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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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 Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 6:35 pm Post subject: |
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Then imagine paragraphs and paragraphs of lines like the one I quoted, above, much of it written in nonsensical, wanna-be intellectual language ("the various aspects of the analytical contention's quality"), and you will get it.
I would post it but it would violate all kinds of privacy policies.
I hear undergrads talking about test-taking strategies all the time: they do not have the slightest idea how to answer question X, they never read the book, so they just "bullshit" about anything at all they might have heard in lecture, hoping for at least partial points on anything, etc., etc.
How did historian A use source B to write history C? "Oh yes, this historian used this source to write a history. And it is important that we understand why sources exist because sources allow historians such as this one to write great histories like this. Without these sources we could not have history. So it is good that historians use sources..."
Later in the week: "Why did you fail me!?! I am an A student, I want to go to law school. My father promised to send me to Hawaii spring break if I get straight As. So look at it again!"
It goes on and on and on. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 7:18 pm Post subject: |
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| pkang0202 wrote: |
When I was at University, Wikipedia was NOT accepted as a scholarly source. In fact, they would only allow 1 or 2 sources from the internet, PERIOD. You had to hall your butt to the library the old fashioned way, copy pages and site sources.
Good professors will make you do this, and good schools will have a department policy that makes students put in the effort. |
The standards haven't changed. Wikipedia is not a source. However, the internet has developed and internet sources are acceptable now. Especially for current events. But in most cases schools have web archives or web search engines for finding stuff in print. |
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harlowethrombey
Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 7:27 pm Post subject: |
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When I was in college the internet was still a puppy so we had this things called 'Cliff's Notes' or, if you were tech-savvy, 'Spark NOtes' that you could use to get a general idea of the text.
Before that people had these crazy 'cheat sheets' and 'study guides' they could buy off other students to help get them through their courses.
When the first human lit a firepit not with his head another human saw this, stole the idea, and thus its gone on in perpetuaty.
Does anyone remember when Generation X were such listless slackers they were going to destroy the planet? Does anyone remember when TV was invented and everyone became dumber?
Now I'm not saying that there arent a lot of stupid, unqualified people out there, but it only seems like there are more because there are more people. There are more murders now, than ever, too!
And while I find many people's lack of knowledge disturbing (really, no one can name the 3 branches of the U.S. government? sigh. . . ), it's not because the kids are 'dumb' or 'lazy'. It's because their parents, the education system and society has failed them.
Elementary school age kids want to learn. All sentient organisms do. If somewhere along the way they get 'dumb' then somebody screwed up. If they remain dumb adults then its their own fault, but every generation also, unfailing, lays all the blame at the feet of the next.
Sorry for the rambling post, I'm sick as all get out and hopped up on 2 different kinds of meds and zombie walking through my classes  |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 10:03 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
Then imagine paragraphs and paragraphs of lines like the one I quoted, above, much of it written in nonsensical, wanna-be intellectual language ("the various aspects of the analytical contention's quality"), and you will get it.
I would post it but it would violate all kinds of privacy policies.
I hear undergrads talking about test-taking strategies all the time: they do not have the slightest idea how to answer question X, they never read the book, so they just "bullshit" about anything at all they might have heard in lecture, hoping for at least partial points on anything, etc., etc.
How did historian A use source B to write history C? "Oh yes, this historian used this source to write a history. And it is important that we understand why sources exist because sources allow historians such as this one to write great histories like this. Without these sources we could not have history. So it is good that historians use sources..."
Later in the week: "Why did you fail me!?! I am an A student, I want to go to law school. My father promised to send me to Hawaii spring break if I get straight As. So look at it again!"
It goes on and on and on. |
So what has changed? This has been the case for a long time now. Long time being at least a couple decades. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 10:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Captain Corea wrote: |
| Gopher wrote: |
Do you imagine that some history faculty might take some of them and paste them together into a document called "world history according to the undergrads" just to see how it might look? . |
I think that sounds like a hilarious idea. |
My 8th grade history teacher did something like this. After an assignment, he'd say something along the lines of "Here are some new facts of American history I didn't know before." Then he'd read various excerpts from students' work that were not exactly accurate. Provided a good laugh for us, and made us think, "well at least I didn't do something that dumb on my test." Assuming we weren't one of the contributors of course. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 10:21 pm Post subject: |
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Sorry, 3 posts in a row here..
But the last couple years, I've graded exams for a couple Middle Eastern history classes. The vast majority of students had a good handle of the facts, and could write coherently. What I was shocked by was their lack of analysis and inability to follow the standard format of an academic paper:
-intro with thesis
-supporting argument
-conclusion
instead they just immediately dished out a chronology of events, and maybe loosely tied them to the question asked.
Now is that any different than a generation or two ago? I have no idea. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 11:05 pm Post subject: |
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A generation ago, at least in the UK, those of average intelligence were not allowed anywhere near a university (unless they were rich of course). Only the top 2% (like me old dad) attended.
Now just about anyone can go to a university.
My mum did a teachers diploma at a teacher's college. Nowadays that stuff would be done at a uni and be considered a degree. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 11:12 pm Post subject: |
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| bucheon bum wrote: |
| Now is that any different than a generation or two ago? I have no idea. |
Do you stand with those on this thread who have willfully ignored the evidence I have posted in favor of viewing this topic as a view I alone have constructed out of whole cloth?
Because you should have some idea. Again, I have introduced evidence on this thread that shows that "more than 55 per cent of Ontario's faculty and librarians surveyed" believe that there is something different here. Moreover, American universities spend between $2 and $3 billion more per year for remedial instruction -- something they have only recently had to get into.
Moreover, Kuros may have introduced one of the decisive elements here: universities have been steadily expanding, boasting tens of thousands of students in some cases, in the last several decades. Undergraduate education has become a less selective, and more mass-production-oriented endeavor. I teach more than a few students who, frankly, should never have been admitted to college. That or they are simply not ready to learn what a college has to teach them at this point in their lives. This is new. I imagine if we looked, we would find that universities did not field 40K-50K and more undergraduates in past decades.
Another of the problem's aspects? Never said it was monocausal. Junior faculty need good reviews to earn tenure and promotion from assistant to associate professor and then again, but to a lesser degree, from associate to full professor. In other words, I know more than one who fears failing students. |
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Hater Depot
Joined: 29 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009 8:46 am Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| Do you think, on the other hand, they know how to chat and text, and watch Youtube.com during lecture... just be a good professor and give them their A so they can continue on and get into law or medical school... |
And it does not end in law school, either. There are people who absolutely never stop browsing football scores, chatting, Facebook. Etc.
| Gopher wrote: |
| How did historian A use source B to write history C? "Oh yes, this historian used this source to write a history. And it is important that we understand why sources exist because sources allow historians such as this one to write great histories like this. Without these sources we could not have history. So it is good that historians use sources..." |
Something similar happens in law school exams, where a student writes out all the law, knows it, but utterly fails to apply it to the facts of the hypothetical case. D. Professors tell them over and over not to write this way, but they charge ahead anyway. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009 8:54 am Post subject: |
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I think this wonderfully written article is relevant:
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
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I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work.
My students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but because they must. Both colleges I teach at require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two courses. For many of my students, this is difficult. Some of the young guys, the police-officers-to-be, have wonderfully open faces across which play their every passing emotion, and when we start reading �Araby� or �Barn Burning,� their boredom quickly becomes apparent. They fidget; they prop their heads on their arms; they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had been tasered. Their eyes implore: How could you do this to me?
~~~~
Adult education, nontraditional education, education for returning students�whatever you want to call it�is a substantial profit center for many colleges. Like factory owners, school administrators are delighted with this idea of mounting a second shift of learning in their classrooms, in the evenings, when the full-time students are busy with such regular extracurricular pursuits of higher education as reading Facebook and playing beer pong. If colleges could find a way to mount a third, graveyard shift, as Henry Ford�s Willow Run did at the height of the Second World War, I believe that they would.
There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need college�but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. And when all is said and done, my personal economic interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don�t think that�s such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath�s �Daddy�? Such one-to-one correspondences probably don�t hold. But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I can�t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors� prison.
America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone�s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.
Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it�try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn�t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.
For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.
I am the man who has to lower the hammer.
We may look mild-mannered, we adjunct instructors, but we are academic button men. I roam the halls of academe like a modern Coriolanus bearing sword and grade book, �a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries.� |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009 9:10 am Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| Do you imagine that some history faculty might take some of them and paste them together into a document called "world history according to the undergrads" just to see how it might look? . |
But can we throw this all in the laps of the undergrads? Maybe we as educators have failed them; perhaps many were taught by Mr. Garoson. (Fast forward to 7:53.) |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009 9:30 am Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
I think this wonderfully written article is relevant:
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
| Quote: |
I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work.
My students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but because they must. Both colleges I teach at require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two courses. For many of my students, this is difficult. Some of the young guys, the police-officers-to-be, have wonderfully open faces across which play their every passing emotion, and when we start reading �Araby� or �Barn Burning,� their boredom quickly becomes apparent. They fidget; they prop their heads on their arms; they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had been tasered. Their eyes implore: How could you do this to me?
~~~~
Adult education, nontraditional education, education for returning students�whatever you want to call it�is a substantial profit center for many colleges. Like factory owners, school administrators are delighted with this idea of mounting a second shift of learning in their classrooms, in the evenings, when the full-time students are busy with such regular extracurricular pursuits of higher education as reading Facebook and playing beer pong. If colleges could find a way to mount a third, graveyard shift, as Henry Ford�s Willow Run did at the height of the Second World War, I believe that they would.
There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need college�but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. And when all is said and done, my personal economic interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don�t think that�s such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath�s �Daddy�? Such one-to-one correspondences probably don�t hold. But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I can�t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors� prison.
America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone�s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.
Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it�try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn�t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.
For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.
I am the man who has to lower the hammer.
We may look mild-mannered, we adjunct instructors, but we are academic button men. I roam the halls of academe like a modern Coriolanus bearing sword and grade book, �a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries.� |
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Good article, thanks for posting that. |
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Yu_Bum_suk
Joined: 25 Dec 2004
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| Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009 3:41 pm Post subject: |
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| There's no doubt that the standards are definitely lower, especially in the UK. If you meet anyone from the UK who got a degree 20+ years ago you can usually be sure that they're reasonably articulate and can write grammatically. That's certainly not the case with around 50% of Brits who've graduated within the past decade. In NA you'd likely have to go back much further to find a generation with university degrees that actually mean something. |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009 11:33 pm Post subject: |
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http://kazakhstan.neweurasia.net/2009/04/09/educational-deadlock/
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| Today at the lecture only 2 out of 9 students failed to multiply 500 by 1,5. One has got 550, another has derived 1250. This is the last yea undergrads of one of the country�s best universities, specialty - �Economy of public construction�. They are unable to do the maths that are solved in the 3rd class of a secondary school. I think this is a natural result of the education reform in the country. I�m still shocked. |
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ManintheMiddle
Joined: 20 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 9:54 pm Post subject: |
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Good thread, Gopher.
Your detractors here will of course resort to name-calling and ageism (as if being 35 years-old puts one over the hill--as my father once reminded: "How does it feel not to have even seen the hill?"), but I digress. They can't deal with the very real possibility that overall academic standards are on the decline with the push-button generations.
As an earlier poster or two said, too many college kids today have an unhealthy sense of entitlement because they've been raised in societies where "student rights" have spun out of control. My mainland Chinese students (and this at a top university) were expected to take turns cleaning the blackboard and emptying the trash, among other things. Would any Western peer deign to do the same without seeing it as an affront to their individualism?
Writing skills and reading skills go hand-in-hand. College kids read less quality material than they did before the advent of the Internet, VHS/VCD and DVD players. But they haven't engaged in much thinking partly because too many have professors who are idealogues and prefer groupthink. And generally speaking, the caliber of the secondary level teaching force is in decline and has been for nearly four decades.
Still, as a former high school English teacher myself, I resent this elitist comment from our supposedly egalitarian feathered friend:
| Quote: |
A generation ago, at least in the UK, those of average intelligence were not allowed anywhere near a university (unless they were rich of course). Only the top 2% (like me old dad) attended.
Now just about anyone can go to a university.
My mum did a teachers diploma at a teacher's college. Nowadays that stuff would be done at a uni and be considered a degree. |
Some of the best--as well as the worst--classmates (and later students I taught or supervised) were enrolled in the College of Education. But I've encountered more than a few lame ones in journalism, political science, psychology and English classes as well. Perhaps teacher colleges are substandard in the U.K. but in the U.S. they've been integrated into universities (formally referred to as normal colleges). Oh, and the rather self-indulgent plug for pops bemuses me.
On the other hand, there is something to the concern that providing a college education to nearly everyone who seeks it tends to "water down" the talent pool. Clearly, this too is too much of an entitlement. Moreover, it is elitist to privilege those who excel in a liberal arts education from their peers in the trades. Without the latter, where would we all be? At yet with the notable exception of Germany, most Western countries have embraced this professional bias without much examination. |
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