Kevin Carey’s article from a few weeks back, “How I Aced College — and Why I Now Regret It,” laid out in blank terms how easy it was for him to maneuver his way through general education requirements with minimal effort and still pile up credits and a good record.
Unfortunately, it’s not a singular story. A report has come out from UC-Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education entitled “ENGAGED LEARNING IN A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY: Trends in the Undergraduate Experience. Report on the Results of the 2008 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey” (link provided here).
It reports the results of a 2008 survey of students at the undergrad level throughout the entire UC system. One of the things it did was chart the way in which students spend their time in an average week.
In spite of the general recommendation that full-time undergraduates need to devote around 25 hours per week on out-of-class study, the average for all of them was only 12.8 hours. Social-science majors put in only 11.5 hours, physical science majors 15.1 hours. Students in the humanities logged 11.9 hours (sounds like page counts are down — less War and Peace and more novelettes).
Don’t assume, however, that those who fall in the low end of homework time achieve much less than do those at the higher end. Here is a disturbing sentence from the report: “There is a surprisingly modest relationship between the UC GPA and reported hours studying.” The numbers go like this: Students with a GPA below 2.8 study just about the same amount as do students with grades in the 3.2 to 3.6 range — a little less than 12 hours per week. Those with an A or A- average study only an hour extra per week.
Apparently, the tests and papers UC professors assign don’t discriminate much by the labor students put into them. Nor do the students absorb the belief that they really should put that more time into their studies. Indeed, according to the students themselves, they don’t need to regard their campus time as a full-time job.
Elsewhere in the report we read that students were also asked to rate their own abilities. Here’s what they said: ”Students from all backgrounds reported that their analytical and critical thinking skills increased dramatically between their freshmen and senior years,” and “Women and men reported very good or excellent analytical and critical thinking abilities by their senior year.”
5 Responses to The Breeze Through College
jffoster - February 19, 2010 at 11:56 pm
And if you go to the link Prof. Bauerstein gives us above, and look down the page to the next publication below the one he sites, you’ll find an even worse report — i.e. a good report showing how and why things have gotten worse over the last quarter century or so. Here’s the web address below.http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=350 The article is available in pdf. Here’s the full reference:Brint, Steven 2009 (Dec) The Academic Devolution? Movements to Reform Teaching and Learning in US Colleges and Universities, 1985-2010. Research & Occasional Paper Series: Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education, U of California.
j_martens - March 1, 2010 at 10:10 am
To get another angle on college students’ academic efforts, I looked at their online evaluations of professors. What I saw was equally discouraging:http://www.john-martens.com/universities/Is_students_learning.html
johntoradze - March 1, 2010 at 1:21 pm
I am absolutely certain that the root of the current problems lies in the insistence on instilling a sense of self-esteem as a goal in itself. This has resulted in a generation of spoiled, massively grade-inflated young people who think that if they lift a finger, that means they should be lavished with praise. This is compounded by “admission by wallpaper” to “the best schools”. Having taught at one of those “best schools” I know for a fact that teaching at these schools is also lousy much of the time. I know from experience that pedagogy in sciences often includes tests that have little or nothing to do with lectures or books, in some cases I tested faculty and grad students in the department and they couldn’t get even 25% of the questions right. Small wonder that such students turn to cheating. Like neurotic rats in a cage, students before college are lavished with praise for rolling out of bed, then slapped across the face with a cold dead fish in college. But that cold dead fish is not just a wakeup call, it is often an impossible task that their faculty and TAs can’t do either. There is less of that at community colleges and 4 year institutions, which tend to do a better job of education. The whole system from K-12 BA/BS-PhD has lost its way, and the chickens are coming home to roost at the highest levels. Recently, a simple study comparing abstracts found almost perfect matches in some 9,000 papers, most of those published in the last 15 years. This is the simplest, most brain-dead form of plagiarism, otherwise known as cheating. That study just exposed the tip of the iceberg. We have very serious problems and we had better wake up and deal with them.
marka - March 2, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Spot-on article & comments. As someone who hired ‘graduates,’ I have been appalled at the lack of actual knowledge & skills of the ‘average’ ‘A’ student – more average than A. This is not to say that these students are not as smart — they are perhaps ‘smarter’ than these measures show — but that they don’t have the same basic knowledge or skill base, and definitely not the same discipline. Top 10% students today look much like top 10% students of yesterday, but our grading system doesn’t signal that anymore: an ‘A’ now is not top 10%, but top … quarter? half? Some students are so bright & quick that they can attain top scores regardless of time spent studying. However, most top students in the past achieved through relatively harder work — often time spent. It was OK for most to get Bs, or gentleman Cs – e.g., Senator Kerry & President GW Bush. Not any more – ‘A’ or nothing seems to be the attitude, with parents pressuring universities to give their children their pieces of paper.
mbelvadi - March 3, 2010 at 6:52 am
J martens, that’s a hilarious list (ok, in a laughing-so-I-don’t-cry way). I especially love the “worst teacher” who came to class after surgery. That kind of epitomizes the entire list, I think, along with the one who thought 4-6 hours per week of work out of class was way too much.