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

Great idea, Dre, but start teaching the logic sooner. Fifth grade seems about right.

Oh, GPA does not mean jack shit anymore, The SAT and ACT hold the weight. It's the only common ground between schools.

A C today is like a D or an F 30 years ago, and that is at the scholastic level, not the college level.

 

I'd like to see as much of it taught for as long as possible. Just knowing how hard it is to introduce new standards into public school, I figured I'd start off small with 1-2 years.

I consider this board to have a higher level of discourse than most public settings (most of the time), and even here the lack of logic used is pretty staggering at times.

 

My J-School was in your conference, not to get too specific. The school did some good things with advanced classes, but it also wasted a lot of your time. I won't say everyone discouraged working at the school paper, but I came away disillusioned with many aspects of the program. I also made the mistake of thinking too much in terms of internships and not enough in other senses of writing, my own mistake. Nonetheless, it left me with the feeling that classes didn't to enough to facilitate good reporting.

Note: I really liked the MSU campus the few times I went there.

 

For those who might be interested, here's a relatively timely article on the test-prep industry in China. It likely as not is touching on a dynamic that is in play elsewhere as well.

http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/11_20/b4228058558042.htm

 

I had some limited experience with Kaplan because I was going to teach for them (they pay like $25/hour - some of the test prep companies pay up to $50/hour if you reach the 99th percentile on a standardized entrance exam). Ultimately, it was just way too much work outside of the classroom to get started, so I dropped out of the training. But it was my impression, from the techniques they were teaching which seemed pretty basic, that a lot of the test prep courses aim to get 50th percentiles up to the 70th. That type of thing. I didn't get the impression that they were the place to go for people who wanted to lift themselves from Dartmouth to Harvard. Or from State U (non-Virginia/Berkeley/UNC/Michigan category) to Ivy League.

Anyway, anything you can get out of a test prep course you can get from the books - the right books - that are available commercially. You just have to be a self-starter.

(Side note: I remember my mom used to battle me big-time on preparing for the SAT, but I never would. I knew that we couldn't afford more than in-state school tuition anyway, so I didn't feel incentivized at all once Missouri and Northwestern were clearly off the table. Of course, scholarships were of no consequence to me at the time because: (1) That was four years down the road, a lifetime; (2) I was going to make tons of money anyway because I was a young f-ing stud sports writer.)

Although I don't think any of that changes OOP's and others' main objection to standardized college entrance exams: That they basically only measure how well you can take that particular test.

 

People studied for the SAT? WTF???
Read a few newspapers every day. Oh, wait...