the glory and challenges

John at Discriminations has a wonderful post on a NYTimes OpEd that says that the SAT predicts graduation rates better than high school GPA. He wrote the author about a possible objection and the author wrote back an answer!

The OpEd starts off:

FOR some years now, many elite American colleges have been downgrading the role of standardized tests like the SAT in deciding which applicants are admitted, or have even discarded their use altogether. While some institutions justify this move primarily as a way to enroll a more diverse group of students, an increasing number claim that the SAT is a poor predictor of academic success in college, especially compared with high school grade-point averages….
So, here is the question: do SATs predict graduation rates more accurately than high school grade-point averages?

Go read the NYTimes article, then head over to
Discriminations to read the rest. It’s a very good discussion.

As a homeschooling mother of a son presently applying to multiple colleges across the country, I am pleased to hear that the SAT is such a good predictor. My son’s grades are high, but that is partially a feature of our early homeschooling rules. For the first eight years of education, the boys had to get a perfect score. If they didn’t get something correct, they had to keep working on it till it was all correct. This was a built-in motivator for getting their work done correctly to start with. This (mostly) carried over into high school.

My son’s GPA for dual credit courses at the CC are also reasonably high. (He is on the President’s honor roll and is a member of Phi Theta Kappa.) So in his case I don’t know that they don’t both indicate how well he will do. In fact, as a worried mum, rather than a college professor, I am relieved to know that something outside my grading says he will do well.

It’s also a good thing for homeschoolers in general because some of the universities presently require that homeschoolers take the GED. (None of the ones E is applying to, though. That was one of the requirements to start. That and top 100 ranked schools and his program.) With this as an argument, there should be more maneuverability in getting that changed.

Community College Survey of Engagement says:

For example, 49% of students said they often or very often worked harder than they thought they would need to meet an instructor’s standards, and 68% described their exams as more than moderately challenging.

Yet 67% of full-time students said they spent 10 or fewer hours preparing for class in an average week, and 24% said they always came to class prepared. Among full-time students, 29% said they had written four or fewer papers of any length during the current school year.

“Students aren’t going to learn to write well at that rate,” survey director Kay McClenney says.

Let’s see. My students have written a narrative (oops, no, Ike killed that.), a descriptive, a compare/contrast with research, a research paper, and they are presently writing their definition/illustration paper. They had to write a revision of the c/c, which many schools now count as an additional paper. And they have written a minimum of four blog posts.

I guess I don’t feel too badly about the students not writing a lot of research papers in their other classes. But I do wonder how soon in the school year they asked these students and what percentage actually will go on to a four-year school.

Some of the CCs around here have two-year programs that put the students into the job market. Do they need to know how to write an essay per class to go to work? They need to know how to write and they need to have practice, but there are some courses (like cosmetology and air conditioning repair) which just do not require writing.

Have we gotten out of the habit of thinking of CCs as two year schools? Are we back to “junior colleges” again? Just a thought.

… Btw, I do think that we are too easy. But so are the four year schools. My freshman comp I class has to write a five page research paper with five sources. The SLAC where I teach doesn’t require that till freshman comp II. In freshman comp II at my CC, they are required to write a 5-7 page literary criticism paper with six sources. The SLAC says students aren’t able to write literary criticism papers and those are only required of literature majors.

A discussion of why value-added growth models aren’t quite useful.

The story of an adjunct who is fired for publicly identifying plagiarists. I think it is a bit odd that the failing grades were put on hold. I can understand the termination.

High school social skills matter a lot. “Lleras found that such social skills as conscientiousness, cooperativeness, and motivation were as important as test scores for success in the workplace.”

And one that I’ve been finding new blogs to follow on Education at alltop.com. Alltop.com has lots of other topics aggregated, but I like the education one the most.

I have just had corroborated that I was not hired for a job because of my lack of recent work. I have been working on conference presentations and have gotten several of those papers accepted.

However, I have not done much on publications and that was the word my colleague used tonight.

I have been working on a paper for Reconstruction.

And I came home and began checking out other CFPs.

I have already written to the people from this general literature reference work, and I have sent it on to one of my bosses, since they are calling for a theme that she teaches regularly. I don’t know if she is interested in publishing, but it seemed to have her name on it to me. These essays are due January 1.

Ignatius Critical Editions have put out a call for more traditional literary criticism on various books, including Gulliver’s Travels. I have taught this book for seven or so years and have a lot of thoughts on it. The question is whether or not I could finish a 5000 word essay of sufficient interest (for the reader) and complexity by January 1, 2009. But it would be a really good idea. I have blogged earlier on ideas I wanted to deal with at length on GT.

Women’s Reproductive Lives . Deadline is April 30, 2009.

The Christian Parapsychologist, though I am not sure where I would go with this. Perhaps into The Clown of God story? This will be published in September. Proposals are due January 1 and the essay is due April 1. Essay length is 5,000-9,000 words.

American Writers, Twilight Years looks interesting. I was thinking maybe Charlotte Perkins Gilman. But they want a CV and if they’re going on this based on what has been written, they won’t accept me. However, their deadline for proposals is December 20 and June 15 is their end deadline. I can ask. The worst they can do is say “No, thank you.” Perhaps when I write them, I should give this blog’s email address. At least then they will know that I am able to write. (I do realize the type of writing is different.)

A call for a proposed anthology of women’s letters to their doctors. If you read my personal blog, which you don’t, you would know that I could probably create an entire anthology all by my lonesome on that topic. It might not ever happen, though, so I don’t know if I will submit. Submission deadline is February 15. It is certainly doable. And would be kind of interesting.
Update: I couldn’t sleep so I started working up this and the Ignatius paper proposal. Writing like this is how teachers keep from going stale, I would guess.

California State University system will turn down 10,000 eligible students. It doesn’t have the money to educate them.

“The bottom line is there will be 10,000 qualified California graduating students from the largest high school senior class ever in California’s history who will not get into the CSU system because of budget cuts and the probability that next year’s budget will be even worse,” said Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, who serves as a University of California regent and a California State University trustee.

Many of these will be low socioeconomic students who are among the first to go to college in their family.

However, the new changes can work against financially strapped and first-generation students, who may not apply quickly enough to the increasingly competitive schools.

I cannot imagine that 36 students could support 40 jobs. I think they used the downturn as an excuse to cut. But…

Beloit College

announced that it will eliminate 40 positions (with faculty jobs included in the mix) — about 10 percent of the college’s total employees. The reason is that this year’s total student enrollment is smaller, by 36 students, than the college had planned. (Total enrollment ended up at 1,289.) At Ohio State, 36 students would be a rounding error. But at Beloit — and at many liberal arts colleges — that’s enough to create real problems and force real change, including layoffs.

Beloit is not among the colleges that need to explore mergers to survive — and is by most measures highly successful, known for the strength of its liberal arts programs and as a Wisconsin alternative to the large public universities that thrive in the Midwest.

Cascades College in Portland, Oregon closed its doors with $4 million in debt.

Will others also close?

The article said that 4,400 colleges are in the US. Three are closing. They are all Christian colleges.

One quarter (1,100) have endowments of less than $50 million. That was before the downturn. If colleges had money in the stock market, as is likely, many of those lost a third to half their funds.

Ouch.

Unfortunately it has been under fire from the college,; Binghamton University.

Binghamton University’s Department of Social Work ordered the suspension of a master’s student for one year with no guarantee of return, required him to apologize, and demanded that he publicly disavow his own views after he put up posters challenging the department for having hired the executive director of the Binghamton Housing Authority (BHA)—an agency the student thought was responsible for social injustice.

…

Massena chose anonymity after hearing stories from other students in the department about students being unjustly “advanced” (expelled) from the program. When interrogated about the posters, Massena exercised his right to anonymous speech by declining to acknowledge authorship—a decision ultimately cited as the official reason for Massena’s punishment.

One week later, Massena received a “Written Plan” from his department. It failed to specify any alleged violations, but nevertheless assigned him shockingly onerous and unconstitutional requirements to complete in order to continue his master’s program. Massena was required to leave the university for two semesters, with his return contingent on “departmental approval.” He also was required to present a formal statement to university and governmental officials retracting his opinions, to submit formal apologies to a pre-approved list of people as evaluated by Professors Laura Bronstein and Diane Wiener, and to complete a critical reflection paper of ten to twelve pages on the topic of ethics in social work.

We must not allow freedom of speech to be vanquished from the halls of academia.  If it is not protected there, it will be protected nowhere.

As of today, though, the university “has abandoned its attempt to suspend or expel a student who put up posters challenging the Department of Social Work.”  

Good.

I am not sure how he will be able to finish graduate school with such a climate of hostility as I suspect now exists around him, but I hope that he is able to.

This Snowflake is so busy with their personal life that they do not have time to come to class or do the work. But when they don’t get the work done, they are full of excuses.

“I didn’t have time to do the work.”

“Why not?”

“It was my boyfriend’s birthday and I had to make him dinner.”

“Okay, that was yesterday, but this assignment was made last week.”

“Well, I couldn’t start it early!  No college student does that.”

… Sigh.

A student who never got his work done because he didn’t have time, and who told me frankly that he didn’t have enough money to buy insurance for his truck because he had received too many tickets, informed me that he would not be staying in class for the library work because he needed to get to Louisiana to go gambling.  This was, he said, something he did every weekend.  My class meeting in the library instead of the room was just a bonus, as far as he was concerned.  (I did tell him that he would be counted absent, but he went anyway.)

Please leave your own stories of this particular kind of snowflake.  I’d love to know that I am not alone.