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<p>Did you go to high school? Did your high school have geometry, algebra, precalculus, calculus, physics, english, history classes? Wouldn’t it be a little late asking colleges to develop your basic reasoning/writing skills?</p>
<p>chashaobao
Are you involved in hiring decisions for your company? Trust me, IMHO plenty of college grads do not have critical thinking skills. Many schools - HS and colleges - permit students to have stellar grades due to memorization, not thinking.</p>
<p>^ Unfortunately, I have seen too many college students without much rigorous reasoning skills and too many thinking they have it and can demonstrate it by talking a lot of BS.</p>
<p>Carleton College’s required writing portfolio was recently mentioned in an LA Times article about increasing higher ed accountability/documentation of what is actually taught/learned: </p>
<p>“So I have a modest proposal for Obama: In addition to asking universities to lower tuition, ask them also to figure out what their students are learning. Some schools are already doing that. At Carleton College in Minnesota, for example, students are required to submit a set of papers that they wrote during their first two years at the school. Carleton then assesses each student according to a set of faculty-developed standards, and also provides assistance to the students who do not meet them.”</p>
<p>[Colleges</a> need to make sure students are actually learning - latimes.com](<a href=“Are college students learning?”>Are college students learning?)</p>
<p>Add to this Carleton’s capstone project - senior thesis (“Comprehensive Integrative Exercise”) - required of all students:</p>
<p>[Carleton</a> College: Dean of Students: Academic Regulations and Procedures: Senior Integrative Exercise](<a href=“http://apps.carleton.edu/campus/dos/asc/academic_regs/?policy_id=21532]Carleton”>http://apps.carleton.edu/campus/dos/asc/academic_regs/?policy_id=21532)</p>
<p>Having a capstone project like a senior thesis is a great idea, and I think everyone should do that. But it isn’t the same thing at all as teaching critical thinking. It doesn’t even require critical thinking to do well (although maybe some places it does). Still, if colleges are going to teach critical thinking, they ought to be doing is freshman year, not senior year.</p>
<p>Constructs of critical thinking and professional writing standards are discipline specific (a philosophy paper is composed very differently than a science report). A senior thesis requirement is an excellent approach (faculty advisers/ multiple drafts/ defense). Most honors program have a thesis option as so many LACs.</p>
<p>JHS, if you think you can write a senior project without being thoroughly grounded in the field and practicing critical thinking throughout your college career, I suspect you haven’t seen many quality senior projects.</p>
<p>I can only speak for my school but I would say a large portion of my classes contained writing where you had to think and analyze things… lots of writing was done. it may also depend what type of major you are. If you’re an art major or something there probably isn’t much critical thinking involved. I took a ton of business courses and they almost all required some sort of critical thinking or analysis. </p>
<p>I had a course on business analysis… our main project there was when we were presented with a problem and we had to analyze it and create our own solution as part of a group. We wrote about a 60 page paper or so on it. My group had done a project on blockbuster. </p>
<p>In my managerial accounting class we were assigned a company and we had to analyze all of their financials. I had general motors, which is kind of funny now that I look back on it. I thought it was neat how all you had to do was write them a letter telling you were studying them for a project and they sent back tons of materials. That one was about 20 pages single spaced.</p>
<p>In my finance course we had this neat software that simulated starting a company. We had to make original decisions on staffing, product availability, location, etc, and then at the end of the week we’d find out how our company was doing vs all the other simulated companies. you then made adjustments and the next week analyzed those results and did more of the same. The project took all semester. I believe each week was supposed to reflect 1 year of the business being open, if I remember right. Most profitable group in the end didn’t have to take the final.</p>
<p>in my operations management class we were assigned a company and a mentor whom we shadowed… we had to learn how the company worked, research and analyze all their numbers, and present the company leaders with a swot analysis of their business. That group paper was about 80 pages.</p>
<p>in marketing we had to create a marketing plan complete with marketing research and analysis. That was about 20 pages.</p>
<p>in business policy we had to create a business plan as a group for a fabricated business. We had to do a LOT of research and analysis for this one. It was our capstone course. Final paper wound up being well over 100 pages as a group.</p>
<p>all of the above classes had some sort of essay/short answer tests - no multiple guess. You had to know your stuff.</p>
<p>That being said, I picked my school because I liked it’s curriculum… the other schools I looked at didn’t do things like that. A lot of the graduate programs I’ve been looking into seem to assign projects similar to the ones I mentioned above. I’m very big on theory… understanding the why… Once you have the theory down you can apply it… I don’t want to study the end result and memorize if i should be picking definition a b c or d. I want to do study and research and apply the things I’m learning.</p>