What makes an LAC "good"
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/ |
Anonymous
Evidently resorting to lying is your idea of rigorous critical thinking. |
Anonymous
No one brought any of that up? What are you on about? |
Anonymous
...an article about how students have to read multiple books a week and aren't just "Not reading and getting As..." So the point still stands. |
Anonymous
Maybe you didn’t read the article. Some excerpts: “Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations.” “Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. ‘One has to adjust to the times,’ he said.” “The Columbia instructors who determine the Lit Hum curriculum decided to trim the reading list for the current school year.” “The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take… And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.” “For years, Dames has asked his (University of Chicago) first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.” Then there’s hours worked data like the below from Harvard’s paper comparing courses from different depts. The top 7, and 9 of the top 10, were in STEM. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/2/27/miller-harvard-course-workload-divisions/ The author noted the 3x workload difference between some STEM depts and some non-STEM ones might actually be underestimated due to how the survey capped hours reported. They also said: “If administrators like Dean Khurana are serious about academic laxity at Harvard, they must be prepared to have frank conversations about the source of this problem and recognize its disparate incidence in humanities and social science courses.” But in the spirit of trying to move things along it was already offered there were other ways of comparing rigor at the institutional level, like surveying grad school matriculation/ acceptance rates or graduation requirements, where there’s also distinct differences across schools. Those are probably even less uniformly agreed upon measures than hours worked or the expectation to actually do what’s assigned, though. A surly poster decided that if someone referenced differential expectations across majors they didn’t know anything, so here we are, debating STEM v the rest, which is dumb both because there’s so much data on that topic familiar to most with even lay interest in higher ed it doesn’t make sense to attack someone personally for mentioning it, and also because there are other (less triggering?) ways to compare and differentiate schools. Resorting to personal insults and chest thumping on an anonymous forum doesn’t really strengthen one’s argument; if anything, it signals weakness in the position. |
Anonymous
I got As in chemistry and math courses without doing every single assignment. This isn’t unique to the humanities. |
Anonymous
Nowhere in the article does it cite students reading multiple books per week. The closest example is a book assigned every 1 to 2 weeks. |
Anonymous
Yes, I still use this skill today! |
Anonymous
There’s a huge difference between a student not turning in their weekly math or chem problem set and a student not reading the humanities book. The student who doesn’t turn in the weekly problem set but intends to get an A needs to make a real effort to learn whatever they didn’t turn in, because the material very explicitly builds on itself. The student who didn’t read the humanities book isn’t going back and reading the book a week later so they can understand the next one; at most they read a summary of it. The Atlantic article does mention the phenomena of students not reading books isn’t entirely new, but the extent and frequency of it is, to the point curriculums are actually changing. But really the ultimate indicator is hours spent studying, which as the Harvard paper reports can be vastly different. |
Anonymous
I'm sorry, but did you get a STEM degree? Yes things build on each other, but most of us are human and understand there's a very finite amount of things actually tested, which is most of your grade. There's a lot of stuff I half-a$$ed, and I don't know to this day, and it wasn't that detrimental, to be honest. |
Anonymous
Yes. And I have worked in higher ed, as have other members of my immediate family. |
Anonymous
But it’s usually hard to predict exactly what will be tested. At least in STEM. |
Anonymous
Maybe the STEM kids are stupider, studying more because their tiger helicopter parents pushed them into courses they can’t handle. |
Anonymous
| Jane Eyre was the woke juvenile literature of its day. Stop fetishizing old books written for past cultures that spoke a different version of English. |
Anonymous
At some point, i understood what was reasonable to test within a two hour period. There’s an intuition in STEM education. |