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   StillIRise1963 (stillirise1963@mastodon.world)'s status on Friday, 04-Oct-2024 02:37:16 JST StillIRise1963

   THIS is what is happening to students. THIS IS ALSO why kids turning in a essay written by AI in middle school is indicative of a serious fucking problem that will come to bite ALL OF US in the ass.

   https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 04-Oct-2024 09:01:03 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     @StillIRise1963 @Brad_Rosenheim
     Agreeing that there may be something there, I am reflexively •extremely• skeptical of two aspects of this:

     (1) “Kids these days” moral panics have a terrible track record; they very often tend to either misdiagnose the problem, or be made up out of whole cloth (cf 90% of Jonathan Haidt). Not that it’s wrong, but, like miracle cure health science studies, I always start skeptical. In this case…

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 04-Oct-2024 09:03:15 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     @StillIRise1963 @Brad_Rosenheim
     (2) If there is in fact a non-imaginary shift here, I’d be very interested in discovering whether we can trace this to college becoming more accessible to students who haven’t had a privileged K12 schooling that prepped them for college from the start. IOW, is this students changing, or is it admissions changing? If the latter, it’s still a problem, but it’s a •good• problem that represents progress.

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 04-Oct-2024 09:22:40 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • fulanigirl

     @fulanigirl @StillIRise1963 @Brad_Rosenheim
     I’d be interested in seeing longitudinal data on that MIT prof’s impression. I’ve often been shocked at how poorly some students write (I’m a college prof too), but I’m not totally confident that it’s notably worse now than the first class I taught in 2008. This is something where I don’t trust my memory. I •do• remember being surprised at the low quality of some student writing from the start.

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     fulanigirl (fulanigirl@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 04-Oct-2024 09:22:42 JST fulanigirl

     in reply to

     • Paul Cantrell

     @inthehands @StillIRise1963 @Brad_Rosenheim There is some evidence that students who excel a the top of their classes in neighborhood schools do struggle in college courses. There was a sad article in the WaPost some years ago by one of DC's leading Black HS students who talked about how under prepared he was when he got to college. But we were also seeing people coming out of top elite colleges who could not write. An MIT prof said they can write one well composed sentence but not a paragraph.

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 04-Oct-2024 09:25:21 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • fulanigirl

     @fulanigirl @StillIRise1963 @Brad_Rosenheim
     A problem I often notice with faculty is that we’re the product of survivor bias: we’re the ones for whom school worked well. We assume all of our own peers in college were more or less clones of us; we don’t get a true longitudinal cross-section of students until we start teaching. We easily mistake that change in sample group for change over time.