Scared of junior year here at brown

lostaccount
Sat, 12 Jul 2014 14:03:49 +0000

This is a rant so skip it if you are opposed to rants! It adds to points made by the previous poster (Ren mom). If you need a Spark note to the central point it is this: students with the most potential are being punished when they choose rigorous courses of study and those that nurse GPAs instead of stretching their intellectual capabilities are being rewarded. The result is damaging to society.

It is disappointing but not surprising that a college student can’t shake a focus on GPA. The focus reflects a fundamental problem in our educational system. Instead of being motivated to get the best education possible students are motivated to get the best grades and scores possible. Grades and scores are mistaken for education. Admissions officers at med, law and finance graduate programs are equally misguided. Don’t we want a society that is as educated as possible? Don’t we want our students taking the most rigorous and thorough courses as possible. And isn’t it sick (in the old fashioned way of using that term) that admissions officials at these programs, including those from so-called best programs, can’t uphold better values? For ease of selection, they reward those students who selected the curriculum that gave them perfect GPAs rather than those that took the most rigorous curriculum possible. Isn’t it pathetic that they missed so much in their own education that they don’t understand decision making well enough to construct methods to choose the most outstanding students rather than simply the students best at gaming systems? Why should our best students be avoiding the most rigorous curriculums possible in order to get into the best professional schools-shouldn’t that actually eliminate them from consideration instead?

To say the tail is wagging the dog is an under-statement The overarching goal of educators is to produce an educated civilized society. And no schools have more responsibility to do that than do the Ivy+ schools.Why? Because they can (and do) attract the very best students in the world. And so what happens with these best is very important to society. It is everyone’s business to ensure that they don’t screw it up. There is no other place our best go–there is not an alternative planet where the most competent people in the world are being groomed to take the most influential positions/jobs in the world. So, it behooves these schools to take that role seriously. If students in these schools are mining for As instead of learning at the highest level possible they are doing disservice to the world. Yes, it is that serious and that important! The days of the Ivy League schools being baby sitting services for adolescents should have ended in the 1880s! The focus should be on ensuring that they get the most rigorous education available not that they are able to select the weakest classes possible to enable them to nurse a 4.0 for 4 years!

It’s not all the fault of the colleges. They get students who have been corrupted by a decade of confusion about what tests are all about. So they focus on the test scores instead of learning the material. Those particularly good at taking tests, who are often those that view the tests as most important, are rewarded again and again. Those that learn material but don’t focus on the tests are punished. A decade of this shapes what students focus on. By 12th grade, some students are outstanding test takers and they are plucked out of the pool by certain colleges who will give them another 4 years of the same-plus a prestigious sounding certificate for their wall. But that’s not all…there’s more! The very best test takers and the students who took the weakest curriculum (usually humanities where As are ensured) are selected by graduate and professional schools-some of which continue the focus on grades. Students who take the most rigorous programs are punished for doing so.

The current way tests are used adds to the problem. Students with money and educated parents have found ways to bypass the substance of learning by focusing on gaming the tests. That has corrupted the test which now does not measure what it was designed to measure. In general, tests in class and standardized tests are intended to sample a small part of what someone knows. College entrance exams, for example, are supposed to provide an indication of how well someone has learned in the preceding 10 years. But that is not true any more. Students are skipping the learning part and focusing on how to improve on the outcome measure (get a good score) by studying just for the outcome measure. Now the score does not reflect a sample of what the student knows-it reflects all of what the student knows. That is a corruption of the test which is no longer a valid measure of what it was designed to measure. The current system rewards those students who have a keen ability to zoom in on the outcome measure without ever bothering to think about the entire endeavor we call “education”.

So what is the outcome? We end up with a society that places weak students in the most influential positions and we lose the opportunity to have our most capable students learn at the highest level possible. Can we be surprised that the finance industry is filled with people without an ethical compass? Universities, even the best of them, have provided training opportunities to those most able to play the system rather than to those students with values and experiences that would ensure more honorable priorities. The student who gave up a difficult major for a simplistic one, and who spent their time studying for the admissions tests rather than studying course content, is the student accepted over the student who stuck out the difficult major and devoted the most time and effort to course content not admissions tests. So why be surprised by an entire industry of people in their 30’s (on wall street and in finance) who take advantage of every loop hole they can to make money-and then when things tank scream they are too great to fail. They were selected on the basis of their ability to go for the short cuts-and play the system-why would we expect that stop that once awarded with lucrative jobs?