The professoriate plays along because teachers know they have a good racket going. They would rather be refining their research or their backhand than attending to tedious undergraduates.Maybe the author describes himself, but there certainly are many professors - especially at smaller schools - who truly care about their students and don't consider teaching tedium.
All parties are strongly incentivized to maintain low standards. It is well known that friendly, entertaining professors make for a pleasant classroom, good reviews and minimal complaints. Contrarily, faculty have no incentives to punish plagiarism and cheating, to flunk students or to write negative letters of reference, to assiduously mark up illiterate prose in lieu of merely adding a grade and a few comments, or to enforce standards generally. Indeed, these acts are rarely rewarded but frequently punished, even litigated. Mass failure, always a temptation, is not an option. Under this regimen, it is a testament to the faculty that any standards remain at all.If that describes SCSU, then the governing boards should step in. Yes, there are professors at every school who would rather be liked than challenge their students. But that certainly doesn't describe all of the faculty at the small state university where Mr. M works. Students who don't do the work, who cheat, who don't make the grade certainly do fail at his school. They screw up, they don't graduate. Granted, their helicopter parents usually swoop in at that point to whine that their little baby should be handed a diploma anyway, but it doesn't work that way.
Employers are justifiably fed up with college graduates lacking basic knowledge, to say nothing of good work habits and intellectual discipline.I will agree that students are graduating with poor writing skills from colleges far and wide, but work habits and intellectual discipline are things they should have developed K-12. Look at the parents - not the college.
I will agree that students are graduating with poor writing skills from colleges far and wide, but work habits and intellectual discipline are things they should have developed K-12. Look at the parents - not the college.
Common Core is one size fits all.. no room for taking the individual into consideration.
Creativity: People are creative. Kids are incredibly creative, since the entire world is magic to them. Use it.
Common Core is one size fits all.. no room for taking the individual into consideration.
As a college professor I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that while I agree with the article, I do know where my bread is buttered. The students WANT the credentials and they don't want to have to work for them. The path of least resistance is to lower standards and keep the gravy train rolling.
Virtually every power center in the university -- including the athletic teams, the administration and the students -- push for lower standards and easier grading. If the faculty gives in (and many do) then there is no one left who cares a twig about academics, except maybe the alumni (at least those not interested in football) and the companies that employ our graduates.
This is why grade inflation has been trending the way it has, and student performance going the other way.
Are you a fan of SciFi?
I like Star Trek Next Gen, and some other things in the genre. I enjoyed the book "Ender's Game." Why do you ask?
Yes, there are professors at every school who would rather be liked than challenge their students.
Grabbed by the title, had to come in.
After getting a BA in communications I floundered for a job in that field. Decided to change career path so went to community college for premed classes before transferring. Foothill community college, Los Altos, CA. Wow! Was impressed by the excellent instructors there. Math, chemistry, biology, zoology, geology, anthropology, all top-notch. Made my first year of med school seem simple.
Imagine. Transferred from a "community" college and kept up with Stanford grads! This from someone who went into the sciences all foam, and no beer. I thank my lucky stars for those instructors. Without whose help I probably would have washed out of med school in the first six months.
In theory, education is an easy fix.
Firstly - decouple college teaching from research. Most researchers are terrible teachers. Mountaineer can back me on this - if someone is researching, be it a single year from the 1300's or a metabolic pathway, they are a little on the distracted side when it comes to imparting information. So - create a second level. Teaching professors and research professors. Let the students compete to work with the research professors. Most people love to learn, no matter what their age, but they love to learn new things, not crap that is already in the book.
Which brings me to my second point. You are not going to have engaged college students if you don't respect all three legs of lower education.
Facts: Facts are the core to an education. Yet pumping fact in to a kid, for it to be vomited back up onto an exam paper is not sufficient. Spend more time on the relationship between the facts. Insist on the kids learning to both read and write fluently and grammatically. That is some voodoo magic right there. Insist on basic numeracy.
Critical Thought: Hey, it's in the book it must be true. People here are awake and aware of just how wrong that is, but were you ever actually taught how to think? Not the group think of approved stances we complain about, but actual working from first principles to a conclusion. I'm betting the answer is no for a good 99% of readers and posters here - and in the main, they are people who do that. They had to teach themselves.
Creativity: People are creative. Kids are incredibly creative, since the entire world is magic to them. Use it.
As a college professor I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that while I agree with the article, I do know where my bread is buttered. The students WANT the credentials and they don't want to have to work for them. The path of least resistance is to lower standards and keep the gravy train rolling.
Virtually every power center in the university -- including the athletic teams, the administration and the students -- push for lower standards and easier grading. If the faculty gives in (and many do) then there is no one left who cares a twig about academics, except maybe the alumni (at least those not interested in football) and the companies that employ our graduates.
This is why grade inflation has been trending the way it has, and student performance going the other way.
Right on Doc! Having spent 22.5 years at one of those august institutions of "higher" learning I can personally attest to every word you said!
Back in 1951, C.M. Kornbluth wrote a SciFi short story called "The Marching Morons" that could be the scariest SciFi story ever written.
In this story, a man wakes up after an unintended long-term period of suspended animation brought about by a freak accident.
The world he wakes up to is quite bizarre.
It it all starts to make sense when he finds out that the average IQ of the general population is about 45, and that one of the side effects of the lower IQ is a propensity for humans to give free rein to physical drives, with procreation being the strongest of all natural urges. As a result of that the human population stands at 5,003,000,000 people, made up of three million “elite” (people with average IQ of 100) and 5,000,000,000 morons. The elite, understanding that the population growth cannot be sustained, breed at a far slower rate than the morons, but because of that they have become veritable slaves, working feverishly trying to keep the morons from destroying the human race.
Asides from everything that they must do to keep things running, they must also spend every spare minute seeking a solution to what they call the Poprob”.
Their problem is simple:
- The morons must be managed or they will literally cause billions of deaths, and the eventual destruction of the human race.
- Sterilizing all the morons is impossible since there aren’t enough “elites” to accomplish that task.
- Propaganda encouraging responsible sexual behavior and small families doesn't work because the morons can’t fight the higher biological drive that calls for them to procreate.
Sound familiar?
Amazingly enough, the resurrected man quickly finds a simple, yet somewhat harsh solution to the problem.
He proposes a plan to the "elite" that would have them advertise free trips to Venus, a place described as a tropical paradise with blanket trees, ham bushes, and soap roots. In a world-wide frenzy, every nation rushes to get as many of their people to Venus as soon as possible so that they can stake their claim to the free land.
Being built and piloted by morons, every spaceship launched blows up en route and trips to Venus become an effective method of population control.
The story becomes scary when you look into the possibility of something like that happening here, and you run across this chart:(http://boilingfrogs.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/world_iq_over_time.gif?w=510)
P.S. After the overwhelming success of the plan, the "elite" have the resurrected man killed.
Where you at any point graduated? Or did you retire a professional student?
:silly:
How come in the chart for the 1950s all of the national averages are in the 80s but the total average is in the 90s? The chart doesn't make sense to me.
The lines you're looking at are population growth, not IQ.
Oh, ok. But why does it say average IQ on the left side? I'm confused.
The blue line indicates IQ, the rest of the lines indicate population growth, so India (yellow line) goes from a population of just under 500 million in the 1940's to just under 2 trillion by 2100.
So the lines other blue, correspond to the population data on the right, but the IQ corresponds to the data on the left.
. Foothill community college, Los Altos, CA. Wow! Was impressed by the excellent instructors there. Math, chemistry, biology, zoology, geology, anthropology, all top-notch. Made my first year of med school seem simple.One of my college roommates went on to earn a Ph.D. and is now a history professor at a community college in TX. She just has been named to create and head up an Honors College at that institution. She's an outstanding teacher who cares deeply about her students and inspires them to want to learn. Any student at a "name" university would be lucky to have her.
Imagine. Transferred from a "community" college and kept up with Stanford grads! This from someone who went into the sciences all foam, and no beer. I thank my lucky stars for those instructors. Without whose help I probably would have washed out of med school in the first six months.