Whatever happened to good writing?
"Good parents are percistant and show understandment."
My classwork in college usually consisted of essays and big research papers, with our professors expecting us to use critical thinking skills to analyze the world around us. Often you hear that a liberal arts degree mostly just teaches you to think critically. But in TAing a class this semester at Arizona State, I’ve come to realize that skills such as these are not necessarily the norm at a big state school.
The class I TA is an upper-level, advanced Psychology course which is offered only to Juniors and Seniors. The prerequisites include your typical classes like Psych 101 and Research Methods. Most of my students are Psychology majors. And yet many cannot write complete, coherent sentences. In fact, in a short-answer question on our first exam, two–count ‘em, two– people out of 42 described the ideal parent to demonstrate good “understandment”. The second time I saw it I actually started to doubt myself and looked it up to see if it was a new word recently added to the English language. Nope. The only place it’s listed is on urbandictionary.com.
While my graduate program, like most graduate programs at ASU, is well-known and highly respected, there is something very troubling with the undergraduate system here. Everyone here knows it… in fact, many of my professors crack jokes about the incapabilities of the undergrads.
How did a big research institution like ASU become so polarized? Who’s to blame? In a public university setting, there’s plenty to go around. First, Arizona as a state mandates that the public universities be available to nearly everyone in the community, with very few requirements or limitations. Second, it requires them to be “as close to free as possible”. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that many of the people who ASU caters to should not receive an education. I’m saying that there are community colleges here that should be the catch-all for the students who don’t belong in a four-year college.
Another roadblock to raising the educational quality here is… you guessed it… funding. The new governor of Arizona has decided that the economic crisis can be solved through cutting education funding– effective immediately. A huge chunk of this fiscal year’s budget was stolen out from under the university. As a result, all faculty and staff are required to take at least 10 days of unpaid furloughs from work. That means that even my mentor has to take off 10 days this semester and not work on the grants, papers, and other projects that need to happen. An entire polytechnic campus of ASU will be closed and several programs will be entirely completely shut down starting next year. Not only will many students lose the resources to get an education in their home state, thousands of faculty and staff will be jobless. To top it all off, the legislators of Arizona are resisting the stimulus package funding we so desperately need. It seems like education is one of the worst places to “cut the fat”.
As a result, it is only expected that classes will continue to increase beyond the current 400-person introductory undergrad class (seriously, it’s 400 people). There’s no way anyone can expect to recieve the attention and feedback required to cultivate writing and critical thinking skills. Given the lack of training, we can’t penalize students for their poor writing. So we end up easing up on the way we grade them to allow most of them to continue and graduate without being able to write a thoughtful sentence. Honestly, it makes me feel a little dirty to be a part of it. And meanwhile, I sit in my 5-person classes with top-notch professors and stipend, feeling guilty for the education I’m receiving here. What is there to do? We’ll just blame the undergraduates, I guess. Can’t wait to read those 15 page drafts that are due in a few weeks.