Failing Intro Economics
jamesgmartin.center
jamesgmartin.center
I would say about 85% of the classmates I had (again, right before the pandemic) were completely unwilling to put in any effort to learn whatsoever. It still makes me mad thinking how many students expected grades to be given for nothing. Most wouldn’t study more than 30 minutes for a test and expect to be given a B for “good job you took it” and then go complain in office hours when they failed. Davidson looks to be about the same quality as my university, so i expect their students are similar.
What happens to these 85% students after the pandemic? I suspect they got even more used to doing nothing and expecting a pass.
Please note, just like the professor points out, there are always a minority of students who are very good at learning, who are motivated to learn, and who excel in classes where 80% fail. If a class had 100% failure problem then I’d blame the professor.
As a graduate from a mid-tier university in the US:
-Nobody has ever given a shit about Intro to Econ. Practically every single Freshman is forced to take it so everyone bemoans the experience.
-Most schools allow you to take a Community College version of the course and transfer over credits saving you time and money (and effort depending on the school).
-In the "Hierarchy of Course Priorities", Intro to Econ is barely above Anthropology and soft sciences. I.e nobody gives a shit. Nobody has ever given a shit. And nobody wants to read through 20 pages of supply and demand and hear about a dude named Keynes because nobody thinks they're going to be an Economist or care or think its important. (Of course they're detrimentally wrong, but we're not here to criticize them, just see things from their perspective)
-Mid tier universities can have a mix of really good and really bad professors. So while he's pouring out his heart and soul, his faculty colleagues might be giving even less of a shit than his students. Degrading overall morale and willingness to learn. Especially when its entirely possible now to coast through a class online, do a few multiple choice exams, and move on with your life.
-Finally, Freshman classes as a whole filter out students who have poor studying discipline, so the likelihood of encountering failing students will be higher than average.
It's not just today's students, full grown economists haven't been up to what's needed for some time now.
It’s always been a weed out class (lots of future investment bankers would switch to an easier major). If he has kept the sane bar as previous years, and college kids are struggling as much as it seems, I’m not surprised with the poor results.
As an alum, I think Davidson is in a tough spot. It made a name for itself in the past for the rigor and volume of its coursework. Grade deflation was a common topic when I attended. While it is not a household name, it’s built a very solid reputation with graduate schools and key employers for producing graduates with the requisite skills to excel. Obviously it does not hurt a large part of student body comes from upper-middle-class to upper class backgrounds which I argue provides the real value proposition (networking and exposure to upper class ideas and culture) but I digress
However, being really really hard with a low name profile is a tough appeal in the current zeitgeist. Schools have become businesses where parents and students want guarantees, especially if they are paying private school tuition. But if Davidson lowers it standards to meet customer demands, then how does it differentiate itself? Especially in the humanities. If you are an English major at Princeton then you are set because of your schools brand. But an English major at Davidson needs that reputation of rigor for their personal brand (and to hone skills of course).
Joking aside though, if something is true of 85% of a group then that is the audience, and the truth, we're working with. Lamenting their individual lack of dedication, hard work, whatever virtue will be gratifying but not actually solve any problems.
Again if it's truly 85% then that's that. How can professors adapt to the needs of their students is a more useful question, if the problem you want to solve is actually the failure of this mass of students to learn. I suspect it isn't though, either for the author of the article, or you, or most of the commenters here. We want to whine about the vicissitudes of the youth, and congratulate ourselves on our virtue, and this approach works well towaeds that goal.
>Fourth, students seemed reluctant to come to the office seeking help. [...] I suspect there is an increased factor of intimidation associated with being lost in the material and asking a much older male professor for help.
Let's ignore the weird second half assumption about 'older males' for now... Young people do not have a concept of 'come to the office seeking help'. In my years of professional experience I have not once gone to someone's office to seek help. Instead, people email each other, text, chat, video call... help can be synchronous or asynchronous. I wonder how many times a student has taken time out of their day to trek across campus to the professor's office only to find the professor away, or head-down busy grading papers, or just about to leave? Young people can be extremely sensitive to how they impose themselves on other people. Professors need to get with the times and make themselves available through channels that their students are more comfortable with, and I think this should include allowing students to get help with the material anonymously. (I don't intend to direct this at this specific professor, but the bemoaning of students not seeking help I find is often linked to professors thinking it's still 1972)
Typically, professors announce office hours during which they will be available to answer questions, so this is not an issue.
From a professor's perspective, online options for tutoring students are vastly inferior. Helping a student understand a concept is interactive: you must ask the student questions, listen to their explanations, and formulate explanations to give back to them. That is very difficult in a text-based medium, particularly in a course involving mathematics or other things that don't really fit in plain text. (And while I can write LaTeX math quickly, my students cannot.)
You'll also often have multiple students asking questions. In person, it's easy to group together related questions, and to jump from student to student -- or to say "why don't you talk to Sarah, she's working on the same problem." In an anonymous online setting, you lose that, and students can't connect to each other.
I've used asynchronous online platforms like Piazza, and you lose all the opportunity to listen to students and figure out what exactly they're thinking. Instead you just provide a wall of text for them. And of course students learn to expect responses within hours at any time of day, including weekends, and start getting annoyed if you don't respond quickly to a question posted at 4am Saturday morning. You start to dread the Piazza notifications. Yes, you can set expectations and insist you only answer during certain hours, but other courses will have that one fanatical TA who answers at all hours, and so your students will still be annoyed.
edit: That being said, you're right about students being more willing to use anonymous options. When I lectured online due to COVID, and students could send a direct message to me in the Zoom chat, I got loads of questions. I had to learn to keep the chat open on a second monitor to follow the questions and respond in real-time. As soon as we switched back to in-person teaching, the questions stopped, and the class would just stare at me blankly if I asked if they had questions. But I'm not sure how to replicate that option in person.
There is some meat in that concept and it's an interesting problem that doesn't have a solid solve yet.
I love remote work,learning,etc but for that free flowing of data in a group or one on one setting it lacks positional audio.
I can't whisper under my breath to the person beside me or break out with a small team and still have people near us hear the convo and maybe chime in.
Tip: stream the class and give them the YT link so they can ask questions. Not ideal but should work and you might find a new process in there.
Cheers
Games like DayZ handle positional audio very well but a 3D engine is overkill when it's just audio that is missing.
AR I think will fill this space over VR but time will tell. Imo a solid 2D layout with flexibility to 'move around' is all we need for UI.
It's the audio rules that haven't really been mapped out outside of gaming I'm aware of
Yes, professors had office hours, but you'd usually go there if something was extraordinary, or maybe if you really couldn't find a tutor or someone else to answer your pressing question before the test. We did have tutors, with weekly sessions, those were good for 90% of the stuff. Also it was recent enough that you could indeed write emails and expect an answer (CompSci though)
But that's not the point, your "jump from student to student" confuses me - was this in a lecture hall with multiple people and some sort of panel Q&A? Office hours for us was basically waiting in line in front of the professor's office and going in one by one, also for the most part there were so many people that you'd hardly be remembered as an individual, so your "go talk to Sarah" sounds really unrealistic to me.
But overall I am not disagreeing with you or the author a lot, my main point would more be: if their lecture was being streamed/recorded I probably would not have missed a single lesson, if I was in the position of the students here.
I would only admit one student at a time if I were giving individual feedback on a project, or answering questions about a take-home exam where collaboration is not allowed, or something like that.
I have my own “don’t feel like dealing with this mildly unpleasant task” hang-ups. I’d likely be more successful and happier if I spent more time overcoming them (to include being forced to).
True. Also true, students have other classes.
To students raised in an async on demand world the concept of static office hours is fairly foreign. Certainly not top of mind.
So many professors create a blanket "come to my office hours" approach rather than trying to train students to understand that it might take them 24 hours (or longer - on weekends) to respond to an email.
Saying something once or even a couple times that is at odds with the listener's inherent behavior doesn't count as communicating.
Insisting it does sounds like the type of out of touch professors GP is talking about.
Apart from anything else, making teaching points via email or any chat app can be a royal PITA, take twice as long and is more open to misunderstanding. Teams and Zoom can be a bit better, but you never know who the student is sharing the room with (parents, little brother etc).
As for the older males thing... Certainly the current climate can make personal consultation an issue in that regard. This is the reason I now compel students to book consultation in small groups.
The idea that these young adults should be treated so sensitively is pretty weird to me. Yes, it can be uncomfortable. Transitioning from childhood to adulthood is full of uncomfortable times.
We're on the third week now, and I'll reiterate it today.
We'll see if it makes any difference.
> Professors need to get with the times and make themselves available through channels that their students are more comfortable with
If an international student can write the professor, I'm thinking that is already the case. Email at university has been a thing for over thirty years.
"The highest-achieving student was an international student for whom English was not the first language. Yet he wrote me regularly requesting specific topics and textbook pages to prepare for class."
On the other hand, I help the students async and at odd hours on Discord every single day.
It seems the more a student should be asking for help, the less likely they are to do so. I spend a fair about of time during the quarter trying to break down that wall.
> Professors need to get with the times and make themselves available through channels that their students are more comfortable with
Let’s all do whatever the students believe it is more convenient for them, so they don’t have to impose themselves :-)
(For the benefit of young people who may confused about the timeline of technology in the dark ages, telephones were already quite popular in 1972.)
At this point, I'll trust student sentiment over a professor's insistence any day of the week.
Professors throw out the word "office hours" like it's self-explanatory. It's not. And unless you're a certain type of person, you just won't know or learn how a professor's office hours could help you.
It's not immediately apparent to me (or particularly first generation college students) how swinging by a professor's office hours for 10 minutes on an alternating Thursday is going to help me understand 5-dimensional integrals.
If you're students don't make use of your office hours (and need to), it's a failing on the professor, not the students' culture.
The professor is not responsible for holding your hand and explain every little term—especially terms like “office hours”, which are bog standard at literally every university. This isn’t some arcane obscure term—it’s college classes 101.
College is a useful learning experience for this type of responsibility. You say its not “self-explanatory”? Good! This is a great opportunity for the 18-year-old to learn what to do when something is not obvious. Ask! Don’t just assume it’s irrelevant.
College is a crash course in (small parts of) the real world. If you can’t figure out office hours, you’re gonna have a hard time when it comes to taxes, loans, and other real world things. And the consequences in the real world are much more severe and Real than a bad grade on a problem set.
However the sheer size of student populations and the complexity of college life have grown exponentially, and they aren't slowing down. With that in mind, this personal responsibility mindset is quaint.
"Office hours are times when you can meet with your professors and teaching assistants to discuss the material being presented in class or other."
And it's no help at all to the student who is mostly bewildered by the constant swarm of disjoint activity on a college campus. 4x so for a first generation student. These students understand math and exams. The cultural stuff in the middle mostly goes over their heads.
I was not alone in this, as of 2010, regularly spending my evenings in office hours with either TAs or professors for specific classes. For certain math classes, I'd do all my homework in a group setting with other students and a TA. It was weird not to go to office hours for extra help.
And, well, it is te students who are missing the opportunity…
1) The pandemic response of schools completely disrupted the learning level and style of an entire generation of kids for two years, and we’re now seeing the downstream impact of that.
2) I’m pretty sure that compared to 20 years ago, the more capable students are using AP Econ to test out of the college intro course, so you would expect the average interest and effort level of the remaining students to naturally decline.
3) I’m having trouble parsing this statement: “As a result, the student experience increasingly diverges from that of other courses, in which students feel a higher level of comfort, receive greater affirmation of their opinions, and earn higher grades.” But on the surface it seems to match a trend I noticed in college where students are optimizing for easy grades instead of for actual learning.
4) It really seems like the academic field of macroeconomics stopped matching reality in 2008 and now an entire generation of kids have grown up mistrusting economists and policy makers for good reasons.
It's probably because the market in most jos, including corporate jobs, doesn't need or optimize for actual learners.
Which wouldn't be a problem if there was internal motivation, but the whole culture doesn't respect or optimize for inspiring that either...
>It really seems like the academic field of macroeconomics stopped matching reality in 2008 and now an entire generation of kids have grown up mistrusting economists and policy makers for good reasons.
I think it never matched reality: it's just that things were cushier before 2008 (all the way to the previous serious bubble and accompanying economists spin).
(2) I have nothing to say here. You're just plain right.
(3) Both you and the professor are right. Students have a lot of incentive to optimize for grades, in lieu of developing an actual appreciation of the material. In any class I didn't give a damn about (Economics 100, for example), I optimized for grades. Also, teaching out of a 20, 30, 40 year old book isn't conducive to interesting lectures. The information is almost always noticeably outdated. An economics 101 book with no mention of the subprime mortgage crisis or Dodd-Frank is just missing a chapter. And yes, I will be distracted by the details of a question that references such antiquated things as landlines and "neighbors you actually talk to." I think it's justified for students to expect that a decade's worth of crippling debt will pay for high quality, modern course materials.
(4) Not sure if this is anything new. Young people have been distrustful of institutions for as long as the idea of institution has existed. Maybe my generation doesn't have much trust in economists specifically. It seems like a field prone to the worst instincts of groupthink. Does every generation have a subject like that?
QUOTATION: The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
Person who has been teaching for forty years bemoans the youth these days...more at 11.
The world is constantly changing and influencing each upcoming generation, for the better or worse, and Sokrates considered this issue important enough to discuss.
> specifically. Please note, I am not trying to “blame” students for their failing performance; rather, I am trying to understand it. Remedying the situation will require action by both students and faculty.
To his credit he does suggest several changes he and faculty could make by the end of the article.
But I think he's missing the most relevent point: with the vast number of online educational resources on the net, many students have been exposed to what great teaching looks like. Decades ago when this guy started teaching he did not have to survive that competition and comparison. He should stop entirely worrying about what students need to do and up his own game to at least match what anyone can find for free on video streaming platforms and elsewhere.
He is the paid professional here. When he has eliminated his own shortcomings then he can perhaps start to correctly identify things that aren't a result of those shortcomings.
They don't need to for it to affect attendance. You stick around when you find something captivating and skip that which you find dull. And something that was captivating twenty years ago compared to the other content that was available at that time might be dull compared to today's content. Teachers can't expect styles and material from decades ago to just work like it used to.
Very little to no time is spent looking at ways to do either of those. This the article really is just mostly the professor complaining about his students while doing no introspection on his own possible failures.
Old professor I had in university would do a Math quiz in the first class, with disclaimer on the paper: If you find this hard save your money and drop out. Just some basic Algebra. Tenure and teaching for 30 years, he genuinely did not give a fuck. Of course lots of people would skip first class due to their O week..
Same epic prof would give exactly same tests year to year with 2-3 number changed around.. then fail everyone who provided answers from a wrong year. You would think people would learn or word would get passed down.. nope.
How effectively is it controlling for factors?
> A lot of programs are admitting under prepared students.
Sure. But there remains the question of _what_ should the students be prepared for, and are educational institutions providing that substance? Meaning, are students under prepared because they don't know how to succeed in a college environment, or are students under prepared because colleges don't know how to teach in a modern environment?
QUOTATION: 97% of quotes on the Internet are complete fabrications.
Probably, this what the Romans said towards the end of their run as well.
But some generations actually are worse than their predecessors (at least in certain aspects). There are universal complaints about teenagers: loud, rude, etc, and there are specifics I see for youth today: they are emotionally more fragile and underdeveloped, are more passive in general, understand complex situations less, and have a harder time in accepting reality.
I'm not blaming anyone (if I were it would be the boomers that ruined the youth today), but blanked dismissal of issues because "this is how things have always been" doesn't help. For most of human history we've been at war and at the brink of starvation, and all the while there was a concentrated effort to handle those issues.
Then you get to live in your car. Unless someone has come and taken that.
What gave you the idea that younger generations aren't aware of this? About 17 out of 10,000 people in the US are homeless. The vast majority of people in the US are not experiencing what you are describing.
And I only wanted to point out that there is an objective reality.
I certainly did not mean to say anything negative about younger generations.
Sure. But the point is that the prior generation is too biased to correctly identify when this happens. And it's a solid point. The older generations are far more often wrong than they are right. Many of the kids I know who were supposed to do horribly in life due to their parents being too easy on them are now pretty damn successful adults.
> there are specifics I see for youth today: they are emotionally more fragile and underdeveloped, are more passive in general, understand complex situations less, and have a harder time in accepting reality
I haven't seen any of that in the kids I know. Perhaps it's the adults who are guilty of these things and can't handle the kids. Kids take a huge amount of work to be around. It's tiring. This is nothing new.
If you predict a storm tomorrow, you'll eventually be right. But that doesn't make you good at prediction.
While I agree that it's hard to have an assessment of new generations that isn't biased by your beliefs, I also think that simply giving up because everything is relative is not useful.
The questions becomes: how can we see the problems of a generation with which we don't share a history in way that's useful to them?
The original Socrates quote I was referring to is used to give up on doing anything, while my understanding of it was that we need to use more nuance and empathy to help guide the youth. Simply giving up on passing the lessons we learned from experience is a waste.
You're right that past generations could be more bottled up because of social expectations, but I've seen also more flexibility in the past around various concepts.
I don't mean to make an argument, for which you seem to be positioning yourself, but rather just see that some things have regressed, and it's not all merely relative.
By the tone of your response, I'd imagine you had many contradictory conversations, possibly with close-minded individuals, so maybe that's why you're interpreting what I'm saying as if I'm a US right-winger.
I think we'd be more in agreement if we'd met in real-life, as you also seem to value growth. My argument is that for that growth and development to happen, weaknesses need to be stated more clearly and addressed.
I mean this quote isn't in Plato's writings either but still
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2022/09/ap-economics-is-a-mo...
I think most of his points in the featured article are missing the point even if his thesis is generally correct. In my memory, most students were pretty poor. Lots of them did not understand how to learn. They tried to get through class and make up for it later, and then found that hard, and so they gave up, then scraped by because the classes themselves weren't really all that hard and you could do fine without understanding it. I can't imagine this guy's econ 101 is very different.
Now imagine that cohort after a couple years of being half tuned into remote learning classes? Yeah they probably suck at school. I only learned how to be a student in the last couple years of high school. If I was instead just playing video games while half listening to a zoom for those two years I'd probably be a lot worse off too.
The twentieth century began with children learning Latin and Greek in high school and ended with adults learning remedial English in college.
I would further say that it is fairly ideological and terse up to being cryptic at times to some extent. Econometrics and how it's taught come to mind.
If you grant this assumption, I wonder how much students' lack of interest may come from the field's teachings clashing with a person's everyday life and experiences.
Did the author forget about Covid. These students has their last two years of high school completely overturned by Covid and broad shutdowns. Of course, they are going to take the warning literally for school.
I think the Covid shutdowns really hurt young people’s education, and we are only just seeing the evidence for how much.
> The expectations at the college or university level seem to be falling. In other words, the AP course has actually adapted more to changing and challenging economic conditions, particularly macroeconomic ones, than has the more stagnant college-level course.
How is it that a college has more stagnant material than a curriculum designed by a bureaucracy? This sounds like a Davidson problem.
1) Perhaps the univ has dropped its standards? And doesn't make an effort to prep those on the lower end?
2) 50 years? I can't help but wonder how exciting and engaging this course isn't. Perhaps student performance is a reflection of prof performance?
COVID transmission over video conferencing is typically zero. Still blames students for not showing up to class during a pandemic.
That said, as a professor you take kids as they are, not as you wish them to be. I have only taught at state schools, but if I had to teach the same course at a community college (or an advanced high school) I would likely alter my course/lectures at least some to accomodate the different pupils.
I remember Macro econ was a tough slog when I was an undergrad (it was at 8am). IMO they should do micro as the intro course and leave macro for the majors.
Can easily see a not so smart kid that checks boxes and had a good high school GPA due to parental supervision totally bombing out in college.
I think micro is much easier/more intuitive personally (I think you are projecting a bit saying anything in intro macro has clear usefulness in running a business or investing). But I am sure you could make macro more relevant/interesting than what I took in school as well via clearer analogies to current situations.
Well that's easily fixable with low effort - at minimum make a web conference for each of the lectures, but better yet save the recordings onto a platform that students can refer back to later.
Edited to clarify filtering comment: if teachers don’t filter out low performing students who don’t make any effort to work within their environment, then the trust in a college degree as a signaling mechanism to potential employers goes away. It’s already started to go away for a variety of reasons, but graduating students who can’t do basic math and can’t regularly even attend lectures will destroy it completely within the next ten years. I say this as an employer who already has a shaky trust in a degree based off real world experience hiring CS graduates.
1. "First, attendance was sporadic with many of my students." I think this is true and always has been true for entry level college classes. You usually have a set of students who will never come, a set of students who will always come, and the middle is what you need to worry about. My solution to this is require attendance, which I first started this year. I've noticed remarkable differences in class; I'm more involved in learning, can fix problems earlier with less feedback time, and students are more engaged with the materials outside of class.
2. "Second, work outside of class was not done with consistency." This is a tough one. I was shocked to find how many students don't read anything. Not just the textbook; they don't read documentation or even the lab assignments. I'm sure this has been a thing since I was in school in the 2000's. I think this is a case of "students just don't know how to". I try to teach them how to read documentation, as it is a skill, not something natural to common life. I also think requiring short essays on reading material is superior over multiple choice because it makes "brute forcing" through the assignment less easy. You can just copy snippets from a web search, and that happens, but again, I'm just trying to move the "middle" here.
3. "Third, basic mathematics proficiency, whatever the claims of our admissions office, is greatly lacking." This is an interesting one too, especially in computer science. Most of my students in my entry level classes do not understand the concept of a filesystem. Using phones and chromebooks their entire life, they've never had to find files outside of a search field. Some know even less about how to use the computers we bring to class. I blame this on big tech making crappy products and driving people to appliance computers, but that's a rant for another day. This is surprising but not difficult to overcome; you just have to teach it in the first week. You lose valuable time you should be teaching the material to teaching "how to find your file to submit", but good pre-made materials can alleviate this somewhat.
4. "Fourth, students seemed reluctant to come to the office seeking help." This is definitely true, but also, they don't seek out reading the text/assignments for help or on campus tutoring. I also think this is something you have to teach; how to formulate a question based on something you don't know. I also want to mention here that cheating is rampant in computer science, so this is a more tempting approach for many students. Again, another issue for another discussion.
5. "Fifth, and finally, the introductory economics course, as stated in my 2014 Inside Higher Ed article, has remained somewhat constant." Other than the student learning outcomes (SLO's), courses in college are surprisingly flexible. I'm free to do pretty much what I want in the bounds of the SLO's. But: prepping a course is very work intensive, and it takes away from the student-centric work referenced in the other 4 points.
Anyway, in closing, just want to say that there are a lot of good hardworking, non-tenured, full time professors out there. Its the hardest I've ever worked in my entire career and the most challenging work I've ever done. A lot of the points raised in the article are true, and its not just "kids these days" but systemic problems ranging from early education, tech literacy, and motivations for even attending college.