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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’ve been a professor in an interdisciplinary field (bridges social sciences and STEM) for 10 years and agree with all of the observations here. The writing ability has absolutely declined and the need for spoon feeding (aka “scaffolding” in edu speak) has gone way up. Students want to know exactly what is going to be on a test. They seem to lack the ability to pick up on cues about what I am emphasizing and get overwhelmed by all the info. They want me to tell them I won’t test them on xyz and I tell them I wouldn’t bother going over xyz if I didn’t think it was important! There is a lot of pressure to provide practice tests, detailed study guides, and increasingly detailed rubrics for writing assignments. I hate grading papers with a rubric. I would much rather give a holistic grade along with comments on specific elements or sections. That is what I remember from college. Now they want a detailed justification of every single point you take off. Students seem to think they start out with 100% and the professor takes points away, as opposed to starting with a 0 and earning points. Some of them want you to “pre grade” their work, going over it sentence by sentence during office hours. I’ve had to put a stop to that preemptively by saying I will only give high level feedback before an assignment is due because I can’t pre-grade everyone’s papers.

I think the lack of textbooks in ES/HS is also hurting them. Now none of them see the need to buy the textbook in college and they are missing out on the opportunity to fill in their knowledge gaps by reading the chapters. Some textbooks are written by international experts in the field and they are missing our not reading them. I know textbooks have gotten expensive but there are cheaper options such as rentals, used books, and electronic copies. But they just assume they can get away without it. I wish students were less concerned with points and grades and more concerned with learning, but they’ve grown up in a system that teaches them to only care about points and grades. It’s frustrating. Some students are outstanding but I worry about a lot of them.

Please don’t take this post as a reflection of my writing. These are stream of consciousness thoughts typed on my phone before coffee![/quote]

The insanely high GPA required for medical and graduate schools are making students highly stressed about their grades .[/quote]

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