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?"

Comments

Betteridge's Law has been beaten

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes... the bar is being lowered, yes it is!

Re:Betteridge's Law has been beaten

[cffrost]

Then wouldn't it get harder as it gets lower?

The lower the bar gets, the harder it is to get a good ROI from a college education.

Re:Betteridge's Law has been beaten

[ShanghaiBill]

Yes... the bar is being lowered, yes it is!

Don't be so sure. Every generation believes that their kids are dumber than they were "back in the good old days". They are nearly always wrong. The classic work about the decline of American education was "Why Johnny Can't Read". It was published in 1955. If you go back and look at random papers written by students in the past, I think you would find their writing to be just as bad as what you see today, and probably worse. Don't let false nostalgia cloud your judgement.

Re:Betteridge's Law has been beaten

[uncqual]

This is what happens when standardized tests are the focus of education.

It seems that the standardized tests were not the cause of a decline, rather that the cause of the standardized tests was a decline.

In the United States, the introduction of widespread standardized testing that elementary and middle school level teachers cared about was mostly in response to concerns about the decline in the education of our young adults.

IIRC, math at the elementary school and middle school levels is the area that the US does the worst WRT other leading nations (and which is probably the best indicator subject for if we are going to be turning out engineers and scientists or dishwashers and retail clerks). In standardized math tests used within the US at these levels I've seen small problems but they seem to fairly accurately gauge what the student knows about math and certainly reflect what was expected (and less) of similar "educated" students 40 years ago.

Teaching math "to the test" is the hard way to do it. Teach math - the tests test that. Of all subjects at the elementary and middle school levels, I think this is most true of math.

For some reason, the elementary school education institution in the US in the past few decades has chosen to teach math more as if it were a "soft" subject. For example, there's lots of "group work" in math now - WTF? The net result of group work is that the kids who "get it" in the group do the work and the rest don't even try (to fail in a group is embarrassing and, besides, the group "achieved their goal" without your help, so why work?). By the end of third grade, the die is usually cast for the kids who were not forced to work their own problems (and, receive incremental help along the way as it became obvious they were struggling with one or more specific concepts) - they will almost never catch up and will fall only further and further behind feeling like idiots and, in self defense, finding other pursuits (such as gangs). For another example, there's to much emphasis on "creative" thinking - it's important to explain the "why's" to the students (several times), but it's also important to do the work (sometimes derisively called "drill and kill") - and in that process the why's begin to sink in or be reinforced. Teach WHY and HOW to "adjust" decimal points during multiplication and long division - some will remember the why and reconstruct the how as needed, some will only remember the how, many will remember only some of both and still do well.

As well, the elimination of "tracking" in many schools has been a mistake. Apparently tracking would "hurt the feeling" of any child not in the top group, so it' s better to toss them into the common pool and feel good while they drown quietly. This forces the teacher to "teach to the middle". This is a disservice to all groups. The kids who are not getting it find the explanations increasingly over their heads. The true "middle" group isn't challenged as much as they could be because the teacher is trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to help the less successful students rather than trying to step up the tempo to advance the students in the middle. The students who are advanced are bored -- unfortunately, this turns some off to education and leads them astray outside of school and most of the rest are grossly unchallenged wasting a lot of valuable opportunity that will almost never be fully reclaimed (time, especially during the period where children are more "plastic", is a precious commodity that simply can't be reclaimed or fully compensated for once wasted wantonly)

It's not just the school's fault of course.

Parents are the biggest part of the problem On the one hand, a shockingly large percentage of recent immigrants come from cultures where education is not important - enough education to earn a bit more than minimum wage is fine (and, in some cases it seems, is preferable because if the kid

Wrong site

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

US University Education shocked me...

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Average students

[the eric conspiracy]

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?

Everyone should go to university (not)

[SirGarlon]

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.

Re:It has for undergrad, not so much for the grads

[rhsanborn]

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.

Nobody Reads

[Sir_Eptishous]

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.

Re:University Professor Here

[supercrisp]

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.)