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The average college student today

• flappyeagle 2y ago
  Are students failing school at a high rate? Because it sound like they should be
  • pclmulqdq 2y ago
    Schools aren't allowed to have standards for student achievement levels any more. Thus, everyone passes. This is the nash equilibrium of school funding being dependent on "student outcomes." At the college level, rankings also rely heavily on 4- and 6-year graduation rates. Administrators notice that and put pressure on processors not to fail students.
  • lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Not university, but an interesting related post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1jmsp7n/my_6th_grade_student_who_cannot_read_past_a_1st/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1jmsp7n/my_6th_gr...
  • DeathArrow 2y ago
    No, because the university doesn't want to earn less money. The more people the sell diplomas to, the better!
  • tekla 2y ago
    You're not allowed to fail students. My 10th grade teacher friend rants constantly about how parents call his boss demanding he pass their kids who haven't handed in a single piece of homework and failed all exams, and he gets forced to pass them.
• vlan121 2y ago
  'The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.' — ̶S̶̶o̶̶c̶̶r̶̶a̶̶t̶̶e̶̶s̶ ̶ (Kenneth John Freeman, 1907 [thanks to morsch])
  • morsch 2y ago
    Apparently, Kenneth John Freeman, 1907. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/ Careful about bogus “ancient” quotations on this topic, though., the article warns.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • andrepd 2y ago
    Apocryphal and also irrelevant. If someone were to have made an unwarranted criticism in 5th century BCE Athens, that would not invalidate that class of criticism forever through the end of time. Plus, we have hard data about reduced attention spans so this is not even about moral panic.
  • the__alchemist 2y ago
    Note: The author is aware of this comparison (His reference is Gilgamesh). You may still find it relevant.
  • arp242 2y ago
    This is such a boring fallacious argument. Are you seriously suggesting that over the last 2,500 years there have never been any changes to any generation of children/youths due to any circumstances? Of course not; that's a ridiculous preposition. Maybe there's a bit of complaining from old coots throughout the ages, but that doesn't mean there are never any structural problems ever. Maybe there are real problems today. And maybe there were real problems in Socrates' time too. Merely posting this without any thought is just dismissive nonsense. Certainly for the situation today, there are huge changes to how kids are raised. Maybe that has zero effect. Or maybe it does. Either way, whatever Socrates did or didn't say has absolutely no bearing on it.
    • amazingamazing 2y ago
      this post is ironic given that we're talking about an article where a professor is complaining about people's poor reading comprehension. the post you're replying to did not explicitly make any argument, they only quoted someone, and no the quoting of someone with no additional commentary is not an argument - lol
• andrewvc 2y ago
  I can’t tell you how many professors I’ve had this exact conversation with. It’s also clear that kids whose parents restrict phone use seem to have superpowers compared to those that don’t. A good starting point would be fully banning all phones for the entirety of the school day in K-12.
  • gehwartzen 2y ago
    It seems some are. My kid is in 4th grade in a city public school (US) and the district just this year banned all phones, tablets, and smart watches during the school day. We’ll see how it goes.
    • hx8 2y ago
      Are laptops also banned?
      • gehwartzen 2y ago
        No. Not sure what the expectations are for HS kids who use their laptops for classwork.
  • nemo44x 2y ago
    Tiktoking in the bathroom will be the new smoking in the bathroom.
  • jaybrendansmith 2y ago
    This is the ONE THING I wish I had done with my kids. They are both pretty good but the phones did absolutely nothing good for them.
    • rmholt 2y ago
      For what goal? Just for them to get instantly addicted once the ban is lifted? For them to lack any communications with their friends and to be excluded from their social circles discussing the newest tiktoks or whatever? I think you chose well
• nicbou 2y ago
  I'm in my thirties. I remember most of these things being true a decade ago. Engineers in training failed the your/you're test. Some people read, but most people did not. We forget that the same ignorance is the norm among people our age because our paths with those people have split years ago. A lot of the behavioural complaints at the end of this post could have been made about me. I didn't have enough time to care about all the things that were forced down my throat. They seemed pointless anyway. I had mandatory French and photography classes to become a software engineer. I'd have enjoyed those if I wasn't working night shifts at a petrol station to pay for them. It's important to remember that those are very young people, right out of high school. We expect then to have skills they're likely not honing in a no-child-left-behind environment. Above all we expect them to understand the importance of all this, even though they have little to no experience as adults. Perhaps we're just slowly turning into boomers, shaking our fist at "kids these days".
  • like_any_other 2y ago
    > I'm in my thirties. I remember most of these things being true a decade ago. The author has been a professor and teaching for over 30 years. Presumably he would not be writing this if the type and scale of the problem hadn't changed in that time.
    • nicbou 2y ago
      Could it be that the author changed as a person, sees the past with rose-tinted glasses, or fails to recognise that the context changed in the last 30 years?
      • suddenlybananas 2y ago
        That seems less likely. What would motivate that change?
  • SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    Yeah, I have an arts degree and twenty years ago I know there was chronic absenteeism in sociology classes because I was chronically absent in sociology. I also couldn't do all the readings each week because I had both homework and other readings and so I had to be strategic, especially when I needed to start my own readings for all the papers I had to write. It's possible this poor professor's readings end up on people's ignore pile.
• djaouen 2y ago
  I graduated from an Ivy League college with a 3.5 and did everything he mentioned in this article, minus the cheating. Maybe the problem is him? Just sayin’. Edit: I should mention I graduated twenty years ago.
  • readthenotes1 2y ago
    The (unintentional?) irony of this comment is pretty humorous
• patrickhogan1 2y ago
  I work with several interns who are exceptionally smart, capable, and well-read. I do see an issue with some where they hop around and don't finish long form projects. But I think thats a function of college where racking up resume filler seems more important these days.
  • LorenzoGood 2y ago
    About the short projects. I am a high school senior, and I sometimes jump around between projects / don't finish them because I sometimes struggle to see the point in finishing them. The only projects I can complete are ones where I can see the point of them and how they will be used.
• r1chardnl 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • readthenotes1 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • echoangle 2y ago
      Because only boomers can have boomer takes? The take is boomer, not the person saying it.
• mxschll 2y ago
  I'm glad I completed my bachelor's before ChatGPT existed. Now in my master's program, I find myself increasingly dependent on AI. It's gotten to a point where professors grade using AI, so no brain-to-brain exchange is happening — just AI to AI.
  • pclmulqdq 2y ago
    You are welcome to eschew AI if you feel like it's hurting your own learning outcome.
    • m-hodges 2y ago
      I believe the choice of the word “dependent” was deliberate in their comment.
  • fransje26 2y ago
    > so no brain-to-brain exchange is happening — just AI to AI. Rubbish in, rubbish out. Just increasing entropy, a day at a time..
• Nextgrid 2y ago
  For the average student, does it actually matter whether they pass the class or not? The social contract of "do well in school and you'll get a good job that allows you to afford live a decent life" is on increasingly shaky grounds thanks to things like the property Ponzi scheme reaching even higher levels of pressure, hiring in knowledge work positions being broken, and understandable uncertainty around how AI is going to reshape many positions. If they're going to be fucked either way, can we blame them for not caring and instead focusing on the very little things that still bring them happiness?
  • jon-wood 2y ago
    If that’s their attitude why are they paying for college in the first place? I could absolutely understand not thinking college has any benefit for them, I did exactly that, what I don’t understand is deciding to go to college and then not engaging with it.
    • StefanBatory 2y ago
      I'm not American here - because "cushy" jobs require degrees. Any of them, but you need to have them. And because those jobs are often your bland office ones, they don't really require a lot of training/skill, so you're free to do them even if you were an below-average student at a bad major. All that matters in paper. (I'm not condoning it, in opposite - but that's a common line of thought)
      • ptero 2y ago
        If one just needs a paper, not education, there are plenty of degree mills that will grant a degree at half the price and 10% time commitment.
    • plasticchris 2y ago
      Maybe they feel it is expected of them and aren’t really interested in the subject matter? I met an engineering student once who told me they hated it but their parents wouldn’t support them for their true passion (the arts). For some I think (given my experience at uni is 2 decades ago) they use it as an excuse to enjoy being young rather than do serious study.
• readthenotes1 2y ago
  "They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. " probably because they're bored. Giving a live lecture is the most disdainful form of teaching, using the slowest and most unbalanced way of passing info. Video your lecture so that the students can watch it at 1.5x speed and do exercises during the class time so that the students are engaged if they decide to show up (which they are more likely to do if they don't have to sit through your live presentation at 1.0x speed). They'll adjust.
  • StefanBatory 2y ago
    I had a lecture, where my professor would read from PowerPoint slides - that commonly contained 50 lines of text. He was surprised nobody wanted to attend his lectures. EDIT: fixed a lot of typos...
  • hollandheese 2y ago
    No, they won't adjust. The students won't watch the recorded videos or do the readings. That's why we have to lecture live. Then even if we get great students that will do the readings and watch the videos so we can do a flipped classroom; the students will complain that they had to teach themselves and tank the student evaluation scores compared to the lecture version. Students expect lectures and dislike more active forms of learning even if they learn more. This is not their fault as it's what they've been trained to expect from K-12.
• Invictus0 2y ago
  In fairness to the kids, The Overstory is horribly boring.
  • A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
    Nah, it's a seriously good book, and even quite gripping towards the end. The problem is that it's rather nihilistic. It's a lot like Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future -- but whereas Ministry had a certain warrior vitality (perhaps too much, too naïve,) I felt like The Overstory made a mockery of human efforts to affect positive change.
• StefanBatory 2y ago
  Author in the start has said, that around 65% of students have skipped on getting a textbook. And thus I have a genuine question to other people here. How common it was for students to actually read a textbook, cover to cover? I did my CS undergrad in Poland - and talking to my peers, I don't think a single of us ever did that. We used lecture slides at best and online resources for code.
  • xandrius 2y ago
    Did over 7 years of university at different levels and never ever bought a textbook. Definitely not important, it mainly reflects on how are teachers choosing to disseminate their knowledge.
  • thegeomaster 2y ago
    Same here. There was a fair amount illicit copying of textbooks too. But this teacher doesn't even want to share his lecture slides.
  • dismalpedigree 2y ago
    More than a few times i would re-read the textbook end to end in the week leading up to final exam. Particularly for subjects that I knew were foundational for future courses. 20 years later I still find myself breaking out my old textbooks several times a year to refresh a topic. I’m referring to mostly engineering, economics, and finance textbooks. As much as I enjoyed philosophy and ethics, I don’t find myself needing to break those books open.
  • b112 2y ago
    I still have many of my textbooks from College. They are great reference books, and yes, I read them all. But that was pre-internet. I must say, that was a very structured, well laid out way to learn. I mean that as opposed to Googling for each subtopic, reading dozens of webpages on that single subtopic, hoping to find accurate info.
  • ludicrousdispla 2y ago
    In graduate school, I would spend four to six hours every night hand-copying textbook chapters into a spiral notebook as it was the only way I could slow down my reading sufficiently to actually comprehend the material. For undergrad, I would always read the 'assigned material' (essays, literature, etc.) but only recall opening one or two textbooks.
• xqcgrek2 2y ago
  Of course he can't fail them. More reason why college degrees are worthless signals.
• JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
  I'm a bit mixed on all these kind of tirades. I imagine a big chunk of most literature undergraduate degrees are people who like the idea of being into literature much more than the kind of work it involves. At the same time, as someone who was very addicted to the internet but only got a smartphone/broadband (previously having a 40 hour monthly limit) in my late teens I do look back at just how much I read then compared to ever since mournfully. I didn't grow up in a house that valued reading much so it was a lot of work to even get started regularly reading stuff with no knowledge base of what I might even like to start from. I'm still able to read a few semi-challenging novels a year but it's an insane amount of work to get into the zone now and I can't picture teenage me with a smartphone and constant internet access ever managing to build up any kind of habit at all. As far as writing is concerned, I think how aggressively LLMs want to rephrase everything is a big issue and I'm not sure how it can be resolved. As autoprompts get more and more florid it's probably unsurprising people are going to get lazier and lazier at precisely phrasing anything. I tried using them building out my CV earlier this year and it was a great sounding board but the actual text it was giving me was atrocious.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• _lvbh 2y ago
  As a college student, I think I can respond to this. > Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. At least for me, it's not that reading bores me - there just isn't enough time and benefit to it, especially for novels and literature. Literary books aren't going in my CV, nor providing any insight into how to write better code. When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this? Edit: note - we don't have any literary modules in my course - any reading would be voluntary. > What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight. I distinctly remember being penalized for any insight that didn't fit marking criteria back in high school english lit. If ChatGPT-like writing is what'll get me to pass, so be it. > Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional. Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs. This is very uni/course specific though
  • cpr 2y ago
    > When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this? If you think of education as trying to lead people into being whole humans, seems like literature and philosophy (properly taught) are some of most critical subjects.
    • SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
      I want this to be true, my arts degree says I even put my money where my mouth is, but university has largely become viewed as vocational training. You do it not to become whole, you do it to become employable.
    • _lvbh 2y ago
      I'll do that when I can be confident in my ability to afford food. Being a "whole human" just isn't a priority when you might literally become homeless
      • sarchertech 2y ago
• nemo44x 2y ago
  Same kids as always but so many are displaced today. Most of them shouldn’t be in a university as they aren’t particularly smart, curious, or interested in becoming a serious person at that moment. Most kids can’t read serious fiction or ruminate about classical philosophy because they just don’t have the tools to get there. They’re disengaged because they don’t want to be there but the alternatives are worse, or appear to be. They’re escaping reality because they’re constantly being humiliated. I don’t have a solution in today’s knowledge economy where being smart, which most people aren’t, is a prerequisite to “success”. I can criticize though as that’s easy. The university system is not for most people. The idea that we should ensure that those that belong should get pathways in and not overlooked means we try to send everyone. And it feels like social death to many if you don’t go. Maybe the kids are smart enough to realize college is mainly a bullshit hurdle to get over so they can get a bullshit job and that little of what they learn matters in that bullshit job. That a diploma is a checkbox and not an affirmation of intellectuality in most cases.
• Ukv 2y ago
  > I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides. I don't feel like asking for the slides is unreasonable/unimaginable. Probably varies by university and department, but for my degree (pre-COVID) all lecturers made their slides available on a VLE, generally in advance of the lecture.
  • like_any_other 2y ago
    It's also much easier to pay attention if you don't have to frantically take notes. To focus on what an equation means, instead of focusing on transcribing it correctly, and then maybe trying to understand it later, if there's any time left, before the lecture moves on.
    • DeathArrow 2y ago
      Of you summarize yourself what the professor said and write it by hand there are more chances you will remember it.
      • like_any_other 2y ago
        Absolutely true, and writing down 'cheat sheets' of such summaries was one of the most effective ways to learn. But I simply did not have the understanding yet, within 60 seconds of being presented new material, to be able to write a good summary of it. And at the same time also write a non-summary, in the likely case that things would not be clear from the summary alone when reviewing. And do all of this before the lecture moves on to the next thing that needs first understanding, then transcribing, then summarizing.
        • RhysU 2y ago
          This is why one attends lectures, reads the book, takes notes for both, and then assembles a summary. It's called studying.
• nebulosa 2y ago
  Some of these observations aren't particularly surprising, but this line really took me out of it: > Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them. The implication that for one course (of which they have multiple in a year, over four years), students can be expected to spend up to $100 for textbooks (and the author thinks this is low-priced!) is astonishing and shows a profound disconnect with the actual financial situation of students. Of course, many will just use libgen or get second-hand copies, but these things are thwarted by incremental releases with just enough changes to make them infeasible for use in the course.
  • MagnumOpus 2y ago
    She is teaching courses that involve reading books. In her words: “I’m teaching Existentialism this semester. It is entirely primary texts—Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre”. Five or more books plus a textbook might cost $100. (And yes of course all of these are on Gutenberg and Libgen, but the point is that the kids don’t read them either way.)
    • TimorousBestie 2y ago
      Setting aside Libgen (never used it, don’t know anything about it), it’s unlikely that any of those authors is available on Gutenberg in a modern, critical translation. Reading primary texts in their publication language was dead or dying even when I was a philosophy major, but still it’s impossible to do close textual analysis without a scholarly translation. I know some of the early translations of e.g. Nietzche sometimes end up saying the opposite of what might have been intended, which is a downer.
      • psychoslave 2y ago
        I guess that anyone which, on top of being an English native, can read both French and German, and are confident that they can grasp anything from some of their most sybilin hermeneuticians, is really far from the average student, whatever their nationality. The linked text is clearly announcing it's focused on the average student, not the top of bottom tiers. I'm not sure about the opinion that the author implies about Harry Potter, but I'm confident the series is an easier read and still give you plenty of opportunity to discuss about philosophical and literacy topics. Anyway, that's definitely an interesting reading, I forwarded it to my wife who teach as a physician, something I rarely feel like relevant to do with HN posts.
• echoangle 2y ago
  > All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them. Is that considered cheap in the US? Do people not do like 5 courses per semester?
  • JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
    Pearson make great money charging obscene amounts for books. In many subjects they'll have some online component so if you thought you could get away with using a second hand copy of last year's edition they'll make you have to pay for the online access section separately regardless.
  • pclmulqdq 2y ago
    Yes. Most textbooks retail in the ~$200 range. I remember that I had one class in college that had such a long list of recommended textbooks (on top of two required texts) that buying all the course materials would cost $3000 retail, and this was 10 years ago.
  • cpitman 2y ago
    Considering these courses included assigned reading, and that total would include multiple novels, yes, that is cheap.
• amazingamazing 2y ago
  this professor sounds like an arse: > > I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides. uhm, why not? smh. even if they contained answers - redact them and share. there are plenty of legitimate reasons why someone would like them. anyway, more relevant to the article: get rid of guaranteed student loans and all of these problems will solve themselves imo. it's no shock people treat college like a joke when there's little at stake for them personally. add insult to injury with people trying to absolve them of bad decisions in the form of getting rid of the little accountability - loans - that they had. two steps to success: 1. stop forcing college on everyone. 2. make colleges guarantee the loans. the quality of the students will change, resolving the issue the article author has.
• DeathArrow 2y ago
  It's a Western problem. In China students work very hard because they had to beat a tough competion to even be able to attend the University. And they know that finishing the University with good grades will mean a difference between a good life and a hard one. In South Korea it's the same. So, IMO, standards should be kept very high. There is no need that all people finish the University. There are plenty of jobs that can be done without attending an University. But the problem is that even for those jobs there's a degree of competence required and some willing to work. And there are people who fail at low qualification jobs. Solution? Bring some competition. Hire only well prepared people.
  • Xenoamorphous 2y ago
    Anything I’ve read about how South Korea treats its students makes me doubt it’s the way to go.
  • rchaud 2y ago
    When it comes to the ChatGPT-ification of cheating, I'd say it's an Anglosphere problem, as it's primarily trained on English-language material.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • SauciestGNU 2y ago
    I'm going to say something really out of pocket about the average American student, so forgive me. Americans aren't used to having to compete. When they lose (and especially when they lose to foreigners) they get extremely resentful and behave as if something has been taken from them. I think a large part of it is an entitlement issue that's pretty common in our culture. But there are also cultural undercurrents from resentful Americans who failed to get ahead in life that actively denigrate the concept of education and the educated.
    • linguae 2y ago
      Maybe I’m biased because I grew up in a family where my dad at one point was a musician and my siblings and I all pursued competitive careers at one point in our lives (academia, acting, business, music, sports), but I don’t know if Americans in general are averse to competition. In fact, I’d say Americans love competition. Americans generally love sports, for example. I do agree, though, that we Americans could do a better job at handling losing, and we also have a problem with people and institutions that want to win at any cost, violating mores and laws when they are impediments to “winning.”
• mrkeen 2y ago
  God help us when those poor students graduate into the real world, unable to perform even the simplest metaphysics or epistemology!
  • dml2135 2y ago
    God help us indeed
  • DeathArrow 2y ago
    >unable to perform even the simplest metaphysics or epistemology Or brain surgery, or lawyering, or designing roads and buildings. And what if they work at a nuclear power plant?
    • mrkeen 2y ago
      That's my point though. Perhaps $100 per course per semester is better spent elsewhere, and maybe walking out of a lecture on Dostoevsky is the correct thing for a human to do. Are students walking out of brain surgery classes because of phones?
  • atribecalledqst 2y ago
    I am definitely interested in how things look for STEM majors on average, and whether they've seen a similar decline. Although the article has a quote from a math professor, and that's certainly not a degree you get into without some level of dedication.
• baazaa 2y ago
  "This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem. What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down." Sounds like an educational system problem. I find it very odd the need to blame phones for everything. POTUS probably can't read a serious novel cover to cover, few of the senior managers at my work can, these kids are all going to pass college despite not being able to do it, it's a basic question of incentives.
  • bckr 2y ago
    I speculate that not a few of them are paying some attention to what brings power and influence in the world, and see that the most powerful man in the world is the opposite of what college would form them into if given the chance. It’s hard to believe in the system we’ve got going.
• BoxFour 2y ago
  As with so many modern debates, it feels like people quickly choose a side and then work backward—rationalizing every argument from that perspective without much critical thought beyond maybe acknowledging some surface-level issues (yes, phones exist and people are probably addicted to them). The author falls into this trap too! Spending $100 on a single course material can be a real burden for college students taking multiple classes per term. Sharing lecture slides was a basic expectation decades ago. Students were cheating long before ChatGPT: The response like the one about the UGM could’ve just as easily been lifted from SparkNotes. On the other hand: Maybe educational outcomes really are declining, but no one wants to pump the brakes because failing students might mean less funding. Maybe Socrates actually was noticing something real about generational decline—attitudes and norms do shift between generations; they’re not locked on some linear path. Maybe we need to just revisit the concept of university as vocational school in general. We’re so preoccupied with proving we’re right that we lose the ability to honestly evaluate which changes deserve serious scrutiny and which ones are just part of the usual generational churn aside from the obviously massive ones (like phones). One side is wrong and stupid about all facets, my side is correct.
• kebsup 2y ago
  I've finished my Bc. in computer science before AI, but even then, sitting through a 1.5h long lecture and reading a textbook was just not the way to learn. a) better quality lectures were available online - it's much easier to learn linear algebra from top MIT Professor than a random one at my university b) the text books were absolutely terrible compared to what was available online I can understand that 20 years ago people were captivated with the physical lectures because it was the only way. Today however, professors are competing with 3blue1brown, Khan academy, pre recorded lectures from top universities and many more great resources. Standing in front of a blackboard slowly going through an unintuitive math proof is just not going to cut it and people will get bored.
  • ghaff 2y ago
    I doubt many were “captivated” by large in-person lectures. But you didn’t really have options.
  • 7373737373 2y ago
    In my experience in-person lectures have been a terrible way to actually learn (compared to recorded ones or other ways of learning): 1. Lectures are often not held in front of just a handful of students, but hundreds, where frequent interaction and questioning between student and lecturer becomes practically impossible, awkward and socially intimidating. Sitting between many other students is incredibly distracting, and I've more than once seen students bring binoculars to class, because they sat so far away from the blackboard! 2. Only a small fraction of lecturers are actually good at teaching, of being engaged and engaging, clear and concise, understandable and empathetic. Not to mention nice handwriting or powerpoint style. Being "forced" to listen to someone whose style of teaching you don't understand or don't vibe with sucks. 3. If you lose the thread in a deep in-person lecture, you might as well just leave. If you watch a recorded one, you can rewind as often as you want until you understand it. 4. Lecture hall rooms are often not the beautiful, comfortable, nice places you love to go to that they ought to be (but dilapidated, broken, uncomfortable, tight, stuffy and dirty). In these contexts, sitting in a lecture hall becomes more hell than heaven. And professors shouldn't expect their students to find their passion while having to endure this.
• Xenoamorphous 2y ago
  It has happened to me, I don’t need to look at following generations. I was an avid reader in my teenage years, I was devouring anything Crichton, Grisham, Cussler or Robin Cook were putting out (hardly Dostoevsky but I was an average teen). Now I devote my life to work and my 3yo daughter and when I have ~1h for myself on a working day (after she’s gone to bed) I just mindlessly scroll on my phone, and when I’ve tried to read a book I just lost any kind of attention span I had and I realised that I’ve “read” a couple of pages but I wouldn’t be able to say what they were about because my mind was elsewhere. So I end up reading a lot of text on any given day but never literature, it’s either code, emails, Slack messages, technical docs or websites…
  • mrkeen 2y ago
    I had to retrain myself to read fiction for pleasure. This is what worked for me: Read a paragraph. If you feel like the info isn't going in, restart the paragraph, but this time slow down enough so you can sound out the words in your head. If the meaning still doesn't go in, restart and actually read the words aloud. If that still doesn't work, get some sleep and try again tomorrow.
    • DeathArrow 2y ago
      Good advice.
  • emseetech 2y ago
    I've also had to "relearn" how to read after a decade of attention-span-killing apps. The method I used worked well but it's slow at first. Read a paragraph then stop and have a conversation with yourself about what just happened. If that's still too hard, do it every sentence and build up. Eventually move on to every page and eventually every chapter. Think of it like weightlifting: You were a an olympic lifter but you had an accident that left you immobile for years or even decades. Now you're getting back to it. Don't get down on yourself for not deadlifting like an olympian right away. Start with light weights and focus on form.
    • 2y ago
• PaulHoule 2y ago
  Re: the gym I've always been quick on the weights, if you give me a workout plan I'll say something like "that's a great workout plan but it needs supersets" [1] It's been a pet peeve of mine for a long time that some people sit in the machines forever but it's steadily gotten worse. I complained to the head of the fitness center at my Uni two years ago about students sitting in the machines and scrolling on their phones. Lately I've been going to Crunch and over there it seems 90% of the young people are wearing Airpods; lately I've been getting more assertive about asking "can I cut in?" when somebody has been sitting in the leg curl machine for 25 minutes but today it involves gesturing wildly like Brain from Inspector Gadget and having them take the pods out before I can make the ask, at least they are always polite about it. It's bad enough that I picked up a copy of Enter the Kettlebell and a 35 pound kettlebell (an intimidating object right now) and will probably set up some TRX straps in my AV/VR/rec room. My fox wants me to do functional training anyway. Re: grad students I'm a non-academic with an academic background who works at a research university. My unit shares a kitchen with a bullpen of about 40 grad students so I wind up talking to them all the time. Pre-pandemic it seemed I could always get them to talk about what they were working on but this year many of them seem terribly inarticulate. The CSGU union saturates the area with posters that explain what they are doing for grad students that should be easy to read but I get the impression that some struggle. [1] https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness/what-is-a-superset https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness/what-is-a-superset
  • kobenni 2y ago
    Home gyms are great. I also recommend adjustable dumbbells, they are very versatile.
• DeathArrow 2y ago
  If students can finish an University without being able to read and comprehend a book, if they can pass exams without learning anything, then why does the said University still exist? They just take money without teaching the students anything. In some countries the universities have to be accredited by some body. And they will lose their accreditation if their output is just people who are functionally illiterate, know nothing about a subject and have no qualifications.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• austin-cheney 2y ago
  At many elite US universities the students now enter at a struggle because they have never read a novel cover to cover. That blew my mind when I read about it just a year or two ago. It explains why many younger developers simply cannot write casual emails at work and absolutely everything must be a time sucking video meeting. It’s an excuse to take a nap or do something unrelated on a different screen. It may also explain why so many software developers now are fully incapable of developing software. Everything must start from the world’s largest frameworks and be AI assisted because I guess now even copy/paste is too tiresome. If you need to refactor it’s best to start over from scratch than debug. The bad news is there are fewer and fewer young candidates available capable of writing original software. It’s the same problem Japan and Korea are having with regard to military enlistment. The population is shrinking, less interested, and less compatible to the minimal requirements. The good news is that with this growing competence/compatibility gap it gets easier and easier to identify candidates that can perform versus those that absolutely have no current hope.
  • ben_w 2y ago
    While things may be worse now with AI making source code itself disposable, and perhaps attention spans really are shorter (I wouldn't know either way, though it does sound a bit cliché for old people to complain about Kids These Days): Time-sucking meetings have always been a problem, the difference now is just that they're online and you can do something else on another screen, rather than been stuck in a chair with a notepad to doodle in. One of the two worst software developers I've ever had to work with was heavy on the copy-paste in the early 2010s, I think they'd been at it for a decade by that point already. They were using C++ and ObjC with manual memory management (and proud of it!) due to a complete lack of interest in learning the better ways. (The other one was bad in a different way, treated me the way I'd treat ChatGPT). > The good news is that with this growing competence/compatibility gap it gets easier and easier to identify candidates that can perform versus those that absolutely have no current hope. Is it, though? AI probably interviews better than I myself do — and yet, my main competitive advantage over AI (and, from your description, over my human competitors) is that I can actually focus on long-horizon tasks. Leetcode, how does {library de jour} perform {task}, what's the difference between {approach 1} and {approach 2}? That's all stuff that most of the LLMs can one-shot.
• donatj 2y ago
  While I am usually pretty skeptical about this sort of thing complaining about "kids these days" I am genuinely unsure what is going on in our high schools. My niece recently graduated with a 4.0 GPA. We played Trivial Pursuit with her at a recent holiday party and she could not answer the most basic questions, and most egregious of all did not know who Winston Churchill was. My mother-in-law, her grandmother, even remarked "What are they teaching you in school these days?" When I was in high school, the kids graduating with 4.0's were much smarter than me, and frankly probably smarter than I am now twenty years later. I just don't think that is the case anymore.
  • tekla 2y ago
    Oh god, I remember when Gorbachev died, some late 20's person I was talking to at a party remarked something along the lines of "Who is that nobody?" This was a person who considered themselves a socialist.
  • aoki 2y ago
    In the US, it was estimated that about half of HS grads had an A- (3.7) average or better. That was in 2016 and was ~10% higher than in 1998, so one should assume that it would be higher now.
• mayrio 2y ago
  As a college student in the past there have been few times when I found it worth it to purchase the course text book. The quality of the text books themselves have also degraded over time which usually end up being a copy and paste from the previous year with different problems. The average college student must also juggle 4 to 5 rigorous classes that each demand 3 to 4 hours of homework in a 24 hour day. It makes it very difficult to spend more than the bare minimum on any particular concept if you want to stay a float. I do agree that the lack of attention span the writer points out is a real problem. I have seen few people even have the ability to read a textbook cover to cover.
• JimBlackwood 2y ago
  This is a fun article because while it discusses a real issue, it has just enough outdated views to distract people from the main point and focus on those. Having recently finished studies and still being in contact with teaching assistants today, the problem is big. Attendance going down, participation going down, courses and curriculum simplified. I already noticed a big shift after Covid and I'm glad I missed the ChatGPT era. Part of this problem is also because courses have (in my experience) rarely rewarded actual knowledge or understanding. In our efforts to standardise everything and come to objective exams, we've rewarded a culture that just intends to pass with the least amount of effort. Next to that are the burdens of being a student; if I didn't have to work most nights of the week, I'm sure I'd have put more effort into studying. Lectures were often boring and questions would be answered by referring to pages in a textbook. Maybe with recorded media, we should revisit the use of lectures. All in all, I don't see how academia can keep the standards high in current society. We'll see how it goes.
  • nicbou 2y ago
    Perhaps it has to do with the reason people go to university, and the pressures they're under. I remember being a poor student burning through my savings. I had no patience for humanities and anything that didn't directly help me get gainful employment. Years later, I love those things, mostly because I am free to pursue them at my own pace, without worrying about maintaining a high GPA, courting companies that offer internships, building up my portfolio, and learning the things that are actually related to my job. That's on top of working my way through school, trying to make friends in a new city, and pursuing happiness. I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation, cutting corners to make ends meet and remember their early twenties as more than endless work and drudgery.
    • plsbenice34 2y ago
      Agreed. Having time and a mental health status where one can relax and peacefully read a whole book is a luxury. Having a job where you can apply any knowledge from your studies is a luxury too. Having space in your life to care about knowledge and learning for its own sake is a luxury I didn't enjoy my studies because it was so stressful and i had to optimise for exams. I had no choice but to cut corners where i could. I was also forced to do many classes that i didnt really care about. Though i have the feeling i can't begin to imagine the life of these people that are addicted to their phone, they kind of feel like a different species to me
• TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  A lot of people here concentrating on the peripheral details, and not so much on the core argument about basic literacy. I'm not a lecturer but I have spent too much time on Threads recently, which is almost as bad. And two things are obvious about posters who are student age or thereabouts. One is that they have a timid and uncurious view of the world which is bizarrely ahistorical. They know about Miyazaki, because Ghibli and anime are nice, but they know virtually nothing about the history of cinema, literature, art, or music. Nothing made before around 2000 exists for them. Worse, many are actively hostile to it, because it's "problematic" for various reasons, all taken from a standard list of words like "colonial" and "elitist" which - having no functional knowledge of anything before 2000 - they don't entirely understand, but are sure they do. The other is that many of them are completely colonised by corporate ideology, and completely unaware of it. Success, hustle, grift, attention-farming, social media strategising, personal branding, and the rest - it's their core morality. Even if they're nominally progressive. So you get a weird kind of pseudo-morality which appears to be socially oriented, but is often just libertarian under a thin veneer. Everyone was surprised by how Gen Z voted, but when you put these together it's not so surprising at all. What's happening is that traditional written literacy has been replaced by a new kind of electronic literacy - moving images over text, shallow quick-hit emotional manipulation over deep insights, transience over permanence, and a kind of entitled transactional narcissism driving it all.
• 0xbadc0de5 2y ago
  I still recall (as a student) challenging the colleges' decision to drop calc 2 and 3 from my EE program almost 20 years ago because the new students couldn't pass them. I had already taken them and couldn't imagine how students would be able to fully grasp EE fundamentals without them. But the college wasn't hearing it. They were replaced with non-core electives.
  • LorenzoGood 2y ago
    Excuse me! No calculus in an EE course?
    • 0xbadc0de5 2y ago
      Calculus 1 remained, but that's hardly enough to develop an intuitive understanding of why things behave as they do or how to begin analyzing them. But this isn't an isolated case - this has been widespread ever since the education system adopted the "no child left behind" policies. They now teach to the lowest common denominator instead of valuing competence, not to mention excellence.
  • 01jonny01 2y ago
    How did you deal with anything apart from idealised DC circuits?
    • 0xbadc0de5 2y ago
      Like I said in my post - this affected subsequent cohorts. My cohort did the full curriculum of calc 1, 2 and 3 (differential & multivariate calc). I was trying to preserve that for those who came after us.
  • __turbobrew__ 2y ago
    Who needs electromagnetism in an EE course anyways? Where I live you need to take an exam to become a Professional Engineer (legal title) and you would be cooked — for good reason — if you could not do calculus.
• template_error 2y ago
  As a student in the UK, admittedly at a very middle of the road non RG, I partially agree with this. Absolutely, the lack of engagement by my peers I see is insane. We have a Discord group for our cohort and the lack of basic problem-solving ability and engagement is disheartening. I especially remember during my Software Engineering class (in year 2, so they have had three programming classes in year one + the whole summer to explore), only three of my group out of eight actally engaged to a serious extent. I had to write a parser for a game file format in said class - just ASCII text. Some of the non-engaging group members couldn't be bothered, or maybe they were scared, to read the nice error message I gave for my parser. I designed it to be nice and readable, tells you what the issue is (e.g., "extraneous comma" or "unknown tile type {}") and the line and column, but I effectively had to be support for these people, who just could not read the error message. There's also a massive fear of even basic mathematical analysis (e.g., in an algorithms class we were analysing traditional graph search algorithms, not that we were asked to prove anything ourselves, but were shown lemmas and relations and I recall my cohort reeling at it). Part of this is definitely AI, most people cannot program without GPT, even to a basic extent. I'm not particularly intelligent, I just work and engage with my studies. I can't imagine just going to university and coasting (though the UK loan system incentivises that, but that's another story) I think we have too many people going to university (I blame Blair) because it's the societal expectation, and a loan is given instantaneously to anyone who applies. This may be part of just going to a mediocre university though. I plan to do a postgraduate, ideally at a much better university, hopefully my peers there will be significantly more engaged. Attendance is a big thing, and I fall into this myself. My university has a policy of recording all lectures, so why go? I know it's 'wrong', but I feel I learn more efficiently with a recording, and due to the lack of engagement I mentioned earlier, it's not like there's a seminar style where we all come having read a research paper or something and discuss it, or go through exam questions (honestly, I would love that and actually attend - but I doubt that many students would do the reading). It is just a lecture which I can just watch at home. This does hurt the community spirit of the university, but honestly I'm not that bothered. However, I completely disagree with the textbooks (though let's be real, if students wanted to read them - many could just pirate them, but they don't) section, as well as the slides. I also agree that note-taking is important, but to completely lose the original content seems unnecessary (I appreciate the argument that in the workplace meetings are only taken down as minutes vs a recording though).
• QuiEgo 2y ago
  The government needs to mandate cell base stations geofence off service to schools during school hours, with a provision for first responders and school admins to turn it back on during emergencies. Or have cell jammers in schools.
• snapplebobapple 2y ago
  anybody else read this and think "Why are you graduating these midwits then? This is why a university degree is useless at this point, it's lost all signalling value because someone who is awesome gets the same degree as someone functionally illiterate with an 8th grade writing level. The person with the 8th grade writing level should have an 8th grade diploma!" The problem is not the phones, k-12, etc. The problem is something like 38% of the workforce has a bachelor's degree and it probably should be more like max 25%. This guy's very average college is likely majority people who should not be in a college degree program and his college is graduating them regardless of failure to attain an actual education.
• OutOfHere 2y ago
  It is not fair to call ChatGPT usage as cheating. It is reasonable for a student to use all available resources. To expect anything else is foolish. Also, in this day and age, expecting someone to pay $100-$200 for a textbook also is foolish. Educators look to be more self-serving than they realize.
• tasuki 2y ago
  > I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides. Why not? Despite the disclaimer, this part made me think it actually might be an old man shaking a fist at clouds... > Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do. Yes, it's a difficult job. TikTok is captivating. Good luck.
• Balgair 2y ago
  Lines that stood out to me and reactions to them (oh god, I'm doing a react video, I hate those): > They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training - I mean, this whole essay then gets reflected the exact same upon the JDs the school has hired, right? They're thinking the exact same thing about you, from the legal perspective > Why buy what you aren’t going to read anyway? Just google it. -Is this person telling the students to pirate? I mean, good!, but you should come out and just say that, I think. > Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level -This is the average for a US adult (same with grade reading level). All you're saying here is that the university is selecting for average people. > I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop - ... then stop assigning papers? What am I missing here? Look, Plato bemoans that people use writing to not memorize everything anymore. I'm sorry that the essay that you loved as a tool for the mind is essentially dead (and I am too), but we must be brave enough to face that fact and move on. > W. V. Quine’s Methods of Logic ... There is no possible way our students, unless they were math or computer science majors, would survive that class. -Funny! I took this exact same book for a class ~20 years ago (...oh god...). I was a STEM major then and the book is essentially just boolean algebra. I whizzed through it, mostly hungover, and all the Philosophy majors barely scraped by. Nothing's changed! >Chronic absenteeism. -Okay, yeah, this is a new thing to me, possibly. I skipped out on an entire GE class once and managed to get a high grade all the same. It was a frosh level class I was just taking for the GE credits though and I was in upperdivision so I never went as I already knew the material. Maybe this is something that is happening with them? That's the most caritable I can get though. I think the author has a real point here. > look to your right. Now look to your left. One of you will be gone by the end of the semester. Don’t let it be you -I had the exact same speech given to me ~20 years ago, and it was true. Granted this was a physics class, no philosophy. But yeah, especially at the freshman level, the kids fail out of school or change majors a lot. That's the beans. > I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I’ll call them out on it in class, so instead they walk out. -Sounds reasonable to me? Also it sounds like this professor likes being the professor more than they like teaching people. At that age, I'd walk out all the time too. Like, these people are adults, yeah, respects must go both ways. But calling people out on it is, to me, kinda a jerk move. > I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides -What the everliving shit?! This person is an asshole? Right? What the fuck was the point of doing this digitally if you can't just endlessly copy and things for free? My company thrives on .ppts and those get sent around like so much spam email. Is this professor living in the stone age? what the hell am I missing here? > Last week I had an email from a student who essentially asked me to recap an entire week’s worth of lecture material for him prior to yesterday’s midterm -Ok yeah, no, that's totally fair. Fuck that student, they're an asshat. > Gambling, looking at the socials, whatever, they are not listening to me or participating in discussion. They are staring at a screen. -Okay, yeah, this is really why I wanted to 'react' at this. The gambling thing, the addictions. Michael Lewis (Moneyball), has a recent set of articles out on the sports gambling in the US. TLDR: This is as bad as the opioid epidemic. If Mike Lewis is saying that it's as bad as pill popping, look, you should sit up and take action fast. It's almost entirely young men, it's nearly all of them, and about half of them will develop to 'problematic gambling' and ~1/5th to full blown 'gambling addiction'. What that means for our dear Professor here is that almost all your 'male students' (because of that metric alone) should be seen as you would look at medium-heavy opioid users, that are popping pills in your class right now in front of you. How would you treat someone that is doing drugs in your class as you teach? Are you going to treat them a little differently, yeah? Like, nearly wanting to throw them out of the classroom right there? Because that is more akin to what is happening than a simple Tiktok addiction. Look, this country has all of a sudden dug a lot of potholes in the road of life for it's youth. Legal weed, gambling, vapes, porn, AI, tinder, etc. It all adds up to a young person trying to navigate it all. Unfortunately, yeah, that's going to affect the classroom too and the person teaching it. > A missed quiz from a month ago might as well have happened in the Stone Age; students can’t be bothered to make it up or even talk to me about it because they just don’t care. -Yeah, that's nothing new I'd think. I imagine this professor is mostly bemoaning that they love their subject and school and many students just, well, don't. Oh, and they're addicted to their phones. > It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. -Yes. Yes! YES! You're not going to be competing with all the PhDs out of your psych department that are getting paid 10-50x your salary now to make sure the undergrads are gambling away the student loan chacks and are endlessly looking at makeup ads and porn and the hell that is tinder. Yes! They are addicted. Treat them as addicts. > What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? -YES! They must learn the lesson now, or they will never get a job, right? This is the kind thing to do to them, not the nice thing, but the kind thing. > That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education. -Okay, yeah, university education has become captured by the very same forces that have addicted your students. No, you're not going to deprive them of anything, it seems, they are already there per this essay. Yes, you're all out of a job, and so now it affects you and now you care? I'm not seeing why I should have a lot of sympathy here. You're not doing the job, the department isn't caring about it's non-TT personnel, let alone adjuncts, let alone student. It seems to me that ya'll need to give a shit about something other than yourself and your interests? I know this is a rant, so logical consistency isn't supposed to really be a part of this. But I'd love a follow up essay that goes into what they think could feasably happen to fix all this. > It’s not our fault. We’re doing the best we can with what we’ve been given. -Well, I'm sorry to say (as a random internet commentor with no skin in the game), bu it sounds like you all need to get together and demand to be given more or just quit. > All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not sure. I’m not angry, though, not at all. I’m just sad. -Yeah man, I think that's all of us. Regroup after this semester and try to get the department together over dinners this summer and think up a better way forward. Do not do this alone, get allies together and make it better. The kids are worth it. > Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do. -Yeah. Pause then. It sounds like this professor is burnt out and needs a break. The ax needs a sharpening.
• anal_reactor 2y ago
  Average person is stupid. It took the author his entire career in education to reach this conclusion. Congratulations.
• jt-hill 2y ago
  If you can bear with me while i attempt a synthesis here, I think this one line captures basically the entire dynamic, but the author seems to seriously underweight its explanatory value. > The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this It is a transaction. The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero. A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit. The students (or their parents/lender/state) are purchasing the permit from the institution. They are the customer. Anything you, the employee, ask of them beyond the minimum to hold up the fig leaf is a waste of the students' time (from their perspective) and a violation of the implied terms of this transaction.
  • bloppe 2y ago
    Sure, but not all degrees are equal. Institutions have reputations based on how smart / effective their graduates tend to be. So by making it harder for the careless ones to graduate, a university can enhance the value of the degree for those that do. Even with the transactional attitude, it would behoove students to want to be pushed.
    • casey2 2y ago
      Yet institutions don't do this so your reasoning is faulty. Particularly at the "value of the degree" line. There are few, if any, degrees that provide value and even fewer that provide employable skills. Entrenched companies use this to their advantage and have their own recruitment pipelines.
      • bloppe 2y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465278 This may be fake, but as somebody who went to a school that took academic rigor very seriously, I'm confident that my degree is the most valuable thing I own. Recruiters from both startups and entrenched companies are constantly reinforcing that belief. The market for degrees may be pretty skewed, but that doesn't mean it's not a real market with supply/demand dynamics
• nzzn 2y ago
  People are lazy. American students are mostly rich by any global standard and very, very lazy. Doesn’t matter a huge amount as they don’t matter — they will amount to nothing anyway. The States imports enough talent to make up for the lacuna. In the meantime, their parents pump cash into what will become their Alma Maters. When I went to an Ivy League US university as a grad student I was astonished at the remedial nature of undergraduate courses. Content that students in my country mastered at 13 needed to be spoon-fed to US students that were 5-6 years older. Even back then almost nobody failed a course in the US. It was a major deal to fail someone. I came from a culture where the standard was absolute. No curve. Get below z% and you spent the Summer getting ready for a retake. Fail that, and you were out. Education was paid by the State so it wasn’t a business. Profs could fail 20 - 40% of a class and often did. It is astonishing that a Philosophy prof is seeing this. Who the fuck does philosophy at Uni and can’t be arsed to read the recommended texts? He/she is a full Prof. Almost impossible to fire. So fail the lot of those entitled, lazy, bums I say. Enjoy that tenure!
  • anal_reactor 2y ago
    I graduated from top university. I wasn't a particularly bright student, so I had to study very hard in order to pass classes. Just like you say, professor could fail a third of the class and that was normal. Having a weekend off meant that I was forgetting about something. After graduation, I stopped learning. The older I get, the less point I see in endless grinding. Sometimes I watch some pop-sci shows on YouTube, but pretty much without any actual knowledge retention. At my work I do the bare minimum not to get fired. I wonder what does this all mean. On one hand I think that if I worked hard again I could achieve great things. But on the other... god damn, I was constantly depressed as a student. Now that I spend my time just dicking around, at least I don't want to kill myself.
• immibis 2y ago
  Low attention span isn't an illness. It's an adaptation to live in a world where information is available, even thrust at you, from all sides, but most of it has negative, zero, or very low positive value and there are no sources of consistently high quality. When I visit Hacker News I don't click on every link and read it. I read the headlines and click on the interesting ones. But I don't even read the headlines - I skim them. I skip over "Rust Any part 3: we have upcasts" and go straight to the next item: "Everyone knows all the apps on your phone". My email inbox is the same way. Because I get all this marketing stuff, newsletters, mailing lists, recurring invoices (for a successful payment that's about as important as reading a daily email about a successful cron job). Why don't I unsubscribe from everything? Because sometimes they're interesting. So I have to skim the headlines and pick them out. I receive everything, then filter it. (I knew about Bitcoin in 2009, Talk to Transformer in early 2020, and CLIP/VQGAN in 2021. If only I had an ounce of business sense, though it's reassuring that nor do most other people) This is the wrong mode for school, where they're trying to teach you something specific deeply. But someone who's only operated in this mode for their whole life isn't going to be able to turn it off just for school, right? I think in the past we received information through a lot less channels - an unusually large amount would be two or three newspapers on your doorstep every day and five to ten monthly magazine subscriptions. And many of them had relatively limited scope - like magazines about gardening or weightlifting - so you could unsubscribe if you didn't like that topic. Reddit and Twitter and Instagram try to be sources of everything.
• rsanek 2y ago
  The author says he's not "putting down" the students he's describing, but the codescention is spread so thickly through every paragraph that it's hard to believe him. I concur with the other commenters about him also being disconnected from costs. Textbook prices, like those of other expenses related to higher education, have skyrocketed over the last five decades. [0] [0] https://myelearningworld.com/textbook-prices-vs-inflation/ https://myelearningworld.com/textbook-prices-vs-inflation/
• rsanek 2y ago
  > They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom... I’ve even told them to plan ahead and pee before class, like you tell a small child before a road trip, but it has no effect. These are adults. It sounds like you know they're not going to the bathroom, so reminding them of this (and treating them like children) is infantilizing and damages the relationship. I would also mention, I also have a hard time sitting still for 50 minutes. One of my professors used the Pomodoro method in class -- after 25 minutes of lecture, he would stop, tell people to get up, stretch, walk around, chat, whatever, before starting up again in 5 minutes. It was awesome and showed huge respect for the students. I never missed a class of his.
• flakiness 2y ago
  In Japan's heyday (late 1990s), college life was described similarly (modulo the Internet), and it was said that American college students worked hard to graduate successfully. So this can be a symptom of the US's economic success — such an irony. College students in today's declining Japan are working harder than ever before, and they're complaining about their parents' (now grandparents?) generation's broken understanding of the reality of college life.
  • laidoffamazon 2y ago
    Am I parsing this wrong? The perception is that Americans have _never_ worked hard to graduate successfully, including in the '80s. We were supposed to get beat by our Japanese betters because they were so studious!
    • flakiness 2y ago
      They worked hard (long) once they entered the workforce. My understanding is that the college was considered as like a bachelor party. It was their parents who worked really hard and they didn't go college. It was peak blue collar.
• obscurette 2y ago
  While phones and social media certainly contribute, I think that the main problem is elsewhere – most of young people just refuse to take any responsibility. I'm in my sixties now and remember that since first grade it was solely my responsibility to study. Yes, my grandmother and mother helped, reminded me things etc, but I wasn't allowed to say "but teacher didn't ...". It was sharply cut with "nobody cares, you have books and friends and can study yourself". Now while I was a teacher I didn't see a single student with parents like this. It was always teachers' fault if a kid didn't learn, got a bad grade, just didn't listen or behaved like an asshole.
• pdntspa 2y ago
  This tracks with my experience in a regional state school business program about 15 years ago, only it has gotten considerably worse by the authors' description. It was horrifying to realize that these people would eventually become my manager, or worse, C-suite. Intellectualism is at all-time lows. Weep!
  • treis 2y ago
    How's your latin and ancient Greek?
    • pdntspa 2y ago
      I think you're confusing intellectualism with classical academics
• 11101010001100 2y ago
  900 comments and no mention of bloom's taxonomy or any of bloom's work? Yup, no one read the syllabus.
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• garfieldnate 2y ago
  Most of his complaints are understandable, but my goodness please just share the PPT slides, and the lecture notes, too, if they are appropriate for distribution! It's standard practice for the technical courses, at least. Personal notes fill a different niche and are supplemental to the official course notes.
• moojacob 2y ago
  This was written by an Ivy League professor. When can we stop pretending Ivy League students are any better than state school students? So much talent at state schools being overlooked
  • CognitiveLens 2y ago
    You're kind of making his point - the second and third paragraphs are explicitly about the fact that he is not an Ivy League professor. Be the change you want to see in the world by doing the reading first.
    • moojacob 2y ago
      Touche. Thank you
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• ffitch 2y ago
  The share of adults with a higher education degree almost doubled during the author’s teaching career. No surprise a median student is less capable and motivated today.
  • rahimnathwani 2y ago
    Many people see the increase in proportion of young people graduating college as a sign that the education system has improved, not that standards have been lowered. What's obvious to you isn't obvious to them :(
    • OfCounsel 2y ago
      Pedantically, the grandparent comment didn’t say it was obvious, only it was unsurprising :)
• woopwoop 2y ago
  > They want me to do their work for them. During the Covid lockdown, faculty bent over backwards in every way we knew how to accommodate students during an unprecedented (in our lifetimes) health crisis. Now students expect that as a matter of routine. I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides. Get the notes from a classmate. Read the book. Come to office hours for a conversation if you are still confused after the preceding steps. Last week I had an email from a student who essentially asked me to recap an entire week’s worth of lecture material for him prior to yesterday’s midterm. No, I’m not doing that. I’m not writing you a 3000-word email. Try coming to class. I dunno man. Not writing a 3000 word email is one thing, but if you make a power point an then don't share it electronically, it smells like you are cajoling students to attend your lectures in order to stroke your ego. These people are paying a lot of money to attend your course; if they feel that they would get more value out of looking at your power point without attending your lectures that is not something that should be sneered away. Both as an undergraduate student and a graduate TA I was always very put off by this kind of high-handed bullying instructors would engage in to juice attendance of their courses. Just teach well and evaluate accurately. That's what they're paying you for. They're not paying for you to harass them into being at some inconvenient place at a particular time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
• casey2 2y ago
  It's bizarre that someone claiming to be an English teacher doesn't grasp why people started and stopped reading. Your role existed solely to legitimize the print media industry and shall quietly disappear with its demise. You aren't special, nothing you do matters. Give up.
• joshdavham 2y ago
  > What has changed exactly? Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all sections, my average student missed two weeks of class. My brother and I graduated from university a little over 4 years ago and we were both top students (he studied music and I studied applied math). There were classes where he and I (without exaggeration) skipped more than 90% of the lectures. I understand that some professors view this as disrepsectful, but when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own.
  • serjester 2y ago
    Agreed. In college I would always go to the first class, see if the lecture was useful and probably 80% of the time I wouldn’t go again. Although I do sympathize with many of the author’s broader points.
  • Nebasuke 2y ago
    I think this is a good point. I found the following sentences of the article shocking: > I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. It makes you wonder whether the lecturer actually values the time of the students. Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.
    • alistairSH 2y ago
      I’d post that straight lecture is a crap way to teach/learn. And the large auditorium classes that are common at most state Us are fundamentally broken. Interactive discussion is probably much better for most students.
      • throwawaysleep 2y ago
• Nifty3929 2y ago
  While reading this I had an idea. First, the (widely known) problem that I thought about which inspired the idea: basically, how can you maintain academic standards for the class you are teaching, when so few of the students are really prepared to be successful. Sure, you can just keep the standards high/static, fight cheating the best you can, and fail most of the students until you get fired. You could try to teach all the preliminary material yourself, trying to make up for years of poor education, but that's probably too much for the time you have and wastes the time of students already prepared. But how about, instead, having a placement exam on Day 1? A qualifier, if you will. It would test a representative set of knowledge you should already have in order to be successful. The students who don't pass are dropped without judgement, and that's it. Nobody's time is wasted. You can move quickly through a wait-list if there is one, and few students will find themselves with a failing grade halfway through the course. Thoughts?
  • hx8 2y ago
    Entry level courses are suppose to provide the perquisite background knowledge. You cannot take Data Structures until you've taken Computer Science 1 & 2. If students do not learn programming basics in Computer Science 1 & 2 they should be failed, where they can either retake the class or move to something that better aligns with their abilities and interest. The introductory classes serve to weed out the students that will not perform well in the department. Every department has these. At my university (15 years ago), less than 1/4 of the people that started Computer Science 1 ended up starting Data Structures, but over 90% of the students that started Data Structures graduated from the department. My thoughts? Utilize these introductory courses to set the standards expected from students, and expect a lot of freshmen to drop out. Additionally, I do put some blame on high schools for not teaching students fundamental skills like how to take good notes, how to read books, how to write sentences, and how to sit still for an entire lecture. If the standard that college students are educated to falls, then that blame belongs to the colleges.
    • AtlasBarfed 2y ago
      I'm thinking for intro just tell the students they are guaranteed a b- if they skip everything. Just acknowledge the transactionalism. But the entry to the next class level requires a passing grade on the final exam, and DON'T water that down. And of course, the exorbitant cost of college was unmentioned. These people are buying two new cars a year to go there. That uod the ante on the transactionalism substantially, and colleges everywhere would rather mint b+ degrees for 250k than impose standards
• siliconc0w 2y ago
  How do we reconcile this with needing very high test scores to get into even the 'ok' universities. A university that is nearby requires 1380 SAT to be competitive and it isn't even close to a name brand, maybe 90th in the US.
  • LorenzoGood 2y ago
    To be fair its not that hard to get a 1380 on the SAT.
• envolt 2y ago
  I keep hearing from friends and seniors that Gen Z doesn't take accountability for their work, and the sentiments the author has shared in this article are dot to dot relatable. I really don't care that they lack grammar and prefer short words (no cap fr fr), low attention span is just irritating and hard to deal with.
• jeffrallen 2y ago
  In case ya didn't get to the conclusion: > All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not sure. I’m not angry, though, not at all. I’m just sad. One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us. We can’t expect them all to burn with the sacred fire we have for our disciplines, to see philosophy, psychology, math, physics, sociology or economics as the divine light of reason in a world of shadow. Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do. This is a brilliant, beautiful last paragraph. This writer cares and is crying out for help, but sadly none will probably come.
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• i000 2y ago
  It's a question of values, the students know the world does not value the experience or education he is providing, and they don't have an intrinsic interest in it. Being able to discuss Sartre will not get them a high paying job, but somehow that type of stuff is part of the liberal arts education.
• jaco6 2y ago
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• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  The good news for students is being "above average" appears to have gotten easier. The author is careful to point out he is describing "average" students. This implies there are still good students. That has not changed. The author mentions one: "Last semester I had a good student tell me, "hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his computer.""
• martindbp 2y ago
  The whole education system and its purpose is crumbling. Not just the universities but all the way down to preschool. It started with the internet, gained steam with top notch content being available on YouTube, and it's properly dying with the advent of AI. If the purpose is to learn, you can do it better with YouTube and AI. If the purpose is to have fun, socialize and network, that is better done elsewhere, doing sports or other hobbies with other people. If it's babysitting you need, there are cheaper, better and more fun ways for the kids to spend their days. If the purpose is to learn a job, again, education is a terribly wasteful way of achieving that. Then there's the fact that we'll all soon have to come to terms with, which is that most people are already barely able to contribute value to a white collar job, and in 20 years I'm pretty sure that number will be down 99%.
  • oceanhaiyang 2y ago
    > If the purpose is to learn, you can do it better with YouTube and AI. I’d argue that is true for STEM but not for humanities.
    • kelsey98765431 2y ago
      Then they simply do not matter.
      • oceanhaiyang 2y ago
        If you’re saying humanities don’t matter because you can’t learn them on YouTube or via ai slop then that’s a very sad point of view.
      • goatlover 2y ago
        Don't matter for what: thinking, aesthetic appreciation, insights on humanity, knowledge of what came before, understanding current events, questioning the status quo, what is it that they don't matter for?
        • mike_hearn 2y ago
• rrgok 2y ago
  Oh well, I know I'm going to be downvoted to hell. But I always hated this kind of shitty questions in exams > Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory? I don't know nothing about Dostoevsky. Never read any of his books. I don't even know when he was born or dies. I only know the word Dostoevsky. It can be any author or book, not specific to Dostoevsky. Now, coming to my hatred for the exam question: What the fuck am I? A telepath? How am I supposed to know what was happening in Dostoevsky mind when he wrote that paragraph in the book? Whatever is the answer the professor think is right, is that answer approved by Dostoevsky himself? If not, who the fuck the professor think he is to tell me my answer is wrong (yeah I know he can do whatever he wants with his exams - but you get the point) and not in accordance with Dostoevsky intentions? If Dostoevsky didn't write anything about his intentions of that book, what is the point of writing a book? Aren't words, sentences and paragraphs meant to transmit knowledge without so much delusional interpretations? This is all just mental gymnastic spouting one non sense after other without any way to confirm the real intention behind the author mental model. I really don't understand this type of questions. Is there a book explaining the mental model of the author while he wrote the book under study? If not, any interpretable opinion is valid as any other.
  • fancyfredbot 2y ago
    The question is not asking about Dostoevsky's views, it's asking about the views of a character in one of Dostoevsky's novels. The character's views are written down in the book. Since answering the question without reading the book remains problematic, and apparently telepathy isn't your strong point, you would probably have to fall back on your reading comprehension skills to make progress, although the author also suggests using AI if that's too time consuming.
    • rrgok 2y ago
      What a patronizing answer. Since your telepathic power are so strong, why don't you tell me what was going in Dostoevsky mind (mental model? emotions? Was he ever under drugs when he wrote that book?) when he wrote that book and exactly on the topics raised by the question? Oh well I guess you don't have the power to read the past. Maybe you should put my parent post to AI and let it summarize for you, so that it can explain clearly what was my point. Is it too hard for you to copy paste?
• throwawaysleep 2y ago
  If we are being honest, very few students go to university to learn and even fewer what is taught in classes. I didn't spend 60K out of intellectual curiosity. I was interested in a ladder to multi six figure tech jobs. The actual classes did nothing to get me into those. Only algorithms was related to that goal. Physics and chemistry certainly didn't do anything for me. All the things he complains about students not doing? None of them go on a resume. None come up in an interview and it is a rational response to changing incentives.
• Herring 2y ago
  PISA scores for the US are fairly good and stable in Reading and Science, especially compared to the OECD average. It's Math that has taken a hit over time. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-i-and-ii-country-notes_ed6fbcc5-en/united-states_a78ba65a-en.html https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...
  • suddenlybananas 2y ago
    Maybe it's a bad measure.
    • Herring 2y ago
      It would still be a million times better than anecdotes and ragebait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St... > Policy-makers in most participating countries see PISA as an important indicator of system performance
      • suddenlybananas 2y ago
        I know a lot of people who work at the OECD and the place is a bullshit-factory.
        • bartart 2y ago
          Do they have any specific reasons? Haven't heard that sentiment before so curious to learn something new
          • suddenlybananas 2y ago
            My impression is that they have a lot of careerist people who say the right things even if they don't really understand what they're saying. And because the scope of research is so broad, a lot of the management managing these people are either generalists and thus can't evaluate the work or also bullshitters.
• mrbonner 2y ago
  Where I work, we are required to write a substantial number of documents to "express our thoughts for leadership team clearly". At one point, I remember spent every single moment of my daily life at work to think about every word, sentence and paragraph that I put down in a technical document. At some point I was skeptical that all this effort was worthy as the whole point of writing is to communicate ideas. If the document was under the microscope for "nit bits" then we lost the original intention. Unless, I'm publishing a book for example. Now with LLM, I think everyone at work uses it to generate documents. And then, we all just use LLM to summarize the documents for us in a few paragraphs. The whole exercise is now a waste of time. Document writing culture is great but I'm starting to wonder the real benefits in the erabof LLM. To demonstrate this point, I asked my team to just create slides for the next sync up, something that is frowned upon in my culture. To my surprise, the meeting seems to be very productive with everyone engages in the discussion and not bogged down too much in reading for 30 minutes then discuss. It was just: 1) agenda for today 2) slides 3) q&a I think we cut about 50% of everyone time for that monthly meeting.
  • Havoc 2y ago
    >everyone at work uses it to generate documents. And then, we all just use LLM to summarize the documents for us in a few paragraphs. Thought that was just a tongue in cheek joke. Hope that doesn't become widespread...
    • throwawaysleep 2y ago
      It makes sense. Many reasons I write the documents conflict with how it will be used. I often write a ton of bloat in documentation to seem impressive or comprehensive. I put in my performance review once that I contributed over half the total pages. Nobody checked that I added value. They checked that I added pages. It isn't meant to be useful as I am not a meaningful shareholder, so I don't care if the user's time is well spent reading it. I work for my boss, not the user. So both sides using LLMs makes sense, as their incentives are different.
    • IncreasePosts 2y ago
      It exactly matches the meme where people use LLMs to expand some bullet points to a full document, and then other people use LLMs to convert a full document to some bullet points. I think it's impossible to tell who is telling any kind of truth online, or who is just "vibe posting"
• gorgoiler 2y ago
  > I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop. One idea is to not ask for the papers back. When I was in University it was very much impressed upon me that writing papers was for my own benefit. All our marks came from end of year exams where we were essentially writing a paper in three hours under exam conditions. Accordingly — and this obviously only works in a syllabus where grades are awarded only on exam results — nothing says “this is for you not for me” more than not even asking for the papers to be submitted. (Our papers were marked but only with hints. The marks didn’t count and we went through each paper as a class, together, so could essentially mark them ourselves based on the points we did and did not raise.)
  • ricardobeat 2y ago
    Given what the author says about student behavior, this would only result in 99% of them failing the course.
    • gorgoiler 2y ago
      And upon failing the course, the students and their parents sue the university for failing to award a degree. They have, after all, been paying tuition fees of tens of thousands of dollars for the last four years. They damn well expect a degree in return! In response, universities remove degree grading altogether. As your bachelors degree is now guaranteed, graduation is purely ceremonial. Matriculation immediately awards you the degree of Baccalareus Expectum which automatically converts to Baccalareus Artium after paying for 8 semesters. These can optionally be paid in advance and, if so, the bachelors degree (or masters, if you pay for 16 semesters) will be available immediately. Attendance is encouraged but optional. Backlash against a lack of real grades starts to build — without exams or marking, all degrees are the same. Institutions use actuarial tables and AI to determine what grade you would have achieved based on upbringing and family background. Dynamic pricing means the degrees costs less for the rich. Lower class families are able to buy their bloodline a ticket to the elite by proving they are worth it: paying full price. If you think you are elite material, you can take out a loan of course. Why care about the burden of repayments when you’ll be the next superstar lawyer, programmer, analyst, quant, consultant, etc., right? Instead of an end of year exam to prove yourself you can instead prove yourself by paying off that student loan! Go bears!
• cbHXBY1D 2y ago
  I graduated 10 years ago from a public university in the US (albeit one of the best ones - so everyone was your typical high achieving student) and all of this tracks except for the functional illiteracy part. Chronic absenteeism was normal. Disappearing students was normal. Pretending to take notes was normal. Indifference was normal. I'm sure all of the above has __always__ been happening.
• gizajob 2y ago
  Make them hand-write essays and exams with a pen. Ideally in front of you. This is the only solution to receiving submitted LLM-fodder.
• pacbard 2y ago
  The most likely explanation for this phenomenon is that there isn't a change in the population average for variable X, but that the decrease in college students' average X is due to an increase in population college going rates. Looking at the statistics[1], the US went from a 23.2% college completion rate in 1990 to 39.2% completion rate in 2022, or a 67% increase in college degree completions. If you assume that X in the population is constant over time, mechanically you will need to enroll and graduate students from lower percentiles of X in order to increase the overall college completion rate in the whole population. This process might be particularly acute at "lower tier" institutions that cannot compete with "top tier" institutions for top students. [1]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_104.20.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_104.20.a...
  • scythmic_waves 2y ago
    This particular professor has been teaching for 30 years. I'm not sure I find your explanation all that convincing in light of that, especially since this isn't an isolated opinion. I'm much more interested in how much the average student has had a phone to distract them during their lifetime. For the incoming 2025 class of 18 year olds, the iPhone came out the year they were born. So potentially 100%. I expect that plus the availability of LLMs is a deadly combo on an engaged student body.
    • mgraczyk 2y ago
      Based on the intro of the article, the university where this professor works is likely below median. Each year the typical student at his/her university is worse because the best students go to better schools
  • travisjungroth 2y ago
    I don't think the increase is big enough. A 67% increase means the "new" students are 41% of the population. But these reports are coming from all over the place and describing the majority of their class. You can also see it in the whole pipeline. Everything he described is true (age adjusted) for K-12 as well.
  • 2y ago
• creer 2y ago
  None of this is all or nothing. The school could offer catch-up classes. The school and the professor could test and refuse registration in a class for students that are missing the prerequisites. Which means they would need to test at the beginning of the class - and extra work. The school could offer a mechanism for doing that without letting the students stranded with no classes they can register into. etc, etc. But yeah, of course it's absurd to expect one professor to run this on their own when it's really a school-level issue. For me as the student, it has always been frustrating to see a professor start the class material WAY back from what they stated as the prerequisites. (When it was too late for me to switch to another class - as least at conferences I can walk out and do something else.) For me as the professor, it was frustrating that there was no framework at the school to address the problem. The problem was harder than "do I flunk them?", it was "who do I teach for?" It would be part of my job to change this - if things were structured for this to be part of my job. At some schools it is, at others not.
• mgraczyk 2y ago
  > I teach at a regional public university I think this is the main explanation. The median college student has a lower IQ now compared to 10 years ago because more people are going to college, and the marginal new student is below the college educated median. That's it, everything else is downstream. The top 100k university students are as studious and capable as ever before.
  • laidoffamazon 2y ago
    > The top 100k university students Can you tell me which universities these students go to, or other attributes about them?
    • mgraczyk 2y ago
      Around 2 million people take the SAT every year. A score of 710 on the reading portion gets you into the top 5%. So there are ~100k students who scored 710 or higher on the reading portion of the SAT. Those students are the ones I'm talking about. I claim that anyone who can score a 710 on the reading portion is above the level of capability that the author of this post is complaining about. Some evidence for this claim, a score of 710 would put a student in the top 10% of a "regional public university", but the same student would be in the bottom 10% of Harvard or MIT students (probably would not get in with a 710). In other words, the author of this article is complaining about a capability level which is the overwhelming majority of his school, but ~0% of the students at the best schools.
• grumple 2y ago
  The only point I’d argue with this professor: give students your slides by default. In my graduate program, this is done for every class. As a working professional, slides are regularly shared so information can be reviewed later.
• snitzr 2y ago
  Watch John Mulaney's standup about his college asking him for money. He mentions how much money it cost for him to go to school but yet he didn't read and just did drugs. I remember students in class not reading the material either when I was in college in the 2000s. I agree with the article, just adding how things were bad before and now it's worse with phones.
• BrenBarn 2y ago
  As someone who teaches college students, I agree with a lot of this. This sums it up pretty well: > Students are less respectful of the university experience ---attendance, lateness, e-mails to me about nonsense, less sense of responsibility The most noticeable dimension for me is this one: > During the Covid lockdown, faculty bent over backwards in every way we knew how to accommodate students during an unprecedented (in our lifetimes) health crisis. Now students expect that as a matter of routine. In my experience, no matter what flexibility is given up front (e.g., drop lowest quiz score), there will always be some students who ask for additional accommodations. In particular there seems to be a common belief among students that all deadlines are "soft", and they should be able to turn in any missed work any time before the end of the term. Sometimes they'll expect a late penalty, but it seems like a real shock to many students to be told, "No, if you don't submit the assignment by the deadline, your score is zero." I taught a little bit online during the pandemic and initially I thought there were some benefits to keeping some things online, but now I'm not so sure. For instance, doing tests online means they don't take up in-class time. But the extent to which people seem willing to cheat or otherwise cut corners has me seriously considering whether I should revert to in-person paper tests. The article does veer a bit into stuff that seems a bit more questionable to me. Like, I can see not wanting to pay $100 for a textbook --- and this is especially true because students are often jaded by having many classes where they buy a $100 textbook and only need to read a few chapters, so it doesn't seem worth it. Likewise, it seems reasonable to me to provide the lecture slides, although I agree that it's annoying when students pester and pester to get them. My impression of students' reading and writing abilities is also a more positive than the article author's, although that may be because the school I teach at is more competitive. But it's in the low-level logistics (like attendance) where I see the biggest decline in student behavior. I should also say that in pretty much every class I teach, there are still a substantial number of engaged and motivated students. It's just that the lower bound for the standard students have for themselves has been lowered even more, and the average has dropped a bit towards that lower bound.
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• mirawelner 2y ago
  This was also the average college student yesterday and it will be the average college student tomorrow.
• ipcress_file 2y ago
  Yes, students are generally transactional. So give them a quiz on the reading and then start your discussion. It's been working for me for 25 years. My students were great at the beginning of my career and they're still great now.
  • jmye 2y ago
    So you teach something that doesn’t involve any writing? Or you have absurdly high-performing students. Kids are absolutely illiterate, now, and it has nothing to do with “transactional” anything (witness the fact that the article says they’ve been transactional for this professor’s entire career and you didn’t notice). You can argue it doesn’t matter and reading is dumb now that we have TikTok, but there’s no objective way to say that kids are currently reading and writing at grade standards at any level of school.
    • ipcress_file 2y ago
      Of course I noticed the statement that students have always been transactional. I agree with it. I don't think my students are unusual. Perhaps the situation in Canada is better than wherever you live.
  • waveringana 2y ago
    I'm about to graduate and can say professors who did this always had the most engaged students (after half dropped the class from <50% quiz grades). I personally found it annoying as it felt like I was in high school again, but if I was a professor I'd do it too.
• irrational 2y ago
  Is this new? My wife was a TA in college back in the 1990s and her main job was reading and grading papers. The vast majority of papers were incoherent and the students seemed to have only a passing familiarity with English (nearly all of the students were lifetime Americans who only spoke English). It's hard to imagine things being worse today if they were so abysmal back then.
• ckemere 2y ago
  I visited colleagues in the U.K. and France a couple of weeks ago over spring break. Definitely interesting to compare grading approaches with ours here in the US. Both still have end of the semester in class exams which count for a large majority of the grade. Things I really appreciated: in the U.K. model - the professors job is not to teach; instead they provide reading material/assignments via which the student will learn by themselves. In the French model grades are out of 20. I asked what fraction of their students get a 20/20 in a class every year, and they looked at me confused - “Students never get a 20/20. A good grade is a 16/20!”. In France, tuition is essentially free. I think expecting every student to finish in 4 years is a huge loss compared to my experience at big state school in the late 90’s where people routinely did 5 or 6 years. I think we can widespread meaningful learning, accurate grades, and fixed duration programs, but not all 3!
  • dmonitor 2y ago
    > Students never get a 20/20. A good grade is a 16/20! This right here I think is a huge factor. Pretty much every top student in my college classes and highschool were essentially just testbots optimizing for maxing out quiz and exams grades. They barely even grasped the material, they just pestered the teachers into telling the class what types of questions would be on the exams, memorized the formulas, and bitched incessantly when it wasn't 1:1 with what they were given. Professors also have to be super careful about what is on the exam because top grade being a 16/20 means the entire class is failing. The whole education system needs to be reworked to punish this kind of optimization that doesn't even reward knowing the material.
    • phito 2y ago
      Exactly my experience in Belgium where we have a similar grade system. Teachers would give a list of questions in advance, students would just memorize the answers and repeat them at the exam. Most of them had absolutely zero understanding of the material. Meanwhile, students who need to actually understand what they are learning (I can't memorize like others) before passing a test often end up with worse grades but a better understanding. Absolutely broken system.
  • 2y ago
• ineedasername 2y ago
  > I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides. To me this indicates that, all else aside and even granting for the sake of argument they’re correct in all other aspects, they simply aren’t a good teacher, not providing a basic and easy to share resource. Even during my time in University a couple decades ago I never encountered a professor who had slide available in an easily shareable format yet would refuse to make them available. They’re your own notes on digesting, synthesizing, and analyzing the material? Well that’s exactly the sort of thing that is both useful and essentially your job to impart in a fashion that allows students to learn. Whatever the deficiencies of students today, you’re not doing your job if you decide to stand on principle for your own conception of how a student should learn instead of figuring out what will be effective. This alone makes the author’s other observations suspect, perhaps not it kind but at least degree, since it’s clear that one of their core gripes is that students simply don’t learn the way they want students to learn, and they aren’t willing to meet students where they’re at to do the job they’re paid for. This isn’t “get off my lawn,” this is a landscaper saying “I’m gonna cut your lawn the way i want to cut it.”
  • NegativeLatency 2y ago
    Most of my teachers either didn't use slides, or explicitly published their lecture notes. Seems weird to have made slides and then not want to share them.
  • mnazzaro 2y ago
    While I agree with this particular point, it's weird not to share the slides, everything else rings true for me. I graduated college about a year ago, and so much of this I just took for granted. The class would just get smaller as the semester went on and more people 'disappeared'. In a lecture hall of 200 people, do you really think that my classmates weren't on their phones constantly? Empirically, literacy rates are dropping. The anecdotes match the data. Why are you trying to negate this article?
    • 2y ago
• graycat 2y ago
  One approach to, and reason, for college: As in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_show in the 1800s in the US, there were lots of "Medicine Shows": "Medicine shows were touring acts (traveling by truck, horse, or wagon teams) that peddled "miracle cure" patent medicines and other products between various entertainments." So, the audiences were getting lied to, manipulated, fooled, exploited, etc., wasting time and money and risking their health. Currently with some of the media and more, it's the same for the audiences -- fooled. Well, then: Have a college education with some math, physical science, biology, psychology, literature, fine arts, meet some people and improve understanding of people see some all time great examples of good thinking, and then will have some good defenses against being fooled. E.g., there is from page 76 of Susan Milbrath, 'Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars (The Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies)', ISBN-13 978-0292752269, University of Texas Press, 2000. with "Indeed, blood sacrifice is required for the sun to move, according to Aztec cosmology (Durian 1971:179; Sahaguin 1950 - 1982, 7:8)." (the old Google link is now broken), that is, the Maya concluded that it was important for the sun to keep moving across the sky and to ensure this would kill people and pour their blood on a rock. Today with some good education, we can look at this claim and right away conclude: Absurd, nonsense, wasting human life. So, the Mayan audiences didn't have a good, current US college education and were vulnerable to being seriously fooled. For some of the college courses, "Once you have been in a course like that about all you can say is that you have seen it." And experience shows that even just having "seen it" means have some good judgment about thinking, separating the good from the bad. So, it's common to say that a college education yields abilities in critical thinking.
• Barrin92 2y ago
  Anyone who writes this down to schools or selection I think is completely missing the authors point. What they are describing, not just the academic but physical and mental change in young people, is everywhere. People from roughly my age, early thirties and younger, are just chronically heedless. It's not about specific academic tasks it's a general lack of mental and physical acuity. You go in a coffeeshop or a library, you ask for something, if there's a young person behind the counter chances are you get a blank stare or you have to repeat yourself while they have a phone in one hand. Young people in my experience can't focus on long conversations, literally just looking at your face and pay attention. Ted Gioia is quoted in the piece describing it as "checked out zombies" and that's exactly right. There's so many conversations these days where you basically have to snap your fingers in front of someone's face because they're like a distracted cat or something. I taught a soldering class at a makerspace a few years ago and every young person was physically clumsy, as if they had two left hands. Seniors participating did better than 20 year olds. The author is not just a grumpy old teacher, if you pay attention this is everywhere, and all the reading and spelling problems are downstream from it.
• maest 2y ago
  > All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them I don't think I understand. Are students expected to pay north of $100 per course for textbooks? If this is the cheap one, how much are the expensive ones? Why is this not bundled up with the tuition fees or why are the textbooks not borrowed from a common library that all students can use?
  • Havoc 2y ago
    They’re not paying these amounts. They’re borrowing them. Hence the student debt crisis.
• FigurativeVoid 2y ago
  I have a few thoughts, so I’m just going to write them out and see where they all go. I went to school in the US, so everything here applies for the US. - Credentialism isn’t a secret. Students attend university not to learn, but to get a credential. The only way to get said credential is to get good grades, and there are lots of ways to get good grades. When I studied chemical engineering, it was an open secret that everyone was cheating. The professors didn’t care so long as it appeared that you weren’t. People readily took easy classes or sought easy professors. Many people looked to get accommodations that they didn’t need so that tests would be easier. I don’t hate accommodations, I had a few. - This professor that authored this post is complaining that students don’t have original thoughts. For undergraduates, classes are primarily about competency. Having an original thought is really hard work. You have to have a breadth of knowledge in a field that can’t be attained in an undergraduate course. - I hate to blame technology. Our phones and computers are some of the most valuable tools that we have. I love to read. My parents went out of their way to make sure that my siblings and I could all read well, and we weren’t allowed to watch television. TikTok is more fun than reading. Phones are more fun than reading. I don’t blame people for using them over reading. The state of education and reading in America is a travesty. I don’t have any solutions.
  • viccis 2y ago
    >This professor that authored this post is complaining that students don’t have original thoughts. For undergraduates, classes are primarily about competency. Having an original thought is really hard work. You have to have a breadth of knowledge in a field that can’t be attained in an undergraduate course. It's honestly insane to imagine not expecting an undergraduate to answer a simple question asking for an original thought about a simple topic. The Notes from the Underground example is doing exactly this. "Original enough to be publishable" is not the same as "original". For the latter, it just means that the student thought about a question and gave their own answer rather than repeating some talking point that an internet search or ChatGPT query produced.
    • FigurativeVoid 2y ago
      You're correct. But I think that it is still difficult to make an argument that is original enough to make a professor happy.
• neilv 2y ago
  An additional complaint that I've heard, from a writing professor, is that their students are narcissists. I don't think the professor meant that entirely literally, but I'm sure they had considerable visibility into students' thinking and personality, through the students' writing. (This was shortly before the "cheat-GPT" plague; maybe now a professor's only insight from a given student's writing assignments is that their student is a cheater.)
• luhsprwhk 2y ago
  Every year, this ancient topic creaks out of its grave: the young turn old and grumble about the kids. I bet it’s been whining since the Stone Age. As for "the kids don't read", I doubt it. This was perhaps only true when the movies got sound.
• silcoon 2y ago
  In a European public university ~10 years ago, I did a class in discrete mathematics in my first year as a student and it was hard. The professor was going fast, not following any book or notes but writing everything on the blackboard. During that hour I needed to pay constant attention to the lesson, take notes, going home to find explanations in books or online about what I didn't understand. At the exam, there was a quick pre-test to filter out some of the students. I think there were maybe around 150 students if not more, that tried and only 30 that went to the final exam. I was one of them and passed it with a good mark. It was my first exam in my first year, and I still remember it to be enjoyable because I appreciated the hard work required. Two years later, I heard that some students didn't pass the exam and wrote a letter to the faculty director, demanding an easy way. The professor was replaced with another one and they passed the class. Even in reputable public universities, professors have to adjust their teaching to make sure enough students are satisfied with their facutly choice so they can continue receiving government funding.
  • freddie_mercury 2y ago
    I dunno, when only 20% of the students are even able to take the test I'm pretty inclined to put that one squarely on the teacher.
    • the_svd_doctor 2y ago
      In my EU country, lots of first year students are kind of lost and are picking their major more or less at random (or very unprepared). Very low passing rates in first year are very common. It gets better in 3rd year and after.
      • StefanBatory 2y ago
        Or as I've heard - in USA entrance is the hard part; in EU staying afloat during the first year is the hard part. I certainly remember my first year being the hardest in term of rigour, and the others being more pleasant (still hard, though)
    • isbvhodnvemrwvn 2y ago
• zeckalpha 2y ago
  [flagged]
• Reeddabio 2y ago
  If college was marketed as on the job training instead of some romanticized version of you going out into the world and making a difference, I could see the culture changing. Just listen to the graduation speeches that are 10 plus minutes long, it's very discouraging at times because no one will ever live up to Steve Jobs, Ophrah Winfrey, Chadwick Boseman, Barack Obama etc. We drive this stuff into high school kids, and they come out of college disappointed with a lot of debt. It's an outdated model, that needs to be changed. College can't be prestigious anymore when it's expensive AF.
• djoldman 2y ago
  It seems the author describes their experience as an undergraduate professor. Perhaps a critical qualification of this is that the author is a philosophy professor. Humanities departments are losing students and faculty at a great pace. Would professors in other departments on average have the same experience? If directionally similar, are STEM professors having the same magnitude of experience?
• simpaticoder 2y ago
  There is disturbing evidence of learned helplessness here. "The cheating tsunami has definitely changed what assignments I give", "I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop." What happened to failing students who don't do the work or who cheat? If professors and schools won't enforce standards, then college loses ALL of its utility, and is destined for the scrap heap of history.
• subjectsigma 2y ago
  This was true when I was in college (+10 years ago). I remember being in a programming language theory class where the students and the professor had a falling out. He remains one of my favorite professors to this day because he was a very new professor and you could tell the spark hadn't left him yet. He was so full of energy and excitement talking about the subject of programming languages and you could really feel yourself absorbing it through mitosis, or at least I could. Anyways halfway through the course the professor gave us a survey on "how the course was going" (bless him) and he got absolutely reamed. One person complained that they had to learn OCaml, that OCaml was too hard, that the professor didn't do enough to teach them OCaml, and that he would rather the course be taught in Java. The professor, legitimate confusion on his face, said that he had published the course syllabus with multiple resources for learning OCaml and that he had held office hours specifically for people to ask him questions or bring up problems, why hadn't the student come then? Response: "I am too busy, I don't have time to go to office hours." Another girl piped in saying it was "difficult to remember to check the course syllabus every week" and therefore she had "forgotten" to do the reading and therefore she didn't know any OCaml. I was actually furious. I emailed him after the class and said that all these people were fucking dribbling morons and that he was doing fine and I liked the course and learned a lot. Looking back I'm sure the strong language probably made him feel more awkward than vindicated, but eh.
• mbohdana 2y ago
  While the issue raised is valid, and the article makes some good points, the author seems to want an unreasonable level of control over students. > Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Class is optional. Students are paying for a service, they are not required to come to class nor do the work. If a student chooses to do the abovementioned and fails, it is their choice and their problem. Let people make their own decisions. >They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. … I’ve even told them to plan ahead and pee before class, like you tell a small child before a road trip, but it has no effect. I wonder why people don’t want to come to your class. > Last semester I had a good student tell me, “hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his computer.” The good student should get a life or join some Stasi-inspired organization. This is scary, why can't we just leave people alone?
• commandersaki 2y ago
  Ouch the bit about being illiterate hits hard. I've always struggled to read literature that uses highly intricate, complex, or archaic English. I also struggle reading books cover to cover. I also had a disability throughout uni which made it difficult to read for extended periods of time, so I learned to be effective at skimming things. But as I matured as a student, I took the time to really understand prose, especially technical and mathematical jargon as that was pretty important. I read a lot of academic papers and dense books on theory and improved my comprehension skills. But today I still find reading a lot of books end to end is difficult and hard to make time. For awhile I was listening to audiobooks and that helped a lot and it helps ingest content but I feel I'm missing out on learning specific prose or vocabulary. Basically something I really need to improve on.
• alexpotato 2y ago
  > What has changed exactly? Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all sections, my average student missed two weeks of class. I graduated from college in 2001 and the above was true back then too so not sure why the author is making this seem like a new thing. e.g. for CompSci classes at Rutgers back then: - First week of class: no open seats in a giant lecture hall - Halfway through semester: about 50% of people were showing up - 3/4 of semester: I distinctly remember there being ~10 of us in a lecture hall able to hold 100 people and someone asking "where is everybody??" - Final exam: lecture hall 90% full with people taking the final
  • seeknotfind 2y ago
    I never went to class myself unless I was required, had an exam, or loved it. Sometimes I would skip my research advisor's class to do research in his lab. Even if I wasn't in class, I was there though. I'd get notes from someone.
  • SCdF 2y ago
    Graduated 2005 in New Zealand, for every large class it was the same as this as well.
• alexpotato 2y ago
  Regarding people not reading books: My first semester of business school, I realized I opened only half of the books/packets I was told to buy. I made a decision to see if I could do the next 3 semesters without buying any books or packets. I think I needed a book once or twice for some specific homework assignments. For the packets, I even took an Ethics in Business class where every week you were supposed to read a case to prepare for class discussion. I would just listen to folks make points for the first 15 minutes, figure out what the case was about and then make a new point based on that. Professor even wrote in my class feedback "you always have a good insight to bring to class discussions." I mention this to point out that a lot of emphasis is put on textbooks that either: - the professor doesn't even use but is required to select (one professor stated this explicitly) - are considered "great!" by the professor but awful at teaching the material - are pretty good but duplicate what is in the lectures.
  • bamboozled 2y ago
    What would that class be like if no one made an effort to read and study the material though? Just a brag?
    • odo1242 2y ago
      Well, the comment you replied to talks about classes where books are secondary to better sources from which to learn the material, like lecture notes and other sources.
  • dexwiz 2y ago
    My school made it a rule that any book required by the professor had to have at least one copy in the library system. The book could only be checked out in short increments and wasn't supposed to leave the library. Also it may be in 1 of 14 department specific libraries. I figured this out freshmen year, and didn't buy books the last 3 years. I would just copy pages as needed for homework/readings. I think I probably looked at 10% of the total pages I was told to buy. Most classes would use less than a hundred pages a semester. The best classes the professor just skipped this rigamarole and handed out packets copied from various books directly. Only very basic 100 and 200 level classes would stick to a standardized curriculum that followed hundreds of pages in a book. Anything challenging used dense material from real technical books or academic papers.
• evdubs 2y ago
  > I wrote the textbook for a course I regularly teach. > I believe they didn’t buy the books, but I’m skeptical that cost is the true reason, as opposed to just the excuse they offer. > All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them. How about don't charge for the material you present in your course? That is scumbag behavior to teach a course and require your students to buy books you stand to profit from.
  • odo1242 2y ago
    I don't think it's his textbook though, he's just asking people to find specific novels to have a discussion on (and the students are just using SparkNotes).
• jasonfarnon 2y ago
  "Shake your fist at the clouds, dude." How can someone utter and in the same breath accuse his students of writing in cliches?
  • deleted 2y ago
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• jgord 2y ago
  Inequality has also changed over the last 40 years .. students have to hustle gig-economy jobs just to get by, and incur substantial debt to study. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/01/PSDT_01.10.20_economic-inequality_1-4.png https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/wp-content/uploads... Certainly there is no time to read widely or sit around thinking or chatting with people who challenge our views .. no time to hang around campus and engage in conversation. Gary of Garys Economics YT channel makes the point that inequality - in and of itself - robs the middle class of wealth : Essentially he argues that the fraction of dollars allocated to the middle class is less, and the total amount of dollars is used to apportion 'real' wealth - ie. the total number of atoms, people, energy supply, houses, land, paintings does not go up in proportion, so the same dollar amount will buy less realworld goods. Science and Technology - universities and startups - require an abundant over-apportionment of capital to make sure that we cast a large net in order to reach those rare talents that make significant advances. The side effect of wasted funding - students who learn/research stuff they wont use in jobs, and startups that fail to find PMF and scale fast .. is a well educated, better society in which to live. Relatively low inequality and high progressive tax post-WWII funded the new medicine and tech we now enjoy.
  • latency-guy2 2y ago
    You have stated no facts. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2023/labor-force-participation-rates-of-college-students-differ-by-enrollment-status-and-type-of-college.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2023/labor-force-participation-... The demographic across the board works less today than in the past. They might accrue debt, but they're not working it off while at college. Further, you're even more wrong than you think you are. The average student at college is now painfully average. This is because the average student is admitted to college at rates higher than ever before. College participation rate is higher than in the past as well. > Relatively low inequality and high progressive tax post-WWII funded the new medicine and tech we now enjoy. You're not even correct about the taxes either. The taxes were TIED to the war.
    • kevinventullo 2y ago
      The top marginal tax rate was 91% from 1945-1963. It was still 70% up until 1981.
• curtisszmania 2y ago
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• jrockway 2y ago
  We like to blame the students, but there is probably some adjustments that could be made to the system. I think people like to start with "college is a place where you become well-rounded", but nobody ever tells you the value of being well-rounded. Like, do you get money for that? Are there jobs where you have to be well-rounded? I am pretty students just want to have a future where they have a comfortable job and make "enough" money. So, is that what colleges actually provide? The answer seems like "no". We have always done it that way, so we're going to keep doing it that way, but ... why? If it's not working, you've gotta change something. What kinds of jobs do people want to have in the future, and what skills prepare them to be successful? (I'm guessing people that go into the general "college" track don't know yet, so why isn't the first year about trying to figure that out? There are probably hundreds of fulfilling and valuable careers that I have never even heard of!) We act like there is a one size fits all solution to education, but there really isn't. Some of us had it very easy. When I was growing up, I liked science, so I read every kids science book I could get out of the library. That's how I learned reading comprehension; by reading things that would be interesting to comprehend. And having an interest lets it cascade; people pick up on your interest and customize the rest of your academic career for that specific interest. I went to a special math and science high school. We did research. We built things and learned the math behind engineering. I then went to college for engineering. Pretty easy to figure out "what actually matters" in that context. The question is... what do we do for everyone else? Sometimes people don't show a clear interest in something that early, and it's pretty important to be interested. Also gotta say, if I was in the professor's class, I probably wouldn't have done the reading and would have turned in similarly shitty papers. (OK, OK, not as bad as the example provided, but probably just as careless and ... wrong.) I'm not illiterate, but sometimes a subject simply doesn't interest me, and I'm not going to spend times on things that aren't interesting or valuable. I wouldn't expect this professor to be particularly interested in reading or comprehending anything I wrote, for example. Write me a 500 word essay on why Nix is just a Jsonnet file with extra steps. He'd probably get an F and would tell me it doesn't matter, because you know what, it doesn't really! Different people like different things, and you can still be a valuable member of society while having near-zero interest in somebody else's field. (Having said that, I do read fiction occasionally. But ya know, if the book is boring, I just stop reading it and nobody gets in trouble.) I do think that phones and short videos and all that is probably not great for society, but people are looking at something to keep their mind occupied, and that's the easiest thing. What are we doing to give people better things to be occupied by? Nothing? A 12 week course on existentialism? Hmm, maybe that's the problem.
• rr808 2y ago
  Crazy thing is at the same time so many students are way overqualified - 13 APs, 1580 SAT isn't enough to get into a T10 university. Is it really a case of just a bimodal population? Or something else?
• FilosofumRex 2y ago
  The "average" college student description fits Harvard students quite well. Harvard used to offer a "shopping week" at the beginning of each semester, so the students could attend classes and then decide to enroll or not. Needless to say, it devolved into a prof arbitrage, where no student would take a class if prof required attendance, frequent homework, or strict no make-up policy. It was abandoned last year. Anti-affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard revealed that admins and profs had known that most of AA and DEI types would fail and never graduate, or would have to change to non-stem fields. So, they offered layers, upon layers of extra-classrooms (dorm based) help - recitations by grad students, group P-setting, free tutoring, emergency tutoring on exam nights, etc - just to keep the graduation rates up. So students stop going to classes, never bothered to take notes or even open a textbook, just attend the help session on the eve of quizzes/exams! MIT isn't far behind, it offers 6 different version of physics 1 (8.01, 8.011, 8.012, 8.01L, ES.801, ES.8012). So most students just need to pick the right class and they're guaranteed to pass, why bother with the details. Cell phones are just an obvious symptom, they're not the cause. The more expensive & elitist the college education gets, the more transactional the students will regard it.
• facile3232 2y ago
  All this makes sense. Even attending college fifteen years ago, I didn't attend class. What was the point when it was clear the average undergrad class was just a group reading of a textbook? I am paying for the degree. The education became a distraction before I was born. At least this bodes well for my grad school life.
• FilosofumRex 2y ago
  This unfortunate soul is a philosophy prof, which means most, if not all of his students aren't interested in philosophy but rather just need the credits to graduate. But, don't blame the 18-19 yr olds for being astute enough to recognize the true signal from noise. For example, Every major university library renovation I've seen, has resulted in far fewer books on shelves but more audio/visuals, group study rooms, and coffee bars. What signal does that send about intrinsic value of books.
• paulorlando 2y ago
  I hope that the author gives banned laptops another shot. I've been able to ban laptops and phones from my classes without issue (at least for grad students). The students even say they appreciate it. But I recently gave a talk in a colleague's class who allows laptops. Even before I began I had lost 3/4 of the room. The truly interested students closed their laptops and asked questions.
• more_corn 2y ago
  I hate to believe it but I’ve heard this more times than I can discount. So what does this mean for the future?
• refulgentis 2y ago
  He's describing how I acted as a college student in 2006 (notably, pre-phone), and how my mother experienced being a professor in 2008. I really don't like when I see arguments like that.
• dfedbeef 2y ago
  Worth pointing out this person is a philosophy professor.
• udev4096 2y ago
  Yes, majority of the people are stupid. What a discovery!
• rsktaker 2y ago
  I hate school I'll learn everything on my own write when I want to cheat on whatever you give me don't make me do anything. ^I really like living like this. I couldn't imagine being the "good student" ratting out the guy in front of me for gambling! We have to make our own way, school is like this bubble - even if you excel within it, you're just excelling WITHIN it. It's meaningless to me.
  • acbart 2y ago
    Alas. Perhaps if you attended to your studies more, you'd learn the power of the comma. Your comment really demonstrates the disappointing reality of your approach. Thank you for making it.
• phil917 2y ago
  So many of the writer's issues with students today are things I did myself a good amount when I was in college around 15 years ago at this point. I skipped classes all the time and I was often browsing the web on my phone / laptop even if I did goto class. If I'm being honest, a lot of my professors (perhaps a big majority even) were just bad teachers and I got much more value out of the textbook, looking up stuff on the internet, or just tinkering with the at home assignments. I can say with 100% certainty that ChatGPT would have been infinitely more helpful in me learning calculus compared to the professor who taught my class in university. I also don't really align with the issues he has with students asking for the slide decks used in class. If it can help your students learn the material, the whole purpose of the class, then what's the big deal? This point in particular almost made it seem like he's a bit salty over his students not being deferential enough to him. All in all, despite doing many of the things that this writer takes issue with when I was in college myself years ago, I have a great career and I'm good at my work. So I think the kids are going to be just fine.
  • jongjong 2y ago
    Yes I think you're right about that. Most teachers are not good at teaching. You have to wonder why they need special certification to be a school teacher when the result is so bad. I know that most teachers were bad because I had a few excellent teachers and the contrast made it obvious. I failed high school math, then I went to university and did a more advanced math course; I got distinction. I didn't even invest more time. The difference is that, at university, I was mostly skipping the lectures and reading directly from the textbook. Math at school was just insane; it was an endless stream of; if you see this problem, use this formula. If you see that problem, use that formula... But nobody understood what they were doing. Nobody learned math from first principles. It's weird though because in university, as I was doing well in math, I came across John Von Neumann's quote "In mathematics, you don't understand things. You just get used to them." To me, this suggests that some gifted people have the ability to apply complex rules without understanding them from first principles... But that was absolutely never the case for me. I'm the opposite of that. I can't apply something before I fully understand it.
    • 2y ago
• system7rocks 2y ago
  My cynicism about this article is clear - are you students really worse today? Or do we just have more students and a lower average? Getting students to read and analyze challenging work has never been easy. Why should it be now?
• mppm 2y ago
  There is a lot of talk about how LLMs will disrupt software development and office work and whatnot, but there is one thing that they are massively disrupting right now, and that is education. I've witnessed this with a group of CS master students recently, and they have let their programming skills atrophy to barely imaginable levels. LLMs have the twin effect of raising the bar for what even a barely viable junior developer has to live up to, while simultaneously lowering their actual skills. There is a generation of completely unemployable "graduates" in the pipeline. The article mentions that most students are only in it for the diploma anyway, but somehow most people are yet to realize that those diplomas will soon be toilet paper, precisely because they no longer require any actual effort to obtain.
  • goatlover 2y ago
    Computers were supposed to be bicycles for the mind, but increasingly we want them to think for us.
    • TeMPOraL 2y ago
      They were, but that vision was killed as soon as the phrase you quote was spoken. LLMs are, in fact, one of the few products in the past decades that - at least for now - align with this vision. That's because they empower the end users directly. Anyone can just go to chatgpt.com or claude.ai to access a tool that will understand their problem, no matter how clumsily formulated, and solve it, or teach them how to solve it, or otherwise address it in a useful fashion. That's pure and quite general force multiplier. But don't you worry, plenty of corporations and countless startups are hard at work to, like with all computing before, strip down the bicycle and offer you Uber and theme park rides for your mind.
      • mvdtnz 2y ago
        > LLMs are, in fact, one of the few products in the past decades that - at least for now - align with this vision. That's because they empower the end users directly. Oh BULLSHIT. Computer users have been empowered since the very first programming languages were invented. They simply chose not to engage with them.
• cmonreally123 2y ago
  "I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes.' What is this guy's problem. I frequently present to my companies C suite and I've never considered not sending them my unredacted presenters notes...If there's value in them for me why wouldn't their be value in them for others trying to learn about my topic.
  • aprilthird2021 2y ago
    You don't grade your company's C Suite on their ability to learn from your presentation. Do you really think a Professor in college should just facilitate the students to not come to class and take notes??
    • shiandow 2y ago
      Yes. Not because it's a good idea but because facilitating learning is their primary job and uploading the slides is generally helpful for all students, including the ones that do take notes. Not doing so because it allows students to put in less effort only makes sense if you view college as transactional.
      • aprilthird2021 2y ago
        > facilitating learning is their primary job They are not facilitating learning if they help the students to not come to class. So many studies show class attendance is linked to better outcomes and learning of the knowledge.
    • mrkeen 2y ago
      The author doesn't have a problem with students getting the notes. He only has a problem providing the notes. > It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides. Get the notes from a classmate.
      • aprilthird2021 2y ago
• weregiraffe 2y ago
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• mvdtnz 2y ago
  Can someone decipher this sentence for me? Other than the undefined acronym I recognise the words but none of them seem to go together in any way that's coherent. > We’re also an NCAA Division 2 school and I watched one of our graduates become an All-Pro lineman for the Saints.
  • cjustin 2y ago
    The NCAA is the governing body for collegiate sports, of which there are three divisions. Schools that belong to Division 1 typically have the highest level of competition, while Division 3 is the lowest. The Saints are a professional American Football team. A lineman is a defensive player on a football team. Being selected as an "All-Pro" means the player was voted as one of the best players in his position in the entire league (and I guess by extension, the world) during that season. This person was an extreme outlier in the sea of otherwise average students/graduates at this school.
• kazinator 2y ago
  Part of it is that university has become less and less special. People are going because jobs that don't need degrees are asking for them. Those students he's describing are exactly like a lot of his high school peers from 35 years ago who didn't go to university.
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• wetpaws 2y ago
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• remoquete 2y ago
  I'm a tech optimist, but I struggle to see a fast solution to the problems described by this article that doesn't involve ending apps and screens for good.
• amelius 2y ago
  The average college student of today will never be able to afford a house; they are facing a bleak future where even working hard will not help them much. The least we can do is give them smartphones, social media and LLMs in compensation.
• dsign 2y ago
  Hm? I had a great college education. The professors were good, and we were all piss-poor and wanted to move up in life. Our college was (still is) in a corner of the world you never think anything good about, not in general, less so academically. So we knew that our college title was essentially worthless, at least the part of it made of paper. But some of it we could wear, in the way we spoke and treated others, and in the way we faced professional settings, and in how we faced life in general. Two decades down the road, I think it turned out great. Mine it's not a unique story; later in life I've met people with similar backgrounds, from completely different parts of the world. Looking at it now, I realize I had the immense privilege of externalities to keep me laser-focused, and none of the shortcuts, the-quick-money-ways-out that tempt so many.
• pouetpouetpoue 2y ago
  studying is indeed transactional. this means that there is an input and a result. the intensity of effort put by a student is rationnaly a result of a constant (personal to the student), times the product of the chances of getting a result by the intensity of life changing result you get. nowadays, being a student is an obligation: without those diplomas, you dont get anything. but with those diplomas, you can not get anything. so you have to split your attention between different sources to split the risk.
• bigbacaloa 2y ago
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• pazimzadeh 2y ago
  > I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes Unimaginable to not have the lecture slides ahead of time so that I don't have to spend the whole time copying. > Last semester I had a good student tell me, “hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his computer.” So what? Are you paying them or the other way around? Maybe your lectures aren't that interesting. > The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all. > One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us You sound condescending and not very interesting. How much original thinking do you bring? Taking a look at your blog, the vibes are off and I find most of the writing uninspired, borderline cringey. Also, is it important that you're a "tenured philosophy professor with an Ivy League PhD" or should your ideas stand on their own? https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-old-men https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-old-m... "While I am a lesser son of great sires, I am descended from kings." meh.. Do you think that Roderick Chisholm would have the same issues with student engagement, and would he react in the same way you are? It takes a special type of person to bring the ideas to life and not everyone is meant to be a lecturer/teacher. I would love to watch a few of your lectures so I can put myself in your students' shoes. I spent a huge amount of college "in my goon cave" and absent from lectures. There are many reasons why students do this, and it's not your job to judge them. I didn't figure out what I was really interested in for basically the entirety of college. Once I figured it out, graduate school was the complete opposite experience. imho the point of college is not to take in information, but to i) figure out what you're interested in and ii) make life-long friendship and connections. Information is widely available online for once you know what you're interested in. Your attitude is like you're the keeper of secret knowledge and the kids need to attend your lectures and read your book in order to access it. Maybe the kids already figured out that you're not providing any more knowledge than they have access to outside of class, and if class is not engaging then bother attending? A major problem in college is that you can't know ahead of time if the class/professor is going to be interesting, and the engaging advanced classes are locked behind required intro classes. Kind of like a RPG game where you can't know what the advanced skills are without tech-ing into the basic skills, except in real life you can't re-spec and make a new character as easily. While you're probably right about the overall trend of intellectual curiosity, you might be part of the problem. We're not getting rid of phones and laptops. Instead of trying to fight tech, one solution would be to allow any student to drop-in on any class in progress (in real-time and or accessing past class recordings) which would let them decide if they want to invest in the taking the boring beginner required classes.
• paulluuk 2y ago
  I won't go into whether this is "yet another old person complaining about young people", I do not know whether this is a valid complaint or not. Instead, I just want to comment on some of what is mentioned here. For context, I want to reveal a little bit of private information. I grew up in a family that was somewhere between lower class and middle class. My parents found out (or perhaps decided?) that I was quite intelligent as a child. And so they really wanted me to go to university, become part of the "educated elite", and make them proud. Whenever I would do anything that was "smart", I could feel their love and appreciation. I internalized this as "smart = loved". So when I started to struggle in school, because it turned out that you need more than just intelligence but also effort, I stopped trying. In hindsight, I realized that I would rather be seen as a lazy genius than as hardworking average student. Could I have been a hardworking genius? No, I'm pretty intelligent compared to most people, but I'm not a Mensa member or anything (despite the lack of trying -- how does geography knowledge end up on an intelligence test, anyway?). I did end up finishing high school at the highest level, and then got a university bachelors, but the whole process took about 1.5x as many years as it's supposed to, because I treated actual exams as practice exams, and I'd sometimes pass them on the "retry" (usually I did not, but I'd pass them the next year). Suffice to say, I am filled with self-shame and anguish whenever anyone even brings up the topic of education. so, with that out of the way so you can better choose how much to value my opinions, I want to discuss a few points: > Attendance is a HUGE problem Is it really a problem, though? God I wish that my classes were recorded, like so many other studies' classes were. I had a pretty bad sleeping disorder, and having to go to class each day at 9 am, expected to be at peak intellectual level, was really hard for me. It's much better now that I'm working, but still I'm at my best around 11 AM. How I envied students who could watch classes at 6 pm, or whenever they felt like it, and even having the option to re-watch classes! > I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I’ll call them out on it in class, so instead they walk out. Just let them watch their phones in class, then. If you really want them to act as adults, let them choose their own priorities. > I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides. Get the notes from a classmate. Why the hell not? What is the point of this? Is this a hierarchy/power thing? Why would notes from a classmate be better than, you know, teachings from their teacher? > I hate laptops in class, but if I try to ban them the students will just run to Accommodative Services and get them to tell me that the student must use a laptop or they will explode into tiny pieces. Okay so two things: making notes on a laptop is fine, it's no worse than writing on a notebook. Yes, I know that there are some supposed benefits to the hand-eye coordination from writing, but I can't imagine that that's what you care about. No you're probably annoyed by the fact that they are choosing to do different things on their laptop while in your class. But as I said above, just let them. It's their own responsibility to pay attention, and it's neither your obligation nor your right to treat them as children. Instead, consider why these students might be "checking out". Why are they in this class if they just want to gamble and watch memes? Could it be that they are being pressured into being here and that they are desperately trying to "cheat" the system into expressing themselves? Could it be that this hierarchical system where they are supposedly "adults" they still find themselves being stuck in this boring structure where education staff have become their new parents is not the best way for them to find out what they want to do with their lives? I was a bored, distracted student like this. If I could go to university again (I could, but it's exprensive -- not just because costs are high, but much more so because it means missing years of income) I would probably be an excellent student now -- but it would be because I choose to be a student. I never chose to be a student, except that I "chose" to go along with expectactions, and I know that many fellow students felt the same. These people are adults, yes, but they're also still on the same "school child" mindset that they have been on since they were 4 years old. They can't wait to finally be done and actually, you know, live. Okay that was a long rant. > No, you can’t make up the midterm because you were hungover and slept through your alarm, but you can if you had Covid. Then they just don’t show up. A missed quiz from a month ago might as well have happened in the Stone Age; students can’t be bothered to make it up or even talk to me about it because they just don’t care. Okay this opinion is probably way out there, but: why not? If a test is supposed to just be a measure to determine if a student has absorbed the provided information, then why not allow them to take the test because they missed the first one from being hungover? Why have them wait a FULL YEAR to take the class again, if it's entirely possible that they have already absorbed all the information? The article complains about bored students who have "checked out". Gee, with this kind of mindset, I wonder why? > One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us. BUT THEY ARE, though! Just younger versions. From their perspective, they are told pretty much "yeah you're adults now, but before you can begin your life, you have to finish this 3-5 year degree, which will be pretty much exactly as the last 15 years of your life have been but now classes are optional and you'll rake up huge debts in the process that you might be able to pay back over the next 15 years". These are not 40 year olds who had a succesful degree and are now, of their own volition, deciding to study something that truely interests them. These are young adults who are not just studying something that they pray will be interesting to them (because how will they know before starting?) and in the meantime are also dealing with finally having some private freedom -- like renting their own apartment, having relationships, finally being able to drink all night and not have to worry about waking up mom, and whatever else comes with that. I know several people like that who ended up becoming professors at a university, so yes they are very much like you. Trying to make them "the others" doesn't do either of you any good. > Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them. why isn't the teacher just providing these books for free in PDF form? Teachers who require students to read the books that they are selling has always felt very bad to me: the teachers have this weird conflict of interest because they can set any price for their books and the students will have to buy it because otherwise they can't complete their degree. I mean, depending on the country (I'm not american), I know some students are already paying over 60k per year - why does that not include the teacher's required textbook? why is it that someone who has no money, who is given a scholarship to attend university, might still fail due to having no money? Alright, that concludes my rant. Clearly I've been very triggered by this post. As a final note: I want to say that I wish that I had had competent LLMs when I was studying. Textbooks are often written by extremely verbose and long-winded people, which perhaps is not true for the author, but I too really struggled with reading those. And not just because they were long and boring, but also because simple explanations are just much more effective ways to explain complex themes. LLMs are AMAZING at breaking down complicated topics into smaller ones that you can understand, and more importantly, it can tell you in a way that you understand, it "speaks your language" if you will. It's like having a private tutor. Students should be thriving right now because they all got private tutors! Amazing! But instead, the field of education is failing to capitalize on this and is only capable to seeing how it's a problem for the way things have been done in the past. Adapt! Learn! Improve! Don't be complacent, consider that AI might be a tool that can help you teach: encourage students to use it! Find a new way to teach that capitalizes on this amazing new tool in humanity's collective toolbelt. Alright now my rant really is concluded, haha.
• SCdF 2y ago
  One thing I find surprising about this is the overlap between a) university is getting more and more expensive and b) students are caring less and less about using that time usefully. Is this because they know you are going to grade on a curve? So it's a sort of cooperative race to the bottom? Otherwise you would think that the extreme expense of university would make people work harder, and care more. Sidenote: I graduated university in 2005. Facebook came out for the general public in 2006. It's weird to think I was the last graduate class without generalised social media and smartphones.
• hoseja 2y ago
  "novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers." Can you blame them? Looked them up and it's the sootiest coal, unimaginable slop. Who would want to read that? >recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” You might want to rethink your concept of objectivity bud. >As a result they have had to make their tests easier with fewer hard problems. Well there's your problem. If it's impossible to fail it's irrational to try. I love teachers melting down over reaping what they've sown.
• wileydragonfly 2y ago
  25 years ago, I was sitting in the back and alternating between reading paperback books and playing solitaire on my palm pilot. Nobody had smart phones but texting was already a thing. We came out fine.
• yapyap 2y ago
  I mean it’s a bit rough to say and generalize but as someone in college atm it does feel like a good percentage of the students could fit in (some of) the boxes the author thought of. Now along with some people skipping college altogether and other students maybe not wanting to speak up in class for whatever reason professors may feel totally alone. I have to say this does go both ways, of course as student I am inherently biased but there are professors that are not totally present in their lessons, don’t know their material, etc. Now I haven’t been a student for decades do this may not have changed at all or is just a tangential part of my comment. Also if I had to ‘guess’ the reason students are going backwards, it’s phones, it’s social media, it’s a lack of third places, it’s the quick and fast content on social media. That’s also the reason reading has been on a rather downwards trend. And all our ‘creature comforts’ / being lazy also ‘rots’ your brain. As in IF you start using AI tools for coding it starts being so integral you can barely do without, same for AI for reading and even like how using a calculator makes you worse at quick head math.
• noisy_boy 2y ago
  It has always been transactional. There were always a few gems in every class who actually had the brains and/or drive to dig into the subject and enjoy it. A big chunk were there to have a good time with friends and class is something they just went through. The rest hated it but didn't have a choice. This composition has been there forever. Its like gym - everyone should exercise but only a few love it and the rest would rather get the muscles without putting in the effort. The gym rats and the purists are still enjoying real gains. However, now the reluctant majority has access to steroids called LLMs that are providing hollow gains in form of useless degrees and certifications while no one seems to care about the long term damage.
• kevincox 2y ago
  I've also seen a lit of intly typed code. Where IDs and stuff are just plain numbers. Seen lots of bugs, often security relevant when the wrong int gets passed to the wrong parameter.
• flufluflufluffy 2y ago
  yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude
• m2has 2y ago
  As a student who graduates this year, I notice that something like 90% of students seem to rely on LLMs. I’ve seen some students toss in 5+ files of code into GPT just to prompt it over and over again, hoping it produces a desirable output. When it fails too many times they open a new chat and try again. I’ve heard conversations about the best way to prompt the AI to do our assignments for us.
• chriscrisby 2y ago
  Colleges are driven by profit. When I was in school, a tuition scholarship meant a full ride; today, it covers less than half the cost. Schools focus on selling a lifestyle—dorms, dining, and amenities—while classes feel like a side gig. Administrative overhead and bureaucracy have pushed educators even further down the priority list.
• prismatix 2y ago
  The funny thing is that this article makes the author sound like the "lazy" one here. They're completely engulfed in their own experience with no ability to put themselves in a student's shoes. Students ask for lecture slides and that bothers you? Pare down your slides so the content is rendered useless unless they come to class. Attendance is down? Mark attendance with a simple, 1-question quiz every lecture that students need to be in class to access (QR code, iClicker, etc.). Make it count towards a whole grade-letter percentage of your grade. Students leaving to "use phones" during class? Students can take classes back to back. Sometimes with almost no break in between (unless you consider racing across campus from one class to the next a break). It's not easy to switch subjects like that and meaningfully contribute to both spaces.
• munosi 2y ago
  I can agree with the shrinking attention span thing, i can often notice it with my peers even when small talking, though many people who are not interested at all in the subjects and are not going to invest any effort in it, usually drop out within the first year. > All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not sure. I’m not angry, though, not at all. I’m just sad. One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us. We can’t expect them all to burn with the sacred fire we have for our disciplines, to see philosophy, psychology, math, physics, sociology or economics as the divine light of reason in a world of shadow. Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do. That said this is a slight romanticization of the position you are in, because in my experience a minority of teachers are usually invested in making sure their subject is appreciated and understood. Many professors are first and foremost researchers that do teaching as a part time job, I've had teachers that clearly didn't even bother to make sure that students could clearly read what's on the blackboard, i had to skip some classes solely for that reason, i often felt guilt for it. I've had a teacher that explicitly said that we should read a book covering the lesson before going to the class at all, in my eyes this was all a lazy excuse for a course that was rushed because the time didn't allow for a proper presentation of the subject, all the while there were almost useless classes to fill the gaps, i think my university has serious time allocation problems, i struggled a lot with those kind of subjects because i had the expectation of at least have a somewhat rough idea of the topics when going back home from class, those classes didn't satisfy this and this left me quite anxious(i was, and still am also coping with loneliness), because i had to do more work on-top of household chores and keeping myself fed, i think most professors don't realize this and I think it's because most of them didn't have to move across different cities for hundreds of kilometers to attend university, and they also had less financial pressure (we have very few state-owned campuses in my European country). Did i mention that many of them also refuse to record/stream the classes even though all the cameras and software are already set up?
• gdubs 2y ago
  One of the reasons I'm a big fan of Montessori especially in early childhood education is that it's really good at fostering the kind of intrinsic motivation that leads people to want to learn because they have some kind of project that it's going to help them move forward. College kids are arriving with a transactional mindset because more and more that's what schooling has drilled into them for their entire student experience since grade school. College used to be a thing people did to "round out" their education. You gain some life experience, read some great literature, debate lofty ideas, and meet friends who will go out into the world with you. Now — especially when you factor the cost and the loans — people look at it as a checkbox and the evaluation is "what job will this get me."
• elicksaur 2y ago
  >I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides. I get that there’s been shifts in student attitudes - there’s lots of other people in similar positions saying it. But, I think this quote of all of the text shows how the author has a distain for their students not simply because of any perceived lack of effort. My best professors would send these to the class without prompting. But, the author clearly buys into the mystique of the professor like their lecture notes are some secret formula. Meanwhile, they quote: >Troy Jollimore writes, “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.” If I had a teammate in a shared intellectual pursuit who didn’t share their notes…
• beefnugs 2y ago
  The truth might be they know its all a sham. The most important thing you could teach is actually how capitalism works in pragmatic facts: You will never live a good life working for a wage. You need to eliminate middle-men, work for yourself somehow, have constant side hustles. And now that dump is in charge: figure out how to do crypto scams, and financial crimes while figuring out who you need to bribe to get away with it.
• alabastervlog 2y ago
  I've been hearing this from middle school English teacher friends (plural) for a while. The last ~15 years have seen a decline every single year in reading comprehension, to the point that ordinary middle-of-the-road books from the 80s or 90s are beyond the ability of gifted students in the same grade to understand without great difficulty. The chief problem seems to be language complexity and especially holding on to a thought for more than a few words. Even something like The Outsiders will sometimes expect you to keep a few plates spinning in your head until the author takes them back from you a couple sentences or maybe a whole paragraph later. This is a skill especially exercised by reading poetry, as it tends to feature a lot of that holding-onto-context through multiple clauses thing, waiting for the meaning to be resolved. They can't do that. They also increasingly find perspectives other than the first person, in fiction, uncomfortable to read.
  • noodlesUK 2y ago
    > The last ~15 years have seen a decline every single year in reading comprehension, to the point that ordinary middle-of-the-road books from the 80s or 90s are beyond the ability of gifted students in the same grade to understand without great difficulty. I think this is true, but I would disagree with the statement about gifted kids. I recently had the pleasure of reading some essays produced by A-level English students at a nearby school, and I was absolutely chuffed reading them. The mediocre ones were pretty mediocre, and there was definitely some ChatGPT drivel in there, but the ones from the top of the class were genuinely wonderful. The top students were writing beautiful (and insightful) prose, far better than what I could have done at their age. Don't write off the whole generation.
• carabiner 2y ago
  Are colleges reducing admissions standards to compensate for this? If anything, it sounds like admissions are vastly more competitive today than when I applied 20 years ago because students are more capable.
  • SR2Z 2y ago
    I doubt it for a few reasons: - The SAT has been bastardized as a test and no longer effectively measures this stuff - College admissions have deemphasized the SAT and other standardized tests of reading comprehension - Elite college admissions is lousy with "consultants" who workshop students' essays to ensure they've got a better chance of admission That being said, if you were going to find the kids who CAN read, you would probably find them at elite schools.
    • noodlesUK 2y ago
      I doubt that the SATs were ever that effective at screening this sort of thing, at least for the past several decades. They're an aptitude test. By the time you're graduating secondary school you should be able to demonstrate end-to-end ability in multiple subjects (in something like an AP or an A-Level), which should be a better proxy for doing well in university than something as handwavey as the SAT.
      • tekla 2y ago
        SAT scores track pretty damn well with college success. Thats why schools are quietly reintroducing them as part of admissions since the "no SAT" policy fucked up kids who weren't cutting it.
        • noodlesUK 2y ago
          In the absence of a better standardised test, I don't doubt it. However, I really don't think that the SAT does a good job of testing the kind of longer-form literacy that the OP is talking about. I showed the SAT English component to a British A-level English teacher a few weeks ago, and after reading a dozen questions he was red with rage, shouting about how idiotic it was to ask such asinine questions under such a heavy time pressure.
• labster 2y ago
  The illiteracy level of our children are appalling. I can’t imagine why one would take a philosophy course if one does not like reading.
  • tonyedgecombe 2y ago
    >The illiteracy level of our children are appalling. It is appalling.
    • labster 2y ago
      It’s a set phrase, a quote of George W. Bush.
    • fancyfredbot 2y ago
      >The illiteracy level of our children are appalling. Yes they are.
      • itishappy 2y ago
        The illiteracy level is appalling. The illiteracy levels are appalling. Our children aren't appalling! [citation needed]
  • gizajob 2y ago
    People nowadays enrol onto philosophy degrees expecting to learn everything they need from insta and memes. Not even kidding.
• c0redump 2y ago
  > What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. IMO, this is not the problem, but it’s definitely a problem. I think that we should, in fact, fail these kids. And if they repeatedly fail, they should be kicked out. I know that it’s politically untenable, but it also seems right. It also seems wrong to me that these kids are accepted in to the university to begin with. It seems to me that there is a maturity gap here. Have these people never had the experience of not getting something that they want because they failed to obtain it?
  • reverendsteveii 2y ago
    Everyone wants a competitive system where only the best and most qualified advance and everyone imagines themselves among the best and most qualified deserving of advancement. For the majority of us, in an actual competitive system, that belief will run up against the rocks of reality to some extent. You might be great at something but no one is great at everything except that one obnoxious guy you went to high school with. No one likes to find out that they suck, and the way our system is designed right now where students pick their colleges sets up a sort of "fix the grade or we'll take our money elsewhere" leverage students and parents can use against the institution. With the increasing necessity of a college degree in everyone's quest to eat food and sleep indoors, that pressure is only escalating. Junior being not the brightest knife in the crayon box is a tale as old as human society, but until recently Junior used to be able to limp across the finish line in high school and get a job in a factory and have a life. Not the best life, but a life. Nowadays a job where you can comfortably raise a family without a college degree are dwindling. That means that Junior's ability to make a living is gonna depend on getting a degree, and if Junior can't get a degree through competence he will try other ways to get a degree before he'll resign himself to starvation and indigence. If you're about to type the word "trade school" that's an entirely different debate that I'd love to have with you but trade school, while potentially viable for a single person to fix their own situation, is not the answer to the overall problem at a societal level. We need to either return to a situation where the additional post-secondary training and education aren't required or we need to figure out a way to get people the additional post-secondary training and education.
• zjp 2y ago
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  • muchosandwich 2y ago
    I think a lot of people point to parenting but don't lay it out as well as you did here. On the subject of God, Church used to be a place where kids practiced reading. Now it's just some VC backed dude talking at people about personal and political grievances for half the day. Reading/literacy tutoring is also now some VC backed business that becomes more expensive every year.
  • eesmith 2y ago
    "Although parents and other advocates of spanking often claim that spanking is necessary to promote child discipline, studies have shown that parents tend to apply physical punishment inconsistently and tend to spank more often when they are angry or under stress.[18] The use of corporal punishment by parents increases the likelihood that children will suffer physical abuse,[1] and most documented cases of physical abuse in Canada and the United States begin as disciplinary spankings.[19] If a child is frequently spanked, this form of corporal punishment tends to become less effective at modifying behavior over time (also known as extinction).[1] In response to the decreased effectiveness of spanking, some parents increase the frequency or severity of spanking or use an object.[1]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanking
  • noodlesUK 2y ago
    I definitely echo your comments about this point: > The fear of God had been put into them by nightly news and the understanding that an unsupervised child could invite a call from CPS. But walking alone to school or playing outside alone is not neglect. Giving your kid an iPad and letting them rot their brains with Cocomelon is neglect. But I don't at all agree that the logical conclusion to this is that we should encourage corporal punishment. I would estimate that fewer than a fifth of the well-adjusted people I know were beaten or had their mouths washed out or such similar things. I would say that as a proportion, many more of the badly-adjusted people I know in adulthood experienced corporal punishment or similar. We can give children rights, agency and protections from abusive behaviour without locking them in a padded room and melting their brains with iPads. I really think that overexposure to technology is a huge part of this. It's doing something negative developmentally, stripping away children's agency and curiosity. I often feel addicted to tech, but I grew up in a world without nearly as much of it.
• airstrike 2y ago
  > The students cheat. I’ve written about cheating in “Why AI is Destroying Academic Integrity,” so I won’t repeat it here, but the cheating tsunami has definitely changed what assignments I give. I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop. Sadly, not writing exacerbates their illiteracy; writing is a muscle and dedicated writing is a workout for the mind as well as the pen. In the future we'll feed Underground Man through an AI, have it change all the proper nouns to some other set of names, defined per student and thereby watermarking the text to that specific student. Can only read it on a school issued e-paper device so the user can't easily extract the text without a camera and OCR. Then each exam question is rendered per student based on their versions, so an AI model won't know which text this pertains to.
• fritzo 2y ago
  This essay would be stronger if it backed up its anecdotes with data, e.g. trends of standardized test score over time.
  • gizajob 2y ago
    It’s a subjective account though.
• boogieknite 2y ago
  i didnt make it through all the comments but i havent seen anyone mention college sports. from a PURELY financial perspective its the other major reason for college to exist. sports are on life support. its turning into a minor league pro system. personally, i think this is long overdue and overall good. colleges shouldnt be so sports-centric and i think sports would benefit overall if there more more popular local teams in sports beside baseball and hockey. the doom and gloom on the state of college sports is loudly lamented on ESPN and the like. learning academics are circling the drain makes me expect to see many colleges shut down. then i start to think about the midrange medical professionals because my spouse is a nurse. nurses cant LLM their way through college because they have to pass the NCLEX. will colleges only exist for scientists and nurses who need lab access and need to pass a monitored exam to complete their training?
• specialp 2y ago
  Perhaps your average college student is now illiterate in the style of what your academic or Pulitzer Prize board would consider essential to comprehend. Acclaimed fiction novels usually gain acclaim not by how direct and to the point they are, but how they twist at words and portray things in a particularly long winded fashion. Could it be that people of today that have grown up reading prose that is mostly to get to the point, and convey what is needed now do not have the ability to meander like that? If so, does this make them "illiterate"?
  • everforward 2y ago
    I wonder if our prestige has moved from having knowledge of difficult works (in difficult English, in other languages, in historic English) to having knowledge on a breadth of subjects. Someone telling me they’ve read Virgil in Latin reads like a party trick to me. It’s certainly neat, but begs me to ask “why?” rather than inspiring awe. Someone being able to have an engaging conversation on macroeconomics, Supreme Court precedents from 50 years ago, and trends in social media is much more impressive. That’s not to say there’s no value in acclaimed works, but the value now seems intrinsic rather than societal accolades. No one is impressed when your email about a meeting next week is a paragraph long sentence that requires a thesaurus to understand.
  • boogieknite 2y ago
    sort of. im no scholar but i think learning to appreciate writing for the prose, style, and vocabulary and not only the story should be required in higher education
  • milesrout 2y ago
    I had a very similar view to this for a long time. Then I sat down and actually read some difficult novels, but good ones. They are difficult to read but not in the same way that, say, bad social science research is--full of jargon and overly long sentences so the author looks smart. Good novels are difficult because they use language in interesting ways to convey more information than just a dry scientific description of how one event followed another towards the resolution of the plot, like you'd find in most crime novels for example. It really is worth actually learning to read good books. They aren't hard for the sake of being hard. But they also aren't simple for the sake of being simple.
• aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
  I recently graduated from university, and I share some of these views. I became particularly frustrated by the school's practice of lowering the level of courses to allow more students to pass. Before I started, a teacher was fired for failing too many students, so there is definitely a trend toward reducing the quality. But I got through my master of science just as the AI chatbots rose to the mainstream, already frustrated that the courses could have easily included 30% more material. I don't even want to imagine how bad things get when people currently in middle school or high school reach university after having had access to "word salad machines" their whole schooling.
• kashunstva 2y ago
  About a decade ago when my son finished high school, on the eve of graduation, I saw that one of his peers wrote gleefully on social media that she hadn’t read a single book, assigned or otherwise, during her 4 years there. I can only imagine that the intellectual malaise has become more widespread. So long as we reward that form of incuriosity and treat education as solely a transactional economic exercise, the lack of preparedness for post-secondary levels should surprise no one.
  • no_wizard 2y ago
    There seems to be a rise in some sort of 'anti-intellectual' sentiment that has gotten popular over the decades. For me, I saw similar things on Facebook in 2009 when I graduated. I suspect if you go back a decade again, to the late 1990s, you may find some prevalence there. I'm unsure of its origins, but it seems more prominent with middle aged and younger millennials and gen z. I never see nor hear of this sentiment from Gen X or older millennials. I think in some respects, it mirrors the rise of anti-corporate anti-elite thinking. That these mandatory books put in front of are used as tools of the apparatus that perpetuate systemic societal ills. Historically though, the counter culture thing to do was to read lots of literature - often literature published by small outlets and other controversial pieces however there was an expectation of simply reading and learning for the greater good.
• programjames 2y ago
  I saw an interesting post on LessWrong[1] that essentially argues education got so bad because all the education studies are using metrics biased towards the bottom. If you can't measure improvement in the top (10% for standardized tests, 80% for typical definitions of 'achievement'), and then you tie money to which schools are measurably improving learning outcomes, you incentivize schools to teach to the bottom. You end up with schools desparately trying not to suspend/expel students, because it looks bad on their metrics and decreases their funding, while holding back their more diligent students as teachers/babysitters for the less diligent students. [1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LPyqPrgtyWwizJxKP/how-do-we-fix-the-education-crisis https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LPyqPrgtyWwizJxKP/how-do-we-...
• triceratops 2y ago
  It's a combination of phones and that we live in the age of flake. Relevant quotes > It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones...They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. > Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Disappearing students. Students routinely just vanish at some point during the semester. They don’t officially drop out or withdraw from the course, they simply quit coming. The problems of society obviously bleed into college life.
• scoofy 2y ago
  The fact that all these kids likely missed a year or two of school because of COVID is explanatory.
• neycoda 2y ago
  "all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education." Umm, no, the students are depriving themselves by being addicted to their phones and online gambling. The culture is burning. This is how it topples. Through smartphone addiction, gambling, and lack of reading meaningful books.
• timtas 2y ago
  A big part of this is that too many kids are going to college. Less than 2/3 who begin a 4-year degree program will graduate. We’re pushing kids who are not suited to higher education into it because of credential inflation. As more kids get a certain level of credential, others are forced to seek those credentials to keep up. It’s a tragically wasteful way to signal fitness to employers. This has been spurred on by government loan guarantees and other means of assistance, which create demand, which drives prices up. The universities don’t escape blame here. The author is getting these ludicrous pep talks from administration because they must play the charade to keep business booming. Nothing more. They’re selling a crap product to people who don’t benefit from it.