Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Nailed It

I recently guessed that no more than half of my students could read the texts we give them.

According to a recent report by the prestigous non-profit ACT, "just half of high school graduates are prepared to do the sort of reading of complex texts that is typically required in the first year of college or upon entering the work force. The testing service found that only 51 percent of the 1.2 million students who took the ACT in 2005 met its “college readiness” standard, and that students seem actually to be going backwards: More students are on track to do college-level reading in the 8th and 10 grades than are actually ready to do so by graduation time."

Can I call 'em or what?
Blame the high schools.
Well, and us for taking them and trying to ignore the problem.
Sorry for more depressing news.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cut it out!

About your other comment re: Big Mall U - in Texas at least, the top 10% of *any* school are automatically accepted in the UT system somewhere as a way to increase diversity.

On one hand, there's less competition out there for those of us with good reading comprehension. But what use is that if things have to be dumbed down?

Rufus said...

Right, and a lot of students tune out because they aren't really being challenged.

At our already packed U, we have a goal to add 5,000 more by five years from now. I don't even know what the admissions standards are here.

Does your university have a sort of pervasive anti-intellectualism among the students? Because that's the strangest part for me about Mall University. It's probably what drives my rants actually.

Anonymous said...

I think you'll find anti-intellectualism in any large state university, since they have a long statistical "tail," if you know what I mean. You'll find dedicated students, but they are relatively fewer in a huge way.

Rufus said...

I guess I'll never understand people who will pay $2,000 a class to do something that goes so strongly against their deeply held conviction that "reading is gay" and trying is for suckers and so forth. It's sort of like joining a softball team and then complaining incessantly that you hate running and the team had better think of a way for you to play without actually having to run.

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