Our University has some of the smartest college students in the world, but it also has some of the least scholarly. We have students who have no business being here. We have poor writers. We have students who cannot read SAT words. We have a few who don’t understand basic algebra. We even have Viewpoint columnists who don’t know how to vary sentence structure!
However, the most common incompetence among students is poor work ethic. Too many people here don’t understand the diligence required of a college student. I have had classes where professors generously tell us exactly what we’ll be quizzed on, and students still ask to review definitions right before the test.
A 400-level class should not need to spend an hour reviewing the class period before a test. Introductory courses shouldn’t even spend class time on that, yet students seem to think their professors should tell them everything they need to know to get an A. College students are adults and should be able to learn some of that from the textbooks themselves. If students are unwilling to do that, then inviting them to State was a mistake.
Certainly, we can’t identify all poor students before they set foot on campus, but we could be doing better. According to the admissions Web site, all of N.C. State’s colleges admit students with high school GPAs in the B-plus to A range. This seems well and good until I consider that I could have slept through most classes and still made a 4.0 at a high school with a good academic reputation.
Nevertheless, students at schools offering few advanced classes cannot average much above a 4.0, so we can’t base admissions entirely on high school GPA. Why then, don’t applications require rather than make optional, a personal statement or extracurricular activities? The personal statement would allow the admissions office to reject people incapable of expressing themselves in writing, and extracurriculars give evidence of work ethic or lack thereof.
However, the blame doesn’t lie solely with admissions. Too few majors put underclassmen through weed-out courses, which would send lazy students home. My major, biological sciences, certainly doesn’t. Coddling students causes them to expect to be coddled. It seems cruel to weed people out, but it’s better for a freshman to figure out he doesn’t have what it takes than for a senior to figure that out when he can’t get into graduate school or the workforce. The senior has wasted four years and a lot of tuition.
I realize that saying classes should be harder and criticizing a big chunk of the student body makes me about as popular as Duke Football. Perhaps I do sound like an academic elitist, but students who slack off and end up with B’s and C’s in easy majors will not be able to get jobs when they graduate. They would be better served in community college, which would be cheaper, easier and make them more employable.
Furthermore, they wouldn’t increase our class sizes or dilute the quality of State’s education and reputation. The only thing they’d miss would be “the college experience,” which often consists of getting drunk, going to sporting events and reading excellent articles in the Technician. That’s not worth the price of tuition.
Biological and political science majors who become bank tellers or insurance salespeople waste taxpayer money. They also waste much of their own time and money on dreams they aren’t willing to pursue dedicatedly. These students, this college and the whole state would benefit if such students were educated at community colleges instead.
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