<p>I wanted to respond to some of the posts here in this thread.
Kmccrindle notes regarding AP courses that,The highly socratic and age-appropriate interdisciplinary development of the humanities curriculum is eschewed in order to somehow appear more competitive on an Ivy League application and give administrators a lazy way to evaluate (and discipline) staff."</p>
<p>Response:Yes, eliminating the socratic method of teaching is unfortunate;however, this method can be used in AP courses too! It is just that the teachers may be too lazy to implement it. Frankly, I applaud the increase in AP courses. Not only are they generally more rigorous than the typical high school courses of my day, during the dark ages, but they are being offered for reasons besides ivy league admission standards. They can result in less introductory courses taken at colleges. Placing out of courses gives kids greater freedom in choose their own educational destiny. It also allows for a more intensive education in the student’s major or even gives the student the ability to have a double major. Thus, I don’t look at the proliferation of AP courses as a negative.</p>
<p>I do agree with Kmccrindle that the “i luv cheezburger” style of writing found on web sites, has helped ruin writing skills. With all the distractions, fewer kids read books as they did in our day. However, we had only 7 channels of reception on our TV and three were furry.English curriculum need to inculcate a lot more reading, and grammar. Sadly, many schools districts have avoided teaching grammar in lieu of the more recent “advance” of simply pointing out grammar mistakes on papers. Our whole English curriculum needs to go “back to basics” and needs to be redone.</p>
<p>I also agree with Hunt. To me, a great problem is college is grade inflation. Harvard, for example, graduates 91% of its kids with Latin Honors ( Cum Laude or better). The average GPA at many top schools is 3.2+. Give me a break!</p>
<p>Yes, I do know that Harvard and many other top schools have tough admission standards; however, as a former college professor, I have found that these standards have only a passing correlation with college performance. I can honestly say, after teaching thousands of kids in college, that there are many other factors that are equally if not more important than SAT scores or even high school GPAs. These include drive, good study habits, ability to avoid distractions in college, as well as innate academic ability etc. Moreover, once the freshmen year ends, I have found that kids in their major areas of study tend to be as sharp as those of ivy kids in their major area of study. Let me give an example</p>
<p>I was a student at the State University of New York at Stonybrook as a physics major initially. I did change majors to accounting later on.</p>
<p>The kids who majored in physics and succeeded had mostly A’s in high school math and science and usually had an average SAT math score of 700 or better. They didn’t go to an ivy school usually because they had a weakness in some other subject such as language or didn’t do well on the Verbal part of the SAT. However, the average grades for those in the state university was below a 3.0. Even at Maryland where I recently taught, I didn’t give out more than 45% A’ and B’s in total. 55% of the class got either a B- or below. From what I could tell from my colleagues, this was also the case with other classes. It is outrageous that many schools have average GPAs of 3.2 or even higher. To me, that constitutes academic dishonesty and just plain greed in order to make these students happy , contributing alumni.</p>