Are US students being "overtested" ?

bayarea24 · July 22, 2007, 6:33pm

Mikesown

First, your car analogy is deeply flawed. Your own educational philosophy does not propose taking a major for a test drive. Instead, your philosophy of basing your major off a few books you read in high school is akin to buying a car having only read a few car and driver magazines. Contrarily, mikalye emphasizes that when you go to college, you should in fact take your major for a test drive.

Your belief that job possibilities are limited to McDonalds if you do not possess a college degree is also very flawed. Yes, the average college graduate earns more than the average high school graduate, however, there are many respectable and well paying jobs for those without a degree. I hate to provide such a cliche example, but many entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates do not possess college degrees. There are also more realistic examples: There is a doctoral student in my biology lab whose uncle is a plumber. Having never attended college, he makes more than any of the students in my lab ever will. The point is, the students do not make a hefty paycheck their primary goal, but rather to have a career that is personally fulfilling. To some people this may mean a job that allows them to own a BMW, a 10,000 sq ft home, and a yacht. To many others, however, it is simply a job that makes them feel good about what they are doing whatever it may be.

As for foundation courses, they are a vital part of your education. They serve to integrate you into the society as a whole. Remember, that you will not just be a computer programmer. You will also be a functioning member of society. A political science course could help you understand the implications of your voting choices; a theology course lead you to discover that you are interested in Buddhism; a cultural diversity class could lead to a greater understanding of the plight of economically disadvantaged people in country X and lead you to donate some of your time and money. Now, high school CAN accomplish some of these goals, but you should always be learning about the world around you. Taking more classes at higher levels will provide you with the foundation you need to understand the what and why about what goes on around you. College is just one more step in this path.

Finally, kicking a kid out of school for not doing well sends a terrible message. Some of these kids are actually lazy and do not care. But, many may have personal problems at home that cause school to pale in importance. Others may not have the confidence they need. Still others may not have been raised to believe education is important. The possibilities are endless. Once you kick them out, however, you will find that many cannot come back.

mikesown · July 22, 2007, 8:58pm

bayarea24:

<ul>
<li>The test drive analogy is not exact, but the general point is that you can assess whether you’re interested in something by becoming informed about it. Perhaps a better analogy would be to consider someone who needs a car, but has given no thought to the matter. At that point, the person decides to go online, learn about the different types of cars(sedans, SUVs, sports cars, etc), and then makes an educated decision based on the information which the buyer has researched. The person may chance their mind(as they may change their major), but the person has a pretty serious idea at this point about what they want to get. It’s not my belief that student’s shouldn’t be able to change their major, but that it should be hard, and require extra time and effort. At the very least, a student should come into college with a somewhat detailed idea of what he/she is interested in.</li>
<li>I agree, you can do other things besides working at McDonalds without a degree, but these jobs are dwindling away as we move to an information economy. And, I think you would agree, that most people working at low level(not requiring a degree) jobs at McDonalds and other assorted chains are generally not happy with what they do. Jobs are increasingly becoming seperated into low level jobs requiring little to no education(worker at McDonalds, telemarketer, salesperson) which are generally low paying and don’t provide a lot of job satisfaction and high level jobs(lawyer, doctor, engineer) paying more and leading to better job satisfaction. I’m not denying the fact that someone working at McDonalds can lead a fulfilling life, but the chances are much greater that someone who’s employed at a high-paying job will be happier with his/her own life.</li>
<li>This can be disputed(I figure it’s the subject of debate now), but the fact is that school is designed to prepare you for a field. Why should I waste money on a political science class teaching me about voting implications when I can read a book on the subject or talk to people about it? I may be interested in the subject, but I don’t want to spend a semester or two reading many books, taking tests, when I could be taking a class which could apply directly to the field which I want to pursue a career in. Yes, I agree that people should become renaissance men/women, but they shouldn’t take a class to accomplish this. Instead, the person should read books, keep up with the news, and always be curious. It should not be a school’s responsibility(nor duty) to instill being cultured upon students.</li>
<li>Schools have counselors. If a student is having problems at home, he/she can talk to a counselor and try to resolve the issue. I’m not saying kick a student out after one semester of D’s; I’m saying if a student failed all his/her classes for four semesters in a row, the student should be forced to leave until he/she can demonstrate that he/she is capable of learning.</li>
</ul>

To provide an anecdote, I overheard a conversation between a teacher and a student. It went something like this:

Student walks up to teacher.
Student: “Mrs. <>, How come I have a negative average?”
Teacher: “Because you never handed in work, and I take off points for every day an assignment is late”
Student walks away and listens to music, not caring about doing work.

It’s these kinds of students we DON’T want in our schools(at least in this stage of development). If they want to grow up, solve their problems at home, and come back to school, fine. But it seems like a waste of time, effort, and money to even attempt to educate them if they aren’t going to do ANY work, and are not going to try at all. I see so many of these kids at my (very well funded) public high school which has amazing teachers most of which have MS/PhD degrees.

In short, if they have family problems, fine. Let them take off a semester from school and sort them out. But don’t waste anyone’s tax dollars by forcing them to sit down at a desk and do nothing. Keeping a student like that in school only makes them miserable and wastes money. Compulsory education is just plain dumb when it comes to a certain point. Mandatory availability of education is another thing, which I think works much better at the high school level(16+). I know kids who aren’t the brightest people, but they all at least TRY to do well doing all their homework, papers, and studying as much as they can for tests. It’s one thing to be not that smart, but it’s another to not try at all.

bobmallet1 · July 22, 2007, 10:26pm

this coming from a middleschooler

quicksilver40133 · July 23, 2007, 3:27am

Well, let’s think about it. 120 tests over four years… that’s 30 tests per year, or 15 per semester. Assuming 5 classes per semester (15-18 credit hours) that’s 3 tests per class. Assuming 4 classes only raises it by one test. I don’t think that 3-4 tests per class per semester is bad. That’s a midterm and a final, and 1-2 other tests.

ugen64 · July 23, 2007, 3:52am

I have not read the thread (so feel free to disregard what I am saying), but to be honest the US is far from being the worst culprit in this regard. In Korea, where I am currently on vacation, students spend their entire academic career (from elementary school through senior year of high school) preparing for tests. In elementary school, it’s middle school entrance exams. In middle school, it’s high school entrance exams. In high school, it’s college entrance exams. For 12 years, students spend their entire lives cramming for tests (I mean this quite literally - 6 or 7 days a week, and about 10 hours a day is spent in school or private academies studying outside of school).

Personally, as an American college student at a reasonably competitive institution (IMO), I don’t feel like I’m being overtested at all. In fact to some degree I wish there were more tests, so that they would be individually less stressful, and that each test would be less crucial to one’s grade (after all if a class has only 2 tests, for example, and you happen to underperform on one of them…).

Mikalye · July 23, 2007, 5:23am

I like the test drive analogy in many ways, but Mikesown talks a lot about costs. The crux of the argument is the cost (admittedly high) of University experimentation. However, there is a flip side to that cost, which has been experienced by a number of my aquaintences in the UK education system. That is the cost of being wrong in a decision taken when you have incomplete information. The cost is usually 2 years.

Let me elaborate on that. The statistics at most US universities indicate that between 50%-60% of students will change their major or intended major between the time that they enter the school and the time that they graduate.

There are several reasons for this apart from the increased exposure to fields they could not have experienced in high school. For example, take a student who loves physics. Now physics is (usually) a subject that kids do learn in high school. They get to university all charged up about studying physics, a field in which they have already had a “test drive”. Then after a year or two, they may reach the realisation that while they do love physics, the job of a professional physicist is not at all fun. Hmmmm… based on your purely economic approach to university education, time to switch major.

Or the test drive might have been misleading. In high school, I loved math. I arrived at university sure that I wanted to major in pure mathematics. I knew it. I was absolutely clear on that. Then I took my first true pure mathematics course, which opened with us spending a week, and 8 pages of greek letters proving the existence of the rational numbers (fractions). You know, since the time I was 2 year old, and was able to grasp the concept of eating half of a cake, I had been willing to take the existence of fractions on faith. I tried some more, just to see if my first experience was invalid, but I eventually concluded that pure math was just too much academic navel gazing for my tastes. I went shopping for a new major.

Even suppose that I do some reading in high school and decide that I want to study engineering, do I want Civil E, Mechanical E, Biomedical E, Electrical E, Chemical E, Geotechnical E., Materials E., BioE, Nuclear E., etc.? What if I guess wrong?

In most of Europe, the consequences are clear. You give up two years. That is to say, if I elect to major in Physics, I am accepted into the physics department, and I take ALL of my classes in the Physics department. If at the end of my first year, I conclude that Physics is not for me, then I have to withdraw from the physics department and apply for entry as a new undergraduate. Since applications are long since closed for the class entering in the fall, I lose the next year completely (though I could of course continue in the physics that is not for me), and I reenter as a new freshman, two years after I had planned. That is a huge, huge cost that admirers of the European system conveniently overlook when making economic arguments. Given that more than half of American students change their degrees, this is a significant hidden cost.

This is not to say that the European system is inferior. Merely that it absolutely requires that you know what you want to do, which only a minority of students do.

My wife, decided to go back to university to change fields. She already had a bachelors degree but needed to start over with a second bachelor’s degree. For her, the UK system was perfect. She took no subjects outside of her course of study, not one class was taken in any other department, and she did very well. But she already knew EXACTLY what she wanted to do.

b_r_um · July 23, 2007, 7:10am

That depends a lot on the country you are talking about. In Germany it’s usually sufficient to apply in August or September to enroll as a first year student in October.

Mikalye · July 23, 2007, 4:49pm

Interesting. In the UK, you can probably get into some program applying in August, but any competitive program is long since full. The best schools fill early, leaving you with the dregs unless you want to wait another year.

mikesown · July 23, 2007, 6:10pm

Mikalye: You make a lot of good points about students switching majors, but the `test drive’ needs to extend much further than taking a class. Students interested in a major should be fully aware of:

What classes the student can expect to take
What the student will do in his/her classes(reading, writing, building, etc).
What jobs the major can provide the student with
What kind of lifestyle the student will probably have after graduating.

Another analogy to consider is this: Consider that you are purchasing a house(a very big purchase; much bigger than a car). Now, say you have no clue about the housing market whatsoever. You look at different houses, see what you like, and think ``Would I be happy in this house? Do I like the community? Is it well kept?'' You take notes of what interests you as you visit different houses, say the fact that you like a pool, a front porch, etc. Then, you only purchase the house when you know EXACTLY what you want. Sure, you can sell the house and get a new one, but that takes a lot of time and money. This is similar to choosing a major(looking at different houses), and changing your major(selling your house and buying a new one). This is hardly guesswork; by looking at different houses, you decide what you like and make a serious purchase.

In regards to the 50% changing their major, this reflects the problem in the US system. It shows that kids entering college aren’t serious about what they want to do with their lives(at least in the next few years). If kids REALLY knew what they wanted to do, would they be changing their majors? Perhaps european students take more time than US students to evaluate their life goals instead of rushing to college to study something they won’t want. After all, in the timespan that it takes to get a 4 year US degree, you could explore different majors for 2 YEARS and then pursue your major, paying tuition only for the two years which you went to school for your major. In short, instead of rushing to college after high school, students can (maybe SHOULD) take a year or two off to evaluate what they want to do with their lives, and only go to college once they have a serious idea about what they want to do in college.

Take yourself as an example. You say you loved math. But did you ever take an advanced (college-level) math class before going to college? Did you read a college textbook cover to cover to see if you enjoyed the material? I would venture to say no, since after only your first course you decided to change majors.

Also, another statistic that might be interesting to look at is the number of European students who change their majors. I would imagine that this number is significantly below 50 percent, as they are forced to be admitted to a department.

Mikalye · July 24, 2007, 3:35pm

In theory, what you say makes sense. However, the theory is very far from practicality here.

There are two problems, the first is that some fields are harder to investigate than others. I do not think that it is fair to say that 50% of kids entering college are not serious. I think it is fair to say that their high schools have not served to prepare them for any possible career, but that isn’t their job.

Suppose your favourite subject in High School was chemistry and you are convinced that you want to do Chemistry in some fashion for a living. That’s possibly a half-dozen possible majors. You could major in Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Materials Science (building fancy materials for the space shuttle and the like), or more laterally Physical Anthropology or Archaeological Chemistry (many studies of ancient diet for example are carried out using stable isotope analysis), or perhaps you want to be a science journalist or work in industrial insurance. Heck, maybe you want to be a patent attorney specialising in chemical innovations. I absolutely refute the notion that it is the responsibility of a chemistry major to research all of these prior to arriving on campus. Nor, do I actually think it is possible. How precisely do you go about doing that, and that is for a student who knows roughly the field in which they wish to work.

In my particular case, I had read college texts before arriving on campus. I did, and continue to do, buy a variety of math books for recreation. What I had not properly appreciated was the difference between pure and applied mathematics. Indeed, I eventually picked up a degree in applied math. But when I took my first pure math class I realised that for me it wasn’t much fun and I couldn’t major in it. Could I have prepared better? Possibly. Was is incumbent on me to prepare better? Absolutely not. For a junior or first semester high school senior to need to do research in a dozen fields to ensure that they apply to the correct major is just wrong in my perspective. It is unnecessary, and often detracts from their high school education.

Consider someone with an interest in something not so straightforward to research. If you want to work in biotechnology, how precisely can you prepare yourself to find out if the field is for you? You can read books, but trying to find out whether you would enjoy and be good at a laboratory science (or an archaelogical dig, or repairing diesel engines) by reading books is akin to trying to teach yourself sex by reading books. It sounds good, but isn’t actually practical.

You could go on an internship. But that requires that
a) such a thing is possible in your field (there are few nuclear engineering intern spots available)
b) such a thing is reasonably reachable (knowing that you can intern on an archeological dig in guatemala is interesting, but usually useless)
c) such a thing is affordable. A lot of students need to spend their “free” time working, in order to bring in needed income. Properly reseaching these fields is often expensive and involves travel that few can easily afford.

I just don’t think that it is practical. In most European programs, the senior year of high school forms that experimentation year, but that is flawed too (again most high schools do not have the facilities to offer experimentation in Philosophy much less Chemical Engineering). Do fewer students change their major in Europe, when it means dropping out and starting again from scratch? Absolutely. Do I like number wish to change their major? Based on conversations I have had with many UK undergraduates, I think so. The plan in the UK is usually if you are unhappy with your major to get low second class degree and then move into the employment world and try never to look at that field again. There is some awareness of this.

If you study Comp Sci in the UK, be prepared for oral presentations on work you have done (which is unlikely in many US Comp Sci programs), as the school tries to make at least a basic stab at teaching skills you can use even if you decide never to look at a computer again. Similarly, overwhelmingly every UK bachelors degree requires an undergraduate thesis, which US bachelors students only have in certain fields of study.

The advantage to allowing students to experiment is that they can actually discover what their calling is. The disadvantage is that it is expensive (in time). I reiterate that I do not see one system as better than the other. However there are students who would be much better educated in a US educational system, and those who would be better educated in a European one. Its a matter of horses for courses.

mikesown · July 25, 2007, 5:48am

Mikalye:
Perhaps a better system, then, would be to have a 2 year degree like those in Europe for students who were clear set on what they wanted to do, and offer it for a nominal price.

Then, for the curious student you are describing who may be interested in nuclear engineering, that student could enroll as an undecided applicant for a year. Then, the person could enroll in as many classes as they wanted(albeit at a much higher cost) for their first year, and discover what they really wanted to major in before formally switching into a major after their first year.

This way, the unfair burden of paying for unneeded classes wouldn’t be placed on the student who knew exactly what he wanted to study. The undecided student would have to pay significantly more, but he/she would be given the freedom to do whatever he/she wants.

quicksilver40133 · July 25, 2007, 6:26am

Actually, Europe has high school lasting 5 years, so you could make a 3-year US program equivalent, with the first year being a “test drive” and the final two years being focused work. Basically, the US system factors in 2 years of test-driving, instead of Europe’s extra 1 in high school. Which one is “better” is highly subjective and debatable, but I believe certain quantifiable factors speak for themselves.

bruno123 · July 25, 2007, 9:41am

Since I started the thread, let me clarify. I don’t think having 120 tests over four years is necessarily too much, nor do I think continuous performance assessment is necessarily bad. However, unlike immature teenagers in High School, I don’t think university students, who are after all young adults, should require continuous testing to ensure that they keep up with their work and learn the material. Personally, I favor much more something along the lines of the Oxbridge tutorial system where students do meet regularly (once or twice a week) with personal college tutors and are expected to discuss coursework (problem sets, essays, etc.) with them, but are not normally graded for the work they do.

jaso9n2 · July 25, 2007, 10:29am

First of all, 120 tests is a rough estimate. It doesn’t sound like a lot in terms of numbers, but…factor in the time it takes to study for said tests, how much material each test covers, how much time you have in between other assignments for the class (that don’t include recommended reading), and trying to have a social life (crazy, I know) and it suddenly does turn into a lot.

I think continuous performance assessment isn’t the best litmus test for how a student is learning. Whoa, that was a weird sentence. It might work in some fields, but I don’t think that should be the hard and fast rule for every student in every major every where.

quicksilver40133 · July 25, 2007, 10:45am

Bruno: I believe frequent testing is instructive, based on the psychological principle of elaborative rehearsal. It reinforces learning to repeat studying notes, reread the text, and then gauge your retention on tests. Furthermore, the very act of taking a test forces your brain to work differently, which helps retention even more than studying with no incentive. Whether it’s right or wrong is irrelevant. The point is that it has been psychologically proven to work…
Jason, this applies to your “litmus test” statement as well. Furthermore, isn’t college supposed to be about studying? It seems to me that serious college students should (a) study until they know the material, and then stop studying and perform well on the test; (b) study until they think they know the material, do poorly on the test, and learn from their mistakes; (c) give up or forego studying and perform poorly on the test, afterwards seeking help or resolving to try harder; or (d) skip studying, do fine on the assessment, and then nobody really has a problem, no?
Personally, I would enjoy even more frequent testing. How would you the two of you feel if there was more testing, perhaps making the system more lenient of weak grades in favor of stronger ones? I had a professor that replaced all test grades with the average on the final exam, if the latter was higher. In my opinion, he got the best of both worlds - students who studied for tests, but didn’t break their backs, learned from their mistakes and/or sought appropriate help, and then weren’t punished for being human. Thoughts?

aquafoam · February 19, 2008, 4:05pm

i actually like having more tests (rather than the way IB functions … which is what i took) because it gives you more chances to pull up your grades instead of having your entire degree based on few assessments.

Are US students being "overtested" ?

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