Rigor in education

[Tahar Joblis]

After spending ample time on my BA/BS/MA at Appalachian State University, I've now started working on my doctorate at UC-Irvine. I have, in the past, been quite curious about the topic of rigor in education. Now I'm starting to have a body of first-hand experience with another school, and it's very interesting to me how much the expectations vary.

I went to a very good high school (ECHHS is ranked 77th in the US by USN&WR's much-mocked rankings) where the teachers expected a great deal of us. My junior and senior years were filled with 10-15 page papers with attached bibliographies, presentations, etc; my German teacher even took us on a field trip to Davis library so we could find original-language critiques of the literary works we were studying to use for sources. Nevertheless, most of us were derisive about the quality of education we were receiving; it was BS, make-work, not what we would see in college, etc. I didn't give a flying fuck about my grades, and I graduated in the middle of my class.

When I went off to Appalachian State, expectations shifted remarkably, and I was surprised to find that most of the lower-level undergraduate courses, the 1000s and 2000s, were actually quite easy. My intro history professor was impressed by what would have qualified as a mediocre effort in my history classes in high school; my German classes involved less reading and writing in German, and no serious literary analysis; for that matter, my literature class didn't go any more deeply into literary analysis than my high school German class had.

Even though I hadn't taken AP physics, the introductory two-year sequence of physics lectures contained little that was new to me, and little truly engaging until I hit the "junior" level (3000+) courses. A few seminars and labs covered material we wouldn't get anywhere near in high school, and there were some surprises - things being on a ten point grading scale with no curve, for example, meant that I was shocked by the grade on my first math test.

On the whole, though, while the material was new or more advanced in at least half the lower-division courses I took, non-honors courses generally saw little more rigor and were made little more difficult than my better high school classes. But, said the students, we're at Appalachian State. Middle of nowhere. Not a very exclusive school, one not many people have heard of.

And as I continued at Appalachian State, I challenged myself by taking on a triple major; I enrolled in the master's program, and starting TAing introductory math courses. It was difficult for me to wrap my head around what the basic level of college algebra was; the tests and quizzes I wrote tended to be too hard, but I challenged my students, and they either dropped the course or rose to the occasion even as I worked on trying to curve scores as generously as my supervisor would allow me to.

So now I've come to UC-Irvine, a better known school, one with a doctoral program, a serious budget, and a freshman class mostly coming out of the the top tenth of California's high school students. A larger, more highly educated state than my own home state; a school that is probably more widely identified than my alma mater. And still, I heard the derisive comments of the students there, which I have heard throughout my life, that oh, it's UCI. It's slack. And in my doctoral program, I don't feel any less busy than I did working on my master's at Appalachian.

And perhaps it's because it's mainly listed as an econ class, perhaps it's because of the speed of the quarter schedule, but the midterm we just gave in the financial mathematics class I'm TAing seemed easier than the first test I wrote for my college algebra students. And it's an upper division class - 176/135 in a system where 200 marks the start of graduate courses. It seems like we don't spend as much time working with the undergrads, or as much effort into teaching them and grading their work.

Hypothesis #1: Wherever students are, they think they could be somewhere "better," and unless they're actually struggling, it's all "bullshit" and lax standards, not because of lack of rigor, but because folks gotta have something to gripe about. And the actual standards in use may not have much to do with the reputation of the school or department.

Hypothesis #2: The typical baccalaureate degree-seeker is if anything better off going to a university that isn't research-oriented.

Hey, I had to put something more controversial there...

[NotnotgnimmiJymmiJ]

I find pretty much every "core" course I've taken to be pretty much pointless. All the stuff that everyone's required to take. None of the students care, so the prof isn't exactly going to be enthusiastic about teaching the class. That's why the only thing that matters in high school is AP classes. The more bs classes you can skip, the better.

If you're taking courses in your major, you had better be enjoying it (or you should probably switch majors). And if you're not being challenged, you should ask your prof for extra material.

imo, students should just be allowed to take whatever they want.

[Mad hatters in jeans]

feel better now Tahar Joblis?

[Neesika]

You're paying for your degree, and that's really what it boils down to. If you've got the money, you're going to get the little piece of paper at the end, even if you're a total fucking moron.

[Ashmoria]

seems to me (and to be honest, ive been drinking) that there SHOULD be a difference between classes in your major and out of your major.

no philosophy major should to take a hard college math class. no mathematics major should have to take a hard philosophy class. but both should have to take some classes outside of their comfort zone.

one you are in graduate level classes, if they arent challenging you are at the wrong school.

having not gone to a top notch school myself, i have sometimes wondered how much more rigorous an ivy league school would have been. (sometimes i think that the prep schools that ivy league students went to were far more rigorous than the state school i went to)

[Tahar Joblis]

I find pretty much every "core" course I've taken to be pretty much pointless. All the stuff that everyone's required to take. None of the students care, so the prof isn't exactly going to be enthusiastic about teaching the class.

Well... my experience is that we had a choice between different options for most of the "core" classes. And there's a lot of variation in how that works.

Some departments and professors consider these an opportunity to catch students' interest in the field. Others are a little more as you say. I've actually learned a good bit in some of my "irrelevant" core classes (such as the one on urban planning) - but I've also had ones in which I learned little of the course material (e.g., general psych was almost all stuff I already knew, plus listening to the grad student gripe about other disciplines not talking psychologists seriously).

You generally get out of it what you put into it - but if you're paying attention and taking them seriously, you might be getting more out of those "useless" courses than you think.

I remember griping about the uselessness of the homework we were assigned in high school. I didn't really grow to appreciate how useful it could have been for me until I started teaching classes. Similarly, many of my classmates in high school would later say they really appreciated their high school education a lot more after going off to college and seeing what other people at other schools got from it.

[Mad hatters in jeans]

You're paying for your degree, and that's really what it boils down to. If you've got the money, you're going to get the little piece of paper at the end, even if you're a total fucking moron.

not true in my experience.

[Tahar Joblis]

feel better now Tahar Joblis?

Yes! I needed to get my gripe on after spending an evening watching ~200 undergrads spend an hour and a half taking a 25 question multiple choice exam. Whoops, 24, teacher made a mistake on a simple calculation and decided to just give them the answer to that one.

seems to me (and to be honest, ive been drinking) that there SHOULD be a difference between classes in your major and out of your major.

no philosophy major should to take a hard college math class. no mathematics major should have to take a hard philosophy class. but both should have to take some classes outside of their comfort zone.

Bad choice of subjects! There's an overlap for those really interested in logic :-P

one you are in graduate level classes, if they arent challenging you are at the wrong school.

having not gone to a top notch school myself, i have sometimes wondered how much more rigorous an ivy league school would have been. (sometimes i think that the prep schools that ivy league students went to were far more rigorous than the state school i went to)

"At Harvard, they say, it's hard to get a C, it's hard to get an A."

The average GPA state schools hand out is a ~3.3 (B+); at private schools, it's about ~3.7 (A-). There's not really considered to be a quality difference between students and public and private schools on that macro a level; it's a fairly consistent difference between public and private schools. If you're going to measure "rigor" by how seriously you threaten students' GPAs, private schools are less rigorous.

I've learned that at Duke, for example (I grew up in Chapel Hill; you knew people working there) there were only a few classes in which the instructors would hand out Cs - the critical "washout" classes for certain programs. Also, at most private schools, there's something of a de facto sliding school - the more you're willing to pay for your kid's education, the dumber s/he can be and still get in. Donating a new science building can work wonders with the admission committee, and once you're in, you're not likely to flunk out.

Is there a difference in the quality of education you get at a "better" school? There's a lot that goes into making the learning experience easier and providing greater depth and breadth of material covered. There are better and worse teachers, and if your classmates are closer to uniform in ability, it's easier to challenge all of them at the same time.

I think the biggest difference is the amount of attention from what quality of teachers. Better schools are those with better teachers, and who provide more access to those teachers.

[NotnotgnimmiJymmiJ]

snip

I guess I'm being a liiiiiittle bit too harsh. There was a introductory lit class that everyone had to take. It was one of those deals where all the material was selected because (I guess) that was what the prof wrote her thesis on. So no one wanted to participate in class. I'm not going to be interested in Lolly Willowes, ever.

Physics I had to take because I was a lazy idiot in high school and I have no one but myself to blame for that waste of time. Fortunately I was able to pick an environmental science class for the other science requirement, not too bad.

This Social Movements class is a little boring during the actual class, but you get to pick whatever you want to write the papers on, so it's actually quite fun for me. That's how all classes should be.

Then there's this awful two semester course where the creators of the decided to survey all of human history and carefully select the texts that have the least possible relationship with each other that you could imagine. Then they require every single prof in the college of liberal arts to teach the materials they selected. I DARE you to try to discern what relationship all of these texts share.

The Epic of Gilgamesh. Trans. Andrew George. Penguin Classics, 2003.

The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Frank Bergon, Ed. New York: Penguin
Books,1989.

Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis: The Standard Edition. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. W.W. Norton and Company, 1966.

Sophocles, Theban Plays, Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff, trans. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2003.

Plato. The Trial and Death of Socrates, G.M.A. Grube, trans. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1975.

The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. Du Bois. NewYork: Pocket Books a division of
Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2005.

Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1989.

Laozi. The Daodejing of Laozi. Ed. and trans. Philip Ivanhoe. Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Co., 2003.

Edward Jenner, Vaccination against Smallpox
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species
Homer, The Iliad,
The Declaration of Independence
Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism: Part Three of the Origins of Totalitarianism
Thomas More, Utopia
Alexis de Tocqueville, "Reflection on the Causes of the Commercial Prosperity of the United States"
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The Jane Jacobs stuff on urban planning was interesting, so I suppose it wasn't a total waste :/

[Eksperimentia]

You're paying for your degree, and that's really what it boils down to. If you've got the money, you're going to get the little piece of paper at the end, even if you're a total fucking moron.

not true in my experience.

I've found the end result to be mostly true in my experience - a lot of degree holders are complete idiots who can't be relied upon to get anything done. Although my experience-your experience arguments are lame.

[Buffett and Colbert]

I think a certain amount of rigour is needed in any schooling atmosphere. At the moment, the only class I'm being challenged in is Geometry (math isn't my strongpoint ). Despite several teacher's opinions, I can't take any advanced classes or anything, nor do I get more challenging assignments. Unless it shapes up in highschool (which I expect it will since I'll finally be able to take AP classes, as well as classes with generally tougher teachers), I'm going to have a really tough time in college.

So I'm all for rigour, HOWEVER, it sounds as if it was hard to have much of a life (now, that obviously may not be your case) with all that work you've gotten. I think a certain balance is needed so we all don't commit suicide.

[Poliwanacraca]

I'll say this - I went to a college consistently rated as one of the best in the country, and I've attended classes at both average state universities and a couple of completely obscure little colleges, and while I had good and bad professors at all fo those schools, there is absolutely no doubt that there was a HUGE difference in what was expected of me. I had a final exam at one of the state schools that literally took about 5 minutes to complete; at the "elite" school, the last thing we'd do in a course was much more along the lines of a 25-page paper. At the former, I had maybe three hours of real work outside of my classes per week; at the latter, I had an average of 100-150 pages of assigned reading per night, not even counting papers, take-home tests, etc. I don't think any student there felt that they could be somewhere "better," or that anything we were required to do was generally "bullshit" (though again, there are good and bad professors everywhere, and I definitely remember raging about the bullshittiness of being expected never to miss a particular class when the two football players in the same class were cheerfully permitted to skip every single Friday without repercussions). I think it's much more likely that people perceive their work as bullshit when either (a) it actually is, or (b) they are high schoolers, who pretty much think everything is bullshit.

[Pope Joan]

If I give a student a B for a course, I can expect a complaint to be filed with Student Services.

It doesn't matter if no work was submitted, I now have a black mark on my record.

A few more of those and my contract will not be extended next year.

So, democracy and institutional concern for student well being leads to grade inflation .

[Lucky Bicycle Works]

From the context I guess that "TA" means a course you attend but don't get a mark in? I'm not familiar with it.

[NotnotgnimmiJymmiJ]

From the context I guess that "TA" means a course you attend but don't get a mark in? I'm not familiar with it.

Teaching Assistant. They help the prof and teach the students. They basically enslave the TAs to save money.

[Dyakovo]

You're paying for your degree, and that's really what it boils down to. If you've got the money, you're going to get the little piece of paper at the end, even if you're a total fucking moron.

not true in my experience.

Didn't get your little piece of paper at the end?

[Aririn]

You're paying for your degree, and that's really what it boils down to. If you've got the money, you're going to get the little piece of paper at the end, even if you're a total fucking moron.

Not true. You may be paying for your degree, but if you don't do the job as you should, if you don't maintain a good GPA, no amount of money will guarantee you will get that little piece of paper at the end.

[Mad hatters in jeans]

You're paying for your degree, and that's really what it boils down to. If you've got the money, you're going to get the little piece of paper at the end, even if you're a total fucking moron.

not true in my experience.

Didn't get your little piece of paper at the end?

so far it's looking like a no.

[Lucky Bicycle Works]

From the context I guess that "TA" means a course you attend but don't get a mark in? I'm not familiar with it.

Teaching Assistant. They help the prof and teach the students. They basically enslave the TAs to save money.

Thanks. They're volunteers though?

And is that something you do for extra credit, or money, or what? At the uni I went to, the nearest equivalent would be a tutor (usually a postgrad) and they were paid.

[Dyakovo]

You're paying for your degree, and that's really what it boils down to. If you've got the money, you're going to get the little piece of paper at the end, even if you're a total fucking moron.

not true in my experience.

Didn't get your little piece of paper at the end?

so far it's looking like a no.

Shit that sucks...
Sorry to hear that.

[NotnotgnimmiJymmiJ]

From the context I guess that "TA" means a course you attend but don't get a mark in? I'm not familiar with it.

Teaching Assistant. They help the prof and teach the students. They basically enslave the TAs to save money.

Thanks. They're volunteers though?

And is that something you do for extra credit, or money, or what? At the uni I went to, the nearest equivalent would be a tutor (usually a postgrad) and they were paid.

Yup, typically grad students helping or even teaching undergrad courses. They usually get paid some small amount.

[Neu California]

From the context I guess that "TA" means a course you attend but don't get a mark in? I'm not familiar with it.

Teaching Assistant. They help the prof and teach the students. They basically enslave the TAs to save money.

Thanks. They're volunteers though?

And is that something you do for extra credit, or money, or what? At the uni I went to, the nearest equivalent would be a tutor (usually a postgrad) and they were paid.

TAs generally are not students in the class, but instead are workers that either help students, grade paper, or do whatever the teacher needs, and generally get their own grade.

I remember being one in High School, which actually was nice, in that I got a lot of reading time, and easy work. Ended up with money, to the tune of $200 IIRC, which was the exception, not the rule, apparently. I also remember being forced to stop playing the game that was played in driver's ed when I was a TA, because I was too good. ( )

[NERVUN]

I dunno, TJ, I think your experience is more along the lines of by the time you got to the harder levels, you have had your basics and were able to easily make the transition.

Remember, the idea of education is baby steps to help you learn, NOT to torture students... really!

[Tahar Joblis]

I'll say this - I went to a college consistently rated as one of the best in the country, and I've attended classes at both average state universities and a couple of completely obscure little colleges, and while I had good and bad professors at all fo those schools, there is absolutely no doubt that there was a HUGE difference in what was expected of me. I had a final exam at one of the state schools that literally took about 5 minutes to complete; at the "elite" school, the last thing we'd do in a course was much more along the lines of a 25-page paper. At the former, I had maybe three hours of real work outside of my classes per week; at the latter, I had an average of 100-150 pages of assigned reading per night, not even counting papers, take-home tests, etc. I don't think any student there felt that they could be somewhere "better," or that anything we were required to do was generally "bullshit" (though again, there are good and bad professors everywhere, and I definitely remember raging about the bullshittiness of being expected never to miss a particular class when the two football players in the same class were cheerfully permitted to sktnip every single Friday without repercussions). I think it's much more likely that people perceive their work as bullshit when either (a) it actually is, or (b) they are high schoolers, who pretty much think everything is bullshit.

I've had both the experience of having practically nothing required outside of a given class, and the experience of having 100+ pages of articles to read between each class meeting for a single class - both at the same school. There was a huge difference in the expectations of handle those classes. professors in different departments, in the expectations for honors classes, and in some cases from professor to professor within the upper division classes.

I know the guideline at Appalachian was supposed to be that you'd be expected to do about two hours of work outside of class for every hour you spent in class. All incoming freshmen were told this during orientation; your typical 3 credit course would have 3 "hour" (50 minute) lectures a week, and then, hypothetically, 5-6 hours of studying/homework per week, making the typical 15 credit load ~40 hours of work every week. Most of the lower division courses were well under that; a few upper division courses exceeded that.

My first year as a TA, I was doing grading support for four first-semester calculus classes, taught by two different professors. One had a quiz every two weeks, which I graded, and I think perhaps 3 graded homeworks per semester, which I didn't grade. The other had a quiz every week, then had students turn in corrections on the quiz, and had several graded homework assignments per week. IIRC, he had five grades going into the book every week when the class only met four days a week.

When I took second-semester calc as an incoming freshman, there were only four tests and a final exam going into my grades. However, in spite of all of the homework being "optional," the average grade on all the tests in the class was in the 40s. Many dropped. Only a handful passed. The teacher was good, but his expectations were extraordinary.

I dunno, TJ, I think your experience is more along the lines of by the time you got to the harder levels, you have had your basics and were able to easily make the transition.

Perhaps this is unbelievably arrogant of me, but I think I'm a terrible subject to use when examining anything about education. My performance in classes, and how much I learn in classes, doesn't seem to correlate very strongly with how other people work. Still, I think some of my teachers in high school had higher expectations of us, relative to the material they were teaching, than the lecturer does in the class I'm TAing now.

Remember, the idea of education is baby steps to help you learn, NOT to torture students... really!

True! Failing more students doesn't mean you're teaching any better - it just means you're failing more students!

[Dinaverg]

The international Baccalaureate sucks if you can't get a good selection of classes. All my hard classes are stuff I'm good at, and all the other classes are as easy as possible. The rigorous expectation of the IB has little to do with the knowledge, it's the time management. so, maybe that's something.