College standards - again

The heat is on again regarding college study requirements. Another study has been done showing that college students are not studying, reading and writing as much as they used to, and they are getting better grades. Among the debates was an interesting discussion on Tom Ashbrook's On Point last week or so. Responses attributed the result to the standard grade inflation argument, the use of student evaluations for faculty promotion and tenure, and the suggestion that the push before college was more intense than college itself .

I don't know what to think. The humanities faculty have been saying this as long as I've been associated with higher education, and that's been a couple of generations now. About the only thing I can see that is real about it is that the expectation is B level for average now. It doesn't give you much room to reward excellence. I know that's true in my courses. If a student is consistently at C level I pay closer attention to him or her. Usually, for students below that level life just gets in the way - illness, family deaths, family conflicts, commutes, work requirements, transportation issues. I make offers to help or accommodate them, rarely with any takers. Sometimes students really don't want to do any more work than to pass. But it's kind of been that way for quite a while. I do know that I'm getting better writing from more students, so the push in the schools for that seems to be working. But that's really the only change I see.

My approach to education was formed in the ed classes I took in the early 1970s. It was a world of examining what you do TO students in educating them, and their right to utter freedom from the oppression of forced learning practice. What I learned was to put it out there, help students understand why it was important to learn it, but leave it entirely up to them. No hard feelings. Forty years later, the paradigm is actively interventionist, and we're attacked if students aren't learning whether they want to or not.

So it's possible I can appear not to care if my students learn. I don't have an authoritarian classroom, but I tend to rely on some pretty traditional techniques - lecture, presentations, readings, discussion, a little group discussion, lots of projects, and a couple of traditional mostly essay exams. The work itself isn't difficult - you just have to do it. Students have complete access to everything in the class -and more- on Blackboard, but mostly only the best students take advantage of it. But I do care - I just want to treat them like adults: here it is. The choices are yours. I'm here to help, but it's really up to you.

What I fail to understand is that I can hand out the exam and discuss the answers in the class before, and still get miserable and inadequate responses. It's frustrating, and when I started teaching I took it personally, but I know better now. They're measuring their trade-offs and accepting the result. In the larger scale of life, that particular lapse really won't matter much.

I really can't say much. I'll admit that I had to start college twice to get it right. After a required stint in the military, I learned to treat study as a job to be done, and it really was pretty easy at the undergraduate level with that attitude, even if I was working a paying job nearly full-time. Since I now have several degrees, I obviously got the system down. I think the good students do get the system down. I think the less good students may be working the system. But that's okay at the undergrad level. It's their choice and their money. It's just life.

Scenemaker
February 11, 2011