To the Editor:
I concur with Michael Mendillo ("Stop Letting High-School Courses Count for College Credit," The Chronicle, January 1). I'd add the following:
The issue is part of a much broader trend of portfolio development, or embellishment, starting as early as kindergarten. Admittedly, we as professors have also watered down many college courses and have inflated grades to appease entering students. Students increasingly arrive in college with high grade expectations, weak academic backgrounds, and poor study skills. They have been put into AP courses without having completed the basic course in a discipline as a prerequisite. If and when we persuade a student with an AP score of 4 or 5 to retake its equivalent honors level in college, very rarely does that student earn a grade of A or B.
Most AP-science teachers in high school have master's degrees in education, suggesting that they must have struggled with their own science courses in college. They have not by and large contributed to the scholarly advancement of their proclaimed field. Had they been among the top students in college, they would have most probably opted to complete medical, dental, or Ph.D. programs instead. Teaching about atoms, molecules, and life processes without having investigated any of these topics in a scholarly fashion calls to mind a preacher who, metaphorically speaking, never prays himself but scorns his parishioners for not praying.
Parents who hope their children will enter private K-12 schools in Manhattan, for instance, subject them to a battery of tests and psychological analyses, essays, and interviews; when the children are enrolled in such programs, parents are elated to pay as much as $60,000 a year for tuition and fees. An increasing number of elite high-school students enroll in three-year "research" courses where the stressed student carries the burden of finding a mentor elsewhere. Most research professors and scholars shy away from accepting such students, because of liability, lack of priority, or financial and space limitations.
In cases where a student can successfully secure a mentor, primarily through family contacts, the mentor-student interaction remains limited because of the student's underpreparedness and lack of time. If such research project yields accolades for the student as a co-author or an award, the school district would immediately jump on the wagon to take credit for it.
The bottom line for most people nowadays is how impressively they come across on paper and in face-to-face encounters with an interviewer. The commitment to develop depth and breadth of knowledge and intellectual skills for generating or synthesizing new ideas takes a back seat. Would it not be a novel idea if the K-12 system shifted its paradigm to teaching the basics of study skills, English, mathematics, science, and social studies? This should eliminate the need for the remediation of those core topics in the first two years of college, thereby enhancing the number of students who graduate in four years, as well as our global competitiveness.
David N. Rahni
Professor of Chemistry
Pace University
New York
