Liz of I Speak of Dreams has a another fascinating discussion on her site, this one entitled College Illiteracy. As the parent of a college student, it was an interesting read. On a broader scale, the state of higher education in America should be meaningful to every citizen.
I will confess to scurrying over to Rate My Professor to look up the university The Boy attends and scan the roster of rated professors to read what their students think of them. The students remain anonymous. Isn't that special? Reassuring because I'm shallow, the names of his professors I recognized were all rated with happy yellow smiley faces. And a few chili peppers.
But don't get me started on the grammatical correctness and, shall we say, the less than well thought out nature of some of the comments. Which takes me full circle back to the first part of her discussion: Just how educated are our college graduates?
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8 comments:
My partner is a college prof.. a Ph.D.. and she teaches community college.. it's frigtening.. she consistantly gets rave reveiws from her students on "Rate my Prof" mostly because she presents info in a fun and exciting way. (she teaches psych). But the papers..!? Oh My GAWD! The grammer is so bad that I often wonder if english is a second language for these kids. And Plagerism is Rampant.. she has had papers that are 80% plagerized. There is an internet site for Profs that compares a paper to published articles. 80% directly copied. Unreal. Some of these kids are being done a huge diservice.. they shouldn't have graduated high school
and I can't spell plagerized. But if I was turning in a paper, I'd spell check it!
I'm still an undergrad at 29 and I have to say the education level and/or knowledge of my 'peers' shocks me sometimes. Not only that, but even more surprising to me is that academic dishonesty is so prevalent that it's almost the norm -- so much so that at the beginning of each semester, every professor warns us to not cheat.
It feels like I never left high school sometimes. I do think kids these days, on average, are not prepared for university, both in terms of education and emotions/mentality.
We're raising two young girls - 8 and 10 years old - so I find this discussion very interesting in that I hope we can instill the need in our girls to be honest with themselves. To ask the right questions - if we don't address cheating now, I feel it will be too late when they reach highschool and then college.
Thanks for food for thought!
I be's a colledge geraduate, and I thinkin we R just fine!
I work in a University, and out of my school (sports & exercise science) only one professor was on that site. She had rave reviews, but she teaches diving. How can that possibly be a bad course unless you are afraid of the water.
However, as for my own professors, my philosophy professor had about 30 comments about how hot and single he was. Ugh. I guess even if the material is too abstract, gawking at the teacher is at least fun.
W. :)
As a college prof I can tell you that they aren't literate.
Rate my professors is the one site we don't admit checking, but all of us do. When I see my ratings it is kind of funny to read -- some of them think it is a bad thing to rate me as hard, I love it.
I'm afraid it is more than just their academics that are suffering...I WORK with college students from some of the most priveldged economic groups there are and these kids are socially inept, rude, clueless and selfish. Perhaps we were that way as well, in all likelihood we were, but I'm pretty shocked.
Luckily, some of the 'kids' I work with are the best and brighest and give me hope.
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