<p>"I just took my first college chem test...And I'm worried cuz I didn't know that two pints equalled a quart. Guess we didn't spend enough time baking back in in high school."</p>
<p>AP Scholar with Distinction, 4.0 unweighted GPA, 4.6 weighted GPA, 35 overall ACT score, 2250 SAT score, 780 Math II SAT.</p>
<p>(laughing parent)</p>
<p>to be fair, college chem is usually on the metric system. All science is.</p>
<p>LOL! But it isn’t just this generation - my husband called me from the grocery store just yesterday to ask how many cups are in a gallon!</p>
<p>But I bet he/she can do advanced calculus with ease. Who cares how many pints in a quart–when will you ever have to use that?</p>
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<p>When you order Chinese food and want the correct amount of rice to match the number of entrees you ordered!</p>
<p>^^Kind of nice to know, don’t you think? It doesn’t take much to learn that.</p>
<p>When I read the title, I was sure we were getting into having tutors in college. So many kids in our neighborhood keep tutors through college to get help with their course work.</p>
<p>it is used in cooking often, actually. But that is why the dollar store has magnets with the conversions on them to put on your refrigerator, and the conversions are listed in every cookbook ever written.</p>
<p>There are many conversion apps for both the iPhone and Android. I’d bet that AP Scholar had that info in the palm of his/her hand, and didn’t know it.</p>
<p>You are probably right jbehend, but it probably would have been cheating if she did use it, so good call on her part!</p>
<p>Am I weird to think it is actually fun to learn the conversion? It is so logical(?); 4 cups maks a quart, 4 quarts makes a gallon, you order a pint of beer at a bar since a cup is not enough? I do have trouble with Tablespoons, teaspoons tho.</p>
<p>5cc’s in a teaspoon, 15cc’s in a tablespoon, 30cc’s in an ounce, 240cc’s in a cup, 2.2 lbs/kg…stuff you have to know as a nurse…the rest is on a magnet on my fridge! LOL I have to use an app or look online for temperature conversion though. Do not use it enough to keep the equation in my head.</p>
<p>To me, this is a sign that some people just aren’t all that observant of things happening around them. I’ll bet this same kid has seen milk cartons in all these different sizes his whole life. My son is like this–he can ride in a car over the same route hundreds of times, and still have no concept of where anything is.</p>
<p>I’m not sure it’s generational, but there may be an element of kids today thinking they don’t actually need to commit any facts to memory.</p>
<p>Super, I can continue; 4 tablespoons make a quarter cup. What gets me in trouble is why doesn’t 4 teaspoons make a tablespoon. Don’t ask me why I can’t get passed that. </p>
<p>Farenheit is good for body temperature, finer scale.</p>
<p>3 teaspoons in a tablespoon. </p>
<p>I do agree that it’s something that comes naturally from doing a lot of kitchen work. When you’re trying to keep from dirtying another measuring spoon, or you’re making multiples of a recipe to feed a crowd, or you’re writing a shopping list and a recipe calls for two cups of whole milk (which you don’t normally keep around and you need to know what’s the smallest carton size to get), the conversions become etched in your mind. </p>
<p>Taking care of a pool also forces one to learn the relationships between gallons and pints and such.</p>
<p>Doesn’t that annoy you? That it’s 3 not 4 teaspoons in a tablespoon after all the 4 to 1 conversions. 4 to 1 is quite intuitive, half of a half. It happens in music all the time, quarter notes eighth notes. So why a third all of sudden to go from a tablespoon to a teaspoon?</p>
<p>Igloo…what is anoying is that we have not gone metric in the US. I have been promised since 1st grade that US was going metric. I have decided that I would like the next president to make that a priority…since they can’t get anything else done, maybe that will finally happen!! LOL- at least it would be something new for congress to argue about ! (I am just being sarcastic…please do not turn this into a political thread)</p>
<p>Of all the things to be unhappy about in our education system, the fact that one student does not know how to convert between pints and quarts is about #1,000,000 on my list.</p>
<p>I’ll bet that same student can convert milliliters to cubic centimeters of liquid better than most middle-aged people in this country.</p>
<p>What kills me is when you have to start converting ounces and grams back and forth with tablespoons and pints. I made a chart to keep on my computer which has US dry and liquid volume measurements and their equivalents. It also has some ratios for selected foods. Like sticks of butter, lemons, chocolate and eggs.</p>
<p>It is easy to google a conversion website when you need it, though. (Of course, that won’t help you during an exam :-)</p>
<p>College students’ lack of awareness of basic everyday things is not a new problem.</p>
<p>When I was in college back in the 1970s, the first exam in the genetics course for biology majors inevitably involved a problem involving inheritance in chickens. </p>
<p>About half the class would get it wrong because they forgot a simple fact: chickens are birds. There is a fundamental difference in the genetics of birds and those of mammals (for those who care: male birds, like female mammals, have two of the same sex chromosome, whereas female birds, like male mammals, have two different sex chromosomes). If you didn’t recognize that chickens were birds, you could not get the correct answer.</p>
<p>I guess, to most college students, chicken is simply dinner. They never stop to think about what sort of creature a chicken was before it was cut up and cooked.</p>
<p>Back to the OP’s premise, however. Many of our kids make it to college with lots of brilliant info in their heads, and still missing some practical everyday knowledge. That’s why they still need parents for a few more years, until life knocks some of those rough edges off.</p>