Is UND Drifting?

The Princeton Review has come out with its annual lists of top colleges and UND again appears in the position on one of the lists. The lists rank colleges according to various characteristics and UND tops the list for lowest time spent studying.

This recognition first came to my attention when UND achieved this rank last year and I checked yesterday to just to see if this was some type of fluke. Turns out I was out of town when the news broke locally ( I do see the university responded to this ranking in the GF Herald. ). Sure enough again – a two-peat.

Just so we are clear, this review covers “the nations best colleges” and the University of Iowa and Florida State University appear a little further down the list of institutions with students who claim to study less.  This “honor” must be interpreted in this context.

As a UND faculty member, I started to think about whether I would be more bothered by my institution appearing at the top of the partying or lack of studying lists. I decided I would be more concerned with the lack of studying recognition. Perhaps I subscribe to the work hard, play hard philosophy.

Some of the other data are interesting. The reported average GPA at UND is 3.38. The Curmudgeon in me notes that the notion of a “gentleman’s C” must long have vanished. Perhaps now the default grade for showing up and giving it a try must be a B. However, again, it is important to keep things in context – the GPA listed for Florida State is 3.76. How are such “average” levels of performance even possible.

I really do not know what to make of this. Perhaps it is a kind of adolescent “too cool for school” thing – don’t act like you are really trying or really care. Perhaps it is a function of the sample of individuals willing to respond.

I do think there are serious matters here that should be considered (the previous comments were not really intended to be serious). Academically Adrift was one of the books I read this summer (my public Kindle notes and highlights). This book finds fault with higher education in general feeling that the system often does little to advance higher order thinking skills in students. Again, note that I am being careful with my words. Increasing subject area knowledge and developing higher order thinking skills can be different things. Both faculty and students (and perhaps others) are at fault – students study far too little and faculty are not motivated to do much to change this (my short version). Students understand college to be about socializing and obtaining a credential – a competitive system based on achievement is resisted. The average effort level of students per week is 12 hours. So, to be , one might assume many UND students study significant less than this total.

UND has been highly interested in the assessment of various skills of late. The focus is on demonstrating student change rather than establishing enabling conditions students must meet. On the surface this sounds great (demonstrating change), but doing this in a way that is valid with sophisticated cognitive skills is extremely difficult. Perhaps more accurately, it is easy to do this poorly, but very difficult to do at the level that would meet conditions that would be satisfactory to the research community. I have begun to think that the position of expecting each instructor to demonstrate actual change in student advanced cognitive capabilities rather than assuring that certain conditions of instruction have been met is simply the wrong approach. Perhaps we should allow the researchers with the resources to establish quality dependent measures (valid instruments of a given skill) and use these measures with large numbers of instructors and institutions to investigate factors associated with change do their thing. Individual faculty members and most institutions cannot function at this level. We might then use this type of quality assessment work to establish factors that appear to matter. Let the research community squabble over whether such research has really established something of value. Finally, we might encourage others to implement the factors that seem to make a difference.

Despite what  you might think, concrete recommendations do appear. Academically Adrift identified several course characteristics that seemed associated with improvement in higher level skills – reading assignments that averaged 40 pages per week and a writing task resulting in a product of 25 pages or more. Both characteristics in the same course generated even more positive consequences.

I admit that neither of my courses meet these requirements. I beg off the writing standard because, if done well, evaluating 200 and 75, 25 page papers would be an immense task. Failure to meet the reading expectation cannot be justified by my capacity to put in the necessary time. However, I can tell you that expecting students in service courses to read “600” pages results in a very negative reaction from students. Most instructors back off and this is probably the type of complicity on the part of faculty members that the authors of Academically Adrift are describing. As more and more courses reduce the level of commitment that is required, the pressure on the hold outs increases.

Look at it from the perspective of what the Princeton Review seems to describe as the typical UND student –  if you have four or so such courses and have decided you have about 10 hours a week to spend, you might decide you are being abused.

 

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