Headline, May 27 2022/ ''' '' STUDENTS SIGH STANDARD '' '''

''' '' STUDENTS SIGH

 STANDARD '' '''

LATE ASSIGNMENTS - FAILED TESTS - SLEEPING IN CLASS : Welcome to The World Students Society. Welcome to the pandemic era university.

IN MY CLASS last fall, a third of students were missing nearly every time, and usually not the same third.

Students buried their faces in their laptop screens and let my questions hang in the air unanswered. My classes were small, with nowhere to hide, yet some students openly slept through them.

I was teaching writing at two very different universities : one private and wealthy, its lush lawns surrounded by towering fraternity and sorority houses; the other public, with a diverse array of strivers milling about its largely brutalist campus.

The problems in my classrooms, though, we're the same. Students just weren't doing what it takes to learn.

By several measures - attendance, late assignments, quality of in-class discussion - they performed worse than any students I had encountered in two-decades of teaching. They didn't even seem to be trying.

At the private school, I required individual meetings to discuss their research paper drafts; only six of 14 showed up. Usually, they all do.

I wondered if it was me, if I was washed up. But when I posted about this on Facebook, more than a dozen friends teaching at institutions across the country gave similar reports.

Last month, The Chronicle of Higher Education received comments from more than 100 college instructors about their classes. They, too, reported poor attendance, little discussion, missing home work and failed exams.

The pandemic certainly made college more challenging for students, and over the past two years, compassionate faculty members have loosened course structures in response :

They have introduced recorded lectures, flexible attendance and deadline policies, and lenient grading.

In light of the widely reported mental health crisis on campuses, some students and faculty members are calling for those looser standards and remote options to persist indefinitely, even as vaccines and Covid therapies have made it relatively safe to return to prepandemic norms.

I also feel compassion for my students, but the learning breakdown has convinced me that continuing to relax standards would be a mistake. Looser standards are contributing to the problem, because they make it too easy for students to disengage from classes.

Student disengagement is a problem for everyone, because everyone depends on well-educated people.

College prepares students for socially essential careers - including as engineers and nurses - and to be citizens who bring high-level intellectual habits to bear on big societal problems, from climate change to the next political crisis.

On a more fundamental level it also prepares many students to be responsible adults; to set goals and figure out what help they need to attain them.

Higher education is now at a turning point. The accommodations for the pandemic can either end or be made permanent.

The task won't be easy, but universities need to help students rebuild their ability to learn. And to do that, everyone involved - students, faculties, administrators and the public at large - must insist on in-person classes and high expectations for fall 2022 and beyond.

IN MARCH 2020, essentially all of U.S. higher education went remote overnight. Faculties, course designers and educational technology staff scrambled to move classes online, developing new techniques on the fly. The changes often enabled loosening of requirements.

A study by Canadian researchers found that nearly half of U.S. faculty members reduced their expectations for the quantity of work in their classes in spring 2020, and nearly a third lowered quality expectations.

That made sense to me in those emergency conditions; it seemed to me that students and faculties just need to make it through.

That fall, most students were learning at least partly online. Simultaneously, colleges gave undergraduate students more autonomy and flexibility over how they learned, with options to go remote or asynchronous.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Times & Tides, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Professor Jonathan Malesic.

With respectful dedication to the Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and conduct Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless