hardest tests i've ever taken were open book... just depends on who's writing the test and if it's a for profit test
Posted on 06/16/2017 8:30:52 AM PDT by Lorianne
Students are running out of reasons to pursue higher education. Here are four trends documented in recent articles:
Graduates have little to no improvement in critical thinking skills
The Wall Street Journal reported on the troubling results of the College Learning Assessment Plus test (CLA+), administered in over 200 colleges across the US.
According to the WSJ, “At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table”. The outcomes were the worst in large, flagship schools: “At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.”
There is extensive literature on two mechanisms by which college graduates earn higher wages: actually learning new skills or by merely holding a degree for the world to see (signaling). The CLA+ results indicate that many students aren’t really learning valuable skills in college.
As these graduates enter the workforce and reveal that they do not have the required skills to excel in their jobs, employers are beginning to discount the degree signal as well. Google, for example, doesn’t care if potential hires have a college degree. They look past academic credentials for other characteristics that better predict job performance.
Shouting matches have invaded campuses across the country
It seems that developing critical thinking skills has taken a backseat to shouting matches in many US colleges. At Evergreen State College in Washington, student protests have hijacked classrooms and administration. Protesters took over the administration offices last month, and have disrupted classes as well. It has come to the point where enrollment has fallen so dramatically that government funding is now on the line.
The chaos at Evergreen resulted in “anonymous threats of mass murder, resulting in the campus being closed for three days.” One wonders if some of these students are just trying to get out of class work and studying by staging a campus takeover in the name of identity politics and thinly-veiled racism.
The shouting match epidemic hit Auburn University last semester when certain alt-right and Antifa groups (who are more similar than either side would admit) came from out of town to stir up trouble. Neither outside group offered anything of substance for discourse, just empty platitudes and shouting. I was happy to see that the general response from Auburn students was to mock both sides or to ignore the event altogether. Perhaps the Auburn Young Americans for Liberty group chose the best course of action: hosting a concert elsewhere on campus to pull attention and attendance away from both groups of loud but empty-headed out-of-towners. Of the students who chose not to ignore the event, my favorite Auburn student response was a guy dressed as a carrot holding a sign that read, “I Don’t CARROT ALL About Your Outrage.”
SNIP
Thirty five or forty years ago the work you described would have been presented on one or two standard size drafting sheets depending on the size of the project and accompanying specifications.
All the different types would have elev dwgs, details of every connection type and a tabular schedule indicating locations, sizes, quantities,door handedness, etc. And prepared by junior architectural draftsman with a HS diploma and two years experience.
The same draftsman during the construction phase check sub-contractor shop dwgs and schedules for compliance with latest revisions and change orders.
Same for door, window, and finish hardware items. In a pre-CAD/DB environment
Twenty five years ago I started encountering young architects with masters degrees from the top ten schools in the country that couldn’t read nor understand the same types of drawings and specs nor could they be bothered to learn.
Thankful to have retired from ever devolving standards. I would have been charged with some sort of harassment or other social justice crime in berating such folk.
You've just illustrated that. Thanks!
Some of the hardest tests I ever took were open book. In many disciplines there’s nothing wrong with open book, as part of what’s being tested is your ability to find the right info even if you can’t remember it. My open book test were in C and C++ classes, I actually learned while taking those tests, tough stuff.
That may have been the most effective economics lesson you ever delivered in your entire academic career. Nothing like showing some students, out in the real world, that leftism has nothing to offer but violence and tyranny.
The dirty little secret of "selective" schools, is that they graduate smart people because they ADMIT smart people. Except for people in STEM majors, the college years do little to improve the person's skills.
Companies could do better by taking high school graduates, giving them IQ tests, and selecting the smart ones to put through internal training. But selecting by tests, if those tests have "disparate racial impact", is currently illegal and racist. One thing that Trump could do that would drive a stake through the heart of Leftist academia would be to push through legislation that would allow companies to use tests without risk of being sued for discrimination.
The test questions were literally right out of the book and followed right in line, page by page
Heck, even when I was in college we knew undergraduate degrees in biology, history, phys ed, etc, were useless. You had to have something with teeth.
IMHO, this starts with parenting, long before the child enters school. High school students amaze me with their lack of knowledge about things I take for granted. Maybe because I’m old.
You just explained why I’m glad to be many years removed from dealing with architects. Nearly universally, I found them to lack any sense of humility nor could they ever understand that there’s a lot they “know” that just ain’t so! Time after time, an architect would try to tell us why our product didn’t meet a specification in some way. Submittals would ensue with documentation galore yet they could not understand the details behind what they wrote in the specifications. They wanted to hold us to some grand thing they conceived in their head.
I will add a couple of items. This kid was fresh from his A/E masters program, he had never been an architect.
General construction for 48 years and I have know a thousand architects and engineers from the design side. Those put in charge of dealing with submittals have perhaps the most problematic of dispositions.
I knew a top Environmental Architect who was one of the founders of Green type architecture — great guy and very open to outside thinking.
I knew an architect that I had filmed when he was on the job-site due to his behavior. So it balances out.
My favorite story is long ago, before the Department of Energy, there was a building being designed for the Atomic Energy Commission. They didn’t know how to do it at the Corps of Engineers so they hired an Architect who hired a structural engineer. This engineer contacted me (I was a 22 year old builder with my dad) about this specialized structural system. I wrote up the exact manufacturers specs and standards for the material we carried and they incorporated them without a manufacturers name but otherwise verbatim.
Another General came to us for this special system and we, along with him, got the job. A year later, I had a big long argument with the field inspection engineer about how I was not supplying material that met that specification.
The government was not paying the design engineer for field administration so I was arguing with a brick wall. I finally had the manufacturer come spend an entire day with him and I imagine he bought him a bottle of scotch over lunch, or something else I did not want to know about, and the problem went away.
Government.
hardest tests i've ever taken were open book... just depends on who's writing the test and if it's a for profit test
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