Reply to Grade Inflation Sends AP Test Scores Soaring

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]^^ p.s. I suspect most posters here have kids in the best public or private schools in the country, so maybe this doesn't apply to your kid, but I'm still surprised people aren't aware there is an overall problem for college preparedness.[/quote]

Show me the stats on college performance that prove this.

You may be correct.[/quote]

At the college level, all I have are my personal experiences as a professor, as well as the impressions of my colleagues, which I know is not the kind of "proof" you are looking for. Our teaching and grading scales have had to change a bit too in order to accommodate. The problem is that the national/international level standardized tests are only given to children in k-12. At the college level there is no such thing as the PISA or MCAP, etc. as an independent benchmark of high-level performance. But if 11th and 12th graders are performing poorly, and standardized reading and math scores are at their lowest levels in decades, it seems pretty safe to assume that these students are not miraculously making up that deficiency in the summer before they start college. [/quote]

Cmon professor…there must be stats on flunk rates / dropout rates (though that could be financial vs failing) or other academic studies you can provide to us.

Fewer HS kids are attending college vs 10 years ago (a lot fewer…over 1MM) so those poorly performing 11th and 12th may not attend college at all.  That’s a different problem.

However, we aren’t talking about kids that never go to college.  [/quote]

Dropout rates can't tell the whole story since colleges are also very hard pressed to keep the dropout rates low. Thankfully, there is much more effort to keep struggling students onboard these days than in the olden days.

I'm hardly saying the kids are dumb. The grad students are exceptional, and the undergrad students are also extremely impressive. But the bottom 5-10% or so are increasingly struggling to even pass my courses. However, more is definitely being done by the university to keep these students on board, which I think is the right thing to do. Colleagues at other universities report more problems with engagement and performance even from the mid tiers.

If you're really interested, you can also look up the trends. It's not just the low performing range where you see drops in scores. Middle and high range students scores have dropped as well, especially in math. College bound kids are affected, even though they haven't shown as sharp a drop as the lowest performers. I'm guessing DCUM-landia is minimally affected, but it doesn't mean the trends don't exist. [/quote]

I could look up the data…but I’m not the one claiming kids are under prepared.

You work in Academia…yet somehow you can’t reference any studies to support your position?  That doesn’t make much sense to me.  You also have access to academic databases that I don’t have…so seems like you aren’t actually interested in showing much proof.

Haven’t the bottom 5%-10% of a class always struggled?  Even back in the early 90s, 5-10% of kids in any of my classes did poorly (most drop the class vs having a D or F get printed…really the worst is a C at that point).

Unless you teach Precalc for the remedial college kids, you still aren’t supporting your conclusions very well.[/quote]

You seem determined to believe that there is no problem, perhaps because your kids attend school in DCUM-landia which is minimally affected since 9/10 kids are overachievers. How do you explain the standardized test score drops at the mid and upper tiers, and how do could they not obviously indicate that students are not as prepared as a whole? Also, I am not an educational researcher, nor have I ever claimed to. So I do not feel like spending hours looking for more data when you haven't even addressed the data I've already presented. [/quote]

You haven’t presented any data…you even posted you can’t provide any “proof”.  I presented data that there are 1MM fewer kids in college bs 10 years ago…so the kids with poor scores may not attend college at all.  Also, even with TO, top schools have 75%+ of admitted students submitting scores and the scores are off the charts.

I am not saying there isn’t a problem…just find it laughable that an academic thinks opinions, anecdotes and conjecture get an A grade.

Would it really take you hours to find this study (maybe it doesn’t exist)?[/quote]

NAEP data was already presented. And yes, studies at the college level don't exist because widely distributed standardized tests are not administered in college, as I already stated. Perhaps you can get funding to do the study, though. [/quote]

Hmmm….you admitted you haven’t researched it at all, but now the studies don’t exist…which BTW isn’t about having college kids take standardized tests.

So which is it? [/quote]

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