🚀 go-pugleaf

Deep Fried Lettuce wrote:

<snip>

>>>>Thresholds have
>>>>been lowered for grades, my wife was an adjunct prof at a local
>>>>community college and she was not allowed to give anyone less than
> 
> a C
> 
>>>>and she knew students that should not have passed.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>This is happening globally.
>>>
>>>Some of the kids in my son's law class ( at one of the elite Group
> 
> of Eight universities)
> 
>>>simply should not be there.
>>>
>>>But they will be permitted to pass and inflict themselves upon
> 
> unsuspecting clients.
> 
>>That's because one of the purposes of a post-secondary institution is
> 
> to
> 
>>guarantee student success, whatever that's supposed to mean.  I
>>concluded that to many of them, it's being amply rewarded for doing
> 
> next
> 
>>to nothing or playing the system to one's favour.
>>
>>It scares me to think that I might be crossing a bridge or entering a
> 
> 
>>building that some of them might have had a hand in designing.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> so why in the hell are the standards in this and education in
> general being ALLOWED to slip lower and lower evey few years?
> 
> And as for marks why is it that grades are always artificially inflated
> not reflecting the true nature of a student's performance?
> 
> Exactly who was the bizarre person that thought this would be a good
> idea?

Twenty-five years ago, I was working on my first master's degree.  I was 
a TA for soem courses and I began noticing a lack of discipline in the 
students even then.  Many thought they could get away with things that 
I, as an undergrad just a few years earlier, wouldn't have even thought 
about trying.

Between the time I finished high school and I had those students, 
standards started slipping.  Allowing calculators into school classrooms 
was one of the biggest mistakes that could have been made as students 
saw they were no longer required to think.  When I was an undergrad, I 
used a slide rule until nearly the end of my second year.  The chief 
benefit of that, however, was that I was required to not only reason my 
way through problems, I had to clearly show what I was doing when I 
wrote them up for submission.

By the time I started teaching as an instructor over fifteen years ago, 
the rot had irreversibly set in.  When I started, some of the exams I 
set were closed-book.  By the time I quit in 2002, none of them were. 
In fact, if I restricted the students to only one textbook during an 
exam, the students would go and complain behind my back, with the result 
being a severe reprimand for being harsh.

I packed it in when I saw that students were graduating who not only 
failed courses, but couldn't qualify for supplemental exams.  The 
business got too weird for me.

Who let things slide?  There's enough blame to go around:

- overnments that allocate funding based on graduation rates and student 
"satisfaction",

- administrators who emphasize self-esteem over self-respect and actual 
learning, and

- teaching staff who are afraid to maintain standards and impose 
discipline, but who insist on creating a "safe learning environment" 
(I've known too many of those).

I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

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