable sentence, paragraph, argument, etc;.
You can now get the fuck off my lawn as I lament the fact that(gots to have some exaggeration and hyperbole) no one reads anymore:
Unless it is a few pages or less, and more likely 140 characters or less.
A young relative of mine who is is college right now complained about how much reading they had to do for classes. I asked if they ever read on their free time for fun, you know, even something like "Harry Potter". They said no. I have since discovered that this is the norm for the Gen Y and Z folks. Reading on your free time is now considered very anachronistic and unhip.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
How much effort should you put into format and vocabulary for a blog entry? I thought a blog was more like writing in your diary. I think graded assignments should be turned in on paper. My son took a summer school literature course that required blogging about reading assignments. It just sounds like laziness on the professors' part...meaningless busy work that can be counted as "something to grade". Make them write a paper! Oh, but then someone would have to spend their time grading that...
Funny thing, the liberal arts were strong on writing, critical thinking, etc. Back when I was in school ~25 yrs ago. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
And BTW liberal and fine arts courses are *much* harder than you would think. Don't judge till you've tried it.
C|N>K
As somebody currently attending a 'large, state-funded, public university', I can safely say that that how high the bar is set depends on the professor that students are assigned. The university I attend tries to mitigate this somewhat by forcing everybody to take a standardized writing test required for graduation, but the test is set somewhere around early to mid High-School level English skills, so there is definitely a low bar there. Whether or not the bar is lower than it was a decade or two ago: I cannot say. What I can say is that all of my peers with university-level writing skills always attribute them to a rigorous high school teacher or university professor who pushed them to get good, myself included. Those who were not lucky enough to have such a presence in their education still amaze me by including 'txt speech' in academic work, even into their Senior year.
I am attending one of those questionable for-profit schools. This is a large, state-funded, public university.
FTFY
The bar is not being lowered. What you are seeing are the writing efforts of future managers. You'll need to get used to their poor writing skills since you will be working for them in the future. Nothing to worry about.
Proverbs 21:19
http://mycoursecalendar.lakeheadu.ca/pg180.html
Scroll down to Mathematics 1135
Description:
Students are taught the principles of mathematics, both mechanics and applications, in relation to whole numbers, common fractions, ratio and proportion, decimal fractions, and per cent. Students will also be taught about weights and measures, including the metric and English systems; computing dosages; and temperature.
A non-credit course open only to students in the Native Nursing Entry program.
Despair.
I realize the targeted students for this course are not mainstream students, and it's not a credit course, but seriously, people attending university should not be there to learn what fractions and per cent means. Adult high school maybe, but as an entry point into a nursing degree?
I've got nothing but respect for the Natives who want to be nurses, and nothing but despair for the educational system that lets them get to the point where they are ready for a university education, but don't know fractions.
You think their English prose is bad,
just wait until you see (and have to debug, and maintain) their code.
My little Brown Book of English that I used in college does not even have a section on correct format for a blog post.
-Class of 87
And yet, he got a different grade with the EXACT same papers.
I had the same experience. I took a Calculus class in High School and got an A. It was chapters 1-12 in a certain book.
I took it again in College from a professor who, I found out half way through the class, liked to fail lots of people. Same textbook, chapters 9-12. I had JUST had this the year before in High School and I knew it very well. I got an F and failed the class. It was the only class I failed in college.
I took it again the next semester from a foreign exchange professor from China whose accent was so thick 90% of the class couldn't understand a word he said. I only understood half of it. I got an A, because, you know, I knew it REALLY well then.
Grades are WAY too subjective. There need to be more standardized tests for subjects.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Before I received my graduate degree from ODU in Virginia, I was required to pass a Writing Proficienct Test, essentially an essay on a topic that related to my field of study. It was not graded for factual content, but solely for writing skills. I was amazed at how many of my fellow students were sweating blood over this simple test until I looked at what they wrote.
What I saw was much as you described.
My spouse who is earning a phD can attest to that. Even the single pedagogy class they were required to take was a joke - much like an undergrad having to tak PE. At research institutions, teaching students is the least of all faculty's worries. Undergrads are just bread and butter revenue, like selling a $15k car at a dealership. The real milk maids are the grants and endowements the faculty acquire or help acquire.
On an offtopic, yet related to OP - I've attended a state institution as an undergrad, and a private institution as a grad. The differences were wide, imo. My experience with the former mirrors that of the OP at the state school, whereas I see the students being much smarter and motivated at the private school. Even though the latter's entrance requirements were lower, I can tell there's much of a less partying until blakckout-drunk culture. But it could also be due to the intense workload and the professors all assuming you can learn a dozen fundamental principles in two days and ready to apply them to any situation. Sure, that's what a professional can do, but as students, that's tough.
Anyways, I still think it's what you make of the class is what matters. If it's easy, talk to the prof to challenge yourself? I always felt my peers were holding me down and I did a lot of self-directed studies. The "side" help I had with the profs were invaluable - not to mention the resources (which were much, much better at the private school).
WE need more trades / tech schools and less college for all
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-06-12/opinions/35461879_1_college-level-skilled-workforce-elite-schools
You get a gold star and a certificate and a trophy and a party at Chuck E. Cheese for that comment!
(aka "Speak and Spell") was a required course for my engineering degree, and I believe it still is. My prof marked it (un)fairly harshly...I was getting 90s in my English classes and got 50s in the Engineering course.
That said, a depressing number of my co-workers with 10+ years of experience can't write a clear and coherent email or design document.
In 1999, there was a class called Math 001, for students that couldn't grasp algebra in high school. When I first signed up for classes, they wouldn't let anyone in without knowing algebra. In 2000, they created a course below Math 001 for students who didn't understand what fractions were. I ^@$% you not. I walked past the class, and the poor PhD-track grad was explaining numerators and denominators to a bunch of college students. The kicker is that the new class couldn't be called Math 000 because "000" was a special number reserved for something by the registrar's office, so they named the newer middle-school-curriculum course Math 010. Math 010: the weed-in course.
overload of filler / fluff classes leads to people doing the min in them to pass them while taking there time in core classes.
as for IT the helpdesk does not need full blown essays and if you are in a call time based one you don't have the time to write one.
Inner city teachers are required to pass their students or they might get shot by the students.
What state has an affirmative action statute that states this? Your title is that AA is to blame then your first sentence is that security and fear is to blame. Are you saying they are the same thing? If a teacher doesn't follow affirmative action they can be shot by the student? In what universe is this true?
I do not know what grades they are receiving for these posts. Slashdot, is what I am seeing the exception, or the norm? Is the bar being lowered for university students, or am I just expecting too much?
Lowered compared to what? The proliferation of these online courses means that you are now being exposed to the writing of your classmates in ways you were not before; in a physical classroom, you'd come to know your peers more by their speaking than their writing (unless you sat between two teenaged girls...), and only your instructor would have exposure to the class's writing as a whole.
Also, you neglected to mention what kind of admissions process your current school has. Just because it is a public institution doesn't mean they don't have a relatively open-door policy (e.g. a community college).
Personally, I'm taking some graduate courses online, from a school with just such an open acceptance policy, and the writing of my peers does make me wince (hopefully this changes after my first semester). But I think I wince more for their laziness than lack of skill, as just about all of their mistakes would be caught by Microsoft Word or a similarly robust word processor.
But what really irks me is their habit of treating everything like an essay question on a standardized test, complete with standardized response format. What is supposed to be a prompt for online discussion and academic discourse (literally we're told to "respond with a paragraph or two, about 100 words"), and everyone responds with a canned response, with the first sentence always being the prompt (question) rearranged into the form of a statement (often right after quoting the question itself), followed by five or more paragraphs that must have been at least as painful to write as it is to read.
The worst is that it makes me self-conscious of my conversational tone, leaving me to wonder if I'm supposed to be writing like that.
You are absolutely correct that Slashdot's readership is a bit older. I fall into that demographic, but feel that I can speak on the subject of lowering college standards.
I believe that the OP is correct, but there are qualifications. Public universities cannot raise tuition and their government funding is being drastically squeezed between the national debt and the small government tea-baggersI mean tea party. Private universities are raising tuition prices and standards.
I attended a top fifteen private university. The standards were very high. Sure there were a few blow-off classes, but the requirements were such that every student had to take some quite rigorous classes. Engineering students could get away with a minimum of writing classes, but they were HARD. Humanities students could get away with a minimum of math and science. They weren't as hard, but were blow off classes either.
I am friends with several current students at my alma mater. The standards have definitely gone up. The average standardized test scores have gone up. Students now have to take clusters, and the rigorousness of the course work has increased.
My (very recently) ex-girlfriend graduated from a public university recently, and I can tell you that the standards have dropped. There is essentially no math requirement. There are majors where one can take 80% blow-off classes, and student services are poor.
Having said that, there are some fantastic professors at her school, and some great classes. If you attend a school with low standards, you can still get a great education. You just need to seek out those classes that have good professors and interest you.
Check out reatemyprofessors.com, but don't just go by the numeric ratings. Read actual comments. Some people rate primarily based on workload; others actually rate the quality of the teching.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Not so long ago, the U.S. changed the way it taught the three pillars of traditional education: reading, writing, and arithmetic.
The read and writing are very closely coupled, and the ability to write, as well as the size of your vocabulary, directly correlate with whether you were taught to read via the "Whole Language" method, or whether you were taught via the "Phonics" method.
The "Whole Language" method effectively treats the letter combination which makes up a word as if it were an ideogram, and you end up treating English ideogrammatically. The end result of this method of teaching is severalfold for the student taught:
(1) The student can read words for familiar ideograms very quickly; this translates to a perception of rapid initial progress in reading, which does not follow a linear curve when increasing vocabulary usage occurs over grade levels of reading. For most people this isn't an issue, since newspapers tend to use a vocabulary of at most 300 words for most of their stories (i.e. they write their stories in language somewhere between a 5th and 6th grade reading level).
(2) The student will often fail to be able to read words which they have not encountered before, unless the meaning can be derived from context and the first letter of the word. This is because students are still taught the "ABC Song" mnemonic, which can more often get a first letter match, compared to subsequent letters.
(3) Their ability to write words which they have heard spoken verbally, but have never seen written in verbally paired context, is either damaged or non-existant.
(4) When using texting, and to a lesser extent, blogging, and email communications, the student is more likely to engage in use of an abbreviated phonetic alphabet (sometimes called "text-speak").
Contrarily, learning phonetic processing of words leads to a slower apparent ramping to an observed ability to read, but suffers none of the other drawbacks.
The "Whole Language" method came out of the newly minted discipline of child psychology in the 1960's, and took over from the phonetic method in the late 1960's or early to mid-1970's, with California leading the way, and the other educational systems following later -- the delay in adoption depended on how conservative the school or district was when it came to adopting new methods of teaching.
Luckily, the "Whole Language" approach has since been largely discredited, but the children who were taught to read "in the gap" were effectively handicapped in their ability to read, unless they relearn it phonetically with unfamiliar words -- typically most easily achieved by learning a language other than English phonetically, where that language shares most or all of the phonemes with English.
Unfortunately, this "gap" lasted into the mid to late 1990's for some states (mostly, again, the educationally conservative states, who were slow to adopt the "new" phonetic method, after have been late to adopt the "Whole Language" method.
There are a number of interesting scholarly articles on this, apart from the Wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_reading:_whole_language_and_phonics and I encourage you to seek them out, since the Wikipedia article fails to provide date-bands by at least state, or within a state, by school district, which would otherwise allow you to understand the age range you could expect to have been "damaged" by use of the "Whole Language" teaching method.
NB: Some schools, notably Parochial schools (otherwise known as "religious schools"), and Montessori style schools, which had to simultaneously teach multiple grade levels within the same classroom t the same time, never adopted "Whole Language". Catholic schools in particular, which had an emphasis on teaching both Latin and English, and private schools with a foreign (usually romance) language requirement ended up with an additional teaching burden which was do
I don't live in US, but I have reasons to believe that the problems in US education are similar in nature to what we have in my country, Brazil. (The main reason is: the work of brazilian charlatan Paulo Freire seems to be as important in US as it is here.) Those who go to graduate school to become teachers get a terrible education. They get no scientific training (in fact, most graduate without understanding what that is), most of what they are thought is based on pseudo-philosophical work with no scientific verification, largely based on the work of charlatans like Paulo Freire or Jean Piaget. Could you imagine how the world would be if all medical schools were ruled by homeopaths? I believe that is what we have in our educational system. I can't imagine any possible solution without actually closing everything and start it again, but it's just not possible to do that.
In U.S. elementary schools, "pedagogy" means: teach as little as possible while making it as difficult as possible (Google "constructivist math" in case you're not familiar with the curriculum in U.S. elementary schools).
Anyhow, university/college students are adults and should be mature enough to self teach with some guidance from a professor/doctor/master.
Subjective? So you're telling me that American literature from the Federalist period is the same as the stuff written a few years later when Romanticism had reached the USA? That a poem by Emily Dickinson means whatever you want it to be? Or that a sentence can be incorrect or correct, stylistically effective or ineffective, just based on my mood or the health of my bowels? Good lord. I wasted so many years studying. Where were students like you when I needed such an easy answer. Or maybe it's just that you're a bonehead who didn't pay attention to your teachers?
It's a constant frustration. When they *arrive* here the problem is already deeply engrained. It is very difficult to correct at the university level, and it takes the willingness and dedication of the students to fix it. An English writing course or two doesn't fix it. It has to be through multiple projects that the students care about, rather than a few exercises they "have to do" to merely get their minimal English requirements. There has to be consistent and detailed feedback in courses where writing isn't normally the most important emphasis.
Basically public schools are failing to prepare these students, and universities that admit them anyway are left with the difficult task of trying to clean up a mess that the students often don't care about themselves.
That being said, I have made progress with students whose writing was a weakness, but only because they were willing to put in the extra time to improve it.
lol no ppl jst rite diff 2day. langs chnge deal w/it yolo
I graduated from what is supposed to be a decently ranked Engineering program offered by a public state university. My senior capstone project was literally the only one that worked 100%. One other person's project had most features working, and it drops steeply from there for the remainder of the class. More than half the class had 0 features working. Most of them graduated and got their degrees. I understand this respective situation to be common and not unique to technical degrees.
It is my personal opinion that the average population will fail if ideal standards are applied to them, so in order to fulfill political objectives, the bar is indeed lowered enough to produce the desired statistics. I've heard the term 'welfare degrees' uttered for this.
Required reading on this topic. Allan Bloom, 1987
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind
"Bloom's critique of contemporary social movements at play in universities or society at large is derived from his classical and philosophical orientation. For Bloom, the failure of contemporary liberal education leads to the sterile social and sexual habits of modern students, and to their inability to fashion a life for themselves beyond the mundane offerings touted as success. Bloom argues that commercial pursuits had become more highly valued than love, the philosophic quest for truth, or the civilized pursuits of honor and glory."
I worked in college admissions for a little over a year; I also graduated from the same school. Our admissions standards rose considerably from where they were when I applied (in 2006) to the most recent class of applicants. So the bar for admission, at least at some schools (we were a large state school) is rising.
hi
If they are required to write a blog post every day, then I would expect that the writing quality would be allowed to slide as the lion's share of the students have other courses running concurrently; likewise if they are told something like "respond to this news story in the first 24 hours". However if they are given more time then they should be able to write better quality posts if the quality is suppoed to be part of the project. If instead the point is just to run some blogging software and see how it responds under conditions of X, Y, Z, then the quality of the writing itself might not be as important as its frequency and volume.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
also the's itt, devry used to have a good rap but then they kind of had to keep up with the degree system so they kind of got off track and to many jobs said need college degree and 4+ year one at that. When you can learn a lot more at a itt, devry, ect school some of them are only 2 year ones.
"Whether that's OK or not is a judgment call."
I'm one of those former STEM students, but I think language skills are important. Think of what can happen without proper punctuation. "Let's eat Grandma" is not the same as "let's eat, Grandma"
Yes it is! Pour me one please!
Traditional education and IT don't mix CS is not IT also the old Traditional education system is not built for collgle for all.
I went to a private 'research university' for my undergrad, and I had a rule of thumb:
Admitedly, you'd occassionally get the bad but as yet untenured professors, or the actual good tenured ones, but there was a definite correlation between tenured & good teaching skills.
Those that are still working towards tenure have to worry about their classes and actually prepare to present something. Those with tenure might show up and give an incoherent presentation with 20 year old slides and tell you that things haven't really changed since then, so don't worry. (and it was a computer security class ... albeit, 15 years ago)
My least favorite professor would copy problems from the book (his book) on the overhead machine, and refuse to let you take notes in his class (because 'if you were writing, you weren't listening', but I remember things spatially, and remember things like 'that was on the bottom right of my page of notes'). And from just sitting there listening to him drone on, I fell asleep in *every* class, no matter the time of day.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Last fall semester, my first at my current university, I got a 4.0 GPA. I was pretty proud of myself until yesterday when another student raised her hand to ask the professor what "inevitable" meant. I've since realized that, while I may have above average intelligence, I probably look like a freaking genius to my professors compared to my competition.
You obviously never been into an inner city school full of violent ni66ers and sp1cs. Affirmative action gives these motherfuckers too much sense of entitlement. Time to cut them off. Violence will ensure but once this is suppressed America will be the best of the world.
I used to be like your young relative, although I did read a lot when I was in middle school. Now that I'm in my 30s, I desperately miss reading. I can tell my own grammar has suffered with sentences eroding to fragments. I can tell you that the only thing I've been reading has been manuals for the past 3 years and badly-written news articles (CNN, and other news sites that don't even properly follow their own industry-AP style).
Even in my "down" time during flights, I find myself either reading a pop article on the in-flight magazine of talking to the person next to me. Basically, I'm either reading technical manuals, God-awful posts on /. and elsewhere on the internet, or 6th-grade level writings on magazines.
And after work when my brain is tired and frustrated, I have a hard time maintaining plot points or character development, so I just was an hour's worth of tv to "numb" my brain. I never understood the appeal of reality or dumb tv shows until now.
God, I miss reading. Reading fiction.
You wrote, "It is a 3rd year course, so students...". That should be either, "...course, and so..." or "...course; so...".
I've read a lot of comments here complaining about how bad things are.
What I haven't seen is: what are we going to do about it?
PushForMoreCollegeStudents X EverFatteningBellCurveOnTheLowerIntelligenceEnd = ResultsThatWeAreSeeing. Idiocracy coming true.
Is it dumbed down at the secondary level? When I graduated from high school -- like, DECADES ago -- about 14% of my class where honor students. I recently decided to get the home town paper. Last year, 40+% were "honor" students at my high school. That Flynn Effect must really be working for them. The paper runs Snowflake of the Month stories: "Johnny has a wonderful attitude and Suzy is always helpful to other students." That sort of silliness would have embarrassed the hell out of me in my day.
The Reagan era turned universities into "businesses." Where's the customer delight in a failing grade?
The next time that you are about to post something, copy-paste the text into a text editor. Then, put your friend's name at the top of the page, and begin to proofread it accordingly. When you're finished, make the necessary corrections, and post the final text. If you do this, then maybe your posts will be comprehensible.
Midgets have to drink, too.
Have gnu, will travel.
I was talking to a more senior math instructor recently where I teach, and s/he said, "I recently went back to my files from when I started teaching here. Wow! There's no way we could give tests like those anymore!" [meaning they were much too hard for our current students]
So I've been teaching math and computers in community colleges in Boston and NYC for about a decade now. First of all, when I initially started teaching, I simply could not believe the atrocious quality of the work I was getting submitted. It seemed utterly insane. Early on I also gave an assignment for a report paper, taking for granted that college students would have that as an assumed skill. [record-needle-screech] So wrong. The students went nuts when I gave them back corrections on their writing.
Interestingly, the one bulwark, the "proud nail" in the current college system is the basic math requirement, which alone prevents about half of all community college students from graduating. (My ears never stop ringing from the nonstop chorus of, "I've completed all my other credits, I just need remedial algebra to graduate, please I need to pass" a hundred times every semester.) My theory is twofold: (1) math is the last discipline where you can't dance around and lower standards through subjective means; it's really obvious if you can graph a line or not, etc.; and (2) math is the one discipline that's inherently an application of shared principles (we don't just give true/false tests on whether multiplying is the inverse of division, you actually have to use that in the context of solving an equation).
Now, we recently have a new protocol at our university that noticeably and dramatically made the algebra final exam a whole lot easier (fewer problems, mostly two-step manipulations, almost no fractions on the whole final), so as to ease the bottleneck of students trapped in remedial courses. But I see the tide rising everywhere, with the basic math requirement being held out as the last seawall, and stress for both students and instructors is enormous. Ultimately I don't see any final outcome to this other than colleges flat-out remove the math requirement, or fake the testing and make it absurdly trivial.
My dad's a long-time veterinarian, and supposedly it's the same situation at the top professional schools there now. From what he says, a few years ago at one of the top schools, there was a rash of suicide attempts among the students who couldn't take the pressure, so now they basically don't fail anyone, and just pass everyone over to the state bar to determine who gets prohibited from actually practicing (after 8 years of schooling). So it's someone else's problem and the school does collect more tuition, after all.
I don't know what the solution is. It seems like as soon as society decided in the last century that college degrees were inherently valuable, then it was doomed to corruption pressures and devaluation, in a case study of Campbell's Law.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Geez... have you read many clearly written business communications lately? I haven't. It seems that as soon as people receive their degree and enter the world of business, their writing skills are the first to go.
Another thing... writing a blog for college credit? Heck, short of digging a trench and tossing the bar into it, I don't see how the bar could be lowered any farther.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Write a great paper, get an A. Write a shitty paper, get an A. Write a really really shitty paper, get a B.
Why write a great paper?
...or we have an absolute genius. The spelling "waist" proves you read all the way to the end, and were paying attention.
Look up the "All brown M&M rider" story.
Yes from multiple fronts. The worst being industry influence over the education system to "modernize" by doing all their job training for them. They've externalized as many costs as they possibly can in business and now they are trying to externalize their employee training; that is, when they have not skipped that to externalizing the employees... to foreign contractors!
Companies used to hold onto employees and would have them trained. Now, they lay off whole departments and find new ones with the relevant skills or force employees to reapply for their own jobs (many times the real reason is to cut benefits and is not actually related to skills.) The employee is supposed to handle their own training on their OWN time outside of work or be replaced with somebody who enters with that training. So you work 45 hours per week with maybe 2 weeks vacation per year and must spend many hours outside work preparing to keep your job. If you want a raise, forget it - go to another company. No wonder their biggest security threats are from the inside!
Complain about working most your life in a career that is quite likely insignificant? You are lazy! Shame on you! You'd be rich if you just worked MORE... then you can have a real life!
I went to computer science grad school in the 90s. People, including professors, often wrote English at a grade-school level. I am now an assistant editor for scientific journals. I see papers every month that are so poorly written that I don't even know what they are trying to say. I critique accordingly, though we are not allowed to be too direct because it might hurt the feelings of non-native speakers of English.
I did my Master's at a top Canadian university in 1992. I was T.A. for the 4th-year graphics course, one of the "big three" at that school.
Each term we had about 25 students, 5 or 6 of whom were really good.
I went to industry for a decade, then decided my life was too easy.
I finished my Ph.D. at the same school in 2007. I was T.A. again for the 4th-year graphics course.
Each term we had about 50 students, 5 or 6 of whom were really good.
The "gene pool" of good, motivated students didn't change from 1992 to 2007, the profs were every bit as good both in research and teaching skill. The only "improvement" was the pool of fee-paying, half-subsidized students taking the course. The population of the province sure didn't double during the time, but the 1990's drive to get "more technical people" sure doubled the intake. The 5th year of high school was also trimmed back.
I knew faculty who quit for industry rather than teach remedial high-school math.
"Computer Science: because your Mom told you to!" was the headline of a poster seen outside the student society door... hits the nail on the head.
My wife is in a California English Language Teaching certification course online with the University of Phoenix - they have a similar online writing based curriculum. From time to time, she lets me read some of the things her classmates are writing. From what I have seen, a substantial number of educators in the state of California often have terrible writing skills. Their spelling is not great, either. There are many schools in San Diego where school children receive little or no help at home with reading or writing, not to mention math, science, art, or history. Teachers are really the first and only line of defense between these kids and illiteracy. Since most students don't do much reading or writing on their own outside of facebook posts or texting, it is unlikely that they will learn writing skills by experiencing good writing. If their teachers haven't got it together, there is very little chance that anyone else is going to set them aright.
Naturally, these kids grow up and start applying to colleges. Some of them are accepted and must be responsible for the awful blog posts you're talking about.
I'm taking a graduate level course in Structural Analysis and the first exam was on the simple analysis I learned as an undergrad. It is nearly the same test as the first one I took.
I have also come to learn that many graduate courses at my university are curved, where a low C is an A. So yes, we are passing people with poor skills as a society.
If it's graded properly, much of the subjectivity is removed. It's really not too hard, for example, to determine whether or not someone made a logical set of arguments, came to a conclusion that was supported by the facts and arguments they presented, and did so in a manner that was clear and appropriate for the audience. Lazy graders will simply give good grades to papers with few typos, or else will give good grades to papers that present a logical argument, but if you properly train the graders to look out for both the style and the substance, everyone surprisingly gets pretty on the same page with their grading.
During grad school I was, for three semesters, the lead teaching assistant for a writing intensive course that had a total of fourteen teaching assistants and three to four professors, all working together to teach and grade the work from a class of 600-650 students each semester. To say the least, keeping the grading consistent between sections was a primary concern for those of us trying to direct everyone. While we were fairly good at remaining consistent, we realized one semester that we had some issues similar to what you're describing, so we all got together for an entire Saturday early in the semester (on our own time, no less) so that we could work through example essays and get on the same page with precisely what we were looking for. We made sure we all understood what the rubrics meant, how they should be applied, and how many points should be deducted for the most common types of errors or omissions.
Sure enough, the grades that came out that semester were much more uniform between sections, and when a student had a complaint and asked that their paper be graded by someone other than the original teaching assistant, most of the grades they got back were within a handful of points of the original grade, rather than coming out quite a bit differently, as had been happening at the start of the semester.
So yes, there is some subjectivity, but much of it can be eliminated through even a modest amount of proper training.
And has begun digging.
Depends on where you go and what you study. I'm in the Electrical Engineering Ph.D. program at Univ. of Maryland, College Park. It is insanely difficult. Not surprisingly there are almost no American students (maybe less than 10%).
What I teach isn't particularly important. Many of the students in my classes are Freshmen, which makes sense because my courses are mostly first-year. They are not writing-intensive but do involve some writing and a great deal of reading technical material, as well as classroom discussion. There's also some math and logic but the course material is generally more verbal. What I have seen is that these students are often barely able to put complete sentences together, either in writing or verbally. I'm not saying they aren't intelligent, but they have limited vocabulary, misunderstandings about punctuation and capitalization, and what's worse, a poor ability to apply critical thinking. I know that I would not have gotten through college (early 1990s) if I had had this skill level then. So, yes, I think the bar is lower.
First of all, Universities are notorious bastions of Left wing ideologues who probably believe everyone needs a fair shot and no accountability is OK, etc.. That said, even if that were not the case, look at the professors or teachers--perhaps they, too, are poor writers and have no skills to judge another person's prose. I agree, the bar has been lowered across the board in this nation in many areas so it is not your imagination or some isolated incident. It is the world we live in unfortunately. This younger generation had better be worried or at least live with a larger sense of urgency than they currently do. The lack of creativity, enthusiasm, analytical skills, engineering prowess, etc. will be a major problem for them in the future. I'm not sure where they think all of these "fun gadgets" and technological advancements came from but when the generations who built them retire or die..then what? Are they going to be up for the challenge or waiting for another generation to take over? Time will tell...I wouldn't hold out hope given the entitlement culture which exists today. That doesn't breed innovation and creativity....
It was thrown down a well years ago. This kind of class just makes the fact more publicly visible.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I graduated with a CS degree in the mid nineties from a proper university, none of this online crap.
My girlfriend on the other hand has decided to go back to school for health information management. She tends to freak out about writing papers, taking tests and such. She's not stupid, just not terribly well equipped to cope with all of it.
Throughout her program, I wrote probably 60% of all of her papers for her, mostly on topics that I had no background on. I did not attend any of her classes, read any of her text books, or fool around with any of the crap they shovel you in the online courses. I also took many of the tests, or at least helped her through it.
She consistently got A's in all of these courses.
Online courses with blog posts amounts to nothing more than busy work. I watched what she did, and I'm quite sure I could accomplish a week's worth of assignments in about 30 minutes, but they force you to drag it out. One blog post, and three responses per day. Repeat that task for three or four days a week. What a waste of time.
These university professors have grown lazy. There is no teaching in these online courses. You get a syllabus and you have a schedule for handing in the busy work. You take a couple of online tests (and answers to the questions can often be found in google).
Yeah I'd hire these graduates!
The bar isn't being lowered as much as it is what you're doing. You are going to a questionable school as you state and are taking online classes. This is where you went wrong. People/kids who do those classes are not looking for an education. Their looking for the quickest and easiest way to get a degree with little work. Because of this you get to take classes with the individuals who are at best sub par.
First, I'd say you can always find some schools where it is easier to get A's than it was. But it probably isn't a trend.
Second, if it is a trend, do not blame the teachers. This is an administrators' issue. At my University (where I teach and TA), there is a huge push to increase graduation rates. Sounds great, since graduation rate is a huge problem where diversity is high and support is low. Unfortunately, the easiest way to get X students / year is to "lower the bar."
However, the teachers always fight back against this. In general, the average graduating student with a decent GPA is in fact a good representation of what we want a student to look like. So, thanks in part to the tenure system (in which curmudgeonly teachers can't be ousted by angry administrators), we still have high standards for our honor students.
I graduated in 2005 from Vermont Technical College, a small state school, only about 1000 students. Everybody in my class (Computer Engineering Tech) was capable of writing complete and comprehensible sentences or at least capable of cheating to fake it.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. It should be no surprise that this applies to people's writing skills, even at the collegiate level. Whether colleges should *accept* substandard writing is a matter of preference.
HI-YO, HI-YO, DISCERNIBLE TODAY
(A Song After Reading Toynbee)
Has it come to your attention how the race of man
Has been climbing upwards since time began,
How it's been climbing steady, and it's climbing there still,
But every time you notice it, it's going down hill?
Chorus
Going downhill is the natural way,
For the old folks work and the young folks play,
And the pioneer morals universally decay -
Yet definite improvement is discernible today!
Hi-yo, hi-yo, discernible today!
Now there's been a quite demonstrable and healthy gain
In higher mathematics and the size of the brain,
Between us and the oyster there were great strides made -
But every time you look at us, we're slipping down grade.
Chorus
Going downhill is the natural trend,
For the old folks gather and the young folks spend,
Yet line up all our forebears on the path that we descend
And a definite improvement is apparent at this end!
Hi-yo, hi-yo, apparent at this end!
The Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Greeks and Romans, too,
Hung up some fancy records when their world was new,
And some they hung so high the boys are shooting at them still -
But they saw themselves continually going down hill.
Chorus
Going downhill is the way things run,
For the old have illusions and the young have fun,
And our manners and religions everlastingly decay,
Yet astonishing improvement is discernible today!
Hi-yo, hi-yo, discernible today!
Maxwell Anderson and published in the May 8,1948 edition of The New Yorker magazine (pg 26) .
actually, 12, when I was getting a graduate degree at a private institution in a major metro area. I was shocked and dismayed that the numerical methods class, which had both senior year and gradudate level students, suffered because many students had little grasp of topics from basic calc and linear methods. That I could recall far more completely and accurately topics last taken about 15 years earlier than those in their early 20s really pissed me off as I was paying my own fare for the degree and felt my money was being wasted.
Well, to add my own experience... I am currently a PhD student at a public university in the US (I got my undergrad and masters' degree in the UK though) and I've taught undergraduates for a while.
In short, the state of education is pretty appalling. It's not the lack of previous physics (which is my field) knowledge that's the issue. It is students' utter inability to
(a) use proper grammar and spelling
(b) form coherent sentences or paragraphs
(c) use basic logical reasoning
(d) let alone formulate a basic coherent argument
(e) deal with basic algebra such as fractions or exponentials
And I'm not requiring students to write eloquent essays, just communicate in clear written English. It's too much of a gap that they could ever make up during the four years at university. So indeed undergraduate standards are worryingly low. Many of the courses taught at the university are at a level one might consider appropriate for 14-year-olds at best.
It strikes me that the failings are mostly due a poor high-school (and possibly primary and middle-school) system, underfunded and subject to poorly thought-through policies. Messing up the public education system with counterproductive measures to supposedly improve quality seems to be almost a sport in the US. A lot of it is also political -- educated voters are just difficult to deal with, especially if you rely on your base to vote repeatedly against their own interest. And please don't get me started on the lack of historical awareness, even when just limited to US history.
So I fully agree with the original poster. But to answer his or her questions: Yes, the bar is being lowered constantly, and no, you're not expecting too much. Some of my students were pre-meds. It worries me that some day my life might depend on them.
The entrance bar is lower I think, probably to do with money, but there are still challenging classes if you are selective about what you take. Overall I think the quality of education you receive has a lot to do with the quality of education you strive for. Pick a quality program and choose challenging classes and choose challenging work within that class. In a lot of instances the bar tends to be where you put it.
I hope that is meant as a joke. In any case, you are arguing my point for me.
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I recently received my phd in physics last year, at which time I had the unfortunate pleasure to be a TA for many physics courses. Through the years of teaching at a community college and being a TA at the university, I have seen professors significantly curve the courses due to either poor teaching or lazy students. The final two years of the program, it became common place for the physics courses for bio/chem students to be curved to the point that if you got 60% of the total points you would receive an A in the course.
This is why attending a community college is the worst option for higher education. . Community colleges are to quality higher education what Wal-Mart is to downtown commerce. Then to add insult to injury the states require that the universities must accept the credits from in state community colleges to make community colleges a "more viable option. Because of that it has drastically reduced the enrollment at the universities.
The sad/funny thing about this is that many students became cocky and thought so much of their hard work for getting 60% of the points in the class. In my personal opinion, a significant part of the problem is that many students can get solutions to the work that is required for them to work on. Because of this, they never really learn how to do anything and since it is bad practice to flunk a whole class, it needs to be curved.
Oh, I had the experience of dealing with the morons that have graduated from community colleges. They were all perfect little followers of the Republican Party and they thought they knew it all. In reality they were dumb as bricks. A few of these students were members of the international disgrace society known as Phi Theta Kappa "Or I like to call Punks and Thugs of the Klan". As a result the universities had only two options, either keep their bars high and drastically reduce funding due to much lower enrollment, or accept those that are unprepared for university level coursework. Either way the universities end up reducing the quality of their education in order to accommodate the wholly unprepared product for which community colleges are known for producing.
Like many communities that once welcomed Wal-Mart as the savior of local commerce only to rue the day later, the US must first address the predatory issues of community colleges by eliminating them, or face a lost opportunity for improving our economy through higher, quality education.
Seriously - I didn't know there was anything lower than Bachelor's. And those who leave university with only a Bachelor's are called 'quitters' where I come from. These are essentially high school kids we are discussing. They are not suppoesed to be smart.
Yeah, the writing is terrible, but you should also see the decline in art and music skills!
Most of the techies in my class can't even pick a decent blog theme, never mind compose one from scratch. They have zero sense for color matching and use of white space.
And musically, they're a bunch of absolute no-hopers. The .mp3 lists they put in their audio widgets seldom include any quality classical pieces.
First, let me say that in my experience, this is a long trend, not a rapid recent trend. I've been an "old guy" long enough to have seen this for a long time. It just keeps getting "worse". Second, I'm not drinking the Kool-aid on the "it is all the fault of the schools" nonsense. The simple fact of the matter is that on average, humans are not very bright. You have to get a few sigma above the norm before you find people who can put together a good sentence. Smart people learn this easily despite poor schooling. Less smart people will do better with really great schooling, but won't ever be as good at it as those who naturally excel in that area. Third, the real problem here is the increasing notion in our society (fueled mostly by the declining availability of jobs requiring a lower skill level) that "everyone should go to college". Way back in the olden-days when I was finishing high-school, only those of us who sat at the front of the class had any plans to attend college. Not everyone was expected to do work typical of an "office job", let alone a more skilled profession. Most people were factory workers and other blue-collar types. There's nothing wrong with that. They were good at it and it was needed. Put those same people in college and then try to make programmers out of them, and you soon have the 4 or 5 sigma crowd saying all the young people are stupid (or the teachers are stupid). No, the schools are failing at turning washing-machine assembly people into programmers and bloggers. Big surprise there. What is missing is appropriate jobs and expectations for people who are not equipped with the hardware needed to be academic types. Capitalism and technology are moving us out of an era where there was more or less accidentally a good mix of jobs and skill levels. We are increasingly moving into an era where the unplanned mix of skill levels required of people is unrealistic. We just went where the technology took us and did not "design" a world that makes sense for the majority of the population. We should come to understand that we need to design a society that has a proper place for all of its people. Stop trying to force the bulk of humanity to be "information workers". They are not good at it and they don't like doing it. If we are really smart, we should be able to build a world where they can fit in well rather than trying to make them fit the world that we've blindly stumbled into.
Well,
Nothing new here. and it's not just a problem in the Americas. I first came across this whilst working at a certain English University sometime in the mid-late 90s, in one course, only one undergraduate passed the final year maths exam so they 'adjusted' the curve so that the requisite and 'usual' number of these idiots 'passed'.
It saddens me to say, that a large number of these characters were subsequently awarded degrees.
In an engineering discipline.
(Did I say saddens?, apologies, I think I meant 'sickens')
College Degrees:
Not enough time... completely misunderstood. It is a modern certification program and becoming as horrible as an industry certification. MBAs and their religion continue to ruin the world (and it is a religion.) The benefit of a 4 degree is largely historical and came down to a demographic filter. College wasn't for everybody, today it is.
IT:
The computer form of auto mechanic. Networking is similar. Universities want "customers" so their CS program does more IT. Business thought IT was rocket science while today it is approaching being the the tech janitor. HR still prefers degrees. Sure, an auto mechanic with an engineering degree is ideal... but not necessary and probably rare. It gets worse as HR filtering techniques are getting more brain dead.
Developer:
This career fits far more into the classic Apprenticeship model which only really exists in the USA in some trade union professions like plumbers. Higher level networking is more like a plumber as well. Some jobs don't require a master plumber.
Soft Engineering and related:
A master carpenter is like a PhD but the education model is different and it is not formalized - experience and skill is so important you can't force it successfully into a degree program. It remains traditional. Classes on higher level theory are not forbidden in an Apprenticeship model but they are dispersed over the career instead of crammed into the beginning when the student can't grasp their importance or retain as much.
Think about how alternative career models ARE NOT EVEN CONSIDERED when new careers are created - only 1 model is ever considered. This is largely being imposed by HR people's expectations... The other side is the education institutions who have their own biases in addition to the undue influence of HR and MBAs.
Reality is usually not pleasant; expect it to suck and you might discover the truth.
FYI: I'm faculty at a university. I've seen the slow morphing of the university into a trade school, as well as the fight with administrators to revive the universally dismissed "correspondence school model" unaware that putting the prefix CYBER onto something does not change it. The increased application of business tactics in customer relations and even a migration of the term student to customer. Don't flunk so many customers! Make entry level courses EASY so they don't change majors, etc. I'm young, the older ones have seen more. CS probably should have remained the math degree it was, now it is 2, maybe 3 courses in a CS degree.
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Is the Bar Being Lowered At Universities?
Depends on the university, obviously, but I would say yes. I have not seen anything as bad as what the OP reported, but yeah, it has gotten bad at many public universities. Case in point, when you allow people to graduate with a CS degree w/o knowing what a pointer is (one of the many examples I have witnessed), we can say that yes, the bar has been lowered.
I don't know greek or latin. I would be all right on the math parts though. This is the first time I've lit up my algebra neurons in a long while. It's strangely fulfilling to know I actually learned it well enough to be at a 1800's high school level as a 2006 college grad. B.S. Chemistry
From the original article, schools are definitely lowering standards. I was top of the high school class with barely a half-assed effort. We all knew schools were dumbed down at the time. It was a small click of us with smarter parents that pushed us to actually learn a thing or two. It was a baby sitting service for the majority of kids.
I think that we are dumbing down pretty much all education. I am noticing a trend toward mediocrity in most every subject, with written and verbal skills being the most obvious, as we use and see them in action every day. In terms of written and spoken word, it’s not only a case of people using vernacular, as I see a similar pattern of mediocrity in communication across social and economic groups. I can’t tell you how many people I have worked with to help them improve their written communication skills at work. As a business analyst and project manager, I know the power of effective communication and I have noticed that younger people are coming out of university with insufficient skills for the workplace. Are parents failing to work with their kids to make sure they learn from an early age? Yep. Are schools failing to teach students more liberal skills like writing and speech in preference for easily quantified skills like math and reading comprehension? Yep. In general, we are not teaching how to communicate well or how to think critically and our country will suffer for this deficit. I don’t like sounding like an old fart bemoaning the shortcomings of the younger generation, but what I’m seeing is not making me feel good about this culture’s future.
Swisssushi - When the going gets tough, get some tenderizer
The only way to ensure more of the population gets a degree is by lowering the bar. Face it, a lot of people aren't that smart especially if they went through mandatory schooling where you can't fail and they just slide you through.
This topic was being hotly debated when I entered graduate school about thirty years ago. I was at Ohio State and they were concerned that English Department resources were being redirected to teach remedial English to freshmen, who couldn't be turned down if they were from Ohio.
I see that text held up as an example of declining standards quite often, so I finally decided to take a peek...
This test is absolute crap. There is *no* science. None. No physics, no biology, no chemistry. No critical thinking. None. The math is simple; I covered this stuff by the 10th grade (although I've forgotten a bit). The sticking point for modern minds seems to be Latin and Greek, and Greek/Roman history*. I say this as a history buff who was able to answer them: who gives a shit? What is more important, knowing that modern France is smaller than ancient Gaul or knowing how calculate the acceleration of an object under different forces? Or, how to conjugate a verb in a dead language versus, oh, I dunno, a living one?
These are not anachronisms; these were all things that people knew how to do in 1899. Harvard just choose not ask those questions. Why would they do that? Because this test was not about testing academic ability, it was about filtering Harvard students to those who came from a background so privileged as to be able to spend their youths learning utterly useless, esoteric bullshit.
* [I should note that if you learned those languages, a priori you would know the answers to the history questions by default, since you learn Latin and Greek by reading Latin and Greek history texts.]
Maybe I am just that smart, but except for Latin and Greek, which really there is no objective reason to study, that test really is not very hard. Replace Latin with a language of choice among French, German and Spanish, and I am sure most kids would do just fine. My memory of the SATs is pretty poor (been almost 2 decades), but I took the GMAT not too long ago and it was much harder than this [just for reference, the GMAT is not that hard, it is just designed to keep total dweebs out of MBAs].
Another Prof here,
Do not place all the blame on the secondary education system. We admit many more HS seniors to college
than we did 40 years ago, and humans have not evolved in IQ during that time. We are suffering the effects
of the bell curve, and the belief that humans can be educated beyond their natural IQ level.
Generalize all you want.
Go to an engineering/science school - usually private - and you will see that the bar is in fact quite high. Typically the dropout rate is enormous and students are under significant duress.
James Cameron does not do what James Cameron does for James Cameron.
James Cameron does what James Cameron does because he IS James Cameron!
I am a professor of Electrical Engineering at a somewhat major national university.
One of my observations from the last 25 years of teaching is that more and more students walk into my classes to learn engineering because they think that's what they're expected to do, and not because they want to learn engineering.
I think we have wrongly been cultivating a culture in which young people feel "expected" to pursue a college degree in a particular field for all the wrong reasons. Not everyone is cut out for college, or for the field they have been herded into.
There are dire shortages of skilled trade labor as a result, because kids who like working with wood or metal or fabrics or mechanics are being shuffled into college when they should be going to trade school. Many of these students only end up being unhappy, underperforming students because they're not doing what they enjoy doing.
Here are some extracts from John Martin's Child's Magazine, June 1928. This magazine was aimed at children who lived in rural towns, and would not have access to the cultural advantages of cities.
The Black Prince ..."
"On a certain day in June, in the year 1330, the bells of Oxford rang most merrily to announce the birth of little Lord Edward of England, Prince of Wales and Acquitaine, in the pleasant summer palace of Woodstock near by... Sick and dying though he was, he had himself carried to Westminster Hall, where the "Good Parliament" was assembled to fight for the rights of the poor and the oppressed.
- and the next article ... ..." (There is an English translation later in the issue.)
Blanche Neige
"Blanche Neige était tr`es jolie, sa peau était aussi blanche que la neige,
- and even wordplay for children
"Come, climb a bough,
And do it nough.
If new to you
I'll show you hough..."
My conclusion is that we can't use the excuse of a larger population in the universities to explain our current standards.
I've taught in a writing-intensive discipline at the university level for more than twenty years. I see many of the same problems now that I did when I began teaching. Problems manifest at the macro and micro level - almost all are only improved when students A) take the work seriously and B) practice lots. Blogs are an attractive way to encourage students to write frequently and, hopefully, hone their skills.
The catch-22 is that blogs, board posts and the like are rarely taken seriously. Students often fall back into the bad habits of their personal practice or rush to push out the mandated word count at the last second and with little reflection. Their posts can be incoherent and are commonly littered with typos. They hardly appear to be the work of an aspiring professional but getting students to understand and care about those distinctions isn't easy. Does your assignment include any sense the posts are assessed as compositions and not just as tasks to complete?
Not every professor puts a priority on building writing skills. Maybe yours doesn't in this course but you can still, in your own posts, model a clear and professional communication style. See if there are courses or workshops in disciplinary writing. Talk to faculty in your field about whose writing they admire or what models are useful for aspiring practitioners. (Hint: it's often not the most esteemed journals!)
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
Speaking as a college professor teaching Project Management, yes, the students are getting worse. Many cannot put together a complete sentence, know nothing about paragraphs and cannot express a thought in writing in a manner anyone else can understand.
This is the result of High Schools allowing students to pass English and other literary and writing classes when there is no way they could meet the requirements, even lowered requirements.
My students are required to produce project proposals, change requests, status updates, formal emails announcing project stages and launches, and basic business communications. About 3/4 of them cannot accomplish this in a professional manner. They use incomplete and gibberish sentences and include a lot of texting shortcuts including smiley faces.
In my class, I will not allow them to pass until they can produce professional documents. Many end up taking the class several times. It is frustrating that I spend more time teaching basic english than how to produce informative, accurate, timely and complete project management documentation.
I had two papers published during my undergraduate years because my writing was head and shoulders above every other student in my department. Granted, I also put more work into my research than anyone else, but the deciding factor that made the head of the department eager to publish undergraduate research was the clarity of my writing. Needless to say, when it came time to apply to graduate school, having two papers published as an undergraduate was one hell of a plus.
At the graduate level, thankfully, the story is a little bit different. The SATs did not always have an essay section, but the GREs have had them for as long as I can remember. Multiple choice tests, even as sophisticated as the GREs and SATs are, do not give an indication of a student's ability to organize their OWN original thoughts. It always struck me odd that the SATs did not include any sort of writing when I took them.
In any case, the quality of students at the undergraduate level is really to blame here. By the time you get to graduate school, academia filters out most of the dumbasses (except in the case of basket weaving and MBA programs).
... in some areas.
But it is also being raised in others. Some engineering and math programs seem to be cramming two and three semesters into one and expecting the students to still learn the same amount of material. Some courses become a test of who can afford the most tutors. If you are working your way through school, it can be very difficult to keep up.
Either way, it doesn't seem to me that many people are actually retaining much from their time in college. The people who do actually remember things seem to me to be the ones that would have learned those things anyway if they had been given adequate time to work on them on their own.
Nope, no hard evidence. Just my observations. But this is /. after all.
Can you understand what they are trying to say in their blog posts? Do you think that grammar and spelling are prerequisites for establishing a point or telling a story?
Try to realize how much less illiteracy there would be if spelling was phonetic. Education is not about saying things that only "educated" people can understand.
The bar should be lowered, the bar is actually a fence.
I often wonder how much is perception. The old people I talk with make it sound so bad and now after only 10 years I see a pattern myself and it looks bad. I get what they are talking about but at the same time I'm seeing it as well. Just how low can it go? Yet the numbers all point to the world progressing significantly with most nations being near the top end of the old scale. If things were as bad as they seemed why is it not more apparent given the world has been progressing as we've been in decline?
I recognize some of it is my increased skill as a result of teaching the same materials - I was good enough when I started but now I'm much better. There are so many details and alternative perspectives one can experience when teaching something. Perhaps it warps my perspective? Plus there is the tenancy for people to spin their own memories - the brain will fill in memory holes with imagination and that is strongly influenced by emotional memories -- which are longer lasting than details. People don't realize just how horrible human memory is until one studies a little cognitive psychology or hypnosis on that topic.
I have 70 year old friends with similar complaints about students and they said their elders told them similar things to what they are telling me now. They also wonder if it is real-- no bottom has been reached.
Some details are legit, like grammar. The whole system changed and skips teaching grammar because they don't have time with all the other junk they have to cover. I frankly don't care if all the rules are followed, I'm not a fan of english anyhow. If they are going to make drastic wide reaching policy changes to education they should be changing things for the better, like by making english more consistent so all those flawed words which are not phonetic or spelled inconsistently are phased out... then take that saved time and bring back grammar.
The root of the REAL decline which I think does exist (but not as bad as the perception) I think is with the blind use of metrics. Think of it like feature bloat in software. Too much topics and students (quantity) so we must lower the quality to the lowest common denominator to pass the BS measurement games we've created. When you punish kids, they just learn how to avoid punishment - adults too. classic Skinner... now when you reward/punish by simple metrics the people just learn how to game the system. This also applies to educators, administrators, politicians, and even the voting public. Sure parents don't approve of Texas lowering the bar on standard exams, but they DO support it when it helps their brats and the politician who claims to have raised test scores. The politician ran on raising test scores because reality (jobs/colleges) showed grade inflation only made it worse for students later on. So it gets worse. Everybody games the system at all levels; that I think has gotten worse because the NEEDS and BENEFITS to cheating the system are much higher today.
A rigid formal policy system is easy to hack/engineer for a human brain, even a child's. The culture even promotes "lawyer think" where you play technical games to skirt around the intent of actually learning something.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I mean, anyone that's even remotely familiar with the University system knows that degrees have always been a hit or miss indicator.
Honest to God, once Universities stopped teaching people Latin, the quality of a degree was a joke.
And all the degrees you can get without any significant Philosophy or History aren't worth the toilet paper I flush every morning.
And all you PolySci and MBA's - go fuck yourselves. The only people worse than you are the ones that go into advertising.
Teaching people to think for themselves, to question, to create - these are things of the past. You're on your own. Choose wisely, and don't expect to be rewarded by the stupid and banal for it. Just do it because it's awesome.
Walk 150 feet from where you are now and chances are good you'll find a person who grew up in the 1970s, who is nearly illiterate, nearly innumerate, has never read a book, has never written a complete sentence, and knows only what has been told to him by his television. Chances are good he's male, Republican, scared, racist, and underemployed, as he has been his whole uneducated life.
True, many of the students of the 1970s had phonetic reading skills pounded into them, so they appear less functionally illiterate than the worst kids of today. But they don't read, don't write, don't text, don't use the Internet to inform themselves, never have, and never will. Millions of 'em.
They are the people who brought you Ronald Reagan and both Bushes, which in turn pushed educational standards even lower, because only the stupidest poor people vote Republican. They are the ones who happily sent their kids off to Iraq twice and Afghanistan forever, who believed that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, who believed that cutting taxes for the rich would some how make poor people's lives better, who believed scientists paid by an industry to say that cigarettes don't cause cancer and global warming is a myth. They happily send one tenth of their income to a network of pedophiles and another chunk to the political party that works every day to keep them poor and ignorant.
Today's young adults are not nearly as ignorant, not nearly as misinformed, not nearly as gullible. Yes, their English still sucks, as it always has for the majority of Americans, but they read every day, write every day, turn over the truth or falsity of a fact every day, seek reference sources every day instead of the drunk asshole on the far end of the couch. The drunk asshole on the far end of the couch, by comparison, never learned to program the clock on his obsolete VCR.
The future is bright because as silly and wasteful as texting is, it has caused a blossoming of literacy in the United States that was [i]never[/i] seen in its past. Hooray for that, and boo for all those addled disco babies who are still holding us back.
I hate to break it to ya, son, but academic standards have been plunging for the last 4 decades.
While I wait for my sides to quit hurting from laughing...He asks if the bar is being lowered! With schools being used more for indoctrination than basic skills from kindergarten through high school, no one would qualify for entrance if they didn't drop the bar. Don't forget that Universities and colleges now offer a lot of useless degrees that prepare the student for nothing but a massive loan to pay off. This works particularly well on those not smart enough to figure out if the particular degree will get them a job or if there is even a demand for that subject in the real world. It also works well on those too lazy to work on a real degree or want one to get a job where they might have to work after graduation. Writing skills are so bad in general that three decades ago some universities implemented a “Writing Across The Curriculum” program. Both universities I attended used this program. For me it was a chance to add a few points “just-in-case”, but for most of the students it brought nothing but bitching and moaning plus a few lost points. They are even getting rid of cursive writting. Writing, or composing seems to be on the way to becoming a lost art and I found it to be a major part of the real world after graduating even with a BS in CS. BS in CS! I like the ring to that, particularly when so many degrees are mainly just BS and I don't mean Bachelor of Science. However, even on the serious subjects the quality of graduates seem to be deteriorating. There is a lot of the entitlement mentality even showing up in the sciences. They have a degree so the world (or government) owes them a living that will let them live in the style to which they would like to become accustomed. I've seen it as a project manager and I hear it form others who end up with fresh graduates working for them.
What do you mean " is the bar being lowered?" It was lowered a long time ago. The prevailing idea that everyone, anyone, should go to university (college) is nonsense. To keep the numbers up, colleges MUST lower their standards or most students would fail and mummy wouldn't like that. A degree is for the intellectually gifted. Perhaps no more than 25% of graduating high school students should go on to tertiary education. Most college education today is inefficient, ineffective vocational training at best and largely a waste of time. All that can be said for most college degrees is that it helps lazy HR people screen applicants (using irrelevant criteria). Today, if you can't get a college degree it means that you are either dead stupid or have a character defect. It says nothing about your intelligence and potential..
and that's at least half the problem.
the really smart (traditional age) students will not be in that class. kids who prioritize completing a course with as little effort as possible will take that class. possibly while drinking, because hey, they're at home.
if you can, do enroll in a few honors courses. the students will be far more engaged, and the work assigned should be more interesting.
Depends on who you know.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
After a few drings, reaching the bar is hard.
I was worried you and some of your fellow cult members had gone all heaven's gate on us after slashdot ran a story critical of your lord last week. Looks like we will continue to be treated to your fact-free analyses of things you are not familiar with, well into the future. Praise be to ron paul!
There are lots of complaints about teaching these days where the kids at school are given marks for 'effort' when they get things 100% incorrect. They also give 100% for answers that are not 100% correct. They gave actual examples on a current affairs show a few years back. It's like they are deliberately dumbing down the next generation as much as possible.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
when did the standards for blogs become equivalent of a term paper? If your claiming to be a journalist I can see the need to follow standards for written English-otherwise they are essentially online journal entries
A rigid standardized metric has plenty of flaws. You can not solve all the problems with one flat policy solution; you create new problems just as you solve some old ones. Subjective grading may not be fair but sometimes can be more fair than a gamed, rigged, or flawed grade evaluation system.
If I had my way, it would be completely subjective with smaller class sizes and a form of appeals process to catch abuse of power. Far more of a master and apprentice model than today's the assembly line .... like how most HMO doctors treat patients today: get rid of you quickly and out of the way with as little involvement and effort as possible. Crank out the customers to make room for other customers and keep them from not being too upset with the service they pay a lot for.
I can tell you from experience, grading is PAINFULLY bad stuff to do. Even if it is not grading but giving commentary and advice, reading the student work is a horrible experience and worth all the salary it gets me. It is not so bad for a while but it really gets bad - you just have to experience it for yourself to understand. I know some people will get lazy and not properly grade things. The thing to do is to call them on it as it happens, then they'll not cut corners on your work.
I'm in the same boat; totally agree.
I blame HR, MBAs, and society who want 4 year degrees for janitors... I.T. doesn't need 4 year degree. I keep thinking meritocracy... as well as how people are naturally talented at gaming/hacking systems (best examples seen in The Wire: "juking the stats")
As far as critical thinking, math, science, AND student expectations I've seen a constant decline for 10 years. I'm phasing out CS for trade skills - not just me but the programs themselves are. Maybe CS will be preserved; some think it is gone already. New specialized degrees are taking over and students are migrating towards those, so maybe CS survives. Most my students now are not CS and because the CS is a minority vs the glorified trade skill degrees. Maybe that is what we should be doing - since most people are there for jobs today... the customer is always right? (ARE they customers??) The university seems like it will DIE and only it's name will remain on the trade schools that have taken over from the inside. At least a trade skill degree that is also liberal arts degree has the benefits of essentially 2 years of "worthless crap" in other topics which still broadens minds. I don't see any downward trend to the benefits that occur from study in other topics.
For IT, programmers, networking, etc. I am not convinced the university model is best. They are better suited to a unionized trade skill where one works as an apprentice and towards being a master. They do have classes scattered over the many years it takes to become a master. I feel better about a master carpenter's abilities than that of many PhDs just out of school. Medical PhD is unusual in that it tends to be a hybrid with the apprenticeship model. Not that this would be what industry wants, since too many seem to think techies above 35 are too old. Do we want competent professionals or should the majority of them just be conditioned monkeys? "Monkeys" are sufficient for many jobs... and management has found ways to break jobs into simplistic tasks.
Asides:
Correspondence schools seem like all the rage today - same old less prestigious program but now with internet and a prestigious name! So it is good now??
Everybody is a university now... did some regulation get removed at some point?
What are the majority of jobs going to be and what are they now? nurses, drivers, cashiers, secretaries, food industry, managers...
Cultural errors: teachers used to be respected experts. today parents have no respect ("if you can't x you teach") and are always defensive of their poor parenting (possibly because the TV and daycare raises their children and they know it.) Parents are never responsible and rarely hold the child responsible (for OTHER people they'll see it but not for themselves.)
Quantity vs Quality. Feature BLOAT in education. Our grandparents didn't learn calculus in high school but they understood what was covered at a deeper level; that is, the ones who were literate at the end of it... I have an engineer great uncle who was a well respected consultant who NEVER learned calculus! We think we are better today because we have calculus and higher literacy rates and higher graduation rates etc. But those are empty features and empty statistics. One can fudge quantification and fudge the statistics just as much as the fuzzy qualitative aspects we discount as unscientific. I've seen plenty of "hard facts" that make things look like they are going great but we all subjectively and see it getting worse - to the point where today we can start to quantify the negative long term results.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Graduating from Major State University in 2003, one of my required partners on a final project was unable to help with the project for the entire semester.
As we went into the room for our final class session, she insisted that I give her a copy of the final project, which I had completed alone, doing the work of all three people in our group (the third woman was Asian, didn't understand most of the class, and dropped the major finally.) The girl who wanted a copy of the final project she had not contributed to finally admitted that she had been unable to open the files I kept sending her so she could collaborate. It turned out that this student, a single course away from a degree in IT, did not know what a WORD DOC was and was unable to open them on her PC. She did not seek help from others to do that task and had been unable to communicate this fact to me. Instead she kept sending me back the same, unaltered files and insisting she had made changes.
Did I mention she was acing all her courses? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot folks, that bar is no bar at all....
Most definitely it is. Many of the people I work with lack the ability to even READ effectively. I send them e-mails and they seem to scan for keywords rather than reading the entire message, and they end up with the idea that the message says something it does not. The same people send e-mails that contain questions ending with periods and statements ending with question marks.
So, yes. A large portion of the US population is seemingly bordering on illiteracy.