madman31

I've come to a very somber conclusion today: college students are getting less intelligent, less motivated, or both.

I've been in the process of grading research papers today. They are bad. Real bad. And we're not talking easy things like the lack of a research question, missing punctuation, or inconsistent citations.

We're talking that a lot of these students lack the ability to write a coherent sentence. No subject-verb agreement (assuming there is a verb in the sentence at all), fragments, runon sentences, no direction whatsoever. Seriously. I wrote better than a lot of these folks do when I was in junior high school.

I'm still trying to formulate the reason(s) for this. There are a number of possibilities:

1. High Schools simply don't prepare students as well as they used to. Some of these students have never written anything longer than an email. That's just sad. There is a lot of grade inflation at all levels, which is partially to blame, IMHO.

2. Students just don't care. Never before have I seen so many students just 'going through the motions.' Attendance is poor, and when students are failing or doing otherwise not so good, they never even attempt to come talk to me and discuss what some of the things that they can do to improve their work. They take their F's silently and move on to the next semester.

3. Students expect everything handed to them these days. Anything related to independent problem-solving or thought seems to be a foreign concept. They want to be babied--which, in my opinion, is something that needs to be weaned away BEFORE college. Part of the college experience is developing self-discipliine and a work ethic. Somwhere this has been forgotten.

Don't get me wrong--I'm still an optimist. I've only been at my current institution for less than an academic year, and I truly believe that this can be changed for the better. The handicap is just much bigger here than I expected it to be.

A recommendation: Eats, Shoots, and Leaves

Happy studying!