I was emailing back and forth with a college president from one of those highly ranked US News schools about - what else - grade inflation. He or she is someone I've met once. Like usual, I asked that person my standard question. How did we screw up undergraduate education so fast?
The quality of higher education in the US has not always been particularly good. In the 19th century it was, in fact, abysmal. But Charles William Eliot turned Harvard around and his actions seemed to influence higher education across the country. Undergraduate education became a serious business. Robert Maynard Hutchins then carried the torch and provided national leadership while president and chancellor at Chicago in the early to middle 20th century. Certainly, you could still find examples of schools that were country clubs for the wealthy during that era, but for most, undergraduate education required real work.
Then Sputnik came along in the 1950's and suddenly the United States became paranoid that the Russians were beating us in science and technology. We ratcheted up our efforts in higher education even more. The quality of our undergraduate education was the finest in the world by far.
For some reason with the onset of the Vietnam War, the quality of higher education in the US began to wane. We have continued to go downward. We require less work of our students. At Duke for example, undergraduates studied 34 hours a week in the 1960s. Now they are down to 11 hours a week. We give far higher grades for far less effort. Students are less literate. They are less engaged in the process of learning than they have ever been (at least ever since surveys of student engagement have been made).
It's not all bad. We've decided that if you really need to know something for your job or your MCAT, we'll teach you that. So organic chemistry is likely still a bear of a class, although grades are higher than they've ever been. Also if you do possess burning intellectual curiosity, we'll let you read all the books we assign and do all the research you want to write profound and insightful papers; it's just that those that don't do all that reading and write b.s. in their papers might get an A, too.
A couple of weeks ago I was at Stanford talking to some undergraduates about what they did day to day. These were very articulate, smart and happy students. There was one engineer in the crowd. He/she talked about spending 20 hours a week on just one class. I think that was an exaggeration, but I got the drift. The other three were in the humanities. They noted that their classes didn't require much work, but their days were filled with lots of activities, clubs and sports.
I smiled. It sounded like summer camp. How did we screw up so fast?
That's what I asked Mr./Ms. College President. The answer?
"The weakening of undergraduate education was not due to a thousand cuts, nor just one cause. To me, there were several (for private universities)
1. Faculty cowardice - (among some) Many faculty just do not want to argue with students about grades.
2. The quest for good teaching evaluations. I would guess that the correlation between high grades awarded and enthusiastic teacher evaluations is quite high almost everywhere.
3. Political correctness and the mania to support "self-esteem" of students.
4. Precipitous decline of honor codes almost everywhere, so that cheating is rampant.
5. The spread of "spinus dissaperanus," a viral disease that robs university leaders of whatever spine they had before becoming leaders.
6. Governing board failures, due partly to the fact that prospective board members eagerly seek the social status that comes with university board membership.
7. Growing lack of diversity in faculty philosophical views.
And many more."
He/she knows we've screwed up. My guess is that most if not all college presidents know we've screwed up. But they won't say so publicly. It would be a public relations disaster to make such an admission. Privately, they may try to work on the edges to improve education and make it more serious. Working on the edges, though, won't solve this problem.
What will? College presidents need to publicly admit what they know is true. That's what Charles William Eliot did at Harvard. That's what Robert Maynard Hutchins did at Chicago. They screamed and told the truth. Others listened. Until we find another national leader willing to take such risks, we can expect undergraduate education to continue its downward slide.
15 comments:
Speaking as a former grader (I TA'd more classes than I care to remember, in multiple departments on multiple campuses), I have a quibble with President X. I didn't want to argue with students about grades, not because I'm cowardly, but because I didn't really believe in the system, which is suffused with arbitrariness. To begin with, there's an awful lot of arbitrariness in scoring answers to homework and test questions. Typically, a few students' answers are easy to score, because they get either everything or nothing right, but most are muddles, and assigning partial credit is a laborious, messy business. At best, one can be reasonably consistent in one's arbitrariness, to whatever extent different students submit similar muddles. Moreover, when turning score totals into letter grades, exactly what is the difference between, say, a B- and a C+? To my knowledge, none of the campuses or departments where I worked had a mandated set of percentile boundaries. There was no "standard curve", and different faculty members used different cutoffs. I'm a scientist, and I found the decidedly unscientific character of grading distasteful. And anyhow, as I mentioned in a previous comment here, the distinctions among the lower grades seemed to me factitious. In my judgment, most of the students in the courses I TA'd understood the material so poorly that they simply shouldn't have been passed.
Leaving aside President X, from a broader perspective, which of the "stakeholders" in modern universities really care about the decline? Some professors, obviously, and a few students, maybe, who are irked that they work hard and get A's but others don't work hard yet still get A's; but as you noted, some students, I suspect most, are content with the situation. If nobody else is upset, I predict there will be no improvement.
Stuart, your observations seem right on the mark, as usual.
Bloated grading and low standards seem to float up from the same mess in grade school and public school. The students bring their expectations to college, along with declining respect for their teachers and the value of education as opposed to diplomas and degrees. This has been going on for so long that many of these students have now become grade school, high school, and college teachers, further perpetuating the fiasco.
When Rhode Island decided to eliminate those public school teachers who were not getting the job done, Obama backed the decision. Despite his support, primarily due to pressure from the unions, it was just announced that the fired teachers will be re-instated. The low standards in education are like flypaper- very hard to escape without the kind of firm, unflinching, and well-articulated leadership you described in your post.
This summer camp model for higher ed comes and goes. But when it's in fashion, I've never seen any sort of national complaint that we've screwed up. Apparently, the public was happy with the summer camp model in the mid-19th century. Princeton students and alums were happy with the summer camp model in the 1920s and 1930s. Stanford students are happy with the summer camp model now.
Part of the reason, though, they are happy is that in terms of rhetoric everyone pretends it isn't a summer camp. The language of leadership says we are a serious enterprise. So people get the "best of both worlds." They get to screw off at a rate of 50K a year. And everyone tells them they are wonderful, hard working, intellectual giants.
I'm guessing that if President X, Y and Z opened their mouths and said "we're screwing up" people would be upset not because it isn't so but because they were being party poopers.
What made Eliot and Hutchins buck the summer camp model? I'm sure everyone was as happy with that model then as they are now. But for whatever reason both individuals stated the facts plainly and simply. And for reasons I don't understand, people listened.
Some recent candor from Derek Bok, past president of Harvard, July 9, 2010, on radio station WBUR.
Bok: There’s no question that students are studying less. I think something happened in the 1960’s in the relationship between students and faculty that shifted influence much more to the students….So I think that there has been a significant erosion, yes.
Question: Does that mean that in your mind the erosion has led to an erosion in the quality of an education that students walk out the door with at the end of their four years?
Bok: I don’t think see how you can reach any other conclusion....How much students develop and learn in college is very much related to how much of an effort they put into it. So if they are studying less, there has got to be a price to be paid in terms of the amount that they learn
Speaking as a student at one of the sweet-sixteen hardest schools, I am continually amazed at how little work is required for the grades given. I feel professors back off too easily when pressed. Instead of standing their ground with their word as law, their statements become suggestions open to (continuous) debate.
The entire system is losing the objectivity of numbers. Grades were at one point percentages. Based on that idea, a 100 should mean all material presented was repeated back by the student. Anything less meant material was missed. This is not done in practice.
Four issues distort the truth of what information or thinking ability is retained. There is a difference between what is taught and what is measured. (An exhaustive debate I will sidestep.) There are the letter grades -soft aggregations over a range of possible retentions-, the switch of "percents" for "points" so as to avoid the ratio of [amount returned] / [amount requested] and the oh so hoped for curve. Bell or not, the curve distorts a student's understanding of their performance. I feel it hides the truth. I don't understand how a 60% on a test equates to a B, or in some classes (as the hearsay for O-Chem would have you believe) an A. Assuming lettered intervals of 10%, how does a 60% in one class merit the same letter grade as an 80% in others?
Sure, there is an argument of relative measure, that one subject's complexity should be accounted for when compared to another's simplicity... but that seems like a second-rung issue. It does not address flaws in instruction and evaluation of difficult material or the perception of grades. Rather, the curve masks reality with a faster, happier version.
As the system distances itself from its factual numerical origin, it does a disservice to all by pretending it's evaluations are based on numbers. The entire grading system might as well revert to my grade school's Satisfactory, Above Average, Commendable scale. At least that was unapologetically subjective.
You deserve a better education than what you describe. And that's just it. Higher education is, more often than not, no longer challenging the best and the brightest.
I went to Stanford and can tell you that the engineer you spoke to is most likely not exaggerating about spending 20 hours per week on one course. It is well known that for some courses such as CS140: Operating Systems, one can expect to spend up to 40 hours per week on it. 20 hours per week is slightly above average. The standard is 3 hours of work per unit per week outside of class time. In my experience, the estimate of 3 hours per unit per week is about right for science courses while engineering courses are often way above this and social science and humanities courses can be below this. Students are even likely to understate among classmates the amount of time they put in so as not to appear slower.
I too went to Stanford, albeit a long time ago, and can tell you that a required study time of 20 hours a week for one class in engineering or the sciences is an exaggeration. The outside of class workloads back in the 1980s were about 6 to 8 hours a week for a senior level science/engineering class and a couple to a few hours more a week for a graduate level class.
Back in the 1990s according to COFHE surveys of students, undergraduates at Stanford studied on average about 17 hours a week total. Now it's true that this average included everyone at Stanford, from the English majors to the Electrical Engineering majors.
How much do students study today? Stanford doesn't give out those numbers, but its students certainly aren't studying more than they did in the 1990s.
On average, college is a part-time job in terms of workload today. That's true at Stanford. That's true just about everywhere.
Perhaps you are reading the statement as 20 hours per week average per class. That's not what I'm saying, nor what it sounds like the engineer you spoke to was saying. I am saying there are some classes where one has to spend 20 or more hours per week, not all. So it's not an exaggeration.
Courses range from 3-5 units. For a 3 unit class, which most upper-division science and engineering courses are, 6-8 hours per week sounds about right for some majors. To graduate, one needs to take 15 units per quarter. If 6-8 hours per week is average for a 3 unit course, that comes out to 35 hours of studying per week. If it were a 4 unit course, that comes out to 26 hours of studying per week.
Your CV says you did not attend undergrad at Stanford. Having been both an undergrad and grad student there, I can say that the undergrad and grad experiences are quite separate. Being an undergrad and living in the undergrad dorms would have allowed you to see what Stanford undergrad life is really like, and the range of workloads between different majors.
I came across a small survey study a while back which had some data on time use by major or school at Stanford. I can't find it right now but I'm trying to Google it.
I attended Stanford in the late 90s and early 00s, majored in an engineering, science, and social science field as a coterminal masters student. Everyone I knew worked around the clock so the 17 hours from the survey you cite sounds pretty low. I guess I could believe it as an average across all students, but I'd be interested in seeing the exact questions they were asked and the survey data.
Most people I knew were CS or bio/pre-med majors which are probably the highest workload. Studying 30 hours per week was common, 15 hours of class time, 10 hours of work-study, 10 hours of research lab, 5 hours of extracurriculars, 5 hours of exercise, and the rest for eating, sleeping, and socializing is the Stanford I know. That may not be average but it is not unusual.
I actually did take two undergrad classes at Stanford way back when, one senior physics class and one senior chemical engineering class. They were about 6 to 8 hours a week kind of things including homework for me. In the chemical engineering class, though, two very bright undergrad students would do the homework and pass their copies around right before class. So not everyone was doing the work required.
Surveys of time use of students are certainly not exact things. My observations and experiences say that engineers and science majors do study more, a lot more. But the surveys don't seem to show this. In the UC system, for example, science students study about two hours a week more (off the top of my head, I remember it as being about 14 hours a week versus 12 hours a week).
This seems low for science majors, but I do know that when I required students to work more than three hours a week, students complained mightily and said to me personally that my work loads were well out of line with the rest of the university. Is Duke that different than the UC schools or Stanford? No.
I know that students want to believe they are working hard. I also know that many students do work hard. But on average across a university, they don't. On average, it's a part time job today.
One more thing. I've read this comment before on my blog - if you could spend some time in a dorm you'd know - but from a Duke student. I'd love to spend a week in a dorm, Duke or Stanford or wherever. I'd learn a lot. I tried to take the Duke student up on his offer, but he didn't respond. I've never lived in a dorm, actually, even when I was a college student back in the days when Pluto was still a planet (and dinosaurs roamed the earth).
I'm not sure why the numbers come out so discrepant between surveys and what students and alumni actually say. What I found via Googling things like [Stanford workload] seems to agree with my estimate. The rule of thumb is 3 hours per unit per week including class time. (This is a correction to my earlier statement of not including class time.) So 6-8 hours per week for an upper division science and engineering course fits with this as they are usually 3-4 units.
The consensus in this forum discussion is 40-45 hours per week including class time, and referring to a Sleep and Dreams class survey:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/stanford-university/389144-stanford-workload.html
The difference in workloads between majors might not show up so much because one usually only takes 1-2 courses from a major department each quarter. If you know you are taking high workload courses, you fill the other slots with easier courses. For example, every engineer I knew who was double majoring in economics got A+s in economics with their eyes closed. So they may be spending 15-20 hours on an 3-4 unit EE or CS course but 2 hours on a 5 unit economics course. Their total studying might be a manageable 30 hours but they worked 10 times as hard for their engineering courses as social science courses.
There are "summer camp" activities, however, many of these activities do as much to prepare students for work as their coursework. E.g. an engineer joining the Solar Car Project, a biology major joining a journal club, anyone joining an entrepreneurship club, or a writer joining the newspaper.
Even using the figure of 17 hours of studying per week, add in an average class time of 17 hours/units, some office hours, and undergraduate research work, you have about a standard 40 hour work week, not counting the "activities" and student jobs, so I wouldn't say it's part-time.
The estimate of 17 hours a week comes from a COFHE study in the mid-1990s. Stanford study hours then were very similar to study hours at other COFHE schools. My estimate of 6-8 hours a week per class at Stanford comes from taking two senior level science classes almost thirty years ago. How much do students study today?
Stanford does not publish this information. The citation you have is from a "survey" where the data aren't shown and no year is given. It's hearsay on a web site.
But there are other studies, both national surveys and school surveys with real data. For the UC system, the numbers are 12.8 hours of studying, 28.3 hours of total academic time per week (cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/.../SERU_EngagedLearningREPORT_2010.pdf). For Duke, the numbers are 10.5 hours of studying, 22.5 hours of total academic time (www.soc.duke.edu/undergraduate/cll/final_report.pdf). Nationally, it's 26-28 hours of total academic time per week (www.econ.ucsb.edu/~babcock/college_time_use_6_08.pdf).
Nationally, college is a part time job today. That's true in the UC system. That's true at Duke. Is Stanford any different? No. At Stanford, college is on average a part time job. Many students do work hard. Most don't. I know that students and parents feel a need to pretend that isn't the case. They also feel a need to pretend that grading is tough. But the data say otherwise.
My personal anecdote on the topic of free time:
In 1998, I was an exchange student at UC Berkeley from Mexico, majoring in Chemistry. I took six classes, two of them graduate level, and three of them advanced undergraduate (including a biochemistry class popular with premeds). The last one was a freshman class that I added for fun. The total number of credits was 17, if I remember correctly, and I was warned by an academic advisor that I was crazy because it was an excessive load.
To my surprise, my semester there often seemed like a vacation. I was used to spending nearly 40 hours in lectures or labs and having to write four lab reports per week, in addition to problem sets and other things. At Berkely, I had 17 per week of lecture time, and while the graduate classes were tough and their problem sets for one of them sometimes took up to ten hours to solve, some of the undergrad classes required less than an hour of extra time. The net result was that I could go to the movies between lectures, go to San Francisco for the weekend, etc. I guess the reason for all the spare time was that I didn't have any extracurricular activities, because I was a foreign student and barely even knew that they existed.
Note that I'm not talking about the difficulty of the classes. Some of them were quite difficult, and in my opinion harder than the classes in Mexico. I'm only talking about time.
Thanks for that. It's an important distinction to make, study hours versus difficulty.
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