Decades Late, Dollars Short

Accuracy in Academia ^ | September 14, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

[AccuracyAcademia]

There is an old Pennsylvania Dutch proverb that goes, “We grow too soon old and too late smart.” Some colleges still have a youthful outlook.

“In the last few years, however, a cottage industry has sprouted up in academe to measure whether students are actually learning and to reform classes that don’t deliver,” Robin Wilson wrote in the September 10, 2010 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Accreditors now press colleges to show that they are teaching what students need to know.”

It’s an uphill battle. “Faculty rewards have nothing to do with the ability to assess student learning,” Adrianna Kezar, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California told Wilson. “I get promoted for writing lots of articles, not for demonstrating learning outcomes.”

Then again, being too demonstrative in academia can be a bad career move. “A tenured professor at Louisiana State University was pulled from the classroom after she gave failing grades to most students in her introductory biology course last spring,” Wilson reported.

She was definitely bucking a trend. “Mindy S. Mark, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Riverside, performed a study that showed college students spend 10 fewer hours a week studying than they did in 1961,” Wilson reported. “Meanwhile, college grades on average have gone up.”

“Unless one is to assume that current students learn much more, much faster than students did 50 years ago, a natural conclusion is that professors are demanding less while giving better grades.”

[DManA]

“We grow too soon old and too late smart.”

Also “Throw momma from the train a kiss.”

They talk funny.