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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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."
"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.
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?
Maybe the course is graded by something more important than the English abused in the posts
I think there are many ways to evaluate a successful blog, besides the correctness of the grammar.
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
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.
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
Or maybe one where the purpose is to design and build a blog system, where the actual system is what is important, and not the sample posts used for testing ? I guess the lack of information presented is just another sign of the youth having degraded mental abilities. He didn't list the primary objectives, he just bitched about grammar used in blog posts, which may or may not even be relevant to what the class is trying to achieve.
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.
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.
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!
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
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?
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.
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
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
Or maybe one where the purpose is to design and build a blog system, where the actual system is what is important, and not the sample posts used for testing ?
I guess the lack of information presented is just another sign of the youth having degraded mental abilities. He didn't list the primary objectives, he just bitched about grammar used in blog posts, which may or may not even be relevant to what the class is trying to achieve.
probably the point is to generate massive amounts of text for grading with zero effort from faculty - also after this course they can put a "I can run a blog" entry on their cv and apply for those ah so lucrative jobs in the ever paying industry of blogging!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
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.
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...
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 $15k car at a dealership. The real milk maids are the grants and endowements the faculty acquire or help acquire.
On an offtopic, yet related to OP - I've attended a state institution as an undergrad, and a private institution as a grad. The differences were wide, imo. My experience with the former mirrors that of the OP at the state school, whereas I see the students being much smarter and motivated at the private school. Even though the latter's entrance requirements were lower, I can tell there's much of a less partying until blakckout-drunk culture. But it could also be due to the intense workload and the professors all assuming you can learn a dozen fundamental principles in two days and ready to apply them to any situation. Sure, that's what a professional can do, but as students, that's tough.
Anyways, I still think it's what you make of the class is what matters. If it's easy, talk to the prof to challenge yourself? I always felt my peers were holding me down and I did a lot of self-directed studies. The "side" help I had with the profs were invaluable - not to mention the resources (which were much, much better at the private school).
WE need more trades / tech schools and less college for all
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-06-12/opinions/35461879_1_college-level-skilled-workforce-elite-schools
(aka "Speak and Spell") was a required course for my engineering degree, and I believe it still is. My prof marked it (un)fairly harshly...I was getting 90s in my English classes and got 50s in the Engineering course.
That said, a depressing number of my co-workers with 10+ years of experience can't write a clear and coherent email or design document.
In 1999, there was a class called Math 001, for students that couldn't grasp algebra in high school. When I first signed up for classes, they wouldn't let anyone in without knowing algebra. In 2000, they created a course below Math 001 for students who didn't understand what fractions were. I ^@$% 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.
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
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?
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"
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.
You wrote, "It is a 3rd year course, so students...". That should be either, "...course, and so..." or "...course; so...".
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?
(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.)
This is probably because you don't know language teachers of other languages who frown on using passive voice in their respective languages. I, for one, know that teachers of the German language equally frown upon (excessive) use of passive voice.
I like my spaghetti with source.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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..
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.
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)
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
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.