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>“The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having troubl

>“The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.” Are the standards to get into university that low?

SergioAlonso09 4y ago
[dead]
throwaway1777 4y ago
If standards are this low we need English requirements in university more than ever.
xenon7 4y ago
Yes. I'm guessing it's because nearly every American needs to go to college nowadays (sure, there are other options, but college is the most practical) and as a result they had to lower standards. I mean, I've heard that some universities don't even require SAT/ACT scores anymore. That doesn't mean that "prestigious" universities don't exist, but generally speaking they've really dumbed-down things a lot.
- justinator 4y ago
  Even 20 years ago, I had a class that was struggling to get through the introduction of a book. We spent a few weeks on it. I became frustrated and just checked the book out of the library and read it entirely one afternoon. It took me awhile to realize that what most of the class were struggling with was not a grasp of the English language per-se, but the overwhelmingly majority of people in the class were dyslexic. And because of that, they were in an art and design college.
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    …if they had dyscalculia, they'd be studying elementary ed.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  The college diploma is yet another victim of Goodhart's law.
- watwut 4y ago
  42.1% of American 18- to 24-year-olds are enrolled in college or graduate school https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics
  - xenon7 4y ago
    It's really that low? Ah, my bad. That's surprising to me.
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      And 41% is just enrollment -- many will never finish. Maybe 30% of the US actually holds any sort of degree.
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
When I graduated university, it was very clear to me that my peers couldn't communicate adequately at that time. A lot of essays are effectively cheated on and the students are taught mostly to pad as opposed to have serious consideration and thought on the literature. None of this contributes to mastering structure or craft in any way. There's a lot of pressure to graduate students by parents/the board/local government, especially in highschool, especially when English is continually marginalized as a field of study. Where do you, an English teacher at highschool, get off failing a rising star athlete, young mathematician, engineering passionate, or any number of categories that is "worth more" than the capacity to read and write intelligently?
jakeinspace 4y ago
To be fair, I found that an extremely tedious book, probably my least favorite required high school reading.
siva7 4y ago
Standards can also act as a gatekeeper, discriminating against the underprivileged. So i'm glad that everyone gets the same chance, if rich or poor.
- Ambolia 4y ago
  I suppose this is trolling, but if it's not everybody doesn't really "get a change", you are just turning an english major into a different thing while keeping the name and trying to keep the prestige, though that won't last for long.
- CrazyStat 4y ago
  > So i'm glad that everyone gets the same chance, if rich or poor. They don't, though? > The median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.8% of students at Harvard came from a poor family but became a rich adult. From a NYTimes analysis [1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/harvard-university https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
alistairSH 4y ago
And that's at Harvard! Wow. "The Scarlet Latter" was an 11th grade book for me. I remember it being a typical difficulty level as other pre-20th century literature - reading and understanding it was work, but not unusually so.
bell-cot 4y ago
Important context - that quote is attributed thus: "Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor". Harvard's admission standards are seldom criticized for being too low. Though one might ask whether the struggling students were ones admitted on the basis of academic merit, vs. family connections...
- modernpink 4y ago
  Not to mention __________ ______.
  - CrazyStat 4y ago
    Student athletes?
    - econonut 4y ago
      Affirmative action.
      - CrazyStat 4y ago
        Major donors?
        econonut 4y ago
        My extensive hangman experience leads me to believe that's not what the commenter is suggesting.
        Apocryphon 4y ago
        Legacy admissions?
      - bell-cot 4y ago
        Admitting that it's been [cough] decades since I was anywhere near an English Lit. course...even back then, the workloads (hours/week of required reading) were notorious. Similar for the lackluster job market for English Lit. majors. That does not sound like a combination to attract many marginally-qualified students, regardless of affirmative action.
browningstreet 4y ago
Based on my son's freshman year at a big university, all the 101 and 102 classes assume no prior knowledge, of almost anything. Grammar, the desktop/filesystem metaphor (which, I'm told, a whole lot of students still didn't understand even after spend a couple of classes on these basics), what a cell is, and in physics classes... what a proton is. Just to name a few examples.
- 98codes 4y ago
  We can thank iOS and Android for the death of desktop/filesystem knowledge for people at large. Universities will need to start requiring a General Computing course to close that gap, if they aren't already.
codeulike 4y ago
For context, the Scarlet Letter is pretty annoying. Halfway through each of these sentences I feel myself losing patience A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
- kemayo 4y ago
  Definitely a pain if you're trying to teach it in a sentence-diagramming kind of way. That said, I kind of wonder why you'd be bothering to do that unless the kids are literally not able to understand what's being said and you need to work through it from first principles. (Which I guess is possible? That all reads as a bit of a ramble but perfectly understandable, particularly if you read it out loud.) For my part, I've never once in my academic career had to explicitly identify sentence parts.
pdntspa 4y ago
A lot of pre-20th century writing is absolutely awful. Long, pretentious, rambling run-on sentences and authors seemingly in love with the sound of their own voice. My biggest complaint with old books is I want them to STFU and get to the point!
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Leo Tolstoy would like a word with you.
  - randcraw 4y ago
    Or several.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Funnily enough, it kind of applies to this article too.
- rawgabbit 4y ago
  I agree. Scarlet Letter is an example on how not to write. It is steam of consciousness without a modicum of merit. I don't think I learned anything from it. I read half of the book and was completely lost on what the author was trying to say. Maybe that was the author's point. But the writing is god awful. Below is a passage where the dude who got Hester pregnant confessed? Or is it her husband who felt cheated? Uggh. Who cares. “Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the pit, or say rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy, on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness. I,—a man of thought,—the book-worm of great libraries,—a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge,— what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girl’s fantasy! Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people. Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path!”
pclmulqdq 4y ago
Yes they are. Kids in lower schools are generally not taught how to read or write well at all. When they do read books, the books are either distilled into key ideas in class (so you don't really have to read them aside from the occasional quiz) or very easy reading material. When they write, it's usually a "5-paragraph" essay that is more about regurgitating the distilled points than any form of original thought. That is, if they don't cheat on the essay. I recently did an MBA program (yes, pile on the hate) where the average student I worked with had a very hard time reading complex documents or stringing together sentences to form a coherent argument. They even struggled to read reports from consulting companies, which are full of pictures and written in very plain grammar, so I doubt most could tackle "Ulysses," "The Wasteland," or "The Scarlet Letter." By the way, I think this is why the PG writing style is popular - it's very easy to understand the words and sentences, so you can convey an idea to a lot of people, albeit in a not-very-nuanced way. It also makes it fairly easy to write an argument - there is no flowery language around to distract you from the fact that you are saying nothing. A lot of people attribute this to the fact that there are a lot of people who have English as a second language or speak a different dialect of English (Indian English is very common), but I'm not so sure. I have often found that many non-native speakers actually have larger vocabularies and a better understanding of grammar than typical native speakers.
SL61 4y ago
Based on my experience in a liberal arts program in a state school, yes. Professors can't assume the students learned anything in high school, so it takes a few semesters just to get the students to a college level. A lot of students graduated with nothing more than a passing knowledge of their subject because they took so long just to catch up. Many students in the US are working full-time while seeking their degree, so they don't have a ton of time to study or write papers. Most professors understand this and assign a less-demanding load. Another factor that I strongly suspect but can't prove: You have to have a college degree for most jobs, so professors feel like they're hurting a student's future prospects when they give a bad grade. Keep in mind I'm talking about state schools - I would expect Harvard to be better!
- kjellsbells 4y ago
  I'm sure I'm just an old curmudgeon, but when I heard that undergrads were using ChatGPT to write essays my first instinct was to wonder how university standards had gotten so low that a generated essay would not simply be dismissed as a feeble attempt. 500 words on the Thirty Years War generated by an AI and submitted by a high schooler I could understand. But arent college standards higher?
  - notafraudster 4y ago
    It depends on the college. I have two friends who are professors in the same subject (a humanities-ish subject that is reading/writing heavy). One is a professor at a low end CSU. The way she describes her students is roughly high school level; they struggle with tasks like writing a 2-3 page, 3-point, sandwich-style essay. They struggle with reading primary source material. Her senior students typically seem to have the kind of skills I would expect of a college freshman. Many students have severe life disrupting issues (rehab and court are common). Deadlines seem to mostly be a suggestion. The other is a professor, again in the same subject, at a relatively well ranked and famous north eastern liberal arts college. The way he describes his students is that they engage, handle very dense primary source readings, and that many of them are on track for grad school or law school. I am not sure what he assigns them as final assignments, but I would assume 10-20 page final papers are not uncommon. He's never mentioned anything about behavioural issues, though like every other professor he notes that accommodations/mental health stuff is worse than it used to be. I also thought "boy, ChatGPT seems to be closer to what was expected of me in 10th grade English than it does to any university course I ever took", and frankly I went to a mediocre Canadian university and didn't really go to a competitive world class university until my PhD. So it's possible that the push towards everyone has going to colleges has created greater stratification from college to college. The CSU system's mandate is to serve the underserved, so it's probably not a stretch to say many of the people in my colleague's classes wouldn't have gotten into college without an explicit effort to make a college for them.
dkarl 4y ago
My father taught at a local state university, nowhere near state flagship level but still a "university" in name, and he occasionally had kids in class who were close to functionally illiterate. His reading for the semester was very light (something you would get through in a competitive university in a week) but from helping kids who came to his office he could tell it would have been a hundred hours of reading for some of them, even if they skipped all the words they didn't know. I think I approve of letting every kid take a crack at college. If they graduate high school, there should be a school somewhere that gives them a chance. The problem is that if they aren't ready, there's no place they can go. They can't go back to their old high school and demand to be taught what the teachers pretended to teach them. The best they can do is take remedial reading classes at the university, borrowing money to learn what their local schools were supposed to teach them for free. Most (maybe all?) of the kids like this that my dad encountered came from rural schools where you have a similar range of preparedness and home situations that you see in an urban setting, but you only have enough kids the same age to fill one or two classrooms. A teacher can't personalize the curriculum for every single student, so a kid who falls significantly behind will, after a certain point, no longer receive a meaningful amount of instruction, because the curriculum that's appropriate for the bulk of the class is beyond what they can engage with. Schools that recognize the unfairness of failing a kid that they're not even teaching tend to pass these kids along from grade to grade and then graduate them, and it's hard to fault them for it. If you think of instructional level as a spectrum from remedial to advanced, rural schools only have the resources to cover the middle part of that spectrum where 90-95% of their students are. All they can do for the rest is give them an apology and a diploma.
- notafraudster 4y ago
  A lot of colleges now have what amount to transition classes for high school kids who can't hack it in college. The upside of these is that they seem to actually help students who went to shitty high schools or who needed a change of environment. The downside is that typically they don't count for credit but they still cost money.
  - bitwize 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cafard 4y ago
The impression that I get from my brother, who teaches as an adjunct at a couple of state schools in the Midwest, is that yes the standards are that low.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
>"having trouble identifying the subject and the verb" In my experience English class was primarily about reading literature with the goal of teaching morals and values. There was very little information about the structure of the English language. I actually learned far more about grammar, syntax, articles, etc. through learning Spanish.
imbnwa 4y ago
My Philosphy 101 was me having a conversation with the grad student lecturer over Plato's dialogues. After class one day, this STEM student, likely taking the course for the easy credit as I don't believe anyone failed the course, asked me "How do you read this stuff?" in what I interpreted as a mixed tone of condescension ("why would you read this stuff") and surprise ("how do you read this stuff"). Luckily for me I competed in high school policy debate where I learned (the hard way, by losing a lot) how to assess text within the framework of constraints it implies, as well as how to challenge those specific constraints. Lotta people can't do that and end either up being that person in a philosophy course going on a long, idiosyncratic rant that's based on word associations they're making, or just remain silent and merely endure the course for the credit.
disambiguation 4y ago
>Are the standards to get into university that low? Universities aren't what they used to be. In the modern world everyone has access to college, no one is denied, and it has become a necessity to get a degree. Something as simple as running a daycare requires several degrees or credentials in order to be competitive. [1] In short, today you must pay an exorbitant sum of time and money for credentials simply to have access to the labor market. [2] [1] https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/certifications-for-daycare-workers https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/certifica... [2] https://www.thoughtco.com/indulgences-their-role-in-the-reformation-1221776 https://www.thoughtco.com/indulgences-their-role-in-the-refo...

SergioAlonso09 4y ago

[dead]

throwaway1777 4y ago

If standards are this low we need English requirements in university more than ever.

xenon7 4y ago

Yes. I'm guessing it's because nearly every American needs to go to college nowadays (sure, there are other options, but college is the most practical) and as a result they had to lower standards. I mean, I've heard that some universities don't even require SAT/ACT scores anymore. That doesn't mean that "prestigious" universities don't exist, but generally speaking they've really dumbed-down things a lot.

justinator 4y ago
Even 20 years ago, I had a class that was struggling to get through the introduction of a book. We spent a few weeks on it. I became frustrated and just checked the book out of the library and read it entirely one afternoon. It took me awhile to realize that what most of the class were struggling with was not a grasp of the English language per-se, but the overwhelmingly majority of people in the class were dyslexic. And because of that, they were in an art and design college.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  …if they had dyscalculia, they'd be studying elementary ed.
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
The college diploma is yet another victim of Goodhart's law.
watwut 4y ago
42.1% of American 18- to 24-year-olds are enrolled in college or graduate school https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics
- xenon7 4y ago
  It's really that low? Ah, my bad. That's surprising to me.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    And 41% is just enrollment -- many will never finish. Maybe 30% of the US actually holds any sort of degree.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago

When I graduated university, it was very clear to me that my peers couldn't communicate adequately at that time. A lot of essays are effectively cheated on and the students are taught mostly to pad as opposed to have serious consideration and thought on the literature. None of this contributes to mastering structure or craft in any way. There's a lot of pressure to graduate students by parents/the board/local government, especially in highschool, especially when English is continually marginalized as a field of study. Where do you, an English teacher at highschool, get off failing a rising star athlete, young mathematician, engineering passionate, or any number of categories that is "worth more" than the capacity to read and write intelligently?

jakeinspace 4y ago

To be fair, I found that an extremely tedious book, probably my least favorite required high school reading.

siva7 4y ago

Standards can also act as a gatekeeper, discriminating against the underprivileged. So i'm glad that everyone gets the same chance, if rich or poor.

Ambolia 4y ago
I suppose this is trolling, but if it's not everybody doesn't really "get a change", you are just turning an english major into a different thing while keeping the name and trying to keep the prestige, though that won't last for long.
CrazyStat 4y ago
> So i'm glad that everyone gets the same chance, if rich or poor. They don't, though? > The median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.8% of students at Harvard came from a poor family but became a rich adult. From a NYTimes analysis [1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/harvard-university https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

alistairSH 4y ago

And that's at Harvard! Wow. "The Scarlet Latter" was an 11th grade book for me. I remember it being a typical difficulty level as other pre-20th century literature - reading and understanding it was work, but not unusually so.

bell-cot 4y ago

Important context - that quote is attributed thus: "Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor". Harvard's admission standards are seldom criticized for being too low. Though one might ask whether the struggling students were ones admitted on the basis of academic merit, vs. family connections...

modernpink 4y ago
Not to mention __________ ______.
- CrazyStat 4y ago
  Student athletes?
  - econonut 4y ago
    Affirmative action.
    - CrazyStat 4y ago
      Major donors?
      - econonut 4y ago
        My extensive hangman experience leads me to believe that's not what the commenter is suggesting.
        Apocryphon 4y ago
        Legacy admissions?
    - bell-cot 4y ago
      Admitting that it's been [cough] decades since I was anywhere near an English Lit. course...even back then, the workloads (hours/week of required reading) were notorious. Similar for the lackluster job market for English Lit. majors. That does not sound like a combination to attract many marginally-qualified students, regardless of affirmative action.

browningstreet 4y ago

Based on my son's freshman year at a big university, all the 101 and 102 classes assume no prior knowledge, of almost anything. Grammar, the desktop/filesystem metaphor (which, I'm told, a whole lot of students still didn't understand even after spend a couple of classes on these basics), what a cell is, and in physics classes... what a proton is. Just to name a few examples.

98codes 4y ago
We can thank iOS and Android for the death of desktop/filesystem knowledge for people at large. Universities will need to start requiring a General Computing course to close that gap, if they aren't already.

codeulike 4y ago

For context, the Scarlet Letter is pretty annoying. Halfway through each of these sentences I feel myself losing patience A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

kemayo 4y ago
Definitely a pain if you're trying to teach it in a sentence-diagramming kind of way. That said, I kind of wonder why you'd be bothering to do that unless the kids are literally not able to understand what's being said and you need to work through it from first principles. (Which I guess is possible? That all reads as a bit of a ramble but perfectly understandable, particularly if you read it out loud.) For my part, I've never once in my academic career had to explicitly identify sentence parts.

pdntspa 4y ago

A lot of pre-20th century writing is absolutely awful. Long, pretentious, rambling run-on sentences and authors seemingly in love with the sound of their own voice. My biggest complaint with old books is I want them to STFU and get to the point!

AlbertCory 4y ago
Leo Tolstoy would like a word with you.
- randcraw 4y ago
  Or several.
jacooper 4y ago
Funnily enough, it kind of applies to this article too.
rawgabbit 4y ago
I agree. Scarlet Letter is an example on how not to write. It is steam of consciousness without a modicum of merit. I don't think I learned anything from it. I read half of the book and was completely lost on what the author was trying to say. Maybe that was the author's point. But the writing is god awful. Below is a passage where the dude who got Hester pregnant confessed? Or is it her husband who felt cheated? Uggh. Who cares. “Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the pit, or say rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy, on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness. I,—a man of thought,—the book-worm of great libraries,—a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge,— what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girl’s fantasy! Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people. Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path!”

pclmulqdq 4y ago

Yes they are. Kids in lower schools are generally not taught how to read or write well at all. When they do read books, the books are either distilled into key ideas in class (so you don't really have to read them aside from the occasional quiz) or very easy reading material. When they write, it's usually a "5-paragraph" essay that is more about regurgitating the distilled points than any form of original thought. That is, if they don't cheat on the essay. I recently did an MBA program (yes, pile on the hate) where the average student I worked with had a very hard time reading complex documents or stringing together sentences to form a coherent argument. They even struggled to read reports from consulting companies, which are full of pictures and written in very plain grammar, so I doubt most could tackle "Ulysses," "The Wasteland," or "The Scarlet Letter." By the way, I think this is why the PG writing style is popular - it's very easy to understand the words and sentences, so you can convey an idea to a lot of people, albeit in a not-very-nuanced way. It also makes it fairly easy to write an argument - there is no flowery language around to distract you from the fact that you are saying nothing. A lot of people attribute this to the fact that there are a lot of people who have English as a second language or speak a different dialect of English (Indian English is very common), but I'm not so sure. I have often found that many non-native speakers actually have larger vocabularies and a better understanding of grammar than typical native speakers.

SL61 4y ago

Based on my experience in a liberal arts program in a state school, yes. Professors can't assume the students learned anything in high school, so it takes a few semesters just to get the students to a college level. A lot of students graduated with nothing more than a passing knowledge of their subject because they took so long just to catch up. Many students in the US are working full-time while seeking their degree, so they don't have a ton of time to study or write papers. Most professors understand this and assign a less-demanding load. Another factor that I strongly suspect but can't prove: You have to have a college degree for most jobs, so professors feel like they're hurting a student's future prospects when they give a bad grade. Keep in mind I'm talking about state schools - I would expect Harvard to be better!

kjellsbells 4y ago
I'm sure I'm just an old curmudgeon, but when I heard that undergrads were using ChatGPT to write essays my first instinct was to wonder how university standards had gotten so low that a generated essay would not simply be dismissed as a feeble attempt. 500 words on the Thirty Years War generated by an AI and submitted by a high schooler I could understand. But arent college standards higher?
- notafraudster 4y ago
  It depends on the college. I have two friends who are professors in the same subject (a humanities-ish subject that is reading/writing heavy). One is a professor at a low end CSU. The way she describes her students is roughly high school level; they struggle with tasks like writing a 2-3 page, 3-point, sandwich-style essay. They struggle with reading primary source material. Her senior students typically seem to have the kind of skills I would expect of a college freshman. Many students have severe life disrupting issues (rehab and court are common). Deadlines seem to mostly be a suggestion. The other is a professor, again in the same subject, at a relatively well ranked and famous north eastern liberal arts college. The way he describes his students is that they engage, handle very dense primary source readings, and that many of them are on track for grad school or law school. I am not sure what he assigns them as final assignments, but I would assume 10-20 page final papers are not uncommon. He's never mentioned anything about behavioural issues, though like every other professor he notes that accommodations/mental health stuff is worse than it used to be. I also thought "boy, ChatGPT seems to be closer to what was expected of me in 10th grade English than it does to any university course I ever took", and frankly I went to a mediocre Canadian university and didn't really go to a competitive world class university until my PhD. So it's possible that the push towards everyone has going to colleges has created greater stratification from college to college. The CSU system's mandate is to serve the underserved, so it's probably not a stretch to say many of the people in my colleague's classes wouldn't have gotten into college without an explicit effort to make a college for them.

dkarl 4y ago

My father taught at a local state university, nowhere near state flagship level but still a "university" in name, and he occasionally had kids in class who were close to functionally illiterate. His reading for the semester was very light (something you would get through in a competitive university in a week) but from helping kids who came to his office he could tell it would have been a hundred hours of reading for some of them, even if they skipped all the words they didn't know. I think I approve of letting every kid take a crack at college. If they graduate high school, there should be a school somewhere that gives them a chance. The problem is that if they aren't ready, there's no place they can go. They can't go back to their old high school and demand to be taught what the teachers pretended to teach them. The best they can do is take remedial reading classes at the university, borrowing money to learn what their local schools were supposed to teach them for free. Most (maybe all?) of the kids like this that my dad encountered came from rural schools where you have a similar range of preparedness and home situations that you see in an urban setting, but you only have enough kids the same age to fill one or two classrooms. A teacher can't personalize the curriculum for every single student, so a kid who falls significantly behind will, after a certain point, no longer receive a meaningful amount of instruction, because the curriculum that's appropriate for the bulk of the class is beyond what they can engage with. Schools that recognize the unfairness of failing a kid that they're not even teaching tend to pass these kids along from grade to grade and then graduate them, and it's hard to fault them for it. If you think of instructional level as a spectrum from remedial to advanced, rural schools only have the resources to cover the middle part of that spectrum where 90-95% of their students are. All they can do for the rest is give them an apology and a diploma.

notafraudster 4y ago
A lot of colleges now have what amount to transition classes for high school kids who can't hack it in college. The upside of these is that they seem to actually help students who went to shitty high schools or who needed a change of environment. The downside is that typically they don't count for credit but they still cost money.
- bitwize 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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cafard 4y ago

The impression that I get from my brother, who teaches as an adjunct at a couple of state schools in the Midwest, is that yes the standards are that low.

BitwiseFool 4y ago

>"having trouble identifying the subject and the verb" In my experience English class was primarily about reading literature with the goal of teaching morals and values. There was very little information about the structure of the English language. I actually learned far more about grammar, syntax, articles, etc. through learning Spanish.

imbnwa 4y ago

My Philosphy 101 was me having a conversation with the grad student lecturer over Plato's dialogues. After class one day, this STEM student, likely taking the course for the easy credit as I don't believe anyone failed the course, asked me "How do you read this stuff?" in what I interpreted as a mixed tone of condescension ("why would you read this stuff") and surprise ("how do you read this stuff"). Luckily for me I competed in high school policy debate where I learned (the hard way, by losing a lot) how to assess text within the framework of constraints it implies, as well as how to challenge those specific constraints. Lotta people can't do that and end either up being that person in a philosophy course going on a long, idiosyncratic rant that's based on word associations they're making, or just remain silent and merely endure the course for the credit.

disambiguation 4y ago

>Are the standards to get into university that low? Universities aren't what they used to be. In the modern world everyone has access to college, no one is denied, and it has become a necessity to get a degree. Something as simple as running a daycare requires several degrees or credentials in order to be competitive. [1] In short, today you must pay an exorbitant sum of time and money for credentials simply to have access to the labor market. [2] [1] https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/certifications-for-daycare-workers https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/certifica... [2] https://www.thoughtco.com/indulgences-their-role-in-the-reformation-1221776 https://www.thoughtco.com/indulgences-their-role-in-the-refo...