<p>*We found that large numbers of the students were making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous coursework, only a modest investment of effort and little or no meaningful improvement in skills like writing and reasoning.</p>
<p>In a typical semester, for instance, 32 percent of the students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20 pages of writing over the semester. The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying, according to the labor economists Philip S. Babcock and Mindy S. Marks.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, a large number of the students showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing that were administered when they began college and then again at the ends of their sophomore and senior years. If the test that we used, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, were scaled on a traditional 0-to-100 point range, 45 percent of the students would not have demonstrated gains of even one point over the first two years of college, and 36 percent would not have shown such gains over four years of college.</p>
<p>Why is the overall quality of undergraduate learning so poor?</p>
<p>...Too many institutions, for instance, rely primarily on student course evaluations to assess teaching. This creates perverse incentives for professors to demand little and give out good grades. (Indeed, the 36 percent of students in our study who reported spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone still had an average G.P.A. of 3.16.) On those commendable occasions when professors and academic departments do maintain rigor, they risk declines in student enrollments. And since resources are typically distributed based on enrollments, rigorous classes are likely to be canceled and rigorous programs shrunk. Distributing resources and rewards based on student learning instead of student satisfaction would help stop this race to the bottom...*</p>
<p>No Child Left Behind policy means most children fall behind. Teachers have to teach to the test, and make sure that the standardized tests get passed. Since most of that material is objective, kids are taught to repeat answers instead of thinking for themselves. Budget cuts don’t help, either. So more and more kids head off to college completely unprepared for the traditional college life of having to actually read something outside of class and be able to discuss it or write their own ideas.</p>
<p>It doesn’t help that technology has provided easy entertainment and instant answers to questions so that many kids today have not learned to read for pleasure or to research things for themselves.</p>
<p>My high school “B” student, who had had honors humanities classes in HS, was amazed by the number of kids who were completely stymied in college when the profs would ask them their opinions/theories about things that they read or discussed in class. Most of them wanted the profs to tell them what to think, so they could regurgitate that for tests and papers, just like in high school. Thinking for themselves was unheard of.</p>
<p>There are some colleges still out there where the students have to labor mightily for their grades. My son’s chief criterion for choosing his college was the rigor of the academics, and he got his wish.</p>
<p>There are also places where the ones motivated to learn can take courses where they actually do learn quite a bit, but where students afraid of having to do school work or who want “easy A” courses for medical or law school admission purposes can find such courses.</p>
<p>But it is interesting to note that at UC Berkeley, populated with many students who probably tried to take every possible honors/AP course in high school, the honors courses that are offered tend to have low enrollment. For example, honors freshmen and sophomore math courses typically have one 25 student lecture that is rarely full, while the regular versions (and watered down versions like “calculus for business majors”) have hundreds of students and are usually full.</p>
<p>He took Compilers, Computational Geometry and Data Mining this past semester.</p>
<p>It’s a typical compilers course - you write a language compiler during the semester.</p>
<p>Anyone that’s taken a course like this knows that it is a killer project course which requires you to assemble the knowledge from a bunch of disparate courses taken previously (theory and practice) and put them together to create something that takes a language like C at one end which spits out assembler code at the other end. It’s also one of those things that is all or nothing - you have to add layer after layer and meet pretty hard targets on deliverables or else you will wind up with something that doesn’t work at all. It’s not that hard to flunk a compilers course. His professor had 100 students in an intro class and grad students and Phd students to advise so he didn’t have a lot of time for anyone. That’s what happens when budgets get squeezed.</p>
<p>His school has difficult courses with not much help from professors as they are overcommitted but students can learn a lot in this kind of environment. On the other hand, there are easy courses for students that want degrees without working very hard.</p>
<p>Medical and law school admissions practices may be part of the reason for students looking for “easy A” courses instead of taking more challenging courses that they may learn more in. Medical schools also effectively encourage retaking courses for which one has AP credit, rather than taking more advanced courses in the subjects.</p>
<p>Part of that story is that honors and AP courses in HS are NOT necessarily harder because of extremely generous grading policies. Ap classes are typically viewed as the easiest GPA boosters and best resume/class rank padding tools. Harder classes in college are usually just that … harder and requiring more work. </p>
<p>The other part is taking AP courses hardly equates to a demonstrating a love for … learning.</p>
<p>“Medical schools also effectively encourage retaking courses for which one has AP credit, rather than taking more advanced courses in the subjects.”</p>
<p>D was advised to repeat if the AP course was a foundation course for her major- - in her case calc and physics (but b/c she is not a bio.chen major or interested in advanced sci study in either subject, no need to repeat those courses or AP stat). This was not to inflate her grades, but to make certain she was fully prepared for advanced study, since an AP score of 4/5 doesn’t really reflect mastery at the college level.</p>
<p>Sure, but the attractiveness of easy courses extends far beyond prelaws and premeds. I consider them to be a relatively minor issue in the grand scheme of events, as while they should rationally seek out easy classes, at least they’re still motivated to earn A’s.</p>
<p>The far bigger societal problem seems to be with the “easy-C” classes and those students who are interested in doing little more than putting in the minimal amount of effort to graduate, or even to stay academically eligible, even with mediocre grades. Surely every one of us can think of college students of such ilk. Indeed, the stereotypical pop-cultural portrayal of college life is a series of never-ending hijinks by students who seem to be interested in anything but studying: reference classic movies such as Animal House or Revenge of the Nerds (a movie about ‘nerds’ who never actually seem to study). Or consider the infamous Playboy Magazine listings of top ‘Party’ Schools. While some such schools are indeed academically reputable, many others are not - the implication being that the latter schools are clearly more infamous for their partying atmosphere than actual academics. For many students, college represents little more than a 4-year vacation of partying and dating. That is why certain [people</a>](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lechner=]people”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lechner=) absolutely refuse to graduate, but don’t drop out either, because, frankly, they enjoy the lifestyle. </p>
<p>If rich people want to pay for what is effectively a multi-year vacation for their children without having them really learn anything, hey, it’s their money and they can what they want with it. The problem comes when taxpayers are asked to foot part of the bill, whether through Pell Grants, tuition subsidies at state universities for state residents, direct state taxpayer grants to state universities, college tax exemptions from their nonprofit status, or the like. Why should the rest of us support those ‘students’ who are far more interested in partying and dating than in actually studying?</p>
<p>Keep in mind that there is a much greater percentage of students going to college now than in 1960 - and for the most part, that increase does not come from the top of the class.</p>
<p>Probably also worth noting that “Animal House” was circa 1960 not 2010 and had as its basis an exaggerated depiction of the Alpha Delta fraternity at - Dartmouth. (Whose members by and large did go to class, study, and graduate on time.)</p>
<p>I do not see a problem with repeating classes if the college course adds to what was taught in a high school AP class (at some schools, from what I have heard from our high school’s graduates, the high school AP class was actually the more difficult class), but I also like the way some colleges have separate sections (often for fewer credits) for students who have already studied the material at hand at an AP level, but might not be ready to move to the next level at college. </p>
<p>So, a hypothetical intro gen chem class might have a 5 credit option and a 3 or 4 credit option, with the student placed in accordance with their background. The advantage to the student taking the option with fewer credits would be the opportunity to take more credits in something else. At the end of the year, students from each option would end up equally prepared to take the next course in the sequence.</p>
<p>That seems easily believable when, for example, a student who got a 5 on AP Calculus takes “Calculus for Business Majors”, or a student who got a 5 on AP Physics (even the lower level B exam) takes a “Physics for Poets” type of course.</p>
<p>Solution:
Go to a small liberal arts college that stresses learning, critical thinking and written communication, and uses narrative evaluations instead of letter grades.</p>
<p>Alverno College
Bard College (also letter grades)
The Evergreen State College
Fairhaven College (Western WA Univ)
Goddard College
Hampshire College
Harvey Mudd College (first year only)
New College of Florida
Prescott College
Sarah Lawrence College
UC - Santa Cruz (letter grades also)</p>
<p>I agree, but that’s just a reformulation of the problem. The question then is, why did society change to accommodate so many presumably unmotivated students to attend college than ever before, and should society continue to encourage that change through taxpayer subsidies? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Look, nobody is claiming that Animal House was a documentary. But at the same time, let’s not be naive: pop culture has a tremendous influence on shaping societal demands. Simpson and Bruckheimer never claimed that Top Gun was a documentary, yet that movie generated a whopping 500% spike in Navy recruitment of enlistees wanting to become Navy fighter pilots. LA Law is widely credited with a surge of applications to law school, and the recent surge of interest in careers in criminal investigation is undoubtedly linked to the influence of shows such as CSI, NCIS, Bones, Law & Order, Criminal Minds, and the like. Hence, Animal House and more recent films of its ilk depict a debauched lifestyle that surely influences what people think should be their college experience. Again, let’s be perfectly honest, there are hordes of unserious college students who are far more interested in partying and socializing than in the academics.</p>
<p>The answer is that employers want employees that they think are smart but actually determining who is smart is hard and costs a lot of money. So people go to them with college degrees to say “Hey, I’m smart. Here’s my degree which says I’m smart.” And to employers it seems like a pretty easy way to evaluate how smart someone is.</p>
<p>The answer is that colleges are businesses and provide one of two things:valuable information or smart employees. But with increasing enrollment, rising tuition, and declining standards, it has almost entirely diluted the value and become a ponzi scheme. College is on an unsustainable path and could very well end up in a similar situation as the housing bubble.</p>