Students Cope With Shaky Colleges

U.S. officials tell shaky colleges how to clean up student-loan data and keep access to federal aid.

Source: U.S. Helps Shaky Colleges Cope With Bad Student Loans – WSJ

I commented:

Most people would be shocked and awed If they were to see what I saw at a school that is much better than the ones discussed here.

  • A math professor who said that, after 5 years, she could finally tell when the students’ homework was wrong, but still couldn’t always tell what was wrong.  (That was in an introductory course.)
  • A chair of the math department who couldn’t understand a standard example from a required advanced undergraduate course.
  • A statistics professor who had trouble with the concept of function.
  • Another statistics professor who confused a deep, critical, and fundamental idea in statistics with a simple far less important fact.

You can read about the specific cases on my blog, inside-higher-ed ; but, more importantly, you can find a description of the attitudes that led to these events, attitudes that start in major elite universities – like Wash.  U. in St. Louis, where I later taught.

The cases described here may be extreme but they are part of a larger cancer.

Comments

  1. I routinely deal with college-level mathematics faculty that often have serious trouble with simple high-school mathematics. For example. I once had to explain that the domain of a cube root function is all reals and the faculty member (who has been granted tenure) look completely befuddled and wondered how this could be true. I was polite to say the least.