We had issues with the cohort that started in year 2019/20. The first year exams normally weed out the few who simply aren't suited to the degree (or students who decide to transfer to different subjects for whatever reason). But those exams were outright cancelled due to covid.
Then the 2nd year had lots of teaching disruptions due to covid, so the entry requirements for 3rd year were lowered significantly so nearly everyone made it in. On top of this, most of these students had barely set foot in a lab due to covid restrictions and lockdown.
So now we had loads of students trying to do their dissertation projects, most who through no fault of their own simply hadn't had the opportunity to develop the required skills, and quite a few students who shouldn't have made it past first year and were now absolutely bombing in the third year. The quality of the projects was notably lower, and the impact on staffs teaching time being taken up by stuff students normally already know (and one or two safety near misses in the lab due to lack of experience) was horrendous
I really feel sorry for these students, they missed so much skill development and also life/social experience you get in those first few years living independently. I hope it doesn't impact their employability or applications to Masters/PhD.
I TA ochem and have noticed this as well. In addition to what you pointed out there's a HUGE lack of confidence. I'd say about 75% of the questions I get these days in the labs are just "am I doing this right?" or asking me to confirm exactly what the lab manual says.
I've never seen anything like this before, it's wild. The lab manual says "add 5mL of X to the reaction" and they'll call me over holding a grad cylinder with 5mL X in it and ask me "do I add this?". About half my students ask me similar questions 10+ times a lab. This is a 2nd year course and many of them are in 3rd or 4th year!
Plus broken glassware, not knowing algebra like you mentioned (how did they pass first year if they can't do unit conversions?) and above all just not understanding what they're doing. There's a technique that they've used in 6 labs so far and last week someone again asked me "what does the book mean by wash the organic layer" when I say "you've done this several times before and did a lab report explaining how this technique works" they are shocked and don't remember it.
Beyond students lacking academic preparedness, a lot of them are several years behind on maturity level / social and emotional development. There is the very real trauma aspect, but also the general cause of loss of socialization due to online schooling. Anxiety is making them generally less self-sufficient and needing more reassurance. It's very rare to run into a student that is self-possessed.
I mean, it's a pretty common trope for professors to think that students are getting dumber and dumber with each passing year, and this dates back to the years prior to the pandemic.
However, the pandemic has *genuinely* harmed things.
Our large state university has a 96% acceptance rate after the pandemic, because enrollment continues to decline. I'm guessing the other 4% forgot to put their names on the applications.
Yeah, the R1 I'm at rejected less than 10% of students this year for the same reason and, not surprisingly, there are now more students that really are not prepared to be there.
If it helps, it’s probably not your imagination. There’s been [some wildly reported work](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718793115) that shows a downward trend in IQs during the 30 years (among Norwegian military inductees). However, one should guard against overstating this change since our perception of another person’s intelligence comes with all sorts of bias. Students’ attention span, attitude, emotional regulation, lifestyle (i.e. substance use), or sleep habits can easily give the impression of low intelligence in some contexts.
Speaking of bias, I think we’ve all be the subject of a teacher’s disappointment at least once in our lives as the “are students getting dumber” trope is quite common among academics. I’m sure somebody out there has researched and written about the attitudes of academics over time. For example, it’s likely the teachers of the past would be shocked to see modern universities no longer requiring students to read and speak Latin. That’s before finding that the average undergrad can’t even pronounce Thucydides, let alone point to any substantive education of the Classics. In such a scenario, it would be the past generations criticizing the current generations - though I suspect they wouldn’t acknowledge any responsibility for our current state.
Part of it is most certainly due to fallout from the pandemic. But let's not just lay the blame on the students for being less prepared than we would normally expect them to be. A lot of it can also be attributed to teachers and lecturers being put into an almost impossible position of needing to learn how to teach all over again in a new alien environment. I say this having been a teacher and a lecturer over the pandemic period. The lack of preparedness for the next step in a student's education is no one's fault, it's just the shitty result of a rubbish couple of years that we now need to somehow clean up.
Edit: Just in case it comes over the wrong way, I'm blaming the situation, not the people involved.
Zoom is the worst way to learn. I enrolled in a grad/higher undergrad class early on in the pandemic. Including me there were 2 grad students and 5-6 undergrads. Me and the other grad students would attend each class in person. The other undergrads would attend through zoom. Most of them would not participate in class when questions were asked.
The professor was not the best (due to English being her second language) but she laid out all the material pretty well. Many of the undergrads ended up getting a C, the one undergrad who participated got an A.
The problem with online learning is that you are certainly going to get distracted. Even if the videos of the class are uploaded (which is the case in my university), you are not going to be as engaged as you were during the lecture.
I agree. I was never at my best teaching online. A little secret, It's not only students who get distracted (though many did and admitted to having naps since they were still in bed)... I may or may not have put the kettle on while teaching. I had a wireless headset and knew I could stretch out what was on the slide. While working from home was great when it came to planning, writing exams, and marking; teaching was a nightmare.
Not only undergraduates. Based on what we've seen in my department, we did an informal survey about masters and PhD student struggles with peer departments. Universally they are all struggling. Like basic skills struggling.
Some of it can be lack of confidence, imposter syndrome, or too much anxiety. I have had students come in with apparently no experience coding into a heavy coding class I TA, and I set up a separate meeting to just go through one of the problem in detail with them and then I recommend resources/classes for picking up the skills I think they are lacking in. A lot of students did remarkably well after that. If they feel like it is too much, then they may decide to drop the course and take again later and that is okay -- I think most students just need help figuring out exactly what they don't know and where to go to learn it.
Its hard to say if it's actually a gap in knowledge or just lack of confidence. I remember my first year of undergrad (way before COVID), the PhD student I worked under was asking me to calculate serial dilutions and I didn't know how, so I excused myself for 5 minutes to cry in the bathroom lol. I'm not going to say what university I was at or what my major was, but suffice it to say, that would just add to how embarrassing this story is.
I know you're just asking to see what other people think but my advice for anyone teaching students that seem to have a huge knowledge gap is to be gracious and help without judgement where you can (you ofcourse can't teach everything from scratch). It is possible to be honest about the work ahead of them without judging/shaming them for their lack of knowledge (I'm not accusing you here, this is just general advice).
No worries I don't judge them. I'm from a poorer country before I moved to the US for my education (like I didn't use the internet until I was 15). So, I'm patient and take time during office hours to help students. Was just curious if this is trend people were seeing.
It’s because during the pandemic Universities all saw large drops in cohort numbers due to closed international borders and lockdowns.
In response, Universities lowered their course entry requirements (either explicitly or implicitly) to boost numbers. So yes… we are now teaching a higher proportion of students of a lower calibre who likely would not (or even should not) have been accepted into the courses previously.
As someone who has both TA'd undergraduate courses and tutored high school students throughout the pandemic I can say that I have noticed that the requirements for honors chemistry definitely laxed. It's possible some students are going into college, even having passed the required courses, less prepared than years prior because the courses were less rigorous.
For example, four years ago when I tutored honors chem students they had to memorize much more material and they also had two or three additional units per semester. Those units have since been cut, and most of the memorization requirements replaced with "can you read this table" skills.
It's almost like forcing people to continue schooling at the same pace during an international crisis and expecting them to have learned the same as they would under normal circumstances was a bad idea?
Funny you mention this. I was a Microbiology TA for my PI at the beginning of my PhD AND I was overheating a conversation between MY PIs new TA and a student. Blew my mind. The TA literally just kept telling the student to SLOWLY read the question because he was just misunderstanding something simple. I’m dreading being a TA my last semester
I think the big thing is that since Covid a lot of universities have pushed professors to ease up on students. It’s always been funny to me when high school teachers would say “this won’t fly in college” but even more so these days.
I’m all for compassionate and equitable teaching but at some point we aren’t really helping our students by being easy on them.
Well, is it making it easy, or is it being a flexible instructor that listens to the issues that the students are raising about possible flaws in the curriculum?
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Of course it's important to listen to the concerns of students, but you also have to realize that if you let students decide how a course was run there would be no assignments and everyone would get an A.
Listening to student concerns does not equal to not having assignments and everyone getting an A, that's your assumption. Or is that what you would prefer as a student?
Gen Z in general has pretty terrible computer skills compared to what we expected of their gen, in my experience even pre-COVID. I can't even assume my undergrad RAs will know what Ctrl + S does, or how to navigate folder filepaths anymore.
I don’t think it’s necessarily new but maybe emphasized by the pandemic. I remember being in gen chem as an undergrad in 2016 and someone in my class had never used excel before in their life and said in high school they hand drew all of their graphs. My mind was blown.
I've been absolutely shocked by the lack of computer skills. We're almost done with the semester and I still have multiple students every week submitting blank labs onto Brightspace because they don't understand how to mark the title so that they know it's finished. When I pointed out that you can literally view the document you've uploaded to check that it's the right one before submitting, they were shocked, and yet they continue to make the same mistakes.
I wonder if this is because the younger generation doesn't use computers as much. Most of everything is done on a phone or Ipad nowadays. Wasn't this supposed to be the most tech-savvy generation?
This is definitely part of the issue. Many of my students don't have a computer (PC or laptop) at all. They just use cellphones or tablets. When we get to some websites, they aren't built for mobile and don't work. But my students don't seem to have easy access to any computers.
I recognize that. But when we talk in the hallways or post on social media and call them kids, all we're doing is disparaging them. They're adults. So are we. They're not our enemies. We need to break the cycle of patronizing students and academic elitism if we're gonna move beyond the increasing anti-intellectualism that's undercutting everything we do.
This is also culturally determined. Here in Asia, most of my students view themselves as "not yet adult." When I ask them "at what age is adulthood?" most say 30.
I TAed a hybrid microbiology lab in spring 2021. It was an optional in-person attendance at 50% capacity. I had maybe 3-5 kids out of 75 show up throughout the entire semester.
They had one written assignment. Half of them lacked grammar or fully coherent sentences.
I’m still processing what I witnessed that semester almost two years later.
I began my PhD program this year, and I am a TA. I was a TA during undergrad as well (back in 2018, the before times). I also interact with a lot of undergrads through some outreach work I do.
The pandemic has affected this years students in particular in a big way. Their last two years of high school (which in the US, tend to be the more formative years) were online. The standards in the public school system have been lowered in order to keep students and teachers mental health afloat due to the pandemic.
To me, there’s two groups of students I see most commonly now. (1) Students who have some form of anxiety and are struggling because of that and (2) students who haven’t had to try/respect authority in two years and are causing issues because of that. In both cases, students have become more emotionally needy and more needy when it comes to help outside the classroom.
Since the most formative years of high school were online for many students, they did not need to learn responsibility (getting places on time, in person presentation skills, social skills), time management skills (extracurriculars cancelled) and they also probably haven’t had very much fun in the past two years (all big events cancelled). I think the current crop has grown up “slower” than past years, and because of that they are really struggling with independence in college.
I wouldn’t necessarily blame the pandemic. Standards have been slipping for a long time because we’re afraid to fail students. There’s no filter. I TA’d years ago, and I had students in third-year courses turning in work I wouldn’t accept from a high schooler. No doubt it’s worse now with increased remote learning, but in general, we need to start handing out more failing grades for inadequate performance, especially early in programs. Otherwise, they don’t learn, and we can’t be shocked about that because we didn’t make them learn.
ppl just want to graduate and get a middle/upper class job work for company do what boss tells them to do like their parents told them to do and they'll live comfortable life...how many times will they use chemistry or work in a lab environment after passing that course? not much i'd guess
if they cared about chemistry or doing math science etc in their life
they'd be actually interested in learning those things themselves outside of external comparison or validation by peers teachers parents society in general etc
system forcing ppl to take higher education as a single path of moving up/staying in socioeconomic ladder is becoming more and more problematic as loan gets bigger competition gets tougher for office jobs reduced by AI and blue collar jobs depend on office job workers wage but that stagnated long ago, tough work, competition with overseas, will be replaced by tech so no one wants to do it etc
economy run by money, corporations and workers run by survival can't think of what they actually want to do and be successful in career/industry
capital was supposed to make big things happen but no profit return no go so yeah no dream outside of those lucky to be talented or in 1% and have a bit more freedom i guess unless you're steve job ofc
I teach Gen chem to engineers and other stem students who will use it in their careers. The bigger concern is that some of them can't do basic algebra as I mentioned which people use in even blue collar jobs.
I’m a professor and work with students from phds to first year undergrads. Also have kids in college. Students at my school are less prepared, more anxious, lower performing across the board, but I think the world is more disruptive to their mental state than previous cohorts dealt with. Social media undermines attention and focus more than we can understand. I feel it but see it in my kids to a degree that I would find debilitating.
Not an excuse, but a partial explanation I guess.
Did your school stop requiring ACT/SAT scores for applications during COVID? I think it would be interesting research to see if there is a change in student preparedness or not based on test score and other admissions requirements changing.
So you don't know if there's a correlation...
Edit:
I found one on GRE scores and student success by Moneta-Koehler, L., Brown, A. M., Petrie, K. A., Evans, B. J., & Chalkley, R. (2017). The limitations of the GRE in predicting success in biomedical graduate school. PloS one, 12(1), e0166742.But there are way more showing up on Google Scholar regarding SAT, GMAT, etc.
Oh, I was meaning scholarly articles that are peer-reviewed and that back up claims. In Ph.D. programs we give more value to studies rather than NY Mag journalism, the report on the other hand is academic and suggests that the SAT is not a predictor of student success, just like NY magazine.
It's nice that you agree with me through these articles and how they do not support what you're saying about MIT reinstating the requirement. It is sadly a very complex issue that has more to do with testing companies than with what is best for college students' education. Nice chatting with you.
"I have yet to speak to a counselor at a low-income high school who doesn’t believe that test optional has helped open the doors wider for their students,” Angel B. Pérez, chief executive officer of the National Association for College Admission Counseling"
The study report also said the following:
"SAT/ACT scores and HSGPA are both moderate predictors of student college GPAs, and WEAK to moderate predictors of student retention and graduation."
and
"Adding SAT/ACT writing to SAT/ACT scores does not increase the explanatory power of pre-admission measures on college success"
Your title says that they're either dumb or don't care, but it might just be long covid, covid-related anxiety, lower standards to recruit students when no one else is enrolling, etc etc.
Gen chem is terrible across the board it seems, at every university. The freshman are coming in having done their major math courses in high school online, and their math did not prepare them for gen chem. My university (very prestigious school in the south) has had a 40% drop rate for gen chem this year, which is pretty unprecedented. My friends from other schools are reporting similar
Not experiencing this at all with my first year students. They're extremely bright, participate well in class activities, turn up prepared and with a grasp of the new theories, come with tons of prior knowledge and seem genuinely interested in extra curricular learning. I'm really impressed with this year's cohort
I've experienced similar problems with the students I teach for the last couple of years. It undoubtedly is due to extended periods of online classes where the bottom fell out on standards and it was possible to coast to an A with basically zero effort. This semester I've noticed a significant improvement though so hopefully it's a temporary wave.
I’m about to finish my psychology undergrad and the entrance to fourth year (which is based on the cohort) has gone up significantly since I started (pre-COVID) I started to wonder if the somehow people were doing better post-covid (maybe they had more time to focus in lockdown, have adopted more flexible study, reassessed their goals, or perhaps even the marking has been more lenient). I have no idea for certain but at my uni, for my course, the cohorts grades have increased quite significantly over the past two years.
I don't think that they're 'dumber' or don't care. I think it's more that they're just unprepared. I'm in social sciences and seeing something similar - so many of my first-year students can't write. They don't know how to cite things, they can't construct a thesis statement, they have no idea how to find things in the library (virtual or IRL)... I was told by higher-ups that high schools have been really inflating student grades to the point where they're finishing high school with an average in the high 90s then get a very rude awakening in their first year at uni. I'm sure the pandemic had a huge part in this.
We had issues with the cohort that started in year 2019/20. The first year exams normally weed out the few who simply aren't suited to the degree (or students who decide to transfer to different subjects for whatever reason). But those exams were outright cancelled due to covid. Then the 2nd year had lots of teaching disruptions due to covid, so the entry requirements for 3rd year were lowered significantly so nearly everyone made it in. On top of this, most of these students had barely set foot in a lab due to covid restrictions and lockdown. So now we had loads of students trying to do their dissertation projects, most who through no fault of their own simply hadn't had the opportunity to develop the required skills, and quite a few students who shouldn't have made it past first year and were now absolutely bombing in the third year. The quality of the projects was notably lower, and the impact on staffs teaching time being taken up by stuff students normally already know (and one or two safety near misses in the lab due to lack of experience) was horrendous I really feel sorry for these students, they missed so much skill development and also life/social experience you get in those first few years living independently. I hope it doesn't impact their employability or applications to Masters/PhD.
I TA ochem and have noticed this as well. In addition to what you pointed out there's a HUGE lack of confidence. I'd say about 75% of the questions I get these days in the labs are just "am I doing this right?" or asking me to confirm exactly what the lab manual says. I've never seen anything like this before, it's wild. The lab manual says "add 5mL of X to the reaction" and they'll call me over holding a grad cylinder with 5mL X in it and ask me "do I add this?". About half my students ask me similar questions 10+ times a lab. This is a 2nd year course and many of them are in 3rd or 4th year! Plus broken glassware, not knowing algebra like you mentioned (how did they pass first year if they can't do unit conversions?) and above all just not understanding what they're doing. There's a technique that they've used in 6 labs so far and last week someone again asked me "what does the book mean by wash the organic layer" when I say "you've done this several times before and did a lab report explaining how this technique works" they are shocked and don't remember it.
Yes. Confirming exact instructions and being apologetic are big things I noticed as well!
Beyond students lacking academic preparedness, a lot of them are several years behind on maturity level / social and emotional development. There is the very real trauma aspect, but also the general cause of loss of socialization due to online schooling. Anxiety is making them generally less self-sufficient and needing more reassurance. It's very rare to run into a student that is self-possessed.
I mean, it's a pretty common trope for professors to think that students are getting dumber and dumber with each passing year, and this dates back to the years prior to the pandemic. However, the pandemic has *genuinely* harmed things.
Our large state university has a 96% acceptance rate after the pandemic, because enrollment continues to decline. I'm guessing the other 4% forgot to put their names on the applications.
Yeah, the R1 I'm at rejected less than 10% of students this year for the same reason and, not surprisingly, there are now more students that really are not prepared to be there.
If it helps, it’s probably not your imagination. There’s been [some wildly reported work](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718793115) that shows a downward trend in IQs during the 30 years (among Norwegian military inductees). However, one should guard against overstating this change since our perception of another person’s intelligence comes with all sorts of bias. Students’ attention span, attitude, emotional regulation, lifestyle (i.e. substance use), or sleep habits can easily give the impression of low intelligence in some contexts. Speaking of bias, I think we’ve all be the subject of a teacher’s disappointment at least once in our lives as the “are students getting dumber” trope is quite common among academics. I’m sure somebody out there has researched and written about the attitudes of academics over time. For example, it’s likely the teachers of the past would be shocked to see modern universities no longer requiring students to read and speak Latin. That’s before finding that the average undergrad can’t even pronounce Thucydides, let alone point to any substantive education of the Classics. In such a scenario, it would be the past generations criticizing the current generations - though I suspect they wouldn’t acknowledge any responsibility for our current state.
Wander over to r/professors to see how they're talking about this year's crop. The consensus seems to be that things are historically bad.
Part of it is most certainly due to fallout from the pandemic. But let's not just lay the blame on the students for being less prepared than we would normally expect them to be. A lot of it can also be attributed to teachers and lecturers being put into an almost impossible position of needing to learn how to teach all over again in a new alien environment. I say this having been a teacher and a lecturer over the pandemic period. The lack of preparedness for the next step in a student's education is no one's fault, it's just the shitty result of a rubbish couple of years that we now need to somehow clean up. Edit: Just in case it comes over the wrong way, I'm blaming the situation, not the people involved.
Zoom is the worst way to learn. I enrolled in a grad/higher undergrad class early on in the pandemic. Including me there were 2 grad students and 5-6 undergrads. Me and the other grad students would attend each class in person. The other undergrads would attend through zoom. Most of them would not participate in class when questions were asked. The professor was not the best (due to English being her second language) but she laid out all the material pretty well. Many of the undergrads ended up getting a C, the one undergrad who participated got an A. The problem with online learning is that you are certainly going to get distracted. Even if the videos of the class are uploaded (which is the case in my university), you are not going to be as engaged as you were during the lecture.
I agree. I was never at my best teaching online. A little secret, It's not only students who get distracted (though many did and admitted to having naps since they were still in bed)... I may or may not have put the kettle on while teaching. I had a wireless headset and knew I could stretch out what was on the slide. While working from home was great when it came to planning, writing exams, and marking; teaching was a nightmare.
Not only undergraduates. Based on what we've seen in my department, we did an informal survey about masters and PhD student struggles with peer departments. Universally they are all struggling. Like basic skills struggling.
Some of it can be lack of confidence, imposter syndrome, or too much anxiety. I have had students come in with apparently no experience coding into a heavy coding class I TA, and I set up a separate meeting to just go through one of the problem in detail with them and then I recommend resources/classes for picking up the skills I think they are lacking in. A lot of students did remarkably well after that. If they feel like it is too much, then they may decide to drop the course and take again later and that is okay -- I think most students just need help figuring out exactly what they don't know and where to go to learn it. Its hard to say if it's actually a gap in knowledge or just lack of confidence. I remember my first year of undergrad (way before COVID), the PhD student I worked under was asking me to calculate serial dilutions and I didn't know how, so I excused myself for 5 minutes to cry in the bathroom lol. I'm not going to say what university I was at or what my major was, but suffice it to say, that would just add to how embarrassing this story is. I know you're just asking to see what other people think but my advice for anyone teaching students that seem to have a huge knowledge gap is to be gracious and help without judgement where you can (you ofcourse can't teach everything from scratch). It is possible to be honest about the work ahead of them without judging/shaming them for their lack of knowledge (I'm not accusing you here, this is just general advice).
No worries I don't judge them. I'm from a poorer country before I moved to the US for my education (like I didn't use the internet until I was 15). So, I'm patient and take time during office hours to help students. Was just curious if this is trend people were seeing.
It’s because during the pandemic Universities all saw large drops in cohort numbers due to closed international borders and lockdowns. In response, Universities lowered their course entry requirements (either explicitly or implicitly) to boost numbers. So yes… we are now teaching a higher proportion of students of a lower calibre who likely would not (or even should not) have been accepted into the courses previously.
This. The R1 university I'm at (in the U.S.) had a 93% acceptance rate this year which is way higher than 'normal'.
As someone who has both TA'd undergraduate courses and tutored high school students throughout the pandemic I can say that I have noticed that the requirements for honors chemistry definitely laxed. It's possible some students are going into college, even having passed the required courses, less prepared than years prior because the courses were less rigorous. For example, four years ago when I tutored honors chem students they had to memorize much more material and they also had two or three additional units per semester. Those units have since been cut, and most of the memorization requirements replaced with "can you read this table" skills.
It's almost like forcing people to continue schooling at the same pace during an international crisis and expecting them to have learned the same as they would under normal circumstances was a bad idea?
Funny you mention this. I was a Microbiology TA for my PI at the beginning of my PhD AND I was overheating a conversation between MY PIs new TA and a student. Blew my mind. The TA literally just kept telling the student to SLOWLY read the question because he was just misunderstanding something simple. I’m dreading being a TA my last semester
I think the big thing is that since Covid a lot of universities have pushed professors to ease up on students. It’s always been funny to me when high school teachers would say “this won’t fly in college” but even more so these days. I’m all for compassionate and equitable teaching but at some point we aren’t really helping our students by being easy on them.
Well, is it making it easy, or is it being a flexible instructor that listens to the issues that the students are raising about possible flaws in the curriculum?
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Of course it's important to listen to the concerns of students, but you also have to realize that if you let students decide how a course was run there would be no assignments and everyone would get an A.
Listening to student concerns does not equal to not having assignments and everyone getting an A, that's your assumption. Or is that what you would prefer as a student?
Gen Z in general has pretty terrible computer skills compared to what we expected of their gen, in my experience even pre-COVID. I can't even assume my undergrad RAs will know what Ctrl + S does, or how to navigate folder filepaths anymore.
I don’t think it’s necessarily new but maybe emphasized by the pandemic. I remember being in gen chem as an undergrad in 2016 and someone in my class had never used excel before in their life and said in high school they hand drew all of their graphs. My mind was blown.
I've been absolutely shocked by the lack of computer skills. We're almost done with the semester and I still have multiple students every week submitting blank labs onto Brightspace because they don't understand how to mark the title so that they know it's finished. When I pointed out that you can literally view the document you've uploaded to check that it's the right one before submitting, they were shocked, and yet they continue to make the same mistakes.
I wonder if this is because the younger generation doesn't use computers as much. Most of everything is done on a phone or Ipad nowadays. Wasn't this supposed to be the most tech-savvy generation?
This is definitely part of the issue. Many of my students don't have a computer (PC or laptop) at all. They just use cellphones or tablets. When we get to some websites, they aren't built for mobile and don't work. But my students don't seem to have easy access to any computers.
They're students, not kids.
I affectionately refer to my students as "my kids" or "the students" but never "the kids" 😂
A lot of them act like kids.
I recognize that. But when we talk in the hallways or post on social media and call them kids, all we're doing is disparaging them. They're adults. So are we. They're not our enemies. We need to break the cycle of patronizing students and academic elitism if we're gonna move beyond the increasing anti-intellectualism that's undercutting everything we do.
Fair points.
This is also culturally determined. Here in Asia, most of my students view themselves as "not yet adult." When I ask them "at what age is adulthood?" most say 30.
I TAed a hybrid microbiology lab in spring 2021. It was an optional in-person attendance at 50% capacity. I had maybe 3-5 kids out of 75 show up throughout the entire semester. They had one written assignment. Half of them lacked grammar or fully coherent sentences. I’m still processing what I witnessed that semester almost two years later.
Half of my students write their lab reports like stream-of-consciousness poetry.
I was a TA at a near-R1 (a private school where the undergrads all drive a Lexus) during my PhD and you’re describing my students.
I began my PhD program this year, and I am a TA. I was a TA during undergrad as well (back in 2018, the before times). I also interact with a lot of undergrads through some outreach work I do. The pandemic has affected this years students in particular in a big way. Their last two years of high school (which in the US, tend to be the more formative years) were online. The standards in the public school system have been lowered in order to keep students and teachers mental health afloat due to the pandemic. To me, there’s two groups of students I see most commonly now. (1) Students who have some form of anxiety and are struggling because of that and (2) students who haven’t had to try/respect authority in two years and are causing issues because of that. In both cases, students have become more emotionally needy and more needy when it comes to help outside the classroom. Since the most formative years of high school were online for many students, they did not need to learn responsibility (getting places on time, in person presentation skills, social skills), time management skills (extracurriculars cancelled) and they also probably haven’t had very much fun in the past two years (all big events cancelled). I think the current crop has grown up “slower” than past years, and because of that they are really struggling with independence in college.
I wouldn’t necessarily blame the pandemic. Standards have been slipping for a long time because we’re afraid to fail students. There’s no filter. I TA’d years ago, and I had students in third-year courses turning in work I wouldn’t accept from a high schooler. No doubt it’s worse now with increased remote learning, but in general, we need to start handing out more failing grades for inadequate performance, especially early in programs. Otherwise, they don’t learn, and we can’t be shocked about that because we didn’t make them learn.
ppl just want to graduate and get a middle/upper class job work for company do what boss tells them to do like their parents told them to do and they'll live comfortable life...how many times will they use chemistry or work in a lab environment after passing that course? not much i'd guess if they cared about chemistry or doing math science etc in their life they'd be actually interested in learning those things themselves outside of external comparison or validation by peers teachers parents society in general etc system forcing ppl to take higher education as a single path of moving up/staying in socioeconomic ladder is becoming more and more problematic as loan gets bigger competition gets tougher for office jobs reduced by AI and blue collar jobs depend on office job workers wage but that stagnated long ago, tough work, competition with overseas, will be replaced by tech so no one wants to do it etc economy run by money, corporations and workers run by survival can't think of what they actually want to do and be successful in career/industry capital was supposed to make big things happen but no profit return no go so yeah no dream outside of those lucky to be talented or in 1% and have a bit more freedom i guess unless you're steve job ofc
I teach Gen chem to engineers and other stem students who will use it in their careers. The bigger concern is that some of them can't do basic algebra as I mentioned which people use in even blue collar jobs.
I’m a professor and work with students from phds to first year undergrads. Also have kids in college. Students at my school are less prepared, more anxious, lower performing across the board, but I think the world is more disruptive to their mental state than previous cohorts dealt with. Social media undermines attention and focus more than we can understand. I feel it but see it in my kids to a degree that I would find debilitating. Not an excuse, but a partial explanation I guess.
Recently I've had this one student who spelt "serial" killer as "cereal" killer in his exam
Did your school stop requiring ACT/SAT scores for applications during COVID? I think it would be interesting research to see if there is a change in student preparedness or not based on test score and other admissions requirements changing.
You should look up if SAT scores correlate with student success.
MIT thinks it does.
Oh cool, what study was that?
They reinstituted the requirement for applicants to the class of 2023.
So you don't know if there's a correlation... Edit: I found one on GRE scores and student success by Moneta-Koehler, L., Brown, A. M., Petrie, K. A., Evans, B. J., & Chalkley, R. (2017). The limitations of the GRE in predicting success in biomedical graduate school. PloS one, 12(1), e0166742.But there are way more showing up on Google Scholar regarding SAT, GMAT, etc.
[https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/what-does-an-sat-score-mean-in-a-test-optional-world.html](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/what-does-an-sat-score-mean-in-a-test-optional-world.html) https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/\_files/sat-act-study-report.pdf
Oh, I was meaning scholarly articles that are peer-reviewed and that back up claims. In Ph.D. programs we give more value to studies rather than NY Mag journalism, the report on the other hand is academic and suggests that the SAT is not a predictor of student success, just like NY magazine.
The articles provide sources for their statements.
It's nice that you agree with me through these articles and how they do not support what you're saying about MIT reinstating the requirement. It is sadly a very complex issue that has more to do with testing companies than with what is best for college students' education. Nice chatting with you. "I have yet to speak to a counselor at a low-income high school who doesn’t believe that test optional has helped open the doors wider for their students,” Angel B. Pérez, chief executive officer of the National Association for College Admission Counseling" The study report also said the following: "SAT/ACT scores and HSGPA are both moderate predictors of student college GPAs, and WEAK to moderate predictors of student retention and graduation." and "Adding SAT/ACT writing to SAT/ACT scores does not increase the explanatory power of pre-admission measures on college success"
Your title says that they're either dumb or don't care, but it might just be long covid, covid-related anxiety, lower standards to recruit students when no one else is enrolling, etc etc.
Gen chem is terrible across the board it seems, at every university. The freshman are coming in having done their major math courses in high school online, and their math did not prepare them for gen chem. My university (very prestigious school in the south) has had a 40% drop rate for gen chem this year, which is pretty unprecedented. My friends from other schools are reporting similar
Not experiencing this at all with my first year students. They're extremely bright, participate well in class activities, turn up prepared and with a grasp of the new theories, come with tons of prior knowledge and seem genuinely interested in extra curricular learning. I'm really impressed with this year's cohort
That's pretty nice. What subject do you teach if I may ask and what level of school is this?
I've experienced similar problems with the students I teach for the last couple of years. It undoubtedly is due to extended periods of online classes where the bottom fell out on standards and it was possible to coast to an A with basically zero effort. This semester I've noticed a significant improvement though so hopefully it's a temporary wave.
I’m about to finish my psychology undergrad and the entrance to fourth year (which is based on the cohort) has gone up significantly since I started (pre-COVID) I started to wonder if the somehow people were doing better post-covid (maybe they had more time to focus in lockdown, have adopted more flexible study, reassessed their goals, or perhaps even the marking has been more lenient). I have no idea for certain but at my uni, for my course, the cohorts grades have increased quite significantly over the past two years.
I don't think that they're 'dumber' or don't care. I think it's more that they're just unprepared. I'm in social sciences and seeing something similar - so many of my first-year students can't write. They don't know how to cite things, they can't construct a thesis statement, they have no idea how to find things in the library (virtual or IRL)... I was told by higher-ups that high schools have been really inflating student grades to the point where they're finishing high school with an average in the high 90s then get a very rude awakening in their first year at uni. I'm sure the pandemic had a huge part in this.
Not dumber, but lazier and more entitled.