Regarding students attending classes. I went to a state university and on a typical lecture day, around 25->30 percent of students didn't show up. I was a Chem major and it blew my mind. This was especially crazy in O-Chem and P-Chem, bot of which have high failure rates. I will admit this is probably more prevalent in a state university compared to a more prestigious school.
Failing Intro Economics
81–90 of 101 posts
Re: Failing Intro Economics
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's what the professor is doing. From the article: > specifically. Please note, I am not trying to “blame” students for their failing performance; rather, I am trying to understand it. Remedying the situation will require action by both students and faculty.
The author then goes on to blame students in 4 out 5 of the following points. To his credit he does suggest several changes he and faculty could make by the end of the article. But I think he's missing the most relevent point: with the vast number of online educational resources on the net, many students have been exposed to what great teaching looks like. Decades ago when this guy started teaching he did not have to…
They may have been exposed to great teaching, but do they recognize it? Asking people how they feel about the learning without an objective criteria to measure their performance could be a recipe for a local maximum.
Re: Failing Intro Economics
#83My response to everyone saying this must be the professor’s fault: I graduated right before the pandemic, so I don’t know how things changed during the last two years, but I do know that US college students at mid-tier universities are very bad at learning. If I saw a professor at my university take the time to think this hard about why students are failing so badly, then I would trust his performance over the studen…
The standards for ECON101 at Davidson are relatively high. It covers intro micro and macro in the same semester unlike most schools and just finishing the tests in time requires algebraic fluency (same for calculus skills in intermediate micro/macro classes).
It’s always been a weed out class (lots of future investment bankers would switch to an easier major). If he has kept the sane bar as previous years, and college kids are struggling as much as it seems, I’m not surprised with the poor results.
As an alum, I think Davidson is in a tough spot. It made a name for itself in the past for the rigor and volume of its coursework. Grade deflation was a common topic when I attended. While it is not a household name, it’s built a very solid reputation with graduate schools and key employers for producing graduates with the requisite skills to excel. Obviously it does not hurt a large part of student body comes from upper-middle-class to upper class backgrounds which I argue provides the real value proposition (networking and exposure to upper class ideas and culture) but I digress
However, being really really hard with a low name profile is a tough appeal in the current zeitgeist. Schools have become businesses where parents and students want guarantees, especially if they are paying private school tuition. But if Davidson lowers it standards to meet customer demands, then how does it differentiate itself? Especially in the humanities. If you are an English major at Princeton then you are set because of your schools brand. But an English major at Davidson needs that reputation of rigor for their personal brand (and to hone skills of course).
Re: Failing Intro Economics
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Office hours are a compromise. A professor can provide you with individualized help but in a timeboxed manner. One class is no more than something like 20% of a professor's time, either because they are spending most of their time on research or because they are teaching a huge pile of courses as an adjunct. Having professors sit on slack all day ready to respond to asynchronous questions from students is simply not…
Isn’t the “a” the entire point of asynchronous communications? (That no one has to sit around all day to respond to them, as the medium is fundamentally async. If a few back-n-forths suggest that escalating to a synchronous medium is needed, that can still happen, but I’d bet well over 50% of initial contacts could be handled effectively totally async.)
Yes and no. My wife is a professor. In the experience of her colleagues, students who want slack/email feedback don't actually have the same definition of "asynchronous" that professors (or you) do. The number of emails received at 11pm regarding an assignment due as 12am is frankly outrageous. There is an expectation of extremely high availability when it comes to these kinds of interactions.
So many professors create a blanket "come to my office hours" approach rather than trying to train students to understand that it might take them 24 hours (or longer - on weekends) to respond to an email.
Re: Failing Intro Economics
#85My response to everyone saying this must be the professor’s fault: I graduated right before the pandemic, so I don’t know how things changed during the last two years, but I do know that US college students at mid-tier universities are very bad at learning. If I saw a professor at my university take the time to think this hard about why students are failing so badly, then I would trust his performance over the studen…
College is a few years behind me, but not too far that I've forgotten my general experience. As a graduate from a mid-tier university in the US: -Nobody has ever given a shit about Intro to Econ. Practically every single Freshman is forced to take it so everyone bemoans the experience. -Most schools allow you to take a Community College version of the course and transfer over credits saving you time and money (and ef…
This didn't happen overnight, it's a slippery slope over the last few decades.
It's not just today's students, full grown economists haven't been up to what's needed for some time now.
Re: Failing Intro Economics
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author then goes on to blame students in 4 out 5 of the following points. To his credit he does suggest several changes he and faculty could make by the end of the article. But I think he's missing the most relevent point: with the vast number of online educational resources on the net, many students have been exposed to what great teaching looks like. Decades ago when this guy started teaching he did not have to…
They may have been exposed to great teaching, but do they recognize it? Asking people how they feel about the learning without an objective criteria to measure their performance could be a recipe for a local maximum.
> but do they recognize it?
They don't need to for it to affect attendance. You stick around when you find something captivating and skip that which you find dull. And something that was captivating twenty years ago compared to the other content that was available at that time might be dull compared to today's content. Teachers can't expect styles and material from decades ago to just work like it used to.
Re: Failing Intro Economics
#87This point is really bizarre: > The expectations at the college or university level seem to be falling. In other words, the AP course has actually adapted more to changing and challenging economic conditions, particularly macroeconomic ones, than has the more stagnant college-level course. How is it that a college has more stagnant material than a curriculum designed by a bureaucracy? This sounds like a Davidson prob…
Imo biggest issue is that professors are incentivized to research, not teach. 101 classes have a high percentage of non-major, disinterested students, so the good teachers don't want to teach them. So the combination of undergrads being an annoyance that must be dealt with in order to do the real job of research, and the teachers who actually take that annoyance seriously not teaching this class means 101 classes are commonly not updated and little work is put into them by the teachers. AP courses are designed by people whose job is designing courses, not people whose job is research and "oh yea teach these undergrads too."
Re: Failing Intro Economics
#88My response to everyone saying this must be the professor’s fault: I graduated right before the pandemic, so I don’t know how things changed during the last two years, but I do know that US college students at mid-tier universities are very bad at learning. If I saw a professor at my university take the time to think this hard about why students are failing so badly, then I would trust his performance over the studen…
Well aren't you just a special little boy!
Joking aside though, if something is true of 85% of a group then that is the audience, and the truth, we're working with. Lamenting their individual lack of dedication, hard work, whatever virtue will be gratifying but not actually solve any problems.
Again if it's truly 85% then that's that. How can professors adapt to the needs of their students is a more useful question, if the problem you want to solve is actually the failure of this mass of students to learn. I suspect it isn't though, either for the author of the article, or you, or most of the commenters here. We want to whine about the vicissitudes of the youth, and congratulate ourselves on our virtue, and this approach works well towaeds that goal.
Re: Failing Intro Economics
#89I genuinely believe a lot of professors are out of touch, especially around this point: >Fourth, students seemed reluctant to come to the office seeking help. [...] I suspect there is an increased factor of intimidation associated with being lost in the material and asking a much older male professor for help. Let's ignore the weird second half assumption about 'older males' for now... Young people do not have a conc…
I think you are greatly over-estimating how often students are seeking help asynchronously. If the professor was actually flooded with texts and emails from engaged students who just have different communication expectations, I think that would have been mentioned in the article especially in the list of possible ways to improve. It seems more likely that the students are not attempting to engage at all.
Re: Failing Intro Economics
#90My response to everyone saying this must be the professor’s fault: I graduated right before the pandemic, so I don’t know how things changed during the last two years, but I do know that US college students at mid-tier universities are very bad at learning. If I saw a professor at my university take the time to think this hard about why students are failing so badly, then I would trust his performance over the studen…
College is a few years behind me, but not too far that I've forgotten my general experience. As a graduate from a mid-tier university in the US: -Nobody has ever given a shit about Intro to Econ. Practically every single Freshman is forced to take it so everyone bemoans the experience. -Most schools allow you to take a Community College version of the course and transfer over credits saving you time and money (and ef…
I remember econ, and it seems this course is close to the subject matter I had. I thought then and still think that attempting to model highly irregular events (transactions) as a smooth linear system is doomed to failure, so I could never muster the effort required. I'd have been more interested if it had presented itself as a game world instead of supposedly modeling reality.