<p>Birdrock (post 18)</p>
<p>The person is saying that mentioning Walter Williams ( a black conservative) in CC, a place where many liberals get upset at the mere mentioning of conservatives, is like throwing bait out to them. Garlic to vampires… bait to liberals…</p>
<p>I believe garlic repels vampires.</p>
<p>The article Williams quotes is from October 2001. Harvard appears to have addressed grade inflation since then.</p>
<p>As someone who has recently taken college courses (in my 50’s), I can say that the level of education in my classes, among young people, some of whom have master’s degrees, was shocking. I have raised 3 kids, who are now 17-23, and have watched the effects of our overall culture on education, for many years.</p>
<p>Many teachers in the earlier grades are focused on keeping things fun and enjoyable, and on bolstering self-esteem. They are competing with the instant gratification of tv, computers, video games and so on. Attention spans have changed. Each step along the way, expectations seem much lower than, say 30 years ago. </p>
<p>The focus on product rather than process also affects quality. By this I mean, the focus on grades, resume, college entrance, and career aspirations, as opposed to “learning for learning’s sake” in order to live life as an educated, thinking person. Students do enough to get by and get the grade they want, but don’t really think any deeper. Teachers are being forced to also focus on product, not process, as they need to teach to the test by mandate.</p>
<p>A side effect of this is that kids learn to regurgitate what they think teachers or professors want them to think, say or write- because the end goal is the grade, not the learning. One of my kids is at an Ivy and is amazed at how little questioning goes on in class. For instance, few people will stand up and question the premise of an article assigned, in her experience, even when, as it turns out, that was the intent of the professor.</p>
<p>The other change is the loss of a canon since the late 1960’s. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but there is no longer a set body of knowledge that any educated person should know. Education is no longer “classical,” but honors diversity. This is good, but it also contributes to a sort of “anything goes” in education. There are still some colleges that offer “great books” types of curricula, but they are not common. Again, I make no value judgement on this, but I do think it contributes.</p>
<p>I don’t know what the answer is. A good start would be if families could get rid of tv’s during their kids’ childhoods.</p>
<p>The women in my parent’s generation tended not to go to college, mostly. My aunts went to good secondary schools, but no college. They are the most literate, intelligent women I can imagine. Just reading their letters to each other is an inspiring thing. If I compared their letters to my kids’ facebook status updates. the change in educational culture is clear right there!</p>
<p>you can trust me that there is absolutely no grade inflation at my “affluent school” we all work VERY hard for our grades. i think gpa is just a bad indicator success because it’s so subjective. the teacher could just not like you and hurt your grade little by little. grade inflation at some schools vs. grade deflation at other also serves to weaken its’ merit. i think that course rigor and standardized testing should hold the most merit. getting a 5 on the ap chem. test but getting a c in the class just shows that the class was flawed or the teacher was flawed, likewise for sat 2’s</p>
<p>I second the posts that say that maybe math and science education is more complex but that quality of writing is on the decline. Ability to read longer texts is practically non-existent. Ability of students born in the United States to read in another language, even among students who are otherwise bright and reasonably well-prepared is very rare. Students are in college for many, many reasons, only some of which involve learning. But there’s nothing new about there being students who are in college to get an Mrs., or to drink beer and party, or to be away from Mom and Dad but not work. </p>
<p>Most of my undergrad students in a class of say, 35, are fairly hard-working and seriously want to learn but only about 2 or 3, honors students included, will read a work of non-fiction that’s more than 350 pages long, unless they are begged, cajoled, threatened, promised good grades for having made the effort. </p>
<p>Almost none of my students – including undergraduate English majors – read books outside of class for pleasure. They are very good at gathering bits and pieces of things researching on the internet and stitching it into a kind of essay however. They do not know how to write papers of more than 10 pages however, nor does it matter in the slightest to the Board of Trustees, whose main interest is finding ways to get rid of tenured faculty and replace them with less-expensive part-timers.</p>
<p>NJSue: Well said. I attended a lower economic class HS where 23 (out of 405) students went on to college. I was shocked when listening to the AP Lit overview at parents’ night I discovered how excited the teacher was describing a curriculum not nearly as deep or as broad as I had in HS.</p>
<p>I agree with Williams. What has changed is a culture in which so many parents want things easier for their children, whereas the parents of the 50’s knew easy may not get you there. So many kids just won’t do homework anymore. And they don’t care whether they fail or not. They just will take the zeroes. And cheating…don’t get me started on that! One of the students in the class ahead (and one of my former students who I knew cheated and was only able to catch once) of my D’s in HS got into a top school, was in the top ten of the class and at the awards ceremony bragged to everyone around how he cheated his way into it. I teach and you wouldn’t believe how many kids I catch every year! And it is getting worse and worse. And the excuses they give - “I was only getting some help,” or "it was only homework…"And before you say anything, I teach in a school district that is on the list of top 100 in the nation. There is an upper echelon of students, then there are the rest. I remember using my AP English stuff in college and getting A’s. That can no longer be said. HS is where I found my interest in existentialism and Jungian psych and I never took a psych class in HS, yet we were expected to compare and contrast and research. My 5th grade teacher (big inner city school) had us get style sheets and we were expected to cite, research and write papers. They weren’t HS or college level, but we were expected to back up what we said. Now kids buy papers, or they download from the internet and think that is fine without citations.</p>
<p>My HS is sort of old fashioned. We are required to learn Latin for 3 years, so we learn numerous classics through that. The top third of the school is put in a comprehensive “Honors” program for two years, and they, or rather we, pretty much all stay together throughout high school, so we re able to learn a cannon to some extent. We all know “Richard Cory” and A Modest Proposal backwards and forwards. I should mention that I go to a six year high school, so they have more time to mold and kiln us into a finished product. Also, my school was founded in the 1860s. It’s changing a lot more into the modern HS system now, especially with our new, young principal, but it was founded in an age when secondary education was the end all and be all for most people, so it encourages a different sort of view than the schools a lot of my friends attend.
My father’s school was great hobbled by Jim Crow, so I don’t know if I can compare our two schools. My mother’s school seemed to have a much more modern view than mine does. My school actually sounds most similar to my grandmother’s.
I do have some definite problems with HS English classes. Our style of exegesis just seems artificial. I don’t even think it should be called exegesis really, not even analysis. We give some perfunctory glance to inner meaning, but it’s not at all thorough. I read some of the books required of us for fun, as I’m quite an avid reader, and the comments my peers make about them are just disdainful. I always liked what Flannery O’Connor had to say about the subject. “No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail. […] His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.”</p>
<p>The reason why the value of the degree has declined is because more people are getting it. If 10% of the population has a degree, the degree shows that a person is in the top 10% of the population in terms of education. If 50% of the population has a degree, it just means that the person is average.</p>
<p>A relative transferred out of the small Christian college where she had started out at because, she reported, it was too easy. Way, way easier than high school, she said. </p>
<p>I don’t know the details of the relative’s situation but I’m sure there are some easy colleges out there. (I read here on college confidential that for some majors, the University of Wisconsin Parkside is very easy place to earn a bachelor’s degree, for example.)</p>
<p>I am agreeing that knowing a person holds a bachelor’s degree (a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college - let’s assume the college is accredited) does not mean what it used to mean.</p>
<p>I guess that about sums it up, English Professor Mom. As a professional writer/editor who has interviewed a lot of new grads from very good colleges, I’m taken aback at the generally poor quality of writing. And yet… my girls are/were at the same high school I went to (a Catholic girls’ college prep) and they work so much harder than we did in the '70s. It was no big deal for a girl from our school, with no APs (they didn’t really exist) and not much in the way of ECs and holding about a 3.5 to go to UCLA or Berkeley. Now they slave away to get into those schools.</p>
<p>It’s a fascinating conundrum. </p>
<p>The reading thing most disturbs me. It’s true, my very smart girls do not read for pleasure. My younger one did all through elementary school, but now HS is so rigorous, and Facebook/Law & Order/Glee so appealing, that she no longer does. And yet we watched tons of crappy TV as kids, too… but I also read a lot.</p>
<p>While I agree that many cases that math/science instruction is more complex, many students cannot handle it. I have not taken a math class in 30 years, and I can still factor. (BTW, I was not a math major, either) Many of my son’s friends cannot, and they are in the upper level math classes. They get to college and find that they are not prepared for the rigor. Writing is a lost art, and to a certain extent, I blame the internet for the problem. The IM speak is wonderful for IM, but not for formal writing such as research papers.</p>
<p>And free reading, well, it does not exist for many students. Schedules do not allow for it in some cases, but my youngest son hates to read. He has time, but a strange reading curriculum in elementary school that put an emphasis on quantity not quality of material killed his love of reading.</p>
<p>Form trumps content every time…
I am not going to call out any single post as an example, but a quick peruse of this website offers plenty to ponder in terms of ivy-seeking-student word choice, sentence structure, faulty syllogisms and other big fun on the high seas of web communications 101 by the “I- has-cheezburger” generation. </p>
<p>It does seem to me that a rare few students can diagram a sentence today, and that even our best and brightest are not necessarily gifted communicators or, in truth, critical thinkers. It also seems to me that this phenomenon represents a massive failure as a society to distinguish (and fund) what’s most important in education.</p>
<p>By way of example, my son’s former magnet school essentially eroded its (expensive) interdisciplinary humanities curriculum two years ago in order to accommodate parental requests to implement the ubiquitous slate of AP offerings. (Somehow studying high school material in high school became less than chic.) Since the AP curriculum is, for the most part, standardized, it is ergo quite difficult to make the respective course material interdisciplinary in nature. Suddenly, everyone is teaching to a test, and suddenly, teacher performance is evaluated by student performance on said test. 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>And then there’s the apparent necessity to engage the ‘21st Century Attention Span’ in the classroom, which appears to be not only an uphill battle, but one born of incessant exposure to various media (except books : ), passtimes, devices and approaches to information gathering and communication children experience at home. </p>
<p>So, in some corners of the field of communication studies the theory is that if Big Bird taught your kids the ABCs, what your kids really learned was to watch a television to learn what they need to know. If Google or Wikipedia explained the parts of a sentence, what you kids really learned was to trust someone else’s (summarized) explanation or authority, generally without question.</p>
<p>To counterbalance the instant transfer of information and its availability, the blasting prevalence of “form” delivering and endless array of “content,” we <em>could</em> chose to teach our kids the “basics” of written communication, logic, critical analysis, et al, in SMALL classrooms that afford teachers sufficient time to actually assign WORK for grades, meaning, meaningful and frequent work that is difficult to mark and discuss. (The all-too-rare fully developed essay, for example, that appears to be disappearing at the cyborg hands of the Scantron : ) Instead, our refusal to adequately fund education for ALL students in the country (urban AND suburban); our refusal to fund EARLY education for ALL students in the country; our refusal to implement humane MATERNIY LEAVE programs to enable children to get a running start at cognitive development all combine to undermine the development of fully critical, innovative thinkers.</p>
<p>As they say, garbage in, garbage out. What is extraordinary to me is that there are many many parents here on this discussion board who continually compensate for this lacking in our society by rightfully taking the lead in their children’s education yet somehow we can’t all pull together to create the educational environment we seek in this country.
Hi ho.</p>
<p>This is an interesting website, I am probably going to end up wasting a good amount of time looking through it. This discussion seems to be really one sided though, so I would be interested to see what your responses are to this article.</p>
<p>[Stanford</a> study finds richness and complexity in students’ writing](<a href=“Stanford Report”>Stanford Report)</p>
<p>Although there are some issues with the methods, like using Stanford students as a sample to assess the writing of the young generation, the research brings up some interesting points. This article seems to be asserting that, at least in the upper echelons of higher education, people’s writing seems to be getting better, not worse.</p>
<p>My family is an interesting test case of all of this as both of my children have gone through the same Junior High and High School that I did - and in a few cases had exactly the same teachers. To make it even more interesting, my mom is a reformed pack rat who recently brought down a box full of my high school work.</p>
<p>I was a decent student in high school - mostly A’s. Both of my kids get higher grades than I did on average - essentially straight A’s with a couple of Bs.</p>
<p>Looking at the work, I would assess it like this:</p>
<p>English - My DD has had more difficult classes than I did - she took 2 APs which did not exist in my day. My son did the Honors route and had an easier time than I did. I know that I read more books and wrote more papers than either of them - but my daughter does the kind of work that I learned to do in college. Call it a tie</p>
<p>Math - Their math blows my math away. I went through calculus but they cover far more material in far more depth. 1 point to the modern generation</p>
<p>Social Studies - California standards watered down the content for world studies - I had far richer and more interesting World history classes. I also had a great American History teacher as did my DD (my son’s was weaker for sure.) Their civics is far better than mine. Call it a tie</p>
<p>Science - Theirs is richer and more challenging - despite taking exactly the same classes in the same order with some overlapping teachers. My lab reports look like Junior high next to theirs. 2-0 lead for the youngsters</p>
<p>Foreign Language - I had a great teacher - theirs was terrible. I think the tools are better today - but there is no substitute for a great teacher. 2-1</p>
<p>Looking back on it, I think that kids today take a richer program - but that I had some really good teachers that made the material shine - and a few of their teachers were less than outstanding. Switch teachers for Foreign Language and get CA out of the classroom and they win 4-0.</p>
<p>Firehose, thanks for sharing that Stanford study! Yes, it’s the elite Stanford crowd, but still, it gives me hope. Recently I read a short story written by a recent Stanford grad, son of friends, and it was very good-- I would publish it if I could. </p>
<p>Okay, so it’s not hopeless…</p>
<p>And I would agree with scualum, who like me, went to the same school as her kids. Based on memory, not actual evidence, my girls have had stronger math, science and language (in my case, French that I barely learned, in their case, Spanish that they can actually speak) than I had. Social studies might not be as rich as in my day. Theology/ethics (it’s a progressive Catholic school) is definitely richer and more big-picture now. And English… they still teach them to write, I’m happy to say, but I fear that the AP thing has taken away some of the joy of literature and language. But it’s a game they all play.</p>
<p>scualum, your summary was very interesting. Now we need teacher comments - their perspective on how things have changed. Your cache would make a good seed for a study.</p>
<p>I actually had an English teacher that my father also had. She stood before the Sr. year ‘most challenging’ top English class and, in answer to one classmate who asked why we weren’t made to write more, said “you can’t get these kids today to write”. Ticked me off - I though she should assign writing rather than griping about our work effort. This was over 30 years ago now…</p>
<p>I was really disappointed in the amount of writing my girl was asked to do in HS, but she never took the honors/AP classes.</p>
<p>All I can say is that the rigor of the high school education I got is nothing compared to what my kids have gotten. I would also say that the students I see now at the Ivy I attended 30 years ago are measurably more accomplished than those who attended when I did (including me). I’ve also always felt that if the norm in a school is excellence, it’s misleading to give people achieving that norm a C.
So while I think that some of the concerns raised are quite valid (such as the decline in reading), I don’t the problem is grade inflation at the top schools.</p>
<p>My mom and stepdad think it’s hilarious when anyone tries to claim that public education in the US has gotten worse since they were kids (my dad didn’t go to public schools, so he doesn’t really have the same frame of reference). They both think that their grade school educations couldn’t hold a candle to ours.</p>
<p>I disbelieve that you can’t get “kids today” to write. My siblings and I all had lots of writing in our curricula. I’m sure it varies by school system, but I don’t think it’s a generational thing. It certainly varies by state - I went to schools in both Georgia and Kentucky, and while the Kentucky system had its problems, writing was much more heavily emphasized, and kids were writing better at younger ages.</p>
<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>