Posted on 12/19/2002 3:08:50 AM PST by kattracks
(CNSNews.com) - The college seniors of today have no better grasp of general knowledge than the high school graduates of almost half a century ago, according to the results of a new study.
The average of correct responses for modern college seniors on a series of questions assessing "general cultural knowledge" was 53.5 percent compared with 54.5 percent of high school graduates in 1955, according to a survey by Zogby International.
The Zogby poll of 401 randomly selected college seniors was conducted in April for the Princeton, N.J.-based National Association of Scholars and released Wednesday.
"The average amount of knowledge that college seniors had was just about the same as the average amount of knowledge that high school graduates had back in the 1950s," said NAS President Stephen H. Balch.
Balch noted that the high school grads of half a century ago performed better than today's college seniors on history questions, while contemporary students fared better on questions covering art and literature, with no appreciable difference on geography questions.
The questions asked in the April poll by Zogby were virtually the same as questions asked by the Gallup Organization in 1955, with a few questions being slightly modified to reflect history.
"The questions were just about identical, as identical as we could make them," said Balch. "In most cases, they were absolutely identical."
Balch attributed the stagnation of performance on general knowledge questions to several factors, including a decreased emphasis on general knowledge in high school, placing colleges and universities in the position of having to fill academic gaps among students entering college.
"This is fundamental knowledge that everyone should have and if your students are being admitted without it, then that only reinforces the need for you to take general education seriously," Balch said.
But Balch said he didn't consider such actions to be remedial in nature, noting that "the remedial problems have to do with students not being able to write or read at the eighth grade level and still getting into college. There are many institutions in which that's a difficulty. You have people who just don't have the skills let alone the knowledge."
Even though the NAS study raises questions about the caliber of general education offered in high schools, colleges and universities also bear some responsibility, Balch said.
"I think it probably has a lot to do with the dumbing down of curriculum, both at the college and high school level," said Balch. "It looks good, certainly, to say 'more people are graduating from college,' but is there any real intellectual yield from it?"
Also part of the problem is that many colleges are placing less emphasis on liberal arts education in favor of more specialized education geared toward specific career paths, which Balch said isn't necessarily in the best interest of students or society.
"I think these results, which don't seem to show a great deal of value-added in the general cultural knowledge domain - I think these results are quite interesting and disappointing," said Balch. "We would hope that the college students of today would have done a good deal better than the high school students of the past."
Also contributing to the trend is an easing of college admissions standards. While Balch doesn't advocate a return to standards requiring competency in Greek or Latin, he does say colleges should "insist that the student coming have basic areas of knowledge."
A solid background in general knowledge, Balch said, is "very important both for good citizenship and, for many people at least, for a happy and interesting life," by providing students with what Balch called "cultural furniture that allows them to be better citizens."
Click here to read the general knowledge questions.
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In 1780, the entrance requirements for college, what was expected from a talented high school graduate, included - translate several Odes of Horace from Latin into English -verse-, translate a book of the New Testament from Greek into -Latin-, show expertise in mathematics, and have a blameless moral character. That is what was expected from someone coming out of high school. But only a few percent of the population was expected to go to college.
Lowering of standards has gone hand in hand with extending educational opportunities to more and more people over our whole history. And the big increase in access to higher education takes place between the 50s and today. These days, it is graduate or professional levels of education that correspond in selectivity to college degrees back then, and college degrees now are almost as common as high school diplomas were back then (when plenty of people dropped out after 8th grade to start work in a trade).
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I had a K&E slip stick and a ten or twelve inch duameter circular rule good for two more digits. Noe, of course I use TI solar scientific calculators exclusively.
My background was good enough to enable me to learn the IBM 101 statistical machine which was a precomputer. It had to be hard-wired with plug-in cables in the back to be programmed. In the early '60s I took a one-afternoon cours in Fortran Four and could do anything anybody else could. When the microcomputers came out I taught myself how to program. I've written real-time data acquisition and processing, optical path analysis, standing wave ratios, transducer simulation and many other projects the average degreed computer programmer can't do. I do it faster.
You're
Sorry — couldn't resist :)
like online chatting, alternative lifestyles, beer bongs, unearned income, and the sex lives of celebrities. ;^)
You're
Sorry — couldn't resist :)
I know youre not going to believe this, but every time I put one of those apostrophes in, some program on FR takes them out. SEE!? It just happened again in the third word of this sentence. So do me a favor, will you, and take these apostrophes, ''''''''' ,and stick them where they belong.
Thanks! I appreciate the help.
Hank
I don't know about 1950 Grads ('65 myself), but I am getting tired of expaining to todays grads that:
Vietnam is not a provience of Mexico...
Glenn Miller did not play with the Steve Miller Band...
Etc...
This is like comparing spoon sizes without accounting for the fullness of the bowl; anyway, even a cursory examination of sites on such topics of physical processes as biology discloses noticeable bias on the author's part - for instance, look up the nitrogen cycle in an old textbook and compare it to what you see on Google; either the cycle was perfect 50 years ago or it will never be perfect since every site I perused paid considerable attention to the incompleteness of the gaseous exchange during the denitrification part of the cycle and claimed that man's activity was responsible for elevated nitrates in the streams, rivers and the seas.
However, it is well known that algae blooms and the resultant fishkills have been going on for centuries absent so much activity at the hands of mankind.
Still, the article concerns itself with the lamentable level of personally stored knowledge testable among today's college seniors; what do the keyboard artists do when the power goes off and there's a big wager on the table?
I'm sorry I missed your post earlier, but I'm even sorrier now that I have read it. It is truly sad, and even more so to know your young student is not the exception. I believe very few public (read government) school children are receiving any real education at all.
Best of luck in your tutoring, and to your student.
Hank
Check your mail, I just sent you a virus.
Back in 1988 I purchased an Adam Computer (Coleco) when my daughter was 3 years old; I had her spelling her name and doing rudimentary reading and typing in a matter of weeks.
I was bowling in a league at the time and wrote a spreadsheet program to keep track of the teams, players, handicaps and averages; everything worked fine except the underlying program would not allow the computer to " round down" when the average went over xxx.51; no work around this problem would repeatedly resolve this so I gave up the exercise.
I am currently bowling in a league with my daughter and my current average on their official printout is 172.744; the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Of course, I mentally round down to 172 so it doesn't really matter, I guess.
It doesn't have as much to do with how hard students work as what they are taught, and how, and why. Introduction of "New Math" to replace Real Math, creation of the mush called Social Studies to replace of History, Geography, Government, Sociology, etc., teaching writing without spelling, plus calling areas of interest which have no scientific base a "Science" has been a disaster IMHO.
Load on "Affirmative Action" and other programs with specific social axes to grind and here we are, a society certifiably dumber, and maturing emotionally later than before. And they let these people vote?
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