College eliminates English and math placement tests
The coming dark age: A West Virginia community college has stopped giving English and math placement tests, while also eliminating any comparable remedial classes.
A careful read of the article suggests that this decision is a desperate attempt by the college to deal with its influx of unqualified students, as noted by this quote:
“We are still getting some students who literally cannot read above a third-grade level, and I have never learned how to help such students,”
The college still wants these students to attend (which is a cash cow for the college) but it finds itself struggling to find the right approach for teaching them. Since there is no right approach (these individuals should simply not be in college), the situation results in a poorer learning environment for everyone.
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The coming dark age: A West Virginia community college has stopped giving English and math placement tests, while also eliminating any comparable remedial classes.
A careful read of the article suggests that this decision is a desperate attempt by the college to deal with its influx of unqualified students, as noted by this quote:
“We are still getting some students who literally cannot read above a third-grade level, and I have never learned how to help such students,”
The college still wants these students to attend (which is a cash cow for the college) but it finds itself struggling to find the right approach for teaching them. Since there is no right approach (these individuals should simply not be in college), the situation results in a poorer learning environment for everyone.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
This is very sad.
Everyone should have the chance to be indoctrinated. Free College for everyone.
Race to the bottom.
http://www.newsweek.com/millions-educated-russians-flee-putin-russia-567930
Its not sad. Its criminal that they are pushing students through high school who can not at least read at a collage level.
Since there is no right approach
Maybe there is no one right approach. However, intensive one on one tutoring could be effective. I would assign each one a case officer that monitored their progress and paired them with subject specific tutors. I’d also leverage online training aides and things like GALE Courses.
It would be a math and grammar boot camp where students could proceed at their own pace but would require a specific hourly commitment every day along with counseling, testing, and tutor engagement.
Colleges sort of try this with remedial or introductory courses but upper level classes require a base of knowledge that is not always standardized for students who did do well in high school, so you might want all of your students to go through this process. And often times the information can be taught and absorbed faster than a traditional lecture type of format by leveraging technology.
Also, every college should be forming a digital library of past lectures, speakers, seminars, ect. That allows their students to augment their current coursework. Notes are great but being able to rewatch part of a lecture is also good. So is watching lectures from other professors or from different years.
Wodun:
You prescribe practical methods of trying to fix a problem like any reasonable human might prescribe, but your working the wrong end of the problem. This is a horse long gone from the barn. Lets not fall into the trap of solving problems that in reality are cultural and political perversions. This is much bigger than practically solving problems. The solution lies before anyone even gets near a school, that’s how politically correct and perverted this situation has grown.
Its even ridiculous that we need to have this conversation and it is the confirmation that our reality is now wholly controlled by people who ensure us all failure in the long term. These stories of late where institutions of higher learning are no longer concerned with what any conscious human being knows is their primary function, education, are signs of the completely bankrupt and politically corrupted education system and the ideologies that have delivered them and us all to this counter intuitive American reality.
These stories of irrational accommodation in the education system sicken me. Low standards is no standards.
Thanks Cotour.
Glad I’m not alone in seeing inferior cultures are a product of inferior people.
Why that is such a difficult concept for reasonably educated people can only be a result of indoctrination.
Perhaps “no right approach” really should be “no one right approach.” The purpose of having a teacher rather than a video or film strip is that the teacher can adapt to the specific needs of each student in the class. If one approach does not teach all the students, then the teacher tries approach number two in order to teach those who missed it the first time.
Otherwise, we might as well have robots teaching our students.
California’s colleges and universities are having a similar hard time with under-educated students. Too many students with aspirations to go to college end up with high self esteem but low verbal or math skills. I can only imagine that the self esteem gets a kick in the gut when the students realize they have been poorly prepared for the college they desired to attend.
On the other hand, they do seem to have the hubris to know for certain that socialist ideas are good ideas, and that socialism would work, if only the right people were in charge, unlike all those other losers who have tried it, so far. One of these days, they may figure out that this knowledge should inform them that it isn’t socialism that is good, because they actually believe that it is the leadership that must be good.
Yet another example of how they are ill prepared, because they have been taught what to think rather than how to think.
Orion314,
I think that it is the ideas that are inferior, not necessarily the people. These supposedly inferior people are successfully spreading bad ideas and bad culture.
The world needs welders and pipe-fitters, too.
Mike Rowe Testifies Before Congressional Subcommittee on Closing the Skills Gap
https://youtu.be/p8Lk1KwWEMo
(6:30)
D. Williams
March 20, 2017 at 9:42 pm
The world needs welders and pipe-fitters, too.
That can read, write, and do math.
This is far from a new argument. In an essay in “Expanded Universe”, published in 1980, Robert Heinlein railed against remedial courses for students attending college.
The dumbing down continues.
Orin314:
Wodun, like any other reasonable human being they see a problem and endeavor to fix it. That is reasonable.
But if you do not step back and get a better perspective in attempting to actually understand where the problem actually comes from you are forever stuck dancing to someone else’s agenda trying to fix an insolvable problem.
This “insolvable” problem is a direct result of the perversion that is political agenda, specifically in this case Liberal / Leftist agendas in America today and the 30 or more years before. Its not something that just pops up.
So Wodun is correct if the rules were equal, but they are not, so we are kept busy arguing among ourselves while others continue to push their agenda that is designed to destroy the existing culture in order to replace it with the “correct” culture. Read this is a Leftist operation of disinformation and confusion and we must work to destroy it and restore America more to the center Right, where it belongs.
But they do it in Europe! You will hear related to things like healthcare, the dumbing down of education and other issues. So go move to Europe, thats not what America is about and never should be. The Constitution is why America is not Europe, lets not recreate a mode of operation here that we all fundamentally reject that is over there.
Another something that PISSSSSSES me off!
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-york-richest-state-raise-taxes-article-1.3003889
What is stopping these self righteous M EFER, Leftist manipulators from writing the biggest check to the government that they desire?
From their point of view the government can not have enough of your money. Pure BS and an attempt to create some kind of moral justification to confiscate it all! God I am sick of this G. Soros.
This is a now systemic failure of our whole education system.
I am sorry but I do NOT trust teachers to actually teach the students what they need to move on to the next level. I strongly believe in standardized tests to keep them in check.
If you don’t like liberal indoctrination don’t give them the time to do it.
Once you have standardized tests for all subjects you can then let each child test out at anytime to move onto the next level.
Don’t fall for the idea that children need to have socialization so they must stay in a class for a whole year. That is just a teachers way of keeping students back so they can keep their job.
If you allow the smarter students to test out of a class and move on, the teacher can then spend more time on the slower students. It helps everyone.
Get rid of those 3 month summer vacations. Break it up into 2 weeks off every quarter. Or just a summer and winter 2 weeks off each.
Place the criminal and disruptive students in their own schools. This will allow the well mannered and trying students to move ahead in a safer and better environment.
But all ideas like this are first a fight against the teachers unions.