First posted on November 26, 2006:
When I was in high school, I expected the university to be more difficult, and I expected that my university classes would require more work. And for the most part, the university didn’t disappoint.
Today, students no longer expect the university to be difficult, nor do they expect to have to do much work. And the dumbing down at the university has been overstated; for the most part, the university classroom is as difficult and work intensive as it was when I was an undergraduate.
In fact, students today have a lot of expectations I did not when I was an undergraduate. I don’t recall expecting that I should get an A because of how much I studied, or because I “tried really hard.” I don’t recall expecting that mediocre work that barely fulfilled the requirements would get me an A. I don’t recall expecting to receive partial credit if my answer was incorrect. I don’t recall expecting that I could pass a course while rarely going to class or doing only part of the assigned work.
Why did I not have these expectations that students now have? My high school teachers assigned a lot of homework, and we either did it, or we failed the class. And I might add that our parents made sure we did our homework (no supper until you’ve finished your homework) and punished us severely for bad grades (in my parents’ home, anything less than an A was equally unacceptable).
When I coordinated that ESL writing program, one of the ways in which I beat my head against the wall was by telling teachers to be careful of creating expectations in their students. They didn’t much care if they did or not, and it appears that today’s primary and secondary school teachers also don’t care.
According to a study published by the Chronicle of Higher Education, 48% of faculty members expect students to do six or more hours of homework every week, while only 17% of secondary school teachers expected that much work. Fifty-five percent of secondary school teachers expected only three to five hours of homework a week, and a full 28% — that’s over a quarter — expected no homework to two hours of homework a week.
As far as I know, every university defines a college credit as one hour of class and two hours of outside work a week. Most classes are three-credit classes (yes, there are a few one- and two-credit courses in the catalog, but very few). By the university definition, then, a three-credit course is three hours of class and six hours of out of class work a week. In order to be full-time, a student must take at least 12 credits per semester — that would be a minimum of 12 hours of classes and 24 hours of out of class work per week.
May I humbly suggest that parents who think their kids get too much homework are, to say the least, misguided? Tell me, parents, what are your kids going to do when they get to the university, and are suddenly required to work outside of class for the first time in their lives? If you’re going to call me at the end of the semester and inform me that little Johnny should have gotten an A even if he didn’t do the work for the class, you’re in for a reality check if you think I care what you think.
If I did, you’d be teaching the class.
Certainly, the quality of homework is a different issue. But secondary school teachers require too little homework, not too much. They are setting up the expectation that all students have to do is sit on their thumbs at the university and pass — like they do in high school. And that’s hardly fair to the students.
But it’s also unfair to students to allow idiots like this to teach them in class:
An English teacher in Rhode Island says that “the only way we as teachers know what is going on in colleges across the state is when former students come back to visit us and tell of their experiences.”
Really? You didn’t go to a university, then? Or were you an ed major so you could avoid having to take any real university courses, is that how you mysteriously don’t know “what is going on”?
Teachers, stop sending your students the message that they get something for nothing. And parents, if your kids were doing what they’re supposed to be doing, studying, instead of all those idiotic soccer mom extra-curricular activities, they’d have time to actually do homework, because like it or not, they’re going to work their little butts off when they get to college if they don’t want to flunk out, and we couldn’t care less what grade you think your little Johnny should or should not get.
And here’s a few other reality checks for you:
- “No late assignments” means exactly that.
- “No excused absences” means exactly that.
- “No makeup exams” means exactly that.
- “No extra credit” means exactly that.
Since you’re little Johnny’s teachers and parents, you might want to pitch in and help us teach little Johnny the most important lesson he’ll ever learn, that he won’t get rewarded for doing nothing.
It must be getting close to finals for you. I can detect a sense of frustration.
I recently heard an elementary school administrator ask what should be done when parents do not care about homework. I could not help but think the answer is simple: give the kid an ‘F’ if they do not do their homework. That would get both the student and the parents’ attention. Yet this seemed foreign in this school.
Good habits must start at the elementary level.
In fact, students today have a lot of expectations I did not when I was an undergraduate. I don’t recall expecting that I should get an A because of how much I studied, or because I “tried really hard.” I don’t recall expecting that mediocre work that barely fulfilled the requirements would get me an A. I don’t recall expecting to receive partial credit if my answer was incorrect. I don’t recall expecting that I could pass a course while rarely going to class or doing only part of the assigned work.
boy
you are living in a different world
or, more accurately, we are
we’re living in the world of hours & hours of pointless project homework the kids AND the parents have to do
C. came home the other night with a 20-problem assignment from math.
Twenty problems is about right for most kids (according to Wickelgren), but these problems each had 4 parts.
So: 80 problems.
And since nothing - and I mean nothing whatsoever - has been taught to mastery in this class, and since it is up to parents to find or write worksheets to provide their kids with distributed practice, each one of these 80 problems is laborious and time-consuming to do.
AND: the department is STILL refusing to provide answer keys!
(I’ve complained; other parents have complained; it’s a big-fat-hopeless wailing wall of answer-key complaint around here.)
So C. goes down to the basement to do his 80 problems along with his other homework.
He’s 12.
One hour later, he’s melting down.
He keeps coming up with the same answer (ordered pairs with the number ‘3′ in them) so he thinks he has to be getting them wrong, but since he has no answer key the only way to check whether he’s getting them wrong is to go back and start over again with problems 1 and work it again…..
This is not a math course.
It is a math obstacle course.
So I did all 80 problems - which I could do VERY rapidly since I’ve now had so much practice - and we checked his answers.
These days I have to do C’s homework every night, because the teacher is no longer using the book.
She’s sending home Xeroxes of other books & refuses to supply the answers.
She doesn’t correct homework; often enough she doesn’t go over every answer. (She says she does. She doesn’t.)
She certainly doesn’t ask kids to correct their work.
All of this falls to me.
So: 80 problems, no answer key, no teacher involvement.
I have to work the problems, check the problems, and have C. re-do.
I should add that when I asked the principal to send home a copy of the answer key for the State Test Prep book he said he couldn’t because that would violate copyright law.
The only discernible logic is:
Teacher Xeroxes stuff from books other than the textbook: good
Parents asks Teacher to Xerox answer key from books other than the textbook: bad
Teacher: good
Parent: bad
Motto over the principal’s office:
The answer is no.
Do I sound bitter?
Appropriately bitter.
[…] Many of RightWing Prof’s students come to college expecting an easy time. Actually, he writes, it takes a lot of work to succeed in college. (When RWP was an undergrad) I don’t recall expecting that I should get an A because of how much I studied, or because I “tried really hard.” I don’t recall expecting that mediocre work that barely fulfilled the requirements would get me an A. I don’t recall expecting to receive partial credit if my answer was incorrect. I don’t recall expecting that I could pass a course while rarely going to class or doing only part of the assigned work. […]
I’m constantly reading articles about “brilliant kids” that can’t get into top colleges, and then I’m seeing this sort of thing almost as often. I know that I’m intimidated by the resumes of these “brilliant kids” I read about. When I started college at 18 I took almost nothing but graduate courses (mostly in math and physics, at Ohio State), and graduated in 2.5 years, went to Stanford and had no trouble passing the PhD qualifying exams on entrance (so I did actually learn something as an undergrad), but when I read those articles about how tough it’s gotten, I wonder if I could, today, get into a mediocre place like the Ohio State of 35 years ago. (The faculty, even then, at OSU were much, much better than the average student.)
So are these “brilliant kids” really brilliant, or are they just good at putting together a portfolio? Is the proportion of kids that are really smart the same, greater, or less than it was 35 years ago? And can college admissions people tell a really smart kid from someone with a padded resume?
The reason I worry about this is that I have a daughter who is much smarter than I am, but who is taking a very unconventional path through high school (she dropped out after 3 months and has been studying at home), and while she’s doing very well, she won’t have one of those resumes that intimidate me. She will, however, be able to do college (and even some graduate) level work independently, on time, and of very high quality. That is, if she can get into college someplace…
hardlyb
I’ll try to find the article by the mom who had a child like yours — very intelligent and capable & also homeschooled — I think she described how they put together his college application.
I have a memory that he went to MIT, but don’t trust me at this point.
I think I’ve read enough about college admissions now to know that your daughter will get into a good college.
We’re in the midst of another boom, so applications are going to be tight for several years more, and the name-brand colleges are out of reach for most kids no matter how smart they are.
OK, just asked my husband, who does interviews for Princeton.
This year:
18,000 applicants
1750 accepted
10,000 of the applicants had SAT scores of 2100 or better (we don’t know how many of the 1750 had scores of 2100 or better)
A problem with your argument is that the secondary school day is 8 hours long; therefore, the students are already spending 40 hours per week in school. Given your minimums, college students are (or should be) spending 36 hours on work. So the high school student is 4 hours up on the college kids, even without homework. (I remember discovering just how much *less* time college took than high school!) The real problem isn’t the number of hours either set is putting in but their ability to work without someone holding their hands.
Yes, we expect 17-18 year olds to be more mature and capable of workin g on their own.
Catherine, how many had scores of above 2300, or do they stop caring after 2100? When my daughter was 11 she took the SAT (2 parts then) for a scholarship and got 750v/650m (and all of the math questions that she missed were for statistics, which she had never seen and wouldn’t let me teach her before the test — she always wants to do things on her own). So that should map to about a 2100 now, and I’m sure that she would do better after 5 years. (One of her friends took the SAT recently and got 2320, so that seems quite doable for her if he can do it.) She’ll also have 5 or more AP exam scores by the time she applies (and she’s gotten a 5 on all of the ones she’s taken so far).
MIT is a school I’m hoping will accept her, both because they apparently like driven smart kids, and because we are friends with someone that does admission interviews. Apparently the people he recommends strongly almost always get accepted (he’s very smart and blunt in his assessments). He asked about a year ago if it would be all right with me if he tried to convince my daughter to go to MIT, since he thought it would be a very good fit (and I said he was welcome to try to convince her of almost anything, since her parents had lost that ability years ago, and it would be fun to watch him try).
Catherine, I should make it clear that I don’t know if my friend who does admissions interviews for MIT has influence, of if it’s just that he’s hard enough to please that his choices get in because they would anyway. In fact, what worries me is that it no one will actually care what kind of a person she is, and just decide that she doesn’t fit the square holes they have available.
The problem with those articles is that they confuse applications with applicants. Students today are applying to more schools than they used to. University admissions across the board are increasing as the number of applicants increases. The other problem is that every time I read one of those articles, there’s always some whiny applicant quoted who apparently believes he is entitled to get into Harvard. Well, he’s not. It’s supposed to be difficult to get into college. Nobody is entitled to admission.
The problem with those articles is that they confuse applications with applicants. Students today are applying to more schools than they used to. University admissions across the board are increasing as the number of applicants increases. The other problem is that every time I read one of those articles, there’s always some whiny applicant quoted who apparently believes he is entitled to get into Harvard. Well, he’s not. It’s supposed to be difficult to get into college. Nobody is entitled to admission.
I’m aware of the distinction. I was referring to articles like the one I saw on JoannE Jacobs’ site (from the NY Times) where some Harvard graduate who does admissions interviews says that he recommended kids far superior to himself at 18, and none gets accepted to Harvard. And then you comment that many kids that do get accepted to your college feel entitled to get A’s. Well, those kids can’t really be that impressive, so that means that either lots of kids that look impressive aren’t, or the pool of kids applying your school isn’t deep enough that they can accept only the really impressive ones (or the admissions people aren’t competent to tell the really impressive kids from the fakers).
wow!
To me — not that I’m an expert — but to me it sounds like she’s in, and not because of a friendship or pull.
She’s being recruited.
I found an interesting page about MIT’s policy for homeschooled students (still don’t remember what the article by the mom was):
http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/homeschooled_applicants_helpful_tips/homeschooled_applicants.shtml
ooo, yuck
that looks bad, doesn’t it
sorry
I don’t know how many were over 2300 — I wish I did.
The real figure you need to know is the “yield,” which is how many students accept the offer of admission.
This is probably right:
• Princeton’s yield (the percentage of admission offers accepted) has risen steadily over the last decade; it was 65.7 percent for the Class of 2001 and 68.9 percent for the Class of 2002. Princeton’s yield stands second only to Harvard’s.
• Academic 1’s and 2’s (the academically most qualified applicants) are the most rapidly growing part of Princeton’s applicant pool, and yields on Academic 1’s and 2’s have been increasing significantly. Academic 1’s and 2’s comprised 51.2 percent of the Class of 1993, 68 percent of the Class of 2001, and 72.2 percent of the Class of 2002.[^1]
Report of the Undergraduate Admission Study Group
Though still a long way from Harvard’s 80 percent, Stanford’s yield rate increased to a respectable 69 percent this year, up from 67 percent last year, according to Richard Shaw, dean of admission and financial aid. The number increased to approximately 88 percent for students who attended Admit Weekend or applied under the single-choice early action program.
Admit yield increases by 2 percent