Are the standards to get into university that low?
Professors can't assume the students learned anything in high school, so it takes a few semesters just to get the students to a college level. A lot of students graduated with nothing more than a passing knowledge of their subject because they took so long just to catch up.
Many students in the US are working full-time while seeking their degree, so they don't have a ton of time to study or write papers. Most professors understand this and assign a less-demanding load.
Another factor that I strongly suspect but can't prove: You have to have a college degree for most jobs, so professors feel like they're hurting a student's future prospects when they give a bad grade.
Keep in mind I'm talking about state schools - I would expect Harvard to be better!
500 words on the Thirty Years War generated by an AI and submitted by a high schooler I could understand. But arent college standards higher?
One is a professor at a low end CSU. The way she describes her students is roughly high school level; they struggle with tasks like writing a 2-3 page, 3-point, sandwich-style essay. They struggle with reading primary source material. Her senior students typically seem to have the kind of skills I would expect of a college freshman. Many students have severe life disrupting issues (rehab and court are common). Deadlines seem to mostly be a suggestion.
The other is a professor, again in the same subject, at a relatively well ranked and famous north eastern liberal arts college. The way he describes his students is that they engage, handle very dense primary source readings, and that many of them are on track for grad school or law school. I am not sure what he assigns them as final assignments, but I would assume 10-20 page final papers are not uncommon. He's never mentioned anything about behavioural issues, though like every other professor he notes that accommodations/mental health stuff is worse than it used to be.
I also thought "boy, ChatGPT seems to be closer to what was expected of me in 10th grade English than it does to any university course I ever took", and frankly I went to a mediocre Canadian university and didn't really go to a competitive world class university until my PhD.
So it's possible that the push towards everyone has going to colleges has created greater stratification from college to college. The CSU system's mandate is to serve the underserved, so it's probably not a stretch to say many of the people in my colleague's classes wouldn't have gotten into college without an explicit effort to make a college for them.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/student-life/e...
English is not my mother tongue and it was my first time living in an English speaking country, and of course I had 0 background in anything related to cinema.
The level of the other students was so abysmal that I was got the best grade of the whole class for every single essay.
It was not a great university, but the level of students with even 1 or 2 years of college education is appalling.
For context, I graduated in 2020.
When I started undergrad there in '72 (yes, even some generations ago), if you didn't have close to an 800 verbal SAT, you had to take a remedial writing course as a frosh.
Students with very low SAT/ACT scores in reading/writing needed to take ENG 50-something before moving on to 101 and 102. Students with high test scores could take an Honors version of ENG 101 that also fulfilled the requirements for 102 (so they would only need to take one class).
The problem was that the overall bell curve was so low. The students in remedial courses tended to be extremely low performers - learning disabilities, serious issues at home, or older adults who hadn't been in an academic environment in decades. Those students' writing would have basic grammatical and structural issues leading to unreadability, and ENG 50 was focused on teaching them how to form a sentence or techniques to memorize spelling. There were some downright heroic ENG 50 professors, but the students who made it into ENG 101 had passed a very low bar.
I don't know if the standardized tests have become easier over time. I took the ACT a couple times in 2014 and 2015 but I don't really remember it.
I forgot to mention in my original comment - I graduated in 2020.
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
For my part, I've never once in my academic career had to explicitly identify sentence parts.
I can definitely see the first sentence, alone, serving as an extra credit question on a high schooler's English test: Diagram this sentence!
But that's a high schooler from my era (first half of the 90s). Much less seems to be expected of today's high schoolers.
"Not every writer was writing in such convoluted way."
Sure there were. But unless they're Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce, they're probably not much worth reading.
Before screens, people must have gotten far more enjoyment from authors painting mental pictures in tiny detail.
We have HD video as an option now. A long description of a rose bush doesn't do it for me unless it's needed for the actual narrative.
I strongly disagree. Being convoluted does not make the text more worth reading. It makes it more fun for one kind of reader. That is about it.
Being well written and pleasant to read does not make the text, whether fiction or real like account less worthy.
EDIT: I wonder if maybe the long florid sentences are the entertainment of that time, kind of like how folks 100% video games today, spending a lot more time than necessary for fun. Definitely it is... Verbose though.
What you have quoted, incidentally, is complex because it combines a lot of ideas that follow on from one another. The second paragraph, in particular, starts with the forefathers of Boston allocating land for a prison and ends with disappointment and sadness that prisoners are not even afforded the beauty of nature.
In between it observes that the prisons decays rapidly and is a “gloomy” place with poorly maintained grounds, and observes the general air of hopelessness of the prison.
It’s kind of beautiful, really. It gives a lot of context.
Edit: FWIW, I have ADHD. This wasn’t an easy read, but it was worth it.
That said, after struggling through it a couple of times, taking time to reread portions, it really painted a vivid picture, casting a Gothic pall over the scene in ways a more to-the-point passage might not.
> Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era.
Like tell me that doesn’t paint a picture - in a fine narrative voice!
Then again, I read a lot. I imagine this kind of thing is like exercise. This morning I followed along with a 20 minute "beginner yoga" video, and hated it because it felt painful and incomprehensible to my stiff, aging body.
Poignant. Thanks for sharing.
It's entirely possible that by the time I was into the second paragraph that I had simply adjusted to the writing style and was able to proceed without any issue; I haven't the time to properly compare the two.
I think I approve of letting every kid take a crack at college. If they graduate high school, there should be a school somewhere that gives them a chance. The problem is that if they aren't ready, there's no place they can go. They can't go back to their old high school and demand to be taught what the teachers pretended to teach them. The best they can do is take remedial reading classes at the university, borrowing money to learn what their local schools were supposed to teach them for free.
Most (maybe all?) of the kids like this that my dad encountered came from rural schools where you have a similar range of preparedness and home situations that you see in an urban setting, but you only have enough kids the same age to fill one or two classrooms. A teacher can't personalize the curriculum for every single student, so a kid who falls significantly behind will, after a certain point, no longer receive a meaningful amount of instruction, because the curriculum that's appropriate for the bulk of the class is beyond what they can engage with. Schools that recognize the unfairness of failing a kid that they're not even teaching tend to pass these kids along from grade to grade and then graduate them, and it's hard to fault them for it. If you think of instructional level as a spectrum from remedial to advanced, rural schools only have the resources to cover the middle part of that spectrum where 90-95% of their students are. All they can do for the rest is give them an apology and a diploma.
That's a seat that could have gone to someone else.
Community college is a different story, but those are open for the greater public for the most part.
It took me awhile to realize that what most of the class were struggling with was not a grasp of the English language per-se, but the overwhelmingly majority of people in the class were dyslexic. And because of that, they were in an art and design college.
Maybe 30% of the US actually holds any sort of degree.
My biggest complaint with old books is I want them to STFU and get to the point!
“Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the pit, or say rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy, on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness. I,—a man of thought,—the book-worm of great libraries,—a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge,— what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girl’s fantasy! Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people. Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path!”
I've got bad news about the 20th century- James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Jack Kerouac, the hits don't stop coming
"What's the one-liner on The Scarlet Letter? It's 'adultery is bad,' right? I'll just assume it is and stick it in my Second Brain on Notion, and it'll be like I've read it."
If it is an example of poetic literature. Ok sure.
You can be verbose and interesting without so much padding and flowery speech. When you have this much to say about something, you have this much to say about everything, and I don't care to read long-winded analogies that the writer thinks are cute or wait for them to paint the picture in much more words than necessary.
Maybe people who enjoy this get some sort of energy thinking about well-developed, stylish prose, and it's easy for them to see the scene or this character's anguish but for me it's distracting and takes me out of the moment to focus on the writers "poetry".
e.g., “Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the pit. It was my folly. Your youth and beauty! Misshapen from birth, how could I delude myself with the idea that my intellectual gifts might veil my physical deformity! Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people in this land. Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our story!”
They should be. And if you’re not in love with the sound of the author’s voice too, you shouldn’t be reading their works.
Literature is a luxury. It’s not constrained by utilitarian purposes. Save the short and concise sentences for the newspapers. (Not to say that simple and clear sentences can’t ALSO be beautiful, of course; it’s just that that’s not the ONLY type of beauty to be found in literature.)
Please, tell that to my high-school English literature program directors
That said, the most brilliant writing I know came from the 1800s, especially the American Civil War: Abraham Lincoln, Sullivan Ballou, and popular novelists like Charles Dickens. Perhaps their extraordinary expressiveness arose because, for the first time in history, writing could be appreciated by many. Certainly authors of those times more often wrote from the heart, not just to entertain.
"The Scarlet Latter" was an 11th grade book for me. I remember it being a typical difficulty level as other pre-20th century literature - reading and understanding it was work, but not unusually so.
Harvard's admission standards are seldom criticized for being too low. Though one might ask whether the struggling students were ones admitted on the basis of academic merit, vs. family connections...
Universities aren't what they used to be.
In the modern world everyone has access to college, no one is denied, and it has become a necessity to get a degree. Something as simple as running a daycare requires several degrees or credentials in order to be competitive. [1]
In short, today you must pay an exorbitant sum of time and money for credentials simply to have access to the labor market. [2]
[1] https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/certifica...
[2] https://www.thoughtco.com/indulgences-their-role-in-the-refo...
I recently did an MBA program (yes, pile on the hate) where the average student I worked with had a very hard time reading complex documents or stringing together sentences to form a coherent argument. They even struggled to read reports from consulting companies, which are full of pictures and written in very plain grammar, so I doubt most could tackle "Ulysses," "The Wasteland," or "The Scarlet Letter."
By the way, I think this is why the PG writing style is popular - it's very easy to understand the words and sentences, so you can convey an idea to a lot of people, albeit in a not-very-nuanced way. It also makes it fairly easy to write an argument - there is no flowery language around to distract you from the fact that you are saying nothing.
A lot of people attribute this to the fact that there are a lot of people who have English as a second language or speak a different dialect of English (Indian English is very common), but I'm not so sure. I have often found that many non-native speakers actually have larger vocabularies and a better understanding of grammar than typical native speakers.
Luckily for me I competed in high school policy debate where I learned (the hard way, by losing a lot) how to assess text within the framework of constraints it implies, as well as how to challenge those specific constraints.
Lotta people can't do that and end either up being that person in a philosophy course going on a long, idiosyncratic rant that's based on word associations they're making, or just remain silent and merely endure the course for the credit.
In my experience English class was primarily about reading literature with the goal of teaching morals and values. There was very little information about the structure of the English language. I actually learned far more about grammar, syntax, articles, etc. through learning Spanish.
They don't, though?
> The median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.8% of students at Harvard came from a poor family but became a rich adult.
From a NYTimes analysis [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...