Incompetent students?
Just spent most of my evening setting up a rough and quick homepage (look under my profile) so as to have a place to dump papers and stuff. Also an opportunity to try out this new Dreamweaver our new Web Person kindly installed on my home computer. (If I would refer to her as Web Mistress all kinds of wrong assumptions would be made). It is an illegal copy and not very stable. In addition, it asks me all kinds of questions I am afraid of answering for fear the Dreamweaver Company might raid my place and throw me in jail. Still, I have clicked, dragged and typed untill finally something legible (never mind intelligible) appeared. This technology is still so new to me... sigh!
Anyway, while clicking etc., I was reminded of several reports in tonight's NRC Handelsblad about the level of knowledge and competency of our high school graduates. It appears that because of all the changes in the high schools over the last 15 years or so, we are turning out graduates who enter university unable to do long division and cannot calculate a logarithm without a cheat sheet. In addition, it appears that more than 30% of journalism students make elementary spelling mistakes. This confirms my impression that students nowadays are really good in finding stuff on the internet, but lack the persistence to actually go to the library and find a paper reference. They are good at quick reading, but terrible at really studying a text in detail. They can tell you the conclusions of an argument, but cannot reconstruct to argument, nor evaluate whether it has any merit. It seems they have all kinds of skills I never had (including building decent website and blogs), but lack the background knowledge and attitude towards studying students used to have.
While part of this complaint is of all times (my supervisor lectured me for hours on the trespasses I committed against the Dutch language in the various drafts of my MA thesis), it now seems more is going on and my impression is not just that of an old fart who is entering the ranks of the grumpy old men (well, I wish...), but has some relation to fact.
But what to do about it? Another high school education reform...?!? Oh no!
Anyway, while clicking etc., I was reminded of several reports in tonight's NRC Handelsblad about the level of knowledge and competency of our high school graduates. It appears that because of all the changes in the high schools over the last 15 years or so, we are turning out graduates who enter university unable to do long division and cannot calculate a logarithm without a cheat sheet. In addition, it appears that more than 30% of journalism students make elementary spelling mistakes. This confirms my impression that students nowadays are really good in finding stuff on the internet, but lack the persistence to actually go to the library and find a paper reference. They are good at quick reading, but terrible at really studying a text in detail. They can tell you the conclusions of an argument, but cannot reconstruct to argument, nor evaluate whether it has any merit. It seems they have all kinds of skills I never had (including building decent website and blogs), but lack the background knowledge and attitude towards studying students used to have.
While part of this complaint is of all times (my supervisor lectured me for hours on the trespasses I committed against the Dutch language in the various drafts of my MA thesis), it now seems more is going on and my impression is not just that of an old fart who is entering the ranks of the grumpy old men (well, I wish...), but has some relation to fact.
But what to do about it? Another high school education reform...?!? Oh no!
posted by Bruno at Wednesday, October 26, 2005
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