Study: College Students Not Learning Much
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
1. The exam was supposed to be administered 3 times, Freshman, Sophomore, and Senior years. I took it my Freshman and Senior years.
2. The exam was not a normal exam. I won't say it was pointless, it definitely measured something, but it's hard to say exactly what. Imagine you have to make an exam to measure "learning" and this thing was about as close as you could come to getting one. But that's still far off the mark.
3. The sample was not representative. Taking the exam was opt-in, and the college put forth a variety of incentives to get people to take the exams. Despite this, they definitely had a high drop off between sign-up-for-everything freshmen and I'm way too busy to spend three hours taking another exam seniors.
I believe there were schools where it was not opt-in, but even so, I can't imagine any of the students taking this exam had grades riding on their performance. And given that it was a single exam, it was dependent on the students' state of mind on the particular day they took the exam. Three data points per person, over four years. It's hard to draw any conclusions from this data.
I'm not saying I don't agree that the test may not have measured anything useful, or that there wasn't some sampling bias, but there's nothing inherently wrong with 3 data points per person over four years.
One bit was five documents relating to an environmental issue in a small town. The exam asked the student to analyze the documents, looking for biases the sources may have and flaws in their reasoning.
It did a good job of measuring ability to synthesize and analyze sources, but it definitely would be harder to recognize more focused improvements in reasoning ability.
As of today no one can really say where (on average) you'll learn more/better -- at Harvard or Ohio State. All we know is that Harvard is more difficult to get into. I find that crazy that this is still the state of higher ed.
Harvard has more smart students and professors, so you can get more out of them. But any college will provide a sufficient environment for you to learn, study and think critically, if you so choose.
But they won't make you do these things. You are an adult, after all.
One of the best ways colleges could motivate students is by making sure the curriculum and corresponding coursework is up-to-date. Now, it may have just been my department (enterprise systems engineering UIUC), but 99% of the material covered during my college career was extremely dated. The 8th edition textbooks were almost identical to their 1st edition counterparts published 30+ years ago. The homework assignments were re-used year after year (which made the acquiring the solutions ridiculously easy). You have no idea how disheartening it is to walk into class every day or sit down to do homework knowing that you will never, ever in a million years use anything you are "learning". It's not motivating. It's not encouraging. It's not challenging.
The 3.5 years I spent in college were, without a doubt, the worst years of my life. I just graduated (early, thank god) and I feel like my brain clicked on for the first time since 2007. Don't get me wrong - I am a huge fan of learning and critical-thinking (taught myself Ruby on Rails over the past few months with no prior programming experience), but it's pretty damn hard when you can get through one of the most prestigious engineering programs in the world on auto-pilot.
I have no idea why we consider them the same in America, but in most places, even though UIUC is a fantastic technical school, a degree in something called "Enterprise Systems Engineering" should not be considered a university degree. You simply didn't have that experience. And, yes, I'm sure it was horrible.
In my Anthro and other liberal arts classes, my homework was to read a famous literary work, study a movement, a people, a culture or an event and then be prepared to discuss it critically with my peers, often in classes with 5-8 students.
PS -- I need to add that there are definitely students of engineering who treat the curriculum as the science and discipline and art that it is. These students relish understanding the provenance of the discipline and the state of the art and spend all their time in it trying to master the art. It's just more obvious how to do that in the liberal arts because they groom you to do that. I think you have to be more self-aware and self-motivated in the engineering side of things.
Arts and Sciences => Academic
Engineering, Medicine, Law, Pharmacy, Business, and everything else => Vocational
I think we need to recognize that there are two classes of people who go to college:
Academic: those who wish to learn
Vocational: those who wish to qualify for jobs
This is the most important point in this entire discussion. I had a pages long post about the wonderful years I spent at Cal, and the not so wonderful ones. But I think in the end, this comment sums it up much better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.#Judgme...
Since the SAT[1] is a glorified IQ test[2] the rankings from high to low by population group go Ashkenazi Jews >> East Asians >> Caucasian >> Blacks.
The Disparate Impact legal doctrine[3] means that unless you can show business necessity any test that reliably discriminates between protected classes[4] is automatically illegal.
The strength of this argument is weakened by the fact that TTBOMK no equivalent law exists in the rest of the Anglosphere.
[1]And the LSAT, MSAT, GRE, GMAT etc.
[2]This isn't completely accurate for those tests that measure concrete knowledge like the MCAT, but the correlation is still pretty high
The SAT is a wonderful test for memorization. Also how much time you spent studying, almost as if its a... scholastic test.
It it's relationship to IQ is extremely vague.
This research established the relationship between SAT and g, as well as the appropriateness of the SAT as a measure of g, and examined the SAT as a premorbid measure of intelligence.
In Study 1, we used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Measures of g were extracted from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and correlated with SAT scores of 917 participants. The resulting correlation was .82 (.86 corrected for nonlinearity).
Study 2 investigated the correlation between revised and recentered SAT scores and scores on the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices among 104 undergraduates. The resulting correlation was .483 (.72 corrected for restricted range). These studies indicate that the SAT is mainly a test of g.
We provide equations for converting SAT scores to estimated IQs; such conversion could be useful for estimating premorbid IQ or conducting individual difference research with college students.
The test just happened to test on material none of had ever studied, for example how to clean offal. This was a real test which people with the correct experience had scored highly on. Us college students on the other hand, were deemed barely functional by the same test.
The IQ test is not contrived but it does rely on learned knowledge to be able to test. So the IQ test itself is not a very good test of intelligence, especially in the case where the tool (lets say language) it's using to test IQ is lacking in say non-native speakers.
But to get back to the SAT test, my East Asian immigrant high-school friends with decent English - bad SAT scores. Two years later with greatly improved English, same people - great SAT scores. And I am talking about all of the SAT, including the math part.
In short incentives in higher ed are random, if not flat out reversed. The only motivator for good educators is personal passion.
I'm always amused when the kids who used to tease me for taking college seriously post Facebook statuses like, "omg y cant i get a job?!?!"
Let's consider the assumption that between 36% and 45% of all undergrad students are slackers. Sure, a bunch of students aren't learning because they are slackers, but why there are SO MANY of them? Are there more slackers as a percentage of the population than in the past? Is the internet/cell-phone/facebook era changing the mentality of students to be more focused on the short term easiest/best solution? Or maybe the percent of slackers in the general populace is the same, but a much larger percentage of secondary students go on to undergrad. Well, why are so many more going on in school, especially those that are slackers? Parental/societal pressures might suggest that going to college is just "what you do" after high school. Or maybe peer pressure makes students continue in through school because their peers expect it of them. Perhaps it is sheer inertia that is the driving force; our slackers do whatever is the most expedient at the moment, so when the time comes they'd rather go to a generic college with an undecided major than to go and do something.
Or, (and I like this theory the most), students feel a need, from an economical perspective, to get a degree in order to get a job. And then they go to school, with the singular goal of earning that piece of paper so they can get a job. At this point, "slacker" has been forced into the role by going to school just to be able to get a job afterwards. It's a means to an end, and incidental value is just that. At this point, it isn't just the college's fault, but the general expectations of employers. Why do you require a college degree? Is knowing the theory essential to doing the work or save a substantial amount of training or ramp-up time?
You'll pass no matter what, and in many places can get an A by just cramming for the final. Worse, many classes adjust grading standards based on how students are doing, so anyone who studies hard is betraying their classmates.
Fraternities are given official support while study groups are left to fend for themselves (not that much support is needed, but it would be a nice gesture). A football team that wins a championship can expect official schoolwide celebration, which no intellectual achievement would produce.
People are influenced by social pressure. Children are especially influenced. And the pressures aren't really pushing toward learning.
(A secondary conclusion is that if you want to learn a lot at college, your first act should be to find a network of friends who do value learning.)
The reason why they insist on the 4-year degree, I suspect, is that labor costs are so high in the United States that paying the premium for a 4-year degree is negligible to your bottom line, so hey, why not save yourself the time of filtering through even more resumes and just demand a bachelors degree? It's not like college is going to make anyone worse at their job. As an added bonus, people who carry debt in the form of student loans or mortgages are less likely to strike or change careers - so it's a win/win.
2) The study asked if students had a class required 20 pages of writing, or 40 pages of reading. Especially in engineering, this is often just not practical. In a senior level class, we only had ~20 pages of reading a week, but we spent countless hours building an RTOS from the ground up. That time was so much more effective than reading a book. As far as writing goes, I haven't written a paper in a long time, but multiple 60 hour coding projects are pretty common throughout a semester.
2) I can't tell from the article whether these statistics were actually influential in determining the students' scores on the test. I totally agree that this doesn't translate well between different majors. If the scores were affected by answering this question or the one about study habits or probably a number of others, then I don't really see the point of the study. They started from some sort of "if people take easier* classes, then they aren't as intelligent" baseline and then showed that people take easier* classes...
* "easier," by their definition, has something to do with writing X pages or reading Y pages.
You can "lead a monk's existence" by yourself, without paying a college $40-50k per 30-week year. Hit the books, learn as much as you can, then go out into the real world and make things happen.
It kills me that education and credentialing are so tightly bound together in popular perception. Learning is about what happens in your head, not necessarily what happens in a classroom.
I'm kicking around an idea of an alternative credential for entrepreneurs, which would legally certify you've operated a real business at a certain profit level for a certain period of time. If you want to seek employment when you're done, most employers would recognize that you have economically valuable skills - above and beyond those of college graduates.
If the business takes off, you won't care about the credential... which is a good thing. The amount you'd learn pursuing such a credential would put most college programs to shame.
-Matt Damon, Good Will Hunting
-Frank Zappa
20 pages of writing, or 40 pages of reading
They are going on the assumption that increased pages of writing and increased pages of reading is a metric for amount learned.
There are so many lurking variables at play here. The attribution of cause and effect here to these arbitrary variables is an over simplification fallacy of what's really going on and why.
I worked a couple of on-campus jobs at the school I attended. One of those jobs was in the department of Recreation Administration. I couldn't believe it was a major that people paid money to go to school and study. I couldn't believe the tests I photocopied were real - I could easily pass them, and what I didn't know was obviously information easily obtained from a minimal amount of reading of the textbooks.
It was comical, really, although the parents paying the same tuition for that that my parents paid for my CompSci education shouldn't find it funny. It seems to me like there are an increasing number of "paths of low resistance" through college.
Where has this sample been taken? What colleges? How diverse was the population? Socio-economic statuses? These are all big concerns I have with this statistic. Also, what are they measuring? English? Maths? Sciences?
With all the high school emphasis on getting into college, I would not expect a serious improvement in the maths and English. If it's looking at general stuff, then yes, I would not expect a substantial shift, if we're talking about fields and careers then this is shocking data.
Given all that. I am a college junior, I have learned so much about math (calculus), science, computer science and how to solve problems. More so then I ever could have dreamed. College has opened me up to many new learning opportunities.
While the fault could be at the college, more then likely; however, it's on the student, not the school.
Organizational Research: Determining Appropriate Sample Size in Survey Research http://www.osra.org/itlpj/bartlettkotrlikhiggins.pdf
Common sense is no substitute for an intro stats class. 2300 is plenty.
It's the three R's; readin, ritten, rithmatic. Unfortunately, a lot of programs don't require those areas. People who aren't heavy into those areas in college should probably be going to a vocational school rather than a university.
I find that, as people in technical majors progress through the years, they take less and less humanities and more and more major specific classes.
It might be worrying if math majors didn't take a class that requires problem sets in the last semester. Or english majors didn't take classes that required writing. But to suggest that students aren't learning because they aren't taking courses relevant to their major is a biased assertion.
For one thing, it completely puts down science and math courses. In a multivariable calc class, we didn't have reading or writing (though I did have more than 40 pages of homework!)
Second, it's a bit arbitrary.
Does anyone have any similar stories?
Anyway, I'm in grad school now, and I haven't noticed many slackers (maybe a grad student taking a weekend off?). Although, I didn't really notice many slackers in college either. That may be because I went to a research-focused University to study engineering.
Especially given the headline.
I don't know which philosopher is to blame for the idea that a brain is some kind of black box and school is there to put knowledge in it, but I'd send him back to college.