Professors say today's college kids really ARE dumber and lazier

Yeah, OK. I was thinking of CJR as a little more commercial than, say, physics or medical journals. But that would be the place. I'm sure there are others.

 

When I was in college, there was a lot of "research" being done as to how readers would scan the paper from start to finish. Most of it was bunk, with only self-reporting surveys and some pretty loaded questions; there was also the experiment where they strapped high-tech binoculars on people and then told them to "read the paper like you normally would." Yeah, there's a solid control group.

However, a lot of those studies went a long way to selling the theories that design and not reporting is what newspapers should concentrate on. So the profs/consultants got paid, at least.

 

So, you support methods that pretty much every every educator out there will tell you are a mistake, methods that are part of the reason our educational system is failing so many people these days.

And doing it with a healthy dose of smug, too. Figures.

 

I'm quite curious to know which J-School you attended, because at mine the situation was the exact opposite. By sophomore year, after we had gotten our feet wet, our instructors (people in the newspaper business and beyond) sent us out to hall meetings and community gatherings and made us write stories about that before moving on to bigger and better things. They also ALWAYS encouraged us to find internships and write for whatever we could, just to learn how to interview and write a solid story from lede to conclusion. If you were a junior or senior with no clips or outside experience, you were screwed.

 

Again, I don't think that standardized tests are that great, either. Maybe it'll be seen as a cop-out on my part, but you're not going to box me in a black-or-white, yes-or-no, binary position here. I think, however, considering how much noise they have to cut through, and how many kids now do things like having their parents write their admissions essay or finish their science project, the SAT is the most reliable method admissions people have to distinguish between candidates right now.

Pray tell, how would you do it, given limited time, resources, and reliability of the evidence?

P.S. I am officially retiring from board pissing matches. So keep it clean.

 

That's the problem. The SAT isn't that reliable and many colleges are moving away from it.

Sure, it should be included in the mix when colleges evaluate students along with their grades, the quality of the schools they attended and extra-curricular activities, but it certainly shouldn't be used as the only criteria or even the main one.

That really isn't what I was talking about anyway. We have government mandates at the national and state level forcing schools to put more and more weight on standardized testing at all levels. This is to be the means for evaluating not only students, but teachers as well, which is idiotic.

Education used to be focused on memorization. Students didn't interact with knowledge, they just shoved it into their brains and tried to hold on to it. In other words, they may remember it for a while, but they don't really own the information.

Fortunately, many educators have learned that there is a better way. Learning isn't enough. Students have to understand for their lessons to be useful. They also have to develop critical thinking skills. Students should not just be learning information in elementary and secondary schools. They should be learning how to learn.

For example, if a kid asks how to spell a word or what it means, don't tell him. Tell him how to find out for himself. He is then more likely to retain what he finds and he has learned a basic skill that will help him going forward.

So what does standardized testing do? It pushes teaching back in the direction of memorization, away from creating real understanding and development of critical thinking skills. It forces bad teaching.

 

OOP, we're pretty much 99.9 percent in agreement here. My wife is an elementary school teacher, so a lot of what I think about education comes from her. Nothing drives her crazier than the teachers who distribute worksheets from workbooks and call it a day. Like you say, she tries to stress critical thinking and creativity. Of course, these are hard things to measure. I think, as standardized tests go, the graduate school exams like the LSAT and the MCAT do it better than the pre-undergraduate standardized tests. But even those tests are learnable, though from what I understand the MCAT does a pretty good job of measuring a wide array of knowledge.

I've read about some schools moving away from the SAT, though from what I understand, a big part of that reason is because weighing it too heavily discriminates against minorities. (For example, at the graduate school level, it is my understanding that Stanford and Berkeley emphasize GPA over LSAT for law school applicants for largely the same reason).

I just think that grades, quality of your high school, and extracurricular activities are all subjective/manipulatable or both. What if one applicant is a state champion violinist but did little else? What if the other applicant played three sports and served as a page editor of the school newspaper? What weighs more heavily? GPAs are almost a joke at this point. You have 90 percent of a class at top high schools finishing with above a 4.0. It's getting ridiculous. You have classes with dozens of valedictorians.

Do I think the SAT is flawed as an admissions factor? Yes.

But I think that it is the only common ground among thousands upon thousands of applicants for admissions offices with limited time and resources.

 

More and more it is not common ground. Kaplan's SAT Prep offerings range from $500 (basic SAT prep) to $799 (SAT and ACT) to $4,999 (tutoring). So the test has become not a measure of intelligence but a very limited indicator of how well-versed one is in obscure word analogies and specific test-taking skills. A whole lot of kids who are very smart simply don't do well in a test environment, and a whole lot of parents whose kids are very smart can't afford the classes.

 

I think one of the best ways to make the nation's students smarter and better thinkers would be to require 1-2 year of philosophy/critical thinking/logic in high school. A lot of the issue isn't that kids are necessarily dumber, it's that they don't know how to think well.

 

Yeah. Hell, make it a requirement on par with foreign language. I sure would have benefited more from a formal logic course than three years of French. My experience has been that the most impressive people I've met, intellectually, were either philosophy or economics majors in college. I think that there's a stigma to philosophy - that it's the major for long-haired hippies smoking dope in an apartment with nine dudes living in it. And it certainly attracts that crowd to a degree. But I bet outside of hard science and math majors (and I'll include econ in that group), it is probably about the most academically rigorous discipline there is. And most versatile, because it teaches the most important skill of all: How to think.

 

Bingo.

 

Exactly. And there are high schools that offer SAT prep as part of their curriculum. Mine did it.

The SAT is a measure of how well you are fed the right type of information and test-taking skills, not intelligence. I should know. I was well prepared and I always had a knack for taking tests and I scored very high and we all know I'm not that bright.