academic standards

Reflections on the Loss of Rigor in College Classes

I graduated from a small state teacher’s college in 1963, majoring in physical sciences and math. While I was not privy to overall grade distributions there, I know that Cs, Ds, and failure were not uncommon. This was simply a fact of life and was understood by all. I later became interested in spatial science, […]

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Humanities Must Embrace Rigorous Standards

Much has been said about the decline of humanities, but one important aspect receives less attention: the humanities are easy and becoming easier. Certainly, this was the popular impression among students when I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. The softer the subject, the easier it was. My friends’ schedules, usually posted on […]

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Better Campus Incentives: Reward the Good, Punish the Bad

Bad pronouncements from fellow economists have historically caused lots of mischief, but there is something important on which most of them agree: people respond to positive incentives—money, material goods, power, even sexual attractions—and try to avoid negative incentives—losing large sums of money, freedom through imprisonment, etc. I have argued for decades that those incentive systems, […]

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Crybabies in the Classroom

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The American Postliberal on March 22, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. If you have ever been in a classroom where some sort of deadline is approaching, chances are that you have witnessed what I like to call a “half-hearted mini rebellion.” This is a situation in […]

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Restoring the Academic Gold Standard

Outside of the sciences and engineering, today’s colleges and universities are producing nonsense on an industrial scale while, conversely, little emerges that might help America’s current tribulations. No sane person expects university professors to solve problems of crime, housing, education, and the like unless they have an appetite for jargon-laden ideological claptrap. This outpouring of […]

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How Low Can Higher Education Go?

A new book from author John Ellis examines the real reasons why most college graduates are woefully undereducated when they leave college after four or more years. Below is an eye-opening excerpt from The Breakdown of Higher Education: How it Happened, The Damage It Does, and What Can be Done. Everyone knows that complaints about […]

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More Diversity, Lower Standards

The English departments of Cornell and Harvard have dropped the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) requirement for graduate applicants—a noteworthy move that amounts to a setback for the quality of education and a win for diversity and lower standards. Insidehighered.com reports the Cornell development and includes a link to a candid statement from the English department […]

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Some Faculty Say Diversity Lowers Academic Quality

Harvey Mudd College has been roiled by a self-study, informally titled the Wabash report, that referred to some anonymous faculty declaring that efforts to promote diversity in the student body had lowered the quality of the school.  At first, the school tried to block publication or censor parts of the report, completed in 2015, but […]

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Student Ratings Bait Profs Into Lowering Standards

In the fall of 1980,  towards the end of my first semester of college teaching, I received a memo saying that on the last day of class I was to hand out the course evaluation forms for students to complete and return. A few weeks later, the packet of forms they had filled out was […]

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