Many of RightWing Prof’s students come to college expecting an easy time. Actually, he writes, it takes a lot of work to succeed in college.
(When RWP was an undergrad) I don’t recall expecting that I should get an A because of how much I studied, or because I “tried really hard.” I don’t recall expecting that mediocre work that barely fulfilled the requirements would get me an A. I don’t recall expecting to receive partial credit if my answer was incorrect. I don’t recall expecting that I could pass a course while rarely going to class or doing only part of the assigned work.
Why did I not have these expectations that students now have? My high school teachers assigned a lot of homework, and we either did it, or we failed the class. And I might add that our parents made sure we did our homework . . .
Universities expect students to do two hours of independent work for every hour in class. A full-time college student is expected to study 24 to 30 hours a week outside of class, turn papers in on time and pass without “extra credit.”
Perhaps too many students have gone through their K-12 years designing posters rather than writing research papers.
About Joanne
test.
It also bears mentioning that the “two hours out for every hour in” rule for university-level coursework constitutes a *minimum* amount of time. Many students — and every student at one point or another — will need more time for studying and office hours than this.
I find that it’s not so much the time requirements of the courses themselves that dooms some college students but rather the lack of ability of college students to manage their time and know their limitations. The current high school culture encourages maximal involvement in as many clubs, teams, and organizations as possible. High school students are told that colleges look favorably on that level of involvement. But when they get to college, if you try to put in 16 hours a week in the classroom and then the requisite 32 hours outside — and THEN try to be in a fraternity AND be in 4-5 different clubs AND play sports AND hold down a part time job (or three) — students will find that there’s just not enough hours in the week for all that. But they’ve never been taught to say “no” to the right things.
> According to a study published by the Chronicle of
> Higher Education, 48% of faculty members expect
> students to do six or more hours of homework
> every week,
Maybe Unis/colleges should include a statement on the school application that requires each applicant to sign that they have read the paragraph and agree to put in the designated number of hours. The statement would also go on to suggest that failure to study the requisite number of hours would constitute a failure on the part of the student, akin to a breach of contract between the student and the school.
I can tell you that many students confuse learning the material with simply rereading the chapter. This is especially true in technical subjects involving some math. I don’t know how often I’ve heard the line “I understand the theory, I just can’t do the problems.” I just announce on the first day of class — If you think you understand the ideas and can’t do the homework problems without help, you don’t understand the ideas. I will look at a test problem they’ve gotten wrong and ask them to write the correct solution on a blank sheet of paper. Many don’t know where to begin EVEN AFTER having seen me do the solution in class. Yet seconds before they were sitting in my office telling me with a straight face that they got the idea, but were just careless on the test.
Too many of them went to schools where saying any sort of horse puckey got them partial credit or took math tests that were a rote repeat of the problems they’d done in class.
I think another problem is that the high schools, at least around here, give the kids an abundance of opportunities to do “extra credit” assignements, group projects where everybody shares a (high) grade, etc– compounded with the usual grade inflation pressures. So students are showing up at college thinking they’re going to be coddled, given extra credit assignments to supplement weak or average grades, and then are shocked when their C can’t be supplemented.
A friend of mine, teaching remedial math at a community college, asked students to truthfully write down the percent of the assigned homework that was completed. Those percentages correlated very well with the scores on the exam over said homework.
Amazing, aint it?
Are these students that can’t do real work all distinct from the ones that are “brilliant but can’t get into Harvard”, or is there overlap? I can believe that there are more students that are well qualified to go to the Ivy League schools, since there are more high school students than when I was in high school, and the same number of Ivy League schools, but some stories make it sound as though there are huge numbers of kids that are ready to jump from high school to a Ph.D. program, and other stories suggest that it’s mostly resume padding. Does anyone know whether the proportion of really brilliant and prepared kids is higher or lower than 35 years ago, and also whether college admissions offices can identify those kids when faced with an application from one of them?
What’s amusing is that you all take RWP’s assertions at face value. Thus, college is all sorts of hard work and kids these days just aren’t prepared to take it.
Then in a few weeks, Joanne will post a story about college grade inflation and everyone will blithely forget this conversation and talk about what idiots college professors are for letting their kids away without working.
In fact, the problem is we send all sorts of kids to college who aren’t really interested in doing college work. But they have to go if they want a job.
“Does anyone know whether the proportion of really brilliant and prepared kids is higher or lower than 35 years ago”
Significantly higher. The top tier of students is working harder and learning more. It’s not an exaggeration.
Cal, can you tell me how you know this? I’m not arguing, since your statement conforms to my limited experience (at least as far as preparation goes), but I’d be interested in hearing more. By the way, I haven’t any evidence that kids are actually any smarter now, but since I grew up in a small town in rural Texas and live now in Palo Alto, there are certainly a lot more smart kids around here than there were there.
> “Does anyone know whether the proportion of really
> brilliant and prepared kids is higher or lower
> than 35 years agoâ€
With the emergence of AP courses, the difficulty of high school (at least the last two years) has increased for those headed to college. Calculus, for instance, was not taught in public high schools in most places.
Certainly AP classes have increased the knowledge-base to which students are exposed these days over what we were exposed to 35-40 years ago.
I never had to do anything like that much homework/”outside work”, time-wise.
But maybe that’s because I read really fast and can produce a good paper without seven layers of re-writes and drafts. (Same thing in high school – though there, I got mediocre grades because it was boring and pointless busy-work I didn’t want. Not so much in college, where I got to pick my classes and my major.)
My point is not to blow my own horn (especially since reading fast and writing aren’t that impressive, at least here), but to suggest that the amount of time required varies a lot according to the student… and the major, too.
Orientation at Penn State gave some words of wisdom to parents. They told us that a student’s past performance is the best indicator of success at college but only accounts for 40% of what it takes to do well. 60% of “what it takes” has nothing to do with grades. I believe it. What do you think happens to all those kids that have been doing their homework, staying organized and taking AP classes because their parents have been pushing them? Only those with inner drive and organization succeed. The others start crying, begging and cheating for their grades.
There are certainly a lot more AP courses now. When I was in high school (Garden City, NY in 1970) the “smart kids” took BC Calculus, BC Physics, and AP English, and there were AP courses in Chemistry and Biology (some kids took one of these instead of Physics as seniors), but I was the first kid to take the calculus, physics, and chemistry courses before I was a senior (although as soon as I did it, lots of other kids did, too).
But we didn’t have the history, econ, or the multiplicity of language courses that I see now. There was AP French at the school, I think, but coming from rural-hick-town TX (we moved just before 10th grade), I spoke a little Spanish, and so French was not an option for me.
Anyway, at GC High, the best kids all graduated with most of freshman year of college out of the way, but there wasn’t any summer enrichment (no interning with NASA), and if you weren’t try to go to Juilliard or some fancy art school you didn’t assemble anything that looked like a portfolio. Applying to college meant getting the forms, filling things out with a pen, and mailing them back. After school activities were because you wanted to be in shows or play sports or make a yearbook, not because if you didn’t you’d be headed for a trade school.
I get that the competition is more intense, and now just about every school offers more AP courses than GC High did then, and everyone who wants to go to college takes lots of them. So what do the “smart kids” do now? Take the AP courses in their sophomore and junior years and go to college during their senior year? Or is the academic preparation the same as it was at GC High, and they pile on volunteering, activities, and interning at ever more prestigious places?
Maybe what we are seeing is a widening gap. The group of high achievers are achieving higher than ever, and the average students are sinking a bit.
“Cal, can you tell me how you know this?”
Well, I just noticed your conflation of “brilliant” and “prepared”. I was responding to the second.
More kids have the opportunity to take and excel at advanced classes than ever before. That’s statistically obvious based on SAT Subject tests and Advanced Placement tests.
So it’s not so much that kids are getting smarter as it is that smart kids are all getting opportunities.
The problem, of course, is that this opportunity can’t be limited by anything obvious like ability, so we shovel all sorts of unprepared kids into the mix.
In previous years, we educated two tiers of students–those who were intellectually and academically prepared for a rigorous college education, and those who were going to stop at high school.
Now we educate three tiers of kids. The top tier knows more after graduating from high school than the vast majority of college graduates will ever know. The middle tier is no longer able to stop at high school because we started moving some of the middle tier (blacks and hispanics) into college back in the 70s, and that forced the entire tier into college in order to compete.
However, if you look at these kids’ overall knowledge level and compare them not to college graduates of yesteryear, but their actual peers, they seem pretty solid. But it’s this group that “democratized” college while unfortunately degrading standards a fair amount.
But the real problem is the third group, who we never bothered educating in the past, because they dropped out. A horrifying number of these kids go to college (primarily in the URM categories). These are the ones who are costing a fortune in remedial education. Worse, colleges graduate enough of them that they are utterly devaluing a college degree. That’s why the top tier of kids today are already planning on grad school–it’s the only way they have of distinguishing themselves.
Until we set meaningful standards for college readiness, though, we’ll have that problem.
So whenever you see anyone–Joanne, RWP, or whoever–talk about “college students”, remember that this label is so meaningless as to be absurd.
“What’s amusing is that you all take RWP’s assertions at face value.”
I backed up my assertions with data. You back yours up with nothing. What’s amusing is that you hold yourself forth as an authority, and make silly statements such as these:
“With the emergence of AP courses, the difficulty of high school (at least the last two years) has increased for those headed to college.”
Yet colleges are now having to enroll more and more students in remedial. high-school level courses, such as basic algebra. Can you explain this apparent contradiction?
“Certainly AP classes have increased the knowledge-base to which students are exposed these days over what we were exposed to 35-40 years ago.”
And again, another statement with nothing to back it up. What do you do, exactly, that makes you such an authority on education, particularly higher education? I must have missed that part.
I’ll consider you an authority when you’ve taught university courses for over two decades.
I agree that the best students are doing far more than the best students of my era. There are lots of good college opportunities for these students, even if they can’t all go to the Ivy League.
When I was graduated from high school in 1970, most A and many B students went to college; C students went only if they had wealthy families to finance them. These days, most C students go to college, even if they lack motivation, good work habits and solid reading, writing and math skills. D students go too, though they end up in remedial community college classes.
“Can you explain this apparent contradiction?”
The contradiction is all of your own invention. I didn’t make the second and third statements. Someone called “Wayne” did.
Joanne–exactly. But that’s why it’s so odd that everyone tries to discuss “college students”.
“There are lots of good college opportunities for these students, even if they can’t all go to the Ivy League.”
Yes. The rather absurd focus on grades is putting a lot of exceptionally bright, well-educated students at places like UC Santas Barbara and Cruz, as well as Davis.
Cal, I wasn’t conflating brilliant and prepared, I was taking the intersection. The article linked to in the entry with the title “When brilliant isn’t good enough” described kids that the author clearly thought were both brilliant and prepared. I’m biased enough to think that my daughter qualifies as “brilliant” (her IQ is over 170, for whatever that’s worth) even though it’s not a term I use in daily conversation, and she’s working very hard on her education. What she isn’t doing is spending a lot of time on the sort of stuff that fills the resumes of the kids in these articles. Realistically, interning with NASA on a groundbreaking study on weightlessness in mice, for almost all high school kids, means feeding the animals and cleaning their cages. I’d rather my daughter take upper-division math classes at the local university next year (since that’s what she wants to do), rather than get such an internship, sell ads for a high school yearbook, or volunteer at a homeless shelter. But I worry that she’ll have trouble getting into college because she won’t look as impressive as the other kids, since the things about her that are really impressive could go right over the heads of the people in the admissions office, or that they will decide that she’s not “well-rounded” enough. Or something else.
The unnamed poster RWP seems to have taken great umbrage with my some of last posting:
—-
Wayne Wrote:
“With the emergence of AP courses, the difficulty of
high school (at least the last two years) has
increased for those headed to college.â€
RWP:
Yet colleges are now having to enroll more and more students in remedial. high-school level courses, such as basic algebra. Can you explain this apparent contradiction?
Wayne Responds:
This is true. It doesn’t appear to be true in the top tier colleges, or at least not so much that there are news articles that track the issue.
We need to remember that there has been a huge increase in college attendance since WWII. The college graduation rate was about 12% (as evidenced by the number of college grads that were inducted into the Armed Forces). Now, we are seeing a graduation rate of 25% nationally, with an attendance rate of about 75% (if memory serves).
I started high school in 1959, so my frame-of-reference with high school/college education is about fifty years. A goodly number of colleges have been built since the end of WWII. Obviously, students are needed to fill the classrooms. If those students are not ready for college, they end up in remedial classes, leave or flunk out. If not as many colleges and CCs had been built, then not as many students would be entering, the entrance bars could be higher.
My comments about “difficulty of high school†are based on my memory about the course work that I took when I went through high school (1959-1963) vs the coursework that kids in my town are taking as they start their path in life (ca 2007). As I pointed out, AP courses in Calculus and Physics didn’t exist in the early ‘60s (in my part of the country at least). Since they do exist in high school now, it was offered as “data†to explain my point-of-view. It seemed like “data†to me, but if it does not qualify as “data†to you .. What precise data and in what format would you expect me to offer so that it would pass your exacting expectations?
Wayne Wrote:
“Certainly AP classes have increased the knowledge-base to
which students are exposed these days over what we
were exposed to 35-40 years ago.â€
RWP Objects:
And again, another statement with nothing to back it up.
Wayne Responds:
This is an opinion, to be sure. But being old enough to have started public school over 55 years ago, I do have some memory into what we were taught in those years, and can easily see what kids are being taught today. It really is not that difficult to make a mental difference and express an opinion. (Perhaps I should apologize to RWP for taking the time to share my memories of life in the early 1950s in the South with folks like himself!)
There isn’t enough time or space in Blogs such as these to do much more than exchange opinions .. sad RWP does not see that.
RWP Wrote:
What do you do, exactly, that makes you such an authority
on education, particularly higher education?
I must have missed that part.
Wayne Responded:
This is an anonymous Blog, so what I do isn’t really all that important. However, since you have demanded so imperiously that I identify my occupation, I will tell you I am a systems analyst. My knowledge of higher education is limited to my own undergraduate and graduate experiences, and the vast seas of data available from various agencies, such as the DoEs at every level of government. The Internet makes a lot of data available today that used to exist only in unwieldy tomes, which I found myself reading, from time-to-time.
RWP Wrote:
I’ll consider you an authority when you’ve taught
university courses for over two decades.
Wayne Responded:
I have never claimed to be an authority on Education, I have simply provided data which is readily available in the public domain about education. It is a sharing of information, not an assertion of authority.
By the way, Herr Doctor ..
I fully supported your opinion piece, and didn’t think that I wrote anything that was disrespectful, or called your observations into question. I generally agree with you, but I can see now that you probably aren’t interested in having folks like myself on your side.
Looks like decades of standing behind a podium has detuned your friend-vs-foe detector to a point where it doesn’t work any more. You might want to look into getting it fixed.
Right Wing Prof, if you’re still here, what kind of school do you teach at? I know that there are plenty of the kind of students you describe in community college, and I’m willing to believe there are plenty of such students at mid-tier colleges. I would be surprised (but not stunned) to learn that such students are common at the kind of top universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, et cetera) that are the subject of all the articles about how hard it is to get into top colleges these days.
Admission should be strictly by SAT. Except for football players. And exceptionally cute co-eds.
If people are wanting data points, you can use college guides to provide a little more insight than colleges really want to reveal.
Virtually every Ivy league and Ivy-lke has the same three majors as their top majors (economics, political science, and psychology). All of those students who are taking AP physics, calculus, biology, chemistry, etc; seem to end up avoiding those classes in college.
Also, college guides publish graduation rates, lenght of time to graduate, etc. The average state university has a graduation rate of less than 50%, the students take longer than four years, and most students change their major at least once.
My personal experience is that no one ever decides that economics is too easy and changes into biochemistry.
I will say back when I was in college (at a Public Ivy), some of us in the “hard sciences” used to say:
people who can’t do hard science go into psychology.
If they can’t handle psychology, they go into poli sci
If they can’t handle poli sci, they go into communications.
yeah, stereotypical and snarky, but 18-20 year olds tend to be a snarky lot.
I suspect that what’s true is that we’re seeing a widening gap of knowledge base – people who have all the APs vs. people who are really not prepared (knowledge-wise) to go to college.
But there’s also the issue of motivation and drive. If you were pushed like crazy by your parents to succeed in high school, that doesn’t necessarily mean you will succeed in college, when you’re living away from them, and have added distractions (alcohol, parties, potential hook-ups, your roommate’s video game) that the parents may not have permitted. You can be really “smart” and yet be really “dumb.” I’ve seen A students slide into a pit of Ds because they discovered something that was “more fun” than college, or because they got hooked on online poker, or because they joined the party scene. It happens, and it’s sad when the student’s not able to pull out of it.
I tend to think – just from having compared my experience in the early 90s as a beginning TA to today – that incoming students are, on average, less mature now. They’re more likely to come and beg for a better grade (when they don’t deserve it) – or, worse, have their parents call the prof and ask for a better grade.
I’m no right winger, but I agree with RWP and Joanne on most of the above. But I do not blame the high schools. Sure, you could raise the rigor of some classes, but it would still be true that college is different from high school. It is a reality that students are required to attend HS and that HS teachers are expected to find a way to pass the vast majority of a class. College students do not have to attend class and we do not have to pass them. And this applies at the top end as well as the bottom.
Wayne, take a look at the links in
http://doctorpion.blogspot.com/2007/04/grade-13-at-ishkabibble-community.html
about how students entering JHU have not been prepared for a true college level class by their AP classes. There are similar points made in the discussions linked from
http://doctorpion.blogspot.com/2007/03/my-thoughts-on-college-readiness.html
I’ll take an “unprepared” student who understands the concept of prerequisites, and learns what is in each class, over a kid who “took” an AP class that took two years to do two semesters of college math with essentially no chance of failing.