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Typically, non-literary texts are NOT intended to be “complex” in terms of the ACT criteria.  In STEM subjects like Physics there is no desire to be ambiguous. STEM students are perfectly suited for College work if they can understand the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post or New York Times level of English, as long as they know and understand Algebra, single-variable Calculus and Wave-Particle Duality. 

According to Menand’s “The Marketplace of Ideas” (2010), less than 1% of college students plan to major in Mathematics, so 45% ready for college Math would seem to be more than enough to cover all those planning to major in STEM majors.  Why should there be an expectation that a English major be able to do much with Math?

Even some literary texts like:
 
* Orwell’s “Animal Farm”
* Orwell’s “1984″
* Huxley’s “Brave New World”
* Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale”
* Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″
* Zamyatin’s “We”.
 
are meant to be clear to the 9th grader (or earlier), with definitely a clear purpose, though there are deeper of levels of meaning.  You do not need to know the story of the Russian Revolution to understand Orwell’s point. In fact, the attempt to match the allegory to real events tends to detract. 

You do not need to know that Atwood has set her story in and around a Harvard of the future, with various stores, college buildings and a wall that are identifiable landmarks.  The idea that she was inspired by the Harvard English Department’s politics is not a prereq, but it is an amusing idea.   You don’t need to know the story of Eichmann’s minutes of a certain meeting to appreciate a certain aspect of the novel. These added bits add spice to the novel and its message.

On the literary front, it would appear that English professors are often incapable of understanding “complex texts”. They often only seem capable of mystifying or confusing meaning, by generating various competing and contradictory meanings for “complex texts”.  Some seem devoted to making what seems like a simple and ordinary text into a “complex text”.  Didn’t Derrida spend 65 pages discussing the meaning of the word “yes” in a particular text?   I wonder how English professors would score on the ACT test?  Would they have difficulty completing it with their overly elaborate interpretations?

Most of the test-takers do intend to go to college, David, yes (these days about 70 percent of all high school graduates go to some post-secondary institution).  A few states, though, are expanding the pool by having all seniors take the test.

And it is not true that “Typically non-literary texts are NOT intended to be ‘complex’ in terms of the ACT criteria.”  Texts from philosophy, law, science, etc. also fall into the complex field.  Remember, too, that reading tests are no longer literary-based.  The NAEP reading test for 12th graders, for instance, is now 70 percent informational text.

I took Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Computer Science courses in college, and the reading that I had to do in first year was not “complex texts” as described in the ACT criteria in the article. The textbooks and professors were all trying to be clear and straightforward, they were not trying to be ambiguous, intricate, subtle, elaborate, unconventional,  involved or  deeply embedded. 

The key problem was that in college you were now expected to remember and apply the high school material and add to it at 10 times or more the high school pace. You needed to have the focus and pay attention and absorb 10 times or more of new material/hour, plus you needed to have absorbed correctly the material in the previous classes. Many, including the best students, had been trained by high school to be mentally lazy, to switch off, to zone out, but now that needed to change. Also, back in those days there wasn’t the hand-holding and spoon-feeding that had occurred in high school.

Instead of having each class consist of some tiny bit of knowledge that was repeated and practiced repeatedly through the class (and maybe several classes), it was a constant flow of new knowledge. To exaggerate, it was drinking from an intellectual fire-hose. If you didn’t focus for long periods of time, you didn’t succeed. The lack of readiness was the lack of focus, discipline and ability to absorb (either in the class or from reading your notes and the textbook), or at least the ability to quickly adapt to the new pace. In most, if not all the above courses, you needed to be comfortable with Algebra and Calculus, as well as easily follow an extended logical argument, typically mathematical in nature.

Another aspect of those classes, in those days, was the amount of time and thought you had to spend on the problem sets. You were not given an algorithm, cookbook, or “turn the crank” methodology. You had to stretch your mind from what had happened in class to applying it to the problems. This was time-consuming and stressful, but I assume it helped trained our minds for the challenges ahead. But I wouldn’t be able to solve a simple pendulum problem today.

It seems unlikely that a multiple choice standardized test, especially one with a whole test prep industry, would be able to make an accurate assessment of these factors. Though certainly if you can’t get past the standardized test you are unlikely to manage the hurdles that I have described.

Training the mind not to be lazy needs to occur much earlier in the educational process, but given the problems with basic literacy, it seems unlikely to occur.

A complex text like “Paradise Lost” has repeatedly shown that English professors have problems with “complex texts”.

The inability to understand Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is nicely exemplified by Stanley Fish’s “Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost” (1967), which teaches us (in my interpretation of the book) that Reason (or Logic) is the Devil’s Snare.  More importantly, it teaches us that a complete newcomer to Milton, as Fish was, can show that all others were wrong, which is quite an achievement since you would think that at least Milton’s contemporaries would have understood him. Fish’s interpretation was at least for a time the dominant American one, especially if one excludes those academics of the Ancien Régime.

In 1972, Fish came out with “Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature”, which I summarize as “Literature that deliberately demonstrates the opposite of what it superficially appears to be attempting to argue, or Ironic Self-Destructing Arguments” or “Authors are tricky, devious devils”. But whether this is a result of the religious wars, conflicts and heresies of the time is not explored. Again, it appears that everyone else was wrong or had missed this key aspect.

In 2008, Peter C. Herman’s “Destabilizing Milton: ‘Paradise lost’ and the poetics of incertitude” seems to shift the focus to Milton’s politics, while seeming to require one to have read several of Stanley Fish’s books including ones not directly about Milton. He gives some emphasis to Milton’s role as a writer of radical religious and political polemics and later propaganda for the Commonwealth dictatorship, including justification of the Regicide (Charles I getting tried and beheaded). A track record that caused him to go into hiding when Charles II was restored.

The need to get past the Royal Censor in Restoration England along with Milton’s politics and disappointment with the evolution of the Commonwealth are seen as factors in Milton’s choices regarding his poem of rebellion against an absolute monarch (Cromwell as Satan making very convincing, logical, reasonable arguments about democratic ideals to his Parliament of devils, and Charles I as God, but with a different ending).

Also, the political and religious assumptions and experiences of the readers are seen as resulting in different interpretations. Ex-Parliamentarians and Royalists would read the same words, but understand different things. Oxford University became the Royalist base during the English Civil War, so anything published would see things with Royalist eyes, so what we would read as logical, reasonable, idealistic Democracy, would have been read as treasonous, heretical, absurd, pure evil (I may be reading more into this than was actually written, so read the book for yourself).

One is left with the impression that one needs to have read and remembered quite a bit to have even a chance of understanding “Paradise Lost” and in the end what is the point of a poetical rehash of the English Civil War for American students? One is better off reading Orwell or the others.

How well will top ACT scorers do with “Paradise Lost”, without having the opportunity to read at least some of the interpretive literature or the some of the literature on interpretive techniques?

I.A. Richard’s “Practical Criticism” (1929) nicely demonstrates that even with elite private school training, elite Cambridge undergraduates could not evaluate poetry correctly if they were not given extraneous information that would help them give the “right answer”, like the title and author of the poem.

The “New Criticism” seems to have been a major step forward in mystifying English ;-). A context free, pure text, analytical algorithm geared to allowing poorly trained professors (see Gerald Graff’s “Professing Literature” on its great value in reducing the requirements for learning or understanding by instructors) to generate ambiguity, intricacy and confusion out of Modern English. Of course, they were helped out by those deliberately attempting to be obscure. For example, the new Mandarins as described by Cyril Connolly in “The Enemies of Promise”. Later fads resulted in further deterioration.

You may be right, but note that even average students are going to college straight out of high school (70% of high school grads do so), so in order to prevent the dropout rate from going up, we’re going to need more complex-text training in junior and senior year.

What kind of technical support is available to students?

Technical support is probably limited to whatever the instructor provides – unless their university is actually providing the service. 

Ryan, thanks for sharing this. I have used WordPress for years but only recently started to recognize its potential when I redesigned my own site. The plugins are simply fantastic!  Unfortunately, my institution uses a program called emma which is required by the department; I could house my course materials on my own website, but students would still have to go to emma for other required elements such as the departmental-wide portfolio grading.  Some instructors, myself included, are trying to find ways to let students publish their own wordpress sites to house their portfolios instead of the departmental-portfolio project housed in emma (which students no longer use after passing first-year composition coursework). If that happens, then I would be in a better position to experiment with something like this. Thanks again!

I am a huge fan of Scholarpress but discovered that WordPress 3.3.1 seems to have broken the SPCourseare plugin. It’s is a superb environment for both WP nd multiuser sites and I am sorely missing it.