Posted on 01/17/2015 6:24:17 AM PST by grundle
Four in 10 U.S. college students graduate without the complex reasoning skills to manage white-collar work, according to the results of a test of nearly 32,000 students.
The test, which was administered at 169 colleges and universities in 2013 and 2014 and released Thursday, reveals broad variation in the intellectual development of the nation’s students depending on the type and even location of the school they attend.
... many still graduate without the ability to read a scatterplot, construct a cohesive argument or identify a logical fallacy.
The exam, known as the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus, measures the intellectual gains made between freshman and senior year. The test doesn’t cover subject-area knowledge; rather it assesses things like critical thinking, analytical reasoning, document literacy, writing and communication—essentially mimicking the baseline demands for professionals.
“These are the skills that are important no matter what you are doing; if you’re serving on a jury or looking for a good candidate to vote for, these are highly transferrable skills,” Ms. James said.
The test comes at a time of rising tuition and student debt and a broad rethinking of the value of a college degree in a changing job market. Last month, President Barack Obama spelled out plans for a college-rating system that aims to assess how well schools prepare students for the work world, among other criteria.
The 40% of students tested who didn’t meet a standard deemed “proficient” were unable to distinguish the quality of evidence in building an argument or express the appropriate level of conviction in their conclusion.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Let’s see the ethnic breakdown of these numbers.
bfl
OK.. What’s a scatterplot?
Are these test results broken down by college major? That would be interesting. I gather those in the sciences and business would score high. Those in the social artistic areas not so.
After all the stories we have seen posted about “higher edumacation” why would any freeper be surprised??
The solution involves less students going to college while getting back to the high school diploma meaning something, with acceptance that not all students will earn one. Free community college will just give the least capable two more years of hanging around and collecting government freebies.
Think about it. A young lady out of HS could have one or two children and live very easy with government freebies during her two free years of community college!
Guess what? They get hired anyway. Try working with them.
A type of graph on which the information is shown as individual points rather than as a line, pie chart, or bar chart.
“The test doesn’t cover subject-area knowledge; rather it assesses things like critical thinking, analytical reasoning, document literacy, writing and communication—essentially mimicking the baseline demands for professionals.”
Educators see that sentence and incorrectly think that what needs to be done is to teach “critical thinking” skills. The high schools are inundated with programs to teach “critical thinking”. It is ironic that when we still taught content, made people learn facts and information, that they could develop those skills. Now we teach “critical thinking” and children lack those skills.
I guess you actually need to know something before you can think critically about it. Who knew?
Tnx—I looked it up; must be a neologism? I guess I can read a “scatterplot”—but I think it’s a poor way to graph…sort of simple-minded.
Trained to be democrats.
All sort of categories would be interesting — by institution, type of institution, major, sex, etc. To be useful, this study needs to identify the target for improvement.
That’s the area around the litter box!
Critical thinking is not emphasized, since their goal is to brainwash in most cases.
> “The test doesn’t cover subject-area knowledge; rather it assesses things like critical thinking, analytical reasoning, document literacy, writing and communication—essentially mimicking the baseline demands for professionals.”
Critical thinking, logic, and reasoning are not groupthink traits and are forbidden on college campusees for the indoctrinees.
It’s basically an X-Y plot that shows how closely two sets of data are correlated (or not). If the plot shows a lot of scatter with the data points the less the data are correlated.
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