The Elite College Myth
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/the-elite-college-myth-268c4371
Panicky parents often think their children’s success in life depends on going to a prestigious school. In reality, there are many paths to achieving great things.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/the-elite-college-myth-268c4371
Panicky parents often think their children’s success in life depends on going to a prestigious school. In reality, there are many paths to achieving great things.
Harvard Students Skip Class and Still Get High Grades, Faculty Say
Many students don’t do the reading and don’t speak up in class, according to a report. Now, professors are trying to change that campus culture.
The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/perverse-consequences-easy-113000679.html
Without the threat of poor grades, students have largely stopped trying in their courses. Pinker told me that student performance on the multiple-choice portion of his final exam (which he has kept mostly the same) has declined by 10 percentage points over the past two decades, even as he gives out more A’s. An incoming Harvard junior, who requested anonymity to avoid affecting her future job prospects, told me that, for all the hand-wringing about student self-censorship, her peers mostly don’t read texts closely enough to form opinions in the first place. “I feel like college has become almost anti-intellectual,” Melani Cammett, a Harvard international-affairs professor, told me. “This is the place where we’re supposed to deal with big ideas, and yet students are not really engaging with them.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/perverse-consequences-easy-113000679.html
Without the threat of poor grades, students have largely stopped trying in their courses. Pinker told me that student performance on the multiple-choice portion of his final exam (which he has kept mostly the same) has declined by 10 percentage points over the past two decades, even as he gives out more A’s. An incoming Harvard junior, who requested anonymity to avoid affecting her future job prospects, told me that, for all the hand-wringing about student self-censorship, her peers mostly don’t read texts closely enough to form opinions in the first place. “I feel like college has become almost anti-intellectual,” Melani Cammett, a Harvard international-affairs professor, told me. “This is the place where we’re supposed to deal with big ideas, and yet students are not really engaging with them.”
Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html
When he started at Columbia as a sophomore this past September, he didn’t worry much about academics or his GPA. “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” While other new students fretted over the university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as “intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort. When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”