When my babysitter confessed to me that she managed to make through college with a sociology degree without ever writing a 20-page paper, I made a mental note to cross that college off the list for the boys. It probably increased my middle class anxiety another notch, too, about the quality of that tier of colleges.
The lack of rigor at many colleges has been noted in a recent study. (Thanks to everyone who sent me that link.)
The research of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.
One problem is that students just aren't asked to do much, according to findings in a new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses." Half of students did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.
I'm just finishing up four hours of writing and am running out of words. I'll let you all add the commentary.
Apt. 11d 
“When my babysitter confessed to me that she managed to make through college with a sociology degree without ever writing a 20-page paper, I made a mental note to cross that college off the list for the boys.”
I’d let that school off the hook for that. I didn’t have to write anything nearly that long as a undergraduate. I think that 20-pages is dangerous for undergraduates, who often suffer from bloat in their writing style and who have nearly all been told that they write “really well!” in high school. It’s also an invitation to the use of “internet helper” to fill out the paper (although, who really needs the excuse?).
A senior thesis is the only sort of thing that really justifies that sort of length. I’ve known a number of people who really benefited from writing a senior thesis, but that’s ideally an extremely structured process.
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I also probably didn’t write a 20 page paper, though I did take classes where 20 pages might have been written during the term (it’s been a very very long time ago, though, so I don’t remember).
But, on the other hand, how many contour integrals did she have to do in college.
I’m guessing that’s not the issue with your babysitter, that she was spending her time coding and doing integrals instead of writing, but I’ve been wary for a very long time of pre-set notions of what *every* student should learn. Writing is a very important skill (and, frankly, should be learned in HS). So much of the pop press on the topic inevitably circles around that idea.
I can’t argue that everything is fine — I think that people are graduating without being educated, but I think deciding what “educated” means in our ever more complex world is a difficult task.
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I’d agree with Amy that undergrads should write 20 page or longer papers rarely, at most. (I’m pretty sure that the longest thing I wrote as an undergrad, other than for a fiction writing class, was no more than 20 pages, and that was one time.) More generally, though, at many large universities, even excellent ones, how “pushed” one is, and how much one learns, will depend very heavily on personal effort and initiative. I’m pretty far from sure that that’s a bad thing in general.
(My understanding of the study is also that there were pretty big differences in learning outcomes by areas of study, in a way that’s not that surprising, so we should be careful about talking about college in general here, too.)
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This is a source of great frustration for many of us in the department. Younger faculty believe in writing and vigorous standards. In contrast, our older colleagues are “burnt out” and don’t believe our students are “capable” of writing and they won’t ever have to write anything longer than a 2-3 page policy memo so why should we bother. (Yes, that’s the logic behind their reasoning.) While, I personally don’t believe 20 page papers are a good exercise for undergrads at the institution I teach at, it doesn’t mean it might not be appropriate elsewhere.
In general, I believe students should have done a research paper of at LEAST 10 pages. I had seniors within the major who had NEVER written ANYTHING and were graduating. Folks that’s scary! How do you graduate with a BA in political science not having written anything?
The act of writing a research paper is important because it requires a plethora of skills ranging from collecting materials to synthesizing them and then displaying them. These are valuable tools. Similarly valuable is learning to write a critique. In my upper level classes I assign a minimum of 15 pages of writing and one class tops out at 30 pages (2 five page papers and 2 ten page papers).
I am suspect of institutions from which students proudly say, “Oh, I never had to write anything.”
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“My understanding of the study is also that there were pretty big differences in learning outcomes by areas of study.”
Do tell!
I was also interested in how the assessment worked. When they say there was no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing over the four years, do they mean that the students didn’t improve at all over the four years, or that they didn’t improve compared to similar aged people who didn’t spend those four years in college? Because if there was no improvement at all (not even just the developmental progress you’d expect from being 4 years older), that’s really sad.
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Agree with Amy P. and Matt. My complaint on colleges is that they do little to prepare students for a life outside of college that is not graduate studies. Am I unreasonable to expect that professors should be able to assist students with career advice that does not include a PhD or is that unfair given their own experiences?
I think a better measure when picking colleges is whether it will accommodate that particular child finding his and her strengths.
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I wrote an undergraduate thesis, so I went well over 20 pages. I think mine was close to 120, including references. I also had an honors seminar that required something above 20 pages for our final report. But, you will notice that the report says “20 pages of writing,” which isn’t the same thing and is far more disturbing.
I did most of my writing in honors political theory classes, though I think 10 pages was usually the max for any single paper. There would be two small papers and a big paper, typically. You’d have to submit and then could revise to improve your grade. The grad students in the same class had to write a longer paper or an additional paper.
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one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week
I can’t decide how worried I am about that. Notice that it asks about the previous semester, not ever. I could see an upper level math/engineering/whatever student who isn’t doing that kind of reading for 1/2 their semesters if they took all of the general education requirements at once.
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Speaking of “tiers of schools,” I’ve spend all morning playing with the “interactive” feature on this new report.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/01/educational_productivity/
I think it puts a nail into the coffin of “more money” as a cure for failing schools. Also, looking at the New Jersey data, I can’t help but wonder what the heck is wrong with Asbury Park.
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“But, you will notice that the report says “20 pages of writing,” which isn’t the same thing and is far more disturbing.”
Right. Although depending on how several courses added up, you could still have a very substantial writing load without any one course requiring 20 pages of writing a term.
One of my husband’s more successful graduate classes required a two-page paper based on the class reading every week. I’m not sure wherein lay the magic, but tt was such a successful model that I think he adopted it for a similar course that he taught himself.
Quibbling aside, it looks like a good 36% of college students aren’t getting their money’s worth out of the experience, and neither is the taxpayer. And let’s not forget that anybody who makes it through four years of college is the creme de la creme–there’s a very high attrition rate. 36% of the students who stuck around for four years got very little learning out of the experience.
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I did an undergraduate semester at Oxford, where the weekly format of every class was 1. Read an entire major work (i.e. Middlemarch) and spend some time in the provided list of secondary sources 2. Write a 10-15 page position paper on the work 3. Spend two hours one-on-one with the professor defending what you’ve written. There’s no better format for developing reading, analysis, research, and writing skills IMO.
I’m always a little shocked to read our pile of Christmas newsletters and see how poorly written they are. It seems many of our friends finished college without leaning how to put a few clear paragraphs together.
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Thanks for posting the link, Ragtime.
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To contextualize what I’m about to write: I majored in English in college. I have a PhD in English, with a specialization in rhetoric, composition, and literacy. I teach writing to everyone from brand-new freshman to students finishing up their M.A. degrees.
I read this same study, and it blew me away, though as others have said, I took it to mean 20 pages over the course of a semester and not one twenty page paper. I think I only wrote one of those in college myself.
Every fall, I teach two sections of basic writing; this is the course for students who need some extra help before they take “regular” (for lack of a better term) first-year composition. In this course, students write between 15-20 pages of polished prose (i.e. final drafts of formal papers); those pages are revised multiple times. With homework and in-class writing, they write well over 30 pages–probably close to 40.
In the spring, I teach two sections of first-year composition. My students will write two one page research proposals, an eight-twelve page annotated bibliography, an eight-ten page research paper, and three one-two page papers. That’s a total of 21-30 pages of polished prose. Thanks to homework and in-class writing, they’ll write another 20-30 pages. That’s 41-60 pages for one semester in a first-year course.
I am not an outlier in my field; the courses I teach are outlined with the WPA outcomes:http://wpacouncil.org/positions/outcomes.html. All instructors of the course at my uni are supposed to be within these page guidelines.
In addition to these courses, I teach an upper-level course for majors or a graduate course each term, too. In those courses, students are writing a final project of anywhere from 10-20 pages (more for grad students), along with shorter papers and weekly reading responses. Total pages in a semester are at least 60, usually more.
I’ve worked at four universities, and all of them have similar writing output in required English courses. I go to the major conferences in my field, talk to A LOT of professors, and see or hear about lots of classes and syllabi. We tend to require roughly the same amount of writing in first-year courses–15-20 pages of polished prose, in addition to homework and in-class writing.
Where are these students that they aren’t doing 20 pages of writing during any semester of college? Pretty much every institution in the country requires a first-year writing course.
I wonder if the study just took the students’ word for how much writing they did, versus how they were actually *assigned* to do. Also, I can tell you that some of my students would not think to add up the page numbers if they were asked how many pages they had written in a semester. They would just go with the longest paper they had written.
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I teach college English, and if I have my way I will never assign another fucking research paper in the rest of my teaching career.
*throws cat among pigeons and goes to bed*
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I don’t think I ever took a course that required 40 pages of reading a week.
However…I think I wrote as many pages of code and equations as I did of words in college.
And a page of material is a dramatically different amount, depending on the material. Forty pages of this is a month’s work at least.
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“Forty pages of this is a month’s work at least.” (w/ a link to a book by Devaney)
And, it’s just a “quick and elementary introduction . . . that could be read by anyone with a background in calculus and linear algebra” I should probably add it to my Amazon cart now.
Yes, 40 pages of that book are probably at least a month’s work, and worse, probably couldn’t even be approached by many. And dynamical systems are important.
I think it’s pretty much as reasonable to complain about people not having written 20 pages in college (a standards measure) as it is to bemoan the complete lack of understanding of dynamical systems among the college educated population.
It is important to write well and clearly (and, often, when we complain about writing, we’re really complaining about clarity of ideas which is very very important.). Lots of subjects and thinking skills are important, though, and I continue to find the periodic angst over what youngsters don’t learn today in the popular press to be boring.
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“I continue to find the periodic angst over what youngsters don’t learn today in the popular press to be boring.”
Almost as boring as reading 10-20 page long research papers.
What I find is that such angst presupposes that there is only one kind of education that students can/should receive.
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“What I find is that such angst presupposes that there is only one kind of education that students can/should receive. ”
Yes, and in my case, I get particularly ruffled at how significantly the popular conception of that kind of education underplays science and math. Science and math are increasingly more important in modern society. They both takes time and practice to learn and are difficult to study auto-didactically. And learning them takes time away from other pursuits.
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OK, but now I’m going to argue with you and point to Sir Ken Robinson, who says that modern educational norms value math and science more than the arts.
Re studying and science ed, this is the big link on the NY Times today.
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“modern educational norms value math and science more than the arts.”
It may be given lip service, but doesn’t seem to be taught in practice. I am constantly shocked at the level of math knowledge among educated, say lawyers, to use an example. But, of course, Laura’s constantly shocked at the level of writing skills (maybe among lawyers, but she certainly would be among scientists).
I like the NY Times article, but would like to see it examined in an education study rather than a psychological one. Instead of examining whether retention is better for students in an experiential setting in a lab,let’s actually try two different techniques for something people are actually trying to each in a classroom. And, we need to demonstrate that the students don’t just do better at taking the test, but do better at a generalized skill that follows from the knowledge. The study suggested they’d done that — when they examined whether retrieval practice resulted in better drawings of concept diagrams. That test suggested that the retrieval practice generalized better than concept diagramming and is the kind of thing you want to see.
(for example, if folks trained using the Singapore math curriculum are better at doing the everyday math tests than people trained at doing the every day math curriculum, it suggests one method is better than the other).
I also think the phenomenon should be called “retrieval practice” rather than testing. I’m very sympathetic to the idea that retrieval practice might play a significant role in the storage and maintenance of memories because the brain physiology suggests that it might be. But, as with all beautiful theories, it has to be demonstrated in useful practice, not just in a beautiful idea.
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I also think the phenomenon should be called “retrieval practice”…
That sounds too much like something you do with a dog and a tennis ball.
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“recall practice”?
Or, does that sound too much like what you do in between election years in California?
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I have no idea what California does between elections, but whatever it is must be horrible if the winning candidate is Jerry Brown and he’s turned into a fiscal conservative.
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“It may be given lip service, but doesn’t seem to be taught in practice.”
There’s also an ongoing attempt to turn math and science classes into English or art.
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My senior seminar paper was 30 pages, I can’t remember if that included the works cited and graphs, etc.
I had a huge research paper that was done as a group project in a research methods class. It was in excess of 25 pages, of course there were supposedly 4 of us writing it. Small group project as usual- there were 2 of us doing it.
My kid had to write a 10 page paper in her senior AP English class in high school. She’s only a freshman in college, so I have not data there yet.
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Very useful blog and well written. I definitely think that this will help me a lot. I appreciate all your work. Thank you.
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An exploratory factor analysis could be interesting.
http://www.surveytool.com/research-solutions/
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