College students are lazy. Not in the sit-around-all-day-and-watch-“Napoleon Dynamite” sense, but close. Students today just don’t work as hard for their education as previous generations did – and it shows.
College is supposed to be a place of higher learning.
Education does come with a high price, as tuition costs are rising every semester and professors are asking for more and more of their students’ time. But these same professors go out of their way to provide resources to aid their students. Somewhere along the line, though, this ceased to be good enough for today’s college-goers.These days, most teachers provide study guides for their midterms and final examinations.
Once considered a luxury, this practice has suddenly become the norm and any teacher that doesn’t provide such help is labeled as ‘too hard.’
Information like that travels fast through Web sites like RateMyProfessors.com and can critically hurt the reputation of an instructor. But why do we judge our teachers this way? As a society, we have become so accustomed to taking the easiest route possible that now even the smallest challenges become unbearable.
College is supposed to prepare individuals for the highly competitive and fast-paced real world. Teachers who stop just short of giving the answers for their midterms
are doing their pupils a major disservice. Employers in the real world are not going to give a study guide that details step by step how to finish a big report. It should be no different when it comes to the big midterm or final.The post-college world is competitive and it is becoming
more and more obvious that American college graduates are leaving with a watered-down education.
In my three-plus years here at Temple, I have witnessed numerous outbursts from students who sup-port my beliefs.The most recent outburst occurred in a journalism
class early this semester. The professor had just handed back a test and asked for the class’s opinion about the test. That led to a 10-minute discussion about how vague the study guide was and how there were not enough multiple choice questions.
Excuse me, but I thought we were in college, a place of higher learning. Study guides are supposed to be vague. They guide us in what to study. A study guide is not an answer key, and this seemed to shock the class that was made up of mostly juniors and seniors.
We should be thankful that multiple choice questions appear on our tests in the first place. The romanticized versions of college tests are blue books and 20-page term papers. I thought vocabulary tests were a thing of the past, but apparently that assumption is wrong.
It was difficult not to feel empathy for the professor, as he had to listen to constant complaints about the test. The average grade was a B, so it was not as if he went out of his way to make the test difficult.
It is the moments like these that justify the claim that the American education system is simply not up to par when compared to the rest of the world.
Universities all over the country are proclaiming that the admissions
process is becoming more competitive and that the average SAT score is rising every year, but it doesn’t mean anything if students are being handed their educations
on a silver platter.
This is not meant to be an indictment on the educators at this or any other school, but simply a sad statement on the sign of the times.
I fear that the professors who step up and make their classes challenging will be rewarded with the sad face of doom on RateMyProfessor, which is just not a fair assessment. Professors need to be stricter so that students will dedicate a significant amount of time to their courses in order to succeed.
John Lamb can be reached at
john.lamb@temple.edu.
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