<p>Busywork in K-12 schools probably has more to do with ensuring that the marginal students can get the 70% correct needed to pass the class.</p>
<p>Even in advanced or AP courses, that means that tests have mostly easy questions in order to allow most students to pass. But that is not reflective of what students will see in college.</p>
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<p>What’s the point of watering down the courses so marginal students can pass if that’ll only set them up for greater failure down the road in higher-level education, career training*, or some demanding jobs?</p>
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<li>I.e. If one’s HS physics isn’t up to snuff, one’s going to have a hard time surviving training to be a certified electrician. The phenomenon of trying to pass marginal students by watering down curriculum is such that some areas now require an additional year of community college credits in Physics/STEM courses to ensure aspiring electrician have the necessary background to start training.<br></li>
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<p>The poimt is not other than the most important and central tenet of our public education system. The system roughly measures the ability of passing the students to the next level without much concern of what has been learned and will be retained. The system does an adequate job in punting the problem to the next year, and hopes to minimize the high number of dropouts (which I does not do well in urban areas.) </p>
<p>Why do you think that the model of a “school within a school” is so popular with the chosen “elites”, and why do you think that the colleges have massive needs for remediation classes for most everyone else? </p>
<p>Every college has teachers who a better than average, and teachers who are worse than average. It is my belief that most colleges have at least some teachers who are much better than average, and some who are much worse than average. Teachers can be bad in many ways–they can be boring, obnoxious, unfair in grading, and many others. Some of them are just not that good at teaching–and, believe it or not, sometimes that has to do with their ability to make themselves understood in English.</p>
<p>But what should we tell our kids in college about this? I tell my kids to, as much as possible, take classes from the very best professors at the school, even if the subject may not be something that fascinates them. Similarly, I tell them not to take classes with professors reputed to be bad (or observed to be bad at the first couple of classes), even if the subject is fascinating. Sometimes it can be hard–if you need to take three classes in pre-19th century literature, you may not have ideal choices. You may have to make some compromises.</p>
<p>But I still think that there can be teachers who are so bad that students should complain to the authorities about them. I should have done so when I was a freshman–the teacher in question should not have been teaching, or at least should have received some remedial teacher training. But my failure to complain doesn’t mean that it was my fault that the department chose to have that guy teach freshman calculus. A cursory visit to the class would have shown his superiors that he was ineffective. Apparently, that didn’t happen. I’m not confident that complaining would have done any good–I also should have complained about the textbook they were using–it was terrible. But who wrote it? The chair of the department.</p>
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Another adjunct I know just started teaching last year. He gave his College Physics students such long and difficult exams that the scores were abysmal. Since I was one of the laboratory instructors for his courses, I got to hear all the student complaints. Apparently, his idea is that if there is a genius in the class he will ferret him/her out. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, the students did not feel that they were learning from him and did not appreciate the situation. They complained to the appropriate Chair, and a discussion was had with the professor, but it didn’t help. </p>
<p>Having had both good and bad professors in my day, and having taught for many years, I can say that in pretty much ANY class there will be students who hate the class, hate the professor, hate the book (particularly if the course is one that is remedial or required for their major but not something many of them are otherwise interested in). As such, Chairs are used to hearing complaints and reading bad teacher evaluations for even their best faculty, so there is some truth to the idea that a student known to be very good and serious will be taken more seriously in this situation than an unknown freshman who just walked in two weeks ago.</p>
<p>sorry. never mind.</p>
<p>Hunt: I am very sorry that happened to you. I am not absolutely sure it is relevant to the present discussion. Why? Because colleges 30-40 years ago (sorry if I am aging you incorrectly) were very different places than they are today. I think it is perhaps especially true in the case of your alma mater. I think the experiences of your children (legacies, right?) would be very useful to the discussion. Maybe you disagree. Maybe you think things didn’t change that much. Did your children have these sorts of communication issues with their teachers?</p>
<p>"When the vast majority of the class is unable to finish a midterm, and the subsequent result of grading on a curve makes a 54/100 grade to a 98.6% - something is wrong.’</p>
<p>I don’t think that’s always wrong. There’s a place for courses that ask the students to grasp as much sophisticated material as they can, while the curve means that standout performance relative to peers is rewarded.</p>
<p>That said, profs should be clear about this kind of thing. When I was in a linguistics class that was graded this way, we weren’t told that the class would be curved or what the top of the curve looked like. I was attending office hours every week, frantically seeking help because I kept getting around 50% on my problem sets. I wish the prof had told me that those grades put me on track for an A, which I was shocked to get at the end of the semester. A lot of unneeded angst that semester.</p>
<p>@alh stated, “What does the university owe the student? Forty years ago, at my southern state flagship, I couldn’t understand a professor’s Boston accent. I had really only experienced a southern drawl up to that point in time. For a few weeks it sounded to me like he was talking gibberish. Was the university obligated to provide me only professors with southern drawls?”</p>
<p>I will address the last sentence first. Please note the OP used plural, and it was not just him that had an issue. So, to reduce the argument to the singular is inaccurate and dismisses the fact there seems there was a rather upset portion of the class, not just one person. Obviously, if it is just one person, then there is most likely an issue with that one person. </p>
<p>Overall, the posts illustrate differing value sets, which determine, which issues are should be handled by students, and how those issues should be handled. And it is interesting that many posters do not see colleges and universities as providing a specific service and product, which is all they (colleges) are doing.</p>
<p>For the record, my kids have never experienced this issue, but here is how I see it.</p>
<p>My value set is this: it is clear that 1) one can always reduce an issue to make it unimportant not too solve, but that to me is the easy way out. Doing something about the nexus of the problem is the way to go and provides a positive return after it is fixed properly. In business, if I went about working around all the inadequate things vendors send me, the company would have been out of business over a decade ago. I hold vendors to what they say they are providing. 2) It is important to have a clear understanding what you are paying for and should expect no less, and 3) @blossom, it would be actually DIS-EMPOWERING to teach my kids to expect less than what they pay for when purchasing any service and product.</p>
<p>Here is how I plug my value set into this current discussion: </p>
<p>As for college, I am paying for pretty much one major service / product - teaching of particular subjects and disciplines (the service) with the end-goal being a diploma (the product) for my kids in their majors. [Obviously, the increased knowledge of my kids is a by-product, but that holds no value in the world without the diploma, so we can put that aside in this discussion.]</p>
<p>The key word here is teaching. My kids and I expect that teaching to be the best they can understand and learn from, and that begins with understanding the professor, i.e., basic communication - note please that that was the issue the OP had, basic comprehension of the professor.</p>
<p>What I am not paying for in college is for my kids to have to work around the very thing for which I am writing checks - teaching; there should be no shortfall there, and my kids should get the best. To have them get lower quality teaching than expected would be teaching them a horrible example; which is, even if they are paying for something and the quality is not where it should be, they should stupidly accept lower quality goods and suck it and work around it. Simply, only a dumb consumer accepts such a trade, and I want my kids to be smart, discerning consumers, not wimpy suck-ups who pay full-price and accept less.</p>
<p>Therefore, it is NOT empowering my kids to teach them to work around something they should not have to - that would only be teaching them to be horrible consumers.</p>
<p>What I expect from my kids in college:</p>
<p>I expect my kids to work around having an unfriendly, inattentive roommate. I expect them to work around the fact the school may not plow the sidewalks after a snowstorm. I expect them to work around no paper ever in the library printer. I expect them to work around the terrible gym hours. I expect them to work around the professor’s inconvenient office hours. I expect them to work around the loud parties in their dorm on Friday and Saturday nights. I expect them to work around their too dunk dorm-mates. I expect them to work around the JA who never seems to want to help. If they had a campus job, I expect them to suck it up if they hate it. I even expect them to work around and deal with tasteless food and not great dining hall hours. I expect them to work around their room being too cold in January and February and too hot in September, etc.</p>
<p>For my kids to solve the above issues are the life lessons I expect them to learn in college. The key here is they really can get these lessons anywhere, and thus no need to send them to college and pay $60K/yr just for those.</p>
<p>HOWEVER, what I do not expect them to learn in college is to accept a substandard version of the only real product for which they are paying that high price, i.e., teaching, and more specifically, learning the critical information of their majors. </p>
<p>So, there is the difference in value sets. </p>
<p>Some posters think they pay $60K/yr for their kids to learn to accept lower quality goods for the major purchase for which they are paying. My values say no to that type of transaction. My kids can learn to empower themselves and learn life lessons in all sorts of ways, but to teach them to devalue their own dollars paid for a specific service is teaching them to be rather weak-minded consumers who do not know how to hold vendors accountable. </p>
<p>And, there is the big value difference - I view colleges and universities as vendors that provide a specific service and product and I expect no less than the best because I paid for that. It is not okay to have my kids work around a substandard service and to accept a substandard product in the end. </p>
<p>Last time I checked my dollars gave the colleges full value when they cashed my checks. So, why in the world should my kids and I expect less than full value in the teaching - the service they say they are providing? Well, obviously, I would not. And really, in my book, only a pushover consumer would accept such a trade.</p>
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That’s all well and good in theory, and in terms of at least speaking english, it’s a safe stance, but beyond that who determines what is the “best they can understand and learn from”? And what if the “best” for your kid is not the same “best” as it is for the kid next to him? Does the professor have to teach each student individually? I have 60 students this semester - how would that work? </p>
<p>I believe part of the problem is that there is some skepticism regarding the original post. The post is third hand information which is often not reliable. The OP was speaking for her friend, who was speaking for her daughter, who was speaking for an entire chemistry class. I would love to know what the grade distribution was for that class - did everyone fail because they didn’t learn anything from the professor they couldn’t understand at all? </p>
<p>I agree that universities are providing a product, but not all schools offer the same product. Some of our kids chose to attend major research universities because they value the opportunities they can provide. In STEM fields that often means having instructors who aren’t native English speakers. I posted earlier that my son has had many teachers/mentors with heavy accents, but none of them have been impossible to understand. Some have even been exceptional teachers. I think that is the norm. I believe it’s conceivable to have a professor or TA who has such limited English skills that they can’t communicate, but I think that has to be rare. I think far more often it’s just an inconvenience; they have an accent that makes them difficult to understand for a time.</p>
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<p>For our family, increased knowledge is the value. It is the goal. The diploma is the by-product.</p>
<p>Yes, alb! For our family, increased knowledge is the value, and the kind of knowledge we value is not always measurable on tests. Learning that not everyone shares your language or accent is a basic as is figuring out how to understand people who aren’t like you!</p>
<p>Thanks, alh, it had to be said.</p>
<p>I am amenable to a “consumerist” approach to education within limits. The point where I part ways with the “give the customer what he/she wants” is the point where STEM students would like to cover about 1/4 of the material that is actually in the course, and have only easy problems assigned. This would get a student to a diploma just as well. Quite a few students, even good ones, would be satisfied with that–in fact, more satisfied in the short term than they are with courses that they struggle with, but then understand. </p>
<p>At the university level, we are trying to teach students how to solve problems of types that they have never seen before, rather than how to solve a set of problems after seeing multiple examples of the same type. It is a quite different type of learning from that in most high school math/science courses. It is also less pleasant to most in the short run, but mind-changing in the long run. </p>
<p>^and does this relate to the type of college exams where the curve seems so wild to so many of us? Could you please spell it out a little more? : )</p>
<p>The goal of many college STEM courses might be behind the large curves on (some) college exams.</p>
<p>A score of x% on a college exam just means that the student qualified for x% of the points. It does not mean that the student has mastered x% of the material tested by that exam. It is important for students to understand the perspective of their particular professor, because everyone sets up exams differently. A faculty member might take it for granted that the students can handle 75% of the course material–no point in testing on that material–and test on just the 25% that is most difficult, to see whether the students can handle that.</p>
<p>In the classes I have taught over the years, the lowest A percentage has been 75%, and generally it hovers around 80%. (I think this is something like the Canadian system.) Of course, that is “all in,” including problem sets where the scores are generally a bit higher than they are on exams. Many other people give harder exams, or grade less gently.</p>
<p>When I took Calc 1, our professor announced that he figured out the exam timing by seeing how long it took him to complete the exam. He knew that the students would need a ratio of 5:1, relative to his time. I have found this to be on the mark for classes up through the junior year, and I set up my exams that way. However, a lot of my colleagues do not allow that time dilation factor.</p>
<p>When people are indignant about low scores on exams, I often think of the final mathematics exams in Cambridge. For a long time (though perhaps not in the modern era), the top mathematics student had roughly twice the number of marks (points) as the student who came second–to say nothing of the student who had the lowest score that still qualified for “first class honors.”</p>
<p>Or in briefer form, on many exams, it is <em>not</em> a question of checking whether the students are capable of working problems just like those they have been shown how to solve. Rather, the % score on the exam reflects the % of previously unseen problem types that the student can figure out how to solve (usually under a time constraint).</p>
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<p>Out in the larger world, students may be expected to figure out “previously unseen” problems. Is one point of (college) education to learn the skills to do this? Or try to learn those skills?</p>
<p>mamalion:
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Yes, alb! For our family, increased knowledge is the value, and the kind of knowledge we value is not always measurable on tests. Learning that not everyone shares your language or accent is a basic as is figuring out how to understand people who aren’t like you!
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<p>Would you expect your adult children to apply this principle to say…their surgeon. As surgeon is explaining options and risks in a heavy accent it is then a strong held value that your young adult must figure out how to work around the inconvenience. How about when you are trying to figure out the ins and out of the new health care options and the company representative has an accent so that it is questionable as to whether or not you are actually getting the nuanced and important differences between plan A and plan B. Or, the pharmacist who is going over the use of a new medication. I’m curious, does the moral value of figuring out people not like you hold in these instances?</p>
<p>Who would have thought that colleges with fluent, personable teachers, skilled at explaining difficult concepts in English, were doing such a disservice to their students?</p>