The most important one to me is the second graph, showing the histogram of grades. It's pathetic.
However, I'm not going to jump and blame colleges straight away. As the infographic notes, "60% of college presidents say public high school students are less well-prepared... than they were 10 years ago." If that's the case, they're merely being forced to pass along students that have already been passed along. As a high school teacher, I've already noticed the same thing; students walk into high school barely being competent in basic arithmetic. Primary schooling is shuffling students along.
Why? Our educational policies punish schools that don't. This needs to be fixed.
HERE HERE... Absolutely agree with you...
ReplyDeleteI teach physics and astronomy at the undergrad level, and I find all this very easy to believe. It's very difficult to keep the bar high when so few students seem capable of achieving it. For our majors, we try really hard to keep from washing them out (it's a small school) while still having them graduate with adequate preparation. In the general education classes, what I consider a "good" student comes along so seldom that it's difficult to remember what they are like, and I find myself wondering when my class got so hard (and sometimes easing up on them). Still, I'm nowhere near the demographics shown except for when I teach a night class full of non-traditional students. In that case, I find myself giving out mostly A's, which is a reminder of just how easy my class has become even though most traditional students still do poorly.
ReplyDelete