The Five-Year Party (10 page)
Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
Over the past decade, classes have been dumbed down and then dumbed down again to eliminate difficult concepts, reduce the amount of required reading and writing, and reduce the amount of critical thinking skills that students need to become the leaders of tomorrow. When students still aren’t able to learn it, despite the reduced expectations, they are simply given inflated grades that they did not earn. Today’s college students are aware that there is an alternative path to a passing grade. They can study hard, as a minority of them do, or they can show up in the professor’s office the last week of classes and negotiate a deal for a grade. So many students show up during this last week of classes to request grade manipulation that it has come to be known as
slacker week
. Students know that professors cannot flunk very many students because it is no longer considered acceptable by the administration. They know that colleges consider them valuable customers in the debt-for-diploma exchange. Students want a diploma and they are willing to pay for it, but for most of them, reading, writing, and studying are not part of the deal. Only chumps waste time studying for exams or reading the textbook when they can get a B just for showing up. To Strow and Ransdell, this system of awarding passing grades to students who should have flunked out seems like a genuine win-win situation for everyone involved. The students are awarded their diplomas without doing much work and the college gets to keep the money from tuition and state aid to pay their salaries and keep the process running.
slacker week
. Students know that professors cannot flunk very many students because it is no longer considered acceptable by the administration. They know that colleges consider them valuable customers in the debt-for-diploma exchange. Students want a diploma and they are willing to pay for it, but for most of them, reading, writing, and studying are not part of the deal. Only chumps waste time studying for exams or reading the textbook when they can get a B just for showing up. To Strow and Ransdell, this system of awarding passing grades to students who should have flunked out seems like a genuine win-win situation for everyone involved. The students are awarded their diplomas without doing much work and the college gets to keep the money from tuition and state aid to pay their salaries and keep the process running.
But it’s not a winning situation for everyone. What about the parents who saved all their lives and went deeply into debt to pay for a college education for their children? Do parents think they are purchasing a diploma or do they think they are buying an education? What about taxpayers who are helping to support these new learning-optional college campuses? What about employers looking for educated job applicants who are confronted with degree holders who can’t read?
The problem is that under the new business model adopted by party school administrators, obtaining a diploma is no longer the same as earning one. Anyone who can follow a few simple rules and keep their tuition bills paid can purchase a diploma. Many of America’s colleges, particularly at the third and fourth tiers, are really not in the education business any more but have become diploma marts where students purchase the credentials they want without having to do the work that used to be required to earn them. Most parents I spoke with had no idea that this significant erosion of academic standards had taken place. They still believed, often falsely, that higher education was taking place in colleges. Many of them told me that they simply could not believe the inconvenient truth that colleges were no longer performing the task they were designed to do. Although the price tag soars more and more every year, academic standards have dropped to elementary school levels. Party schools get away with this because parents, the public, and the press aren’t really paying attention.
If we take a closer look at this process, it begins to resemble a massive scam that damages students, the educational system, and even the nation, which depends on colleges to educate our future leaders. Awarding students grades they do not deserve for work they did not perform, which pleases students in the short term, severely shortchanges them in the long run by giving them false feedback about their abilities, skills, and levels of knowledge. It also leaves a very large gap between the body of knowledge that society expects students to acquire in college and the low level of learning that is really taking place.
While a few college students still take their education seriously and choose courses based on what they will need to know after graduation, it’s easy for students to find the slacker tracks through college. Students know which courses are easy and which courses are taught by easy grading professors and share this information with each other on websites like
ratemyprofessors.com
. Colleges allow students to choose classes based on a kind of Chinese menu system. Students choose a class from column A and another from column B until they obtain enough credits in all the categories of requirements. In some cases, these classes might result in a fairly balanced education, but in most cases it leaves large holes in their body of knowledge.
ratemyprofessors.com
. Colleges allow students to choose classes based on a kind of Chinese menu system. Students choose a class from column A and another from column B until they obtain enough credits in all the categories of requirements. In some cases, these classes might result in a fairly balanced education, but in most cases it leaves large holes in their body of knowledge.
Most colleges, in fact, have no idea what kinds of knowledge students have acquired during those four to six years because they don’t administer some of the widely available exams that were designed by organizations like the College Board to show exactly how much knowledge was acquired between freshman year and graduation. Colleges claim that this test would simply add an additional burden on students and faculty, but the real reason is that party school administrators don’t want the world to know how little knowledge graduates have obtained, even in their majors, about things like history, writing, geography, the arts, economics, civics, science, and math. When outside groups administer similar tests, the low level of student learning makes headlines. The results show that college seniors can’t read well enough to understand a newspaper editorial or a simple chart. They can’t solve fourth-grade math problems involving long division. They don’t know in which century the Civil War took place and can’t locate the United States on a map of the world.
“American higher education has lost its bearings and is falling short in its vital educational mission,” said one national expert. “I believe our system has developed serious flaws that interfere with its ability to develop in our young people the depth of critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, and human understanding so essential to dealing with the problems in our world today.”
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Because the majority of students at party schools refuse to do the hard work that used to be required in college, colleges have been forced to dumb down their classes to the level that underperforming students can handle. The lower the standards, the more students will meet the mark without all the bother of making any effort to study or learn. Many professors, however, are complaining that the process has reached ridiculous levels.
Paul Sally, a math professor at the University of Chicago, for example, said graduating “numerically illiterate” students was creating an entire generation that doesn’t know how to balance a checkbook. “This is a serious, serious problem,” he told a meeting of the Mathematical Association of America in 2003. “You can’t teach mathematics with cotton candy.” He found that colleges across the country have replaced courses that actually used to teach students how to
do
math with courses
about
math.
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do
math with courses
about
math.
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“They are describing what is going on in mathematics without demanding any of the skills it takes to do it and without telling them what mathematics means,” he said. Concepts considered too difficult for students are left out entirely. Students call these dumbed-down classes “Math for Rocks” or “Math for Dummies,” he said. They feature “beautiful pictures and imprecise ideas. . . . It’s like learning to drive a car by watching a video and then being told to go drive on the expressway.”
Creating classes that are easy for students to pass without doing any hard work is cheating them in the long run, he said. Students who lack basic math skills have trouble following the stock market or understanding medical studies, getting a mortgage, balancing their checkbooks, or doing their taxes.
In the Department of Communication at Keene State College, where I was employed for a dozen years, all students were required to take a capstone course called “Senior Project” in their senior year. Students constantly told me how difficult this class was, how much time it took, and the large amount of work involved. I never taught this dreaded course, but when I looked at the syllabus, I was amazed to find that students were required to do only one thing during the entire semester: write a single term paper. This activity used to be required as part of most college courses and was something high school students were once required to do. Now, after fifteen years of education, many of them were writing a term paper for the first time and taking a whole semester to do it.
The students met individually with an assigned faculty member once a week for each step of the process. It turned out to be a severe case of spoon-feeding in which the professor directed each stage of the process. There was a class for choosing a topic, a class for choosing sources, a class for researching the topic, a class on how to take books out of the library, a class on citing sources, a class on organization, and a class on proofreading. Students had their hands held during every stage of the process to the point that the final paper could be considered as much the teacher’s work as the student’s.
Given the amount of time involved, one might assume that these papers would be top-notch efforts. When they were presented at the end of the semester, however, some of the topics ranged from Paris Hilton and Britney Spears to the drinking habits of underage students to the role fraternities and sororities play in campus social life. I was often embarrassed to be a part of this poor excuse for learning.
An increasing number of professors don’t even bother assigning term papers anymore because the students simply refuse to complete them. They don’t have the necessary skills and are not willing to take the time to do the research and the writing. Their language and thinking skills are too poor and they don’t have enough familiarity with essays to write one. They don’t know how to use source information and they have a hard time focusing on one thing for very long. “In the old technique of assigning an essay, the student would pick the topic and they would go to the library and research it to determine if it’s a topic you can actually write something about,” said one professor. “Now, most students can’t pick a topic. If you tell them what to do—okay, here’s a selection of topics, pick one—they can do it, but on their own most cannot come up with a topic that they can write meaningfully about.”
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Meanwhile, students have become bolder about voicing their objections to how classes are run. They interrupt lectures by asking, “Is this going to be on the test?” and they answer questions from teachers with comments like, “Who gives a shit?” When professors ask students to pay attention, they tell them to shut up and mind their own business because they pay their salaries. When I attempted to show a student how to make subjects and verbs agree in his news story, he told me to stop forcing my opinions on him and let him do it his own way. In another class, most of the students simply marched out in protest when they thought I was giving them too much homework.
Mike Flatt, the managing editor of
The Spectrum
student newspaper at SUNY Buffalo, explained student entitlement in a column. “Students today feel they have the right to walk in late to class and not be called on it,” he wrote. “A student who works full time to pay for college shouldn’t have to worry about showing up five minutes late . . .
I pay your salary. Who are you to lecture me on any subject (other than the class topic)?
A tenuous power struggle takes place between students and professors, and some professors seem to be missing the bigger picture. We, as students, as paying clients, deserve to send the message to an instructor if we don’t believe they’re giving us an adequate return on our investment. And mocking students for punctuality is poor customer service.”
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The Spectrum
student newspaper at SUNY Buffalo, explained student entitlement in a column. “Students today feel they have the right to walk in late to class and not be called on it,” he wrote. “A student who works full time to pay for college shouldn’t have to worry about showing up five minutes late . . .
I pay your salary. Who are you to lecture me on any subject (other than the class topic)?
A tenuous power struggle takes place between students and professors, and some professors seem to be missing the bigger picture. We, as students, as paying clients, deserve to send the message to an instructor if we don’t believe they’re giving us an adequate return on our investment. And mocking students for punctuality is poor customer service.”
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In other words, the old dynamic in which the professor was in control of the class, set the standards, and acted as gatekeeper in deciding which students had mastered the information and were ready to move on, has been turned upside down. Now it is the students who set the standards and they can get really angry if they feel the standards are too high. Professors who have problems with the new rules can expect to be out of a job.
In countless written evaluations of faculty, students repeat the same complaints over and over. Classes are boring. Professors aren’t entertaining enough, not funny enough. “Bring a pillow,” students sometimes write, or “He needs some dancing girls or a monkey or something to make his class more interesting.” To meet these demands, professors take acting classes and train themselves to be more demonstrative. They search the internet for some new jokes to use in their classes. The goal is to turn their classrooms into stand-up comedy clubs, circuses, or television variety shows.
To see where all of this is heading, you can take a look at the popular HBO comedy series
Assume the Position with Mr. Wuhl
, which uses a college classroom for a setting. It’s not real, of course, but it is everything students could want: fast-paced action with lots of explosive sounds, scantily clad models, rapid-fire changes of topic and format. For students, it’s a laugh-a-second romp through such topics as why President William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia, whether or not cupcake icon Little Debbie really existed, and a PowerPoint reenactment of the death of Alexander Hamilton, complete with pistol graphics and sound effects.
Assume the Position with Mr. Wuhl
, which uses a college classroom for a setting. It’s not real, of course, but it is everything students could want: fast-paced action with lots of explosive sounds, scantily clad models, rapid-fire changes of topic and format. For students, it’s a laugh-a-second romp through such topics as why President William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia, whether or not cupcake icon Little Debbie really existed, and a PowerPoint reenactment of the death of Alexander Hamilton, complete with pistol graphics and sound effects.
Entertaining? Unquestionably. But educational? Well, not really. This kind of approach, which is imitated by countless professors eager for the elusive thumbs-up on student evaluations, is aimed at getting a quick laugh or making an interesting but trivial point. It’s college without all that complicated critical thinking. Students can sit back and enjoy the show until the class ends. But education as scripted by Mr. Wuhl is nothing but a collection of Trivial Pursuit cards without any connections, critical thinking, or any real knowledge being added. It’s what children who grew up watching
Sesame Street
expect from education: lots of short little vignettes with lots of colors and sounds, none of it requiring any real thinking.
Sesame Street
expect from education: lots of short little vignettes with lots of colors and sounds, none of it requiring any real thinking.
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