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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!
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.
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!
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?
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As an adult student who has gone back to school, I want to say something as well.
We have seen a dramatic decline in the knowledge retention of students because professors are not trained on teaching methods. Even strong professors who are very prepared on paper have major and substantial gaps in their ability to communicate. Students are struggling to manage this situation. Do you let them teach to the students in a way that just forces memorization? Or do you only learn the course content at a level consistent with the professor's ability to communicate? Do you somehow split the difference, or if so, how? These are the questions we are trying to answer.
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 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.
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 wish you were kidding.
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.
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
It's very normal for the brain to substitute homophones. It isn't some horrible indictment of the person's intelligence. I'm willing to bet this guy knows the difference between waist and waste. It's the equivalent of a typo.
Isn't there a fundamental law that says that if you critique somebody's grammar and/or spelling, you will make a glaring mistake yourself?
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
You forgot 4) Move to a better neighborhood. Public school quality in America is VERY dependent on the neighborhood and parental involvement. If you run a bad school in a good neighborhood, the district superintendent can get run out of town very quickly. It happened in my hometown (we were all happy to see him go since he was moving all the money from the schools to making the district office nicer and his salary higher).
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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
If you would like to see just how far it has fallen, here is an 1899 entrance exam from Harvard:
Back in 1899, about 5% of students went on to higher education. Today more than 60% do. It is silly to compare someone at the 95th percentile to someone at the 40th.
When people claim that SAT scores have fallen since the 1950's, they are doing something similar. Back then fewer than 20% of high school students took the SAT, today over 60% do. The high school dropout rate was also much higher in the 1950's, so that skews the results further. So the comparison is meaningless. When you correct for these factors, and compare people with similar backgrounds, you find that SAT scores are actually significantly higher today.
If you would like to see just how far it has fallen, here is an 1899 entrance exam from Harvard:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf
The only thing that exam might show is how much colleges have progressed since 1899. A third of that test is just translating Latin and Greek, which has very limited value. The history is very focused on ancient greece and rome. While they are difficult questions, IMHO, if secondary education of the time focued on those time periods I am sure they aren't too difficult. The math on the exam is pretty easy with no calculus to be found. The plane geometry section would be hard for me, but only because my schooling never covered it. If Harvard thought it was important enough back then to put on their exam then I am confident secondary education covered it at the time.
About the only good a test like this would do today is to help make sure no one outside of the upper class and who didn't go to a high-priced private school could ever make it into the Ivy League. It looks like teaching to the test was a problem even back then, except back then top schools mostly asked questions on material they knew only children of equally pretentious parents who know the answers to.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
That's easy. Declining public funding of public education has driven universities to rely more and more on tuition dollars. So we increase enrollments, and we have to keep students happy. We measure our success at making students happy by administering evaluations. Basically higher education is becoming more and more about customer service. Hell, my university insists on calling students customers and forces me to attend several customer service workshops or training sessions each semester. I really enjoy being told how to do my job by a person who has a BA in business! I really enjoy serving my students! (These statements will be revised after I am fully tenured and promoted.)