Party Schools Exposed

Student jourrnalist describes grade inflation

It's been my opinion all along that students are perfectly aware of the breakdown in higher education that is going on all around them. They know which schools are party schools. They know when classes are being dumbed down. They know that administrators will bend over backward to make excuses for them in the name of "retention."

But until now I was not aware of a student who understood the reasons and methods of grade inflation. Then someone sent me a column by Evan Helmuth, a writer for the University News at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Helmuth has the whole thing all figured out. If he understands this, why aren't parents able to grasp the idea that a grade of  A is pretty meaningless when, as Helmuth says, "professors hand out A's like candy."

The especially tragic thing is the impact on the hardworking students who usually lived in A land all by themselves. If everyone gets an A anyway, where is the incentive to work hard to earn it? Helmuth understands this as well.

You can read Helmuth's column here "Grade inflation rampant."

And check out his Matt Drudge imitation photo!

  

Missing from college curriculum: How to get a job 101

They've spent an average of six years at college and don't know much about grammar, civics or math, but today's college graduates spent tens of thousands of dollars to buy a diploma and now they're ready for the workforce, right?

Wrong, according to researchers at York College in Pennsylvania. 

You can read the NPR report "College Grads Unprepared for Workplace." 

Their study found that recent college grads went to interviews wearing shorts and sandals. The first question they asked? "How much vacation time do I get?" They refused to do menial jobs and would only consider jobs at top pay. 

This sense of entitlement is encouraged by college administrators who have bought into the "student friendly" curriculum where there are few rules, anything goes and students get to decide what grades they want and when they will go to classes. Education is optional and administrators are eager to bend over backwards to make them happy.

The world of work, unfortunately, does not work this way. You have to do what you are told. You have to suck up to your boss. You have to dress up. You have to show up on time. These are all skills that are not taught at today's colleges.

Good luck class of 2010! And remember: don't bring a beer to your job interview.

Why send kids to college when most of them drop out?

An article this week in the New York Times spells out what I have been writing in this blog for two years now. We're sending too many unprepared and disengaged students to college for all the wrong reasons.

You can read the article here: Plan B: Skip College.

It wasn't that long ago that only the best and the brightest went to a four-year college, which prepared them to be the leaders of tomorrow. The rest of the high school graduates went to work or signed up for a trade school to learn a profession

Today, however, we send the below average and mediocre students to college as well and the result is that most of them drop out, leaving them with the student loan bills with nothing to show for them. In fact, 69 percent of high school graduates now go to college, up from 5 percent a century ago.

In fact, many college administrators think every student should go to college, a fantasy that defies any kind of logic. These people seem to think that auto repair workers should be discussing Proust in the lunch room or burger flippers should review Einstein's theory of relativity while dolloping mustard on the Big Macs. Completely out of touch with reality.

But these administrators have done an excellent sales job of convincing parents that not sending little Johnny to college is a form of child abuse. At the same time, these administrators have dumbed down their courses, inflated grades and turned their campuses into adolescent playgrounds where binge drinking is not punished and every possible perk from climbing walls to gourmet food courts to luxury condominiums are part of the sales package. Kids go to college not to learn anything but to have the time of their lives at a summer camp that lasts for six years.

If we sent only the bright kids to college, the students who are really interested in learning for learning's sake, we could afford to send them to college for free. It would be a great benefit for our country. But sending mediocre and anti-intellectual slackers to college is a waste of money and resources that reduces the required rigor and cheapens the value of a diploma. Everybody loses except the administrators who continue to add their friends to the payroll and push up their salaries into the quarter to a half million bucks a year range. That's the real reason they want to send everyone to college. More students equal more tuition which means higher salaries. It's a no-brainier!

Why don't students study anymore?

A new study by two economists has found that the number of hours students spend studying each week declined by 10 hours between 1961 and 2003, but does not explain why that happened.

Never fear, Tom Bartlett, one of the best writers for the Chronicle of Higher Education, offers his own suggestions here. Among the reasons he suggests are that students are lazier these days, classes are easier and students have more distractions today.

All of that is true, but the biggest reason is that colleges no longer require hard work to obtain a degree. That was back in 1961 when colleges' prime mission was "education." Today "education" has been replaced by the buzz word you hear every day at academic meetings: "retention."  And the two are mutually exclusive.

Making students study makes them unhappy and encourages them to drop out rather than hit the books. In 1961, students who said they would rather not study were shown the door. Today, students who don't want to study simply complain to the administration that the classes are too hard. They are then dumbed down in the name of retention so you don't have to study. Grade inflation helps a lot too!

Studying and working hard used to be what college was about. Today, college is an adolescent theme park where only chumps waste time studying, or even reading the textbook or even buying the textbook.  Students text their way through classes while listening to their Ipods and if the professor dares give them anything lower than a B, they complain to the administration that the professor is not playing the game by the modern rules. Sooner or later the professor gets the message: dumb down or die.

So in our century only half of colleges graduates are literate enough to understand the difference between opposing newspaper editorials. In an age of deliberate data falsification on television, these leaders of tomorrow are going to have a very hard time deciding whether or not space aliens control the government or if their president is really a socialist born in Africa. Being able to read should be the bottom line for elementary school graduates, high school graduates or even college graduates. But that attitude is so 1961.

At party schools, only brave teachers award low grades

You may have read about the brave biology professor at Louisiana State University who dared to award low test scores for students who failed her tests, but you might not understand the reasons this happened.

In case you missed it, you can read the USA Today story about this here.

In party school culture, "retention" has become the primary mission, replacing the old mission of educating students. Students pay the high costs of tuition and in return they demand  good grades. As one of my students once told me, "I pay a lot of money to come here and I deserve a better grade than this."

Education and honestly evaluating what students  know, which used to be the prime mission of colleges and universities, has generally been forgotten in favor of the new prime directive of  purchasing degrees at the diploma mart.

What happened to Dominique G. Hornberger is that she seemed to have fallen into a time warp and dared to give students the failing grades they deserved for flunking the tests. Students complained and some of them dropped her class. This set off the "retention" alarms in the administrative offices. Danger! Students are unhappy! Take immediate action!

And lo and behold Hornberger was removed from the class and was replaced by a more appropriate party school professor whose first act was to raise student grades across the board. Students now happy. Retention mission accomplished. Problem solved.

Fine, except many professors still consider grading their turf and consider what the LSU administration did to Hornberger a serious breech of etiquette and it set off a national fire storm of protest. Just read some of the comments on the story above.

It's pretty clear that Hornberger was in the right here and the administration was wrong. But all of this just goes to show one more time that education is no longer the top priority and has long been replaced with the prime mission of keeping the customers satisfied so they can continue to pay their high tuition.

Professor refuses order to fix grades for crackhead hoopster

One of my new heroes is Sally Dear, an adjunct at Binghamton University in New York, who took a stand against corrupt college administrators who ordered her to fix the grades of a college basketball player with a spotty attendance record who was later arrested for selling and using crack cocaine.

With 11 years of experience teaching human development, Sally didn't set out to be a whistle blower, but when the New York Times asked her the question, she decided to answer it honestly.  Yes, she said, she had been ordered to give the athletes higher grades than they deserved. As a result of telling the truth, she was fired.

"I'm being fired for being ethical," she told the New York Times. "I have no doubt about that whatsoever."

While Binghamton claimed her dismissal was due to "budget cuts," absolutely no one is falling for that whopper. Now that the door is open, Sally is spilling the beans that many of Binghamton's athletically gifted but academically challenged hoopsters were funneled into the human development program because it was known to favor the basketball program. According to Sally, the department has not been holding the hoopsters to the same standard as other students. Hoopsters who were not passing were given "independent studies" to carry them through, she said.

As a former college teacher, I can tell you that "independent studies" are a well-known dodge to keep students in school who are too dumb to pass the regular courses or who have serious attendance problems caused by failure to get up before noon.

Now the SUNY chancellor has ordered Sally to be reinstated and ordered an outside investigation to focus on issues of "academic integrity" in addition to an ongoing investigation of the collapse of the team after six players were dismissed. The athletic director also resigned.

"It's no secret to anyone that the president's desire to get to the NCAA championship trumped everything else," Sally told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I got caught right in the middle of it."

So one lowly adjunct tells the truth and the whole corrupt system falls apart. College presidents like Binghamton's Lois B. DeFleur who care more about NCAA championships than they do about academic standards are exposed for the unethical creeps that they really are. Binghamton administrators are no doubt staying up late these days feeding the paper shredders to cover up the truth.

Sally thinks there are hundreds of professors like her around the country who are fed up with the dumbed down classes and inflated grades that administrators are forcing on them in order to improve their retention rates and keep the millions in tuition money flowing from student loans into the college coffers.

"They're not willing to talk to anyone," she said. "They're scared of their jobs."

When an industry that brags about its academic freedom intimidates its employees by punishing those who speak out about abuses, its time for a full scale housecleaning.   We could start by kicking out corrupt, overpaid college administrators like Lois B. DeFleur.

'Tis the season to celebrate fraudulent grade reports

It's that time of year again. All the young scholars have flown away from my little college city and there is a strange stillness, especially at night. Not a single terrified scream or cackle of laughter and no more incessant booming of Hip Hop from car windows with a rapper bragging about all the ho's he's beat up so far that evening.

You can walk down the sidewalk for block after block without having to step over a passed out scholar or worry about an adolescent urinator aiming at your shoes. Beer cans, red Dixie cups, the odd bit of cast off clothing, all gone.

But, for parents, it's also the time of year when they get a chance to examine that creative work of fiction called the student grade report.  Wait, don't tell me. Your kid got an A or maybe a B, right? In every class? And that means little Johnny and little Sally are doing great in school, right?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, believe me, dear parents, every party school student gets an A or a B on just about every assignment in every class these days. A well-publicized study that came out last year found that students thought they deserved a B just for showing up! Although there are 26 letters in the alphabet, only two are used for student grades in our era of student entitlement, dumbed-down classes and inflated grades. Try to give a student a C these days and you will create a tempest of resentment and you can expect a series of meetings with angry administrators yelling at you about "retention." Give out a few C grades and your job could be at risk.

In colleges run like businesses, giving anything other than an A or a B is like serving a bowl of soup with a big ugly fly right in the middle. The customers get upset and complain and threaten to take their business elsewhere. Keeping students happy is now rule number one at party schools. Everyone seems to know that except you, dear parents.  Foolishly you think that a B means "good," when it has come to mean second rate. Colleges and students count on keeping you in the dark about all of this.

Professors have learned the hard way that the letters C, D and F are no longer in the academic alphabet. Only those out-of-touch parents aren't aware of that.

The losers here are the students themselves, who think they have gamed the system when they wasted five or six years to purchase a very expensive diploma that's not worth the paper it's printed on. They may have a degree and their grade report may be peppered with grades of A or B, but they can't hide their functional illiteracy for long, nor their inability to balance a checkbook. Their lack of knowledge of civics, history, geography, science and economics means they must spend their lives in a haze of ignorance, entirely unaware of how the world works. But hey, they had a good time in college and that's what they paid for. 

Grade Inflation Goes Wild at America's Colleges

Stuart Rojstaczer has been a hero of mine for a long time now. A former professor of geophysics at Duke, he has gone full time into exposing how inflated grades have damaged higher education in America.  He is a muckraker and true heretic of the first order, forcing colleges to look closely at the awful problem they have created for themselves. He was one of the people who passed on his heresy to me.

So it was with great anticipation that I read his op-ed piece from the March 24 Christian Science Monitor, and I was not disappointed. Many college administrators, of course, deny that grade inflation really exists at all. How could they accept something that reminds them that their entire industry has been cheapened by professors unwilling or unable to flunk anyone because the new academic buzz word is"retention"?

I urge you to read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts from his latest update on the "everyone gets an A" school of college grading.

"When students walk into a classroom knowing they can go through the motions and get a B+ or better, that's what they tend to do, give minimal effort. Our college classrooms are filled with students who do not prepare for class. Many study less than 10 hours a week."

Or how about this:

"Paradoxically, students are spending more and more money for an education that seems to deliver less and less content. With so few hours filled with learning, boredom sets in and students have to find something to pass the time. Instead of learning, they drink."

Right on, professor Rojstaczer!

Grade inflation: Why not just give everyone an A?

To understand what’s wrong with grade inflation at American colleges, imagine that the International Olympic Committee made the following announcement:

 

“Because we have received so many complaints from losing athletes that their self-esteem has been damaged by not winning a medal and because so many of them have tried really, really hard to win one, we have decided that our former practice discriminated against too many athletes. There has been too much agony of defeat and not enough thrill of victory. So, from now on, every athlete will receive a gold medal, even the ones who come in last.”

Pretty silly, eh? What would be the point of holding the Olympics at all? What fun would it be to watch? Why would an athlete spend time training and practicing? Why would athletes bother doing their best when they could take home a suitcase full of gold medals just like Michael Phelps?

 

That is, however, exactly what has happened on American college campuses from the Ivy Leagues on down to the lowest state university. Give a student anything less than an A and students will bitterly complain, hound you for weeks, take their case to the administration and libel you on class evaluations and Rate my Professor. That’s why many professors simply toss in the towel and list A’s from the top right down to the bottom of the grading sheets.

 

While I never heard an administrator endorse grade inflation, they make it clear that they hate taking the time to deal with “grade change requests” from students. Since no students ever complain that their grade was too high, giving universal grades of A solves this problem.

 

What this does, of course, is send a loud and clear message to students: “Only fools spend time studying. I can get the same grade you do simply by harassing the professor during exam week.” And, believe me, students understand that. Grade inflation is directly connected to dumbing down the curriculum to the lowest common denominator and discouraging the kids who really want to be in college and really want to learn.

 

Grade inflation is one of the dirty little secrets colleges deliberately keep from the public. It would be a simple calculation to add up all the grades awarded during the academic year and compare them to previous years. Few colleges, of course, want to make an issue of this and keep the information to themselves. Sometimes, however, it leaks out, as it did at Brown University this fall. The report showed that over half of the grades awarded at this Ivy League school were A. There have also been a number of national studies that have confirmed that this is happening and why, but the public still hasn’t caught on.

Parents are thrilled when their children bring home grade reports with all those As on them. They still think an A means something and that their children are exceptional. The truth, however, is that there is no longer any way to differentiate the exceptional from the merely competent. That misunderstanding on the part of the parents is where all of this begins to look a lot like fraud.

 

Should students get B's for just showing up?

One out of every three college student say that if they attend most of the classes in a college course they should receive at least a B, according to a new study by Ellen Greenberger, a professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California at Irvine.

These "entitled students," as Greenberger calls them, think that enrolling in college is similar to going shopping in a mall where the customer is always right. They think they deserve the highest grades for mediocre work and achievement and are ready to scream bloody murder if their grades are too low.

These students are also more likely to engage in cheating, more likely to exploit others, run away from anything that resembles work and display a "narcissistic attitude" toward the college experience.

The study was published in the November issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. There seems to be no link to this article and I could not find a single American newspaper article on it. In Canada, however, the article has set off a fire storm of coverage. Take a look here and here and here.  That brings up some interesting questions. Why is an American study showing anti-intellectual attitudes among American college students ignored here while it is big news in Canada? Again, I suspect this is the media's reluctance to expose the heresy that students aren't really learning very much in college, but I have no evidence of that.

Greenberger and other educators quoted in the Canadian newspapers lay the blame squarely at the feet of the self-esteem movement, which is a very sacred cow in teacher training programs in America, even though there is increasing evidence that it turns out students that feel really good about themselves but are too high on narcissism to take the time to learn anything.

Certainly I had many students like this at Keene State College and it's a major cause of grade inflation. Try giving one of these narcissistic snowflakes a grade less than an A and you are accused to not being a good teacher, not liking them or being unfair, even if they got 40 on the final exam. If you stick to your guns you can expect meetings with the department chair, the dean and even the vice president. Is it any wonder that most teachers simply throw in the towel and give everyone an A? There is absolutely no repercussions if you do that. A completely separate study this week found that half of all the grades given at Brown University last year were A. Clearly A is no longer "excellent" but more like "average."