Posted on 06/01/2012 8:10:58 PM PDT by chessplayer
Congratulations, young America, you’ve reached the threshold of academic perfection. Recent studies have shown that an “A” is now the MOST COMMON GRADE for college students in the United States. It’s nice to know that my generation is so well educated. Or perhaps not. Based upon a mountain of contradictory evidence and the environment I see all around me as an American college student, I hesitate to declare victory too soon. When you dig deeper the facts show that grade inflation is what really fuels our college students’ higher GPAs, and A today might be equivalent to a C forty years ago.
Despite the outward appearances of academic perfection, today’s students are not on an upward trajectory toward academic success. Last year, a USA Today report showed that college students make little academic progress in their first two years of college. In fact, 45 percent of students showed no significant gains, a figure which contradicts academia’s goal of educating students. College Students are more likely to focus on their social lives rather than their academic record. Professors caught up with their own research are less likely to pay attention to such habits. Additionally, students spend 50 percent less time studying now than they have in past decades.
“Not me. I always called myself Medium Mears.”
If you were “medium” at judging yourself, you wouldn’t judge yourself “medium”. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
Wonder if it was truly ethical to hocus them that way (and anyhow, that could have been three champs abreast). There’s the old saw about the bumblebee that never knew it shouldn’t fly, and so it did.
Isn't that the truth!! I was scared wit-less at my first job, just waiting for someone to present me with an engineering problem, and have them realize I hadn't a clue as how to design anything. I could do matrix math, permutations, differential calculations, relativistic physics, express Reynolds Equations, and roughly explain Special Relativity.
But, connect a J-K Flip-Flop into a timing circuit?
However, to my school's credit; the assortment of tools and concepts I had learned really helped me absorb new material quickly, easily and orderly.
I’m speaking in the context of the horror story of the USAF engineering tech hires who proved so spectacularly incompetent, so the entire category of candidates had the kibosh put on them. The prospective hires should have to take a test to show such things as being able to follow book formulas. So anyone who “graduated” because, say, some dean owed some generous alumnus a favor wouldn’t be able to spoil it for the rest.
We both know that there is an EIT Certification put forth by the various states for Mechanical and Electrical engineers.
I’m not aware of there is a similar “Engineer-In-Training” Certificate for Engineering Technology graduates. If so, I agree that this would be a good “Gating Function” in the hiring process.
My degree was in Civil Engineering, but I could absolutely relate to what you are saying.
In my first job, I stayed late reading blueprints to understand the buildings I was working on.In school, we had never gone through an entire set of building blueprints. There was so much in the real world that wasn;t covered.
I asked a lot of questions and didn’t act like I knew it all—because I sure didn’t.
I listened and learned and grew, step by step.
But like you, I had a toolbox of methods and discipline that I could apply to acquire the information I needed and to use it correctly.
Even now, I laugh at that time period and what an eye-opener it was. Kept me humble, that’s for sure.
And 36 years later, I’m still learning.
I have fixed standards and they are laid out in each course syllabus. Of course most students can’t be bothered to read the syllabus. I did love the Journalism major last semester that complained to me about the rough grading of her grammar. She told me that she is a journalism major/writer and no professor had ever taken points away from her for her grammar. I referred her to the College Writing Center.
That just ain't right.
There seems to be some huge overall spike that coincides with the official end to the Vietnam War (end of U.S. military involvement, that is), Watergate, and the election of Jimmy Carter.
That is horrible. To graduate unequipped to perform in your career is downright dangerous and explains a lot of the problems we are having.
I’m very careful in hiring. I have people write me a quick essay.
My husband worked in a place where he inherited a division with workers who had reading comprehension issues and could not write. He had to carefuly check everything until he could revamp that division staff. They would give him ebonics stuff to sign his name to! They had college degrees.
It was in the late 1960s that administrators discovered “teaching evaluations.” That’s when the average grades start to rise dramatically. Tenure-track and temporary instructors are very vulnerable to this supposed “evidence” that they aren’t teaching well—but students who expect a good grade in the course aren’t as critical when filling out the evaluations.
Student debt is @a trillion dollars... Who with their ‘A’s, ‘B’s, and ‘C’s can repay their student loans?
When I was a TA in the seventies, teaching an introductory physics lab, we had a unit on basic circuits, starting with a battery and a light bulb. I remember one kid who was very upset about it. Asking him what was the matter, he explained that he had learned all kinds of logic circuitry in high school, and had thought that he understood it, but after seeing the basics of electric circuits presented to him, he realized that he hadn’t understood it at all.
I tried to tell him that this was a good thing, not a bad thing, which I thought then and I think now, but he was just too upset. I hope he made out OK, as I would like to think he did.
cf. Flight of the Bumblebee :
Whatever its origins, the story has had remarkable staying power, and the myth persists that science says a bumblebee can't fly. Indeed, this myth has taken on a new life of its own as a piece of "urban folklore" on the Internet.
Agreed that the real education occurs after college. Problem is that far to many get out of college without the base skills to be truly educated.
Americans were far better off in one-room “Little House on the Prairie” schools than they are in $30 million high-tech public schools today. They knew far more about history, languages, mathematics, and even science than the kids do today.
There has to be something high level official or it cannot be used at all?
Where does such a fallacy come from?
This means the scientists who supposedly determined it couldn’t fly were wrong, of course. But the scientists at least were sincere about it.
It’s not respecting an audience of students or anybody else to address them with fallacies, however more colorful than a bland “historically, a third of our entrants have graduated.”
He still knew Booleshit (duck’n & runn’n)
My wife and I went back to school for our MS degree at St. Michael’s College when our plant announced it was closing.
For every class, the professor took the entire first class to go over the syllabus, with special emphasis on the grading.
I never understood (til now) why, as the syllabus was a clearly written, multi page document that spelled out everything needed regarding course requirements.
It was utterly boring to sit through.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.