If college didn't improve your critical thinking skills, what did you do?

My experience in college was that a lot of students were just learning to regurgitate the information, kinda like most kids do in high school. To add to this, academic subjects are on the decline, and more and more students are pursuing degrees in computer sciences and business, which don’t particularly require you to learn how to question the world.

Personally, I did vastly improve my critical reading skills while in college…but not because of anything I was studying for school. Maybe some of my coursework helped, but I had to pursue my interest in logic and critical thinking outside of the classroom.

I’d have to say the friends I had in college pushed me to think more critically. It was in a sense the basic idea of “university” – people of different backgrounds and philosophies exposed to each other’s ideas.

Not much of a party school…

I managed to get through 4 years of college without learning how to think. I had a double major in two lab oriented specialties. I had to demonstrate what I learned, but neither required decision making particularly. Creativity, yes; but not evaluation and judgment. I learned to think in my 20’s hanging around students at M.I.T. who did think. It was fun. Note: I was a very late bloomer. It worked out okay.

I learned to drink vast amounts of alcohol. A+. :)

You take notes, read the material, figure out what the professor wants to hear, and then figure out how to give it to them. A meritocracy is a double-edged sword
The rest of the time, you work so you can pay for your double-edged sword.

Anybody with the money or the willingness to spend a few years deep in debt can go to college, but not everybody can or does learn.

Our educational system is geared towards retention and regurgitation of information and making us better employees, but is actually set up to either ignore or punish those that do ask too many questions or try to understand the information we are given and turn it into actual data. They want obedience, and they want high enough scores on standardized tests and/or high enough enrollment to keep the money flowing in, but that is often about it.

The thing is though, despite the fact that college is no longer about teaching and learning, many jobs require a degree. In fact, they often will pass over a person with years of actual experience but no degree in favor of a snot-nosed brat with rich parents and a BS that the ink still hasn’t dried on.

What I did to improve my critical thinking is to make a conscious decision to be a smartass. My brain is wired a little wonky anyways (AS) so things that most other people don’t have to think about like linking a certain facial expression with a certain emotion actually requires me to think critically anyways. I could have done what many Aspies and Autistic people do and become a shut-in, but I chose to try to be out in the world instead.

Of course, there is no chance of me being normal, so I didn’t try. I embraced my lateral thinking and the ability to ask the questions that others feel are too tactless to ask; the type of questions that I need to know the answers to in order to understand the world well enough to be a functional member of society with a job and all. When I saw stupidity, I attempted to clear up my own confusion, and in doing so forced myself to try and see things from different points of view.. and in the process making people justify their irrational behavior, attempt to correct them, and generally fitting the dictionary definition of “smartass”.

Basic survival pretty much forced me to improve my ability to judge motivations, and to try to reverse-engineer the logic behind the decisions and actions of others. That alone improved my critical thinking skills greatly. Being exposed to different schools of thought and weighing them aganst each other also served that purpose.

As for what others do to improve their critical thinking skills, I have to say that the answer appears to be “not much”. Many Americans take whatever sound-bites their talking heads of choice put out and accept it as gospel without even a cursory fact-checking.

College kids are getting their diplomas by merely paying their tuition, and many are tehre either because they don’t want to work just yet and/or they want their resume to look better when they apply for a cushy, high-paying job.

Can I answer from the perspective of an instructor?

Sometimes I wonder if critical thinking skills can be taught. I actively try to get my students to think for themselves by giving them pieces of information and asking them to find relationships between them. Yet, I so often am asked, “but what am I supposed to write here?” Well, figure it out!

As far as I can tell, teaching involves three components:

(1) Providing information (lectures or reading)
(2) Constructing questions that simultaneously test understanding and nudge thinking in a specific direction
(3) Giving feedback on answers to those questions

I don’t think teachers can insert critical thinking in (1), the delivery of information. So it’s up to us to construct questions that are clear and coherent enough for students to understand them, have enough information that students can get to the answer, yet don’t have so much information the answer is given away. This is hard. Very hard. It is much easier to construct questions and grade answers when the material is rote—either the student has repeated what they were asked to repeat, or s/he hasn’t.

And I do think this rote learning is a crucial component. Without the right vocabulary and techniques, you are not capable of more analytical, synthetic thinking.

I think the best solution is to teach critical thinking incrementally: ask a question, give feedback, wait for student to process. Ask a slightly more complex question, give feedback, wait. And so on until you’ve led the student through a really intricate thought process, all the way letting him/her make the connections.

This is much easier to do one on one. Even in my class of 24, I generally do not see those lightbulb moments unless I’m talking to students in groups of 1–2.

And does that even count as critical thinking? Leading them to some conclusion that I’ve already come to? I don’t know.

So, I guess my answer is: college should start with some amount of memorization and rote learning. And then critical thinking is an interplay between a dedicated, clever teacher and a motivated student. I’m guessing too often it falls off somewhere between step 1 and step 2. Or something.

This probably depends a lot upon what school one attends, what courses one enrolls in, and how one approaches those courses.

Started going with my gut instead.

stupid brain . . .

@nikipedia I agree that critical thinking cannot really be taught, at least not the same way that, say. algebra can. I also agree that critical thinking is an interplay between a clever teacher (as opposed to one that is just collecting a paycheck) and a motivated student, which seems increasingly rare these days.

However, I disagree that college should start with rote learning… unless you are saying that K-12 is a total, complete, utter waste of time. As far as I am concerned, people should have the rote stuff down by the time they graduate high school, and they shouldn’t need more of a refresher than a week or so recap in the first semester of their Freshman year.

@jerv: There are lots of different levels of rote. Take, for instance, my field of neuroscience—in college it was still important for me to memorize things like the parts of the brain and their functions, which are critical to having clever analytical thoughts about the things they do, but probably won’t be taught in most high schools.

I went to college in my late twenties and found most of the students who went right out of high school just wanted the piece of paper at the end. They were not interested in actually learning much except what interested them at the time. There were some who were really interested in learning, but they were rare.

Now, to the critical thinking. It seems to me the education system is geared more to teaching for the test now in K-12. This does not really lead to critical thinking. It is more difficult to teach critical thinking to people once they are in college if they have not had to use it in the previous 12 years of education. I was taught critical thinking by my parents mostly and have been teaching my children the same.

My college experience, and my daughters’, were primarily geared around writing and analysis. Most of the classes I took had blue book exams. My daughter says most of the students in her classes, if given the choice, would take multiple choice tests, because writing is difficult.

I don’t think in high school enough emphasis is placed on comparisons and contrasts in literature and social studies. The application of logic into these subjects naturally extends critical thinking into other subjects as well. Likewise, look at how students struggle with word problems. That is the practical application of mathematics into daily life, and it’s not the primary emphasis of basic math classes. Math is easier to do if you understand what you can do with it.

@nikipedia Ah, I see. I interpreted “rote” a bit differently. It does make sense for the building blocks of subjects not covered in K-12, like neurology.

@BarnacleBill Sad but true.

Now, I don’t know why this popped into my mind, but I feel I need to share it since it seems relevant. I mean, who needs to learn anything in college?

I never even went to college, but I believe I have critical thinking skills. It seems to me that this is something you learn a little at a time, over a period of time, and should already be (largely) in place by the time you’re in college.

I don’t think the problem with college is its emphasis on rote learning. Many classes, especially in the discipline I teach, deal entirely with critical thinking skills (I teach English at the college level; my classes are all about learning how to use language on your own).

I think the problem is that all students seem to be aware that if they don’t like their grades, due to the fact that they’ve failed to exhibit any sign of critical thought, they can make more trouble for the instructor than will be worth the instructor’s while. The result of this very regrettable state of affairs is that many college level instructors simply give out grades their students didn’t earn rather than take the flak from students who know the squeaky wheel is very likely to get the grade.

Now, I’m not one of these understandably cowed instructors; and I’ve put up with harassment in the extreme from students. I even learned that at the community college where I’ve taught for the last couple of years, the students are ENCOURAGED to harass their instructors, to PUNISH their instructors, in effect, for flunking people who deserve to flunk and thus costing the said community college much business. These students knew before they came to my class that they could really cause me lengthy meetings with my supervisors merely for grading them fairly. As a result, they came without any intention of working for the grades they wanted—they believed they should be given to them.

Not all colleges and universities have this issue to such an extreme degree, but nearly all of them have it to some degree. Many evaluators of the educational system point out that until we do away with the end of the semester course evaluations, we will continue to have an educational system that’s geared toward excusing student incompetence because instructors just do not want to risk losing their tenure or tenure track positions or even losing their jobs because students who don’t like their grades bashed them on the course evaluations.

The problems of our higher educational system aren’t entirely due to these above issues, but a lot of them are. We need to protect our college level instructors from the harassment they’re exposed to every day and expect students to put out some effort if they want to graduate.

@Electra Encouraged by who? Harass how?
Don’t you think students opinions of a teacher should count for something? Isn’t that a rather large part of evaluating if a teacher is good at their job?

@papayalily Most students only consider a teacher good if they get a good grade; teachers that give bad work a poor grade are considered bad.

@jerv Perhaps. But in my own experience, the students I’ve talked to base it off of how well the professor lectures, if the teacher created a curriculum that was useful, if the teacher was receptive to being asked for help, if the teacher made the subject fun, if the teacher spent lots of time going on about their own political and/or religious leanings, if the teacher gave them a chance to adequately show what they’d learned, etc. At least 90% of the ratings on RateMyProfessors – which shouldn’t really be that far off from evaluations – are a far cry from “hard grader”.

Sorry this isn’t an answer to your question, but does anyone know a good way to test critical thinking skills? What would be a good example of where critical thinking is employed?

@papayalily That depends on why the student is there. Personally, those are the criteria I use to evaluate an instructor. Maybe I am just a little ignorant based on the schools and students I have seen; experience tends to skew perception.

@ilana This might be a place to start: http://www.insightassessment.com/SampleTest1.html

Thank you for the link @6rant6 it’s what I’m looking for, I just wish it had the answers!

@MyNewtBoobs: The students I mentioned were encouraged by the lower level administration and even the higher level administration to harass their instructors to get what they wanted; what I observed about the way both levels of the administration dealt with troubled students was frightening: students who didn’t like their initial grades in a course were told that they should “keep asking the instructor about the grade; maybe she’ll change her mind”—in other words, if you make enough of a scene and nag long enough, the instructor won’t think it’s worth it and give you what you want and what you didn’t earn.

As for the student evals: there are other ways of evaluating a teacher’s performance in class; I fully advocate more frequent peer evaluations among teachers and more frequent administrative visits (teachers are frequently observed by those who specialize in classroom observation and give the teacher suggestions about dealing with students and judge the quality of teacher-student interaction).

As someone who’s gone to school for ten years for a Ph.D. and two MAs, I feel I deserve to be evaluated by an intelligent, competent, experienced person who doesn’t hate me for giving her a grade that she most certainly earned—that is, I don’t think really qualified people should be evaluated by intellectually incompetent illiterates that are bent on irrational vengeance; I think they should be evaluated by other qualified people who don’t have a personal beef with them. My impressions are also held by key members of national educational committees and published in multiple articles in academic journals. :)

@MyNewBoobs: Students are actually pretty sophisticated in the way in which they try to get back at their instructor; they know that if they SAY that they don’t like their grades, their complaint isn’t going to hurt the instructor. They know the way to hurt their instructor, or to at least do their best to do so, is to attack points that at least sound like valid criticism. And that is what you often see on those “rate my teacher” sites AND on some student evaluations (not even mine, actually—I’ve heard horror stories from colleagues), and I’ve read the papers explaining why the student course evaluation system should be done away with.

Also, it doesn’t make sense—if evaluations are really supposed to evaluate an instructor, why would undereducated, often illiterate students be great judges as to course evaluation? How is someone who takes a course in, say, remedial reading, a wonderful judge on how to organize a lecture? The assumptions at the base of the system are totally irrational. Now, there ARE talented, smart, professional evaluators who DO know how to organize a lecture—let them spend more than one day sitting in professors’ classes examining professors’ lecture styles. But the students aren’t in any position to do anything but give brownie points if they like their grades or use the language they know is the most effective attack strategy if they don’t like their grades. But it is really all about the grades—and I’ve taught for ten years at the college level. I’ve gotten promotions because of professional evaluations and I’ve had to talk to deans because illiterate people who were angry at me said my “lectares sucked”[sic]. This actually only happened once, but I resent having to talk to a dean about an illiterate person’s attempt at vengeance—that IS what it was; this person was not intellectually competent to judge my lecture or anyone else’s.

@Electra If you have such a intensely low opinion of students, if you despise them so much and have so little disregard for their side of the story, why are you still teaching?

@MyNewBoobs: I’ve been told by professional evaluators and by students that I’m great at what I do; I’ve also done it for ten years. I’ve actually gotten awards for my teaching—because there are some students who do appreciate good instruction and because I’ve gotten consistently good peer and administrative evaluations.

I’m just sick of feeling pressured to grade WAY easier than I should because I don’t want to deal with garbage from manipulators of whom I do have a justifiably low opinion. I feel morally compromised by the system and by the way these students manipulate the system. I would like this to stop. I and other excellent teachers deserve for it to stop. The students who are getting degrees they don’t deserve through this sort of manipulation are bringing down the value of degrees in our educational system—the students who EARN their degrees need this to stop. It’s unfair to everyone who works for a living as opposed to complaining for a living, in effect.

@Electra You feel justified. And I’m sure many students feel they are justified – just because they complain doesn’t mean they’re slackers or illiterate (which really sounds like you hate them for it instead of want to teach them to rise above it) or manipulative villain. Some just had a really bad experience with you – statistically, it’s improbable that some haven’t, and not just because you gave them a poor grade.

@MyNewtBoobs: It sounds like you’re projecting because you can’t possibly know what you’re talking about.

The complaints I’ve gotten have been wholly from students in remedial courses—these courses involve material that these students literally failed to learn in elementary school. These people ARE, by any definition, functionally illiterate and many of them ARE slackers (that is, they haven’t made the effort to learn how to read—the truly disabled people I’ve dealt with were almost to a person touchingly willing to do their best to learn).

Attempting to criminalize me (e.g. I “hate them for it”? LOL!) just shows you don’t have a point and you dislike the fact that some professors probably graded you fairly and you didn’t like it. Hence, I’m the bad guy in your small group of mental objects. Oh well, I’ll just have to live with that. I’m sorry to tell you it won’t make me lose any sleep! :D

@Electra Holy… See, this is why I think you hate them and don’t try to see their side. I’m a A/B student. I’ve given horrible reviews to teachers who gave me an A not because I felt they make me work too hard for it but because I felt they were incompetent at their job. Not all teachers are good teachers, and many at universities are hired for their ability to get research money, not effectively teach. You can’t have an education crisis in which people are constantly saying that there are too many bad teachers, but then have every teacher be teacher of the year. Honestly, I’m really trying not to vilify you, but when you explode on these horrible students so irrationally, it’s hard for me to believe that they’re the psychotic ones.. I know I’d be scared shitless to ask you for help.

@MyNewtBoobs You really should try to see @Electra‘s side. Granted, a bit too much vitriol is coming out, but can you look me in the eye and tell me that you wouldn’t be bitter and resentful after a few years of mistreatment?
Just because you are a good, well-behaved student doesn’t mean that your peers are.

@jerv I do see a teacher’s side after years of mistreatment. But it’s seems like at this point, it’s a vicious cycle where the abused has become the abuser. And it’s a lot easier to sympathize with someone when they seem like they’re trying to find a good, balanced, sane position and not just spew vitriol at anyone who reminds them of their bad experience. And I know many of my peers aren’t good students – but I also don’t think that good students are really that hard to find.

Every professor I talk to here at the university say the same thing that @Electra says. Good student evaluations are highly correlated with good grades, and vice versa. Many professors give in because they don’t want any crap and they want to keep their jobs.

In the old days, professors didn’t have to care about student evaluations. They had tenure and couldn’t be fired. Nowadays, most of the teaching is done by adjunct professors and graduate students, and their job security depends on good student evaluations. If you can guarantee your job security by being easy and giving good grades, who wouldn’t do it?

Clearly the university doesn’t care about learning. They care more about income. And who can blame them, what with all the budget cuts these days? It’s even worse at community colleges, where the money is even tighter, and the students are even stupider.

@MyNewtBoobs You call it a vicious cycle, I call it a fact of modern life. I am sure that @electra is actually trying to find that solution, but we all need to vent sometimes as it’s frustrating to beat your head against the wall.

@jerv And I get that – but I am not a student of hers, so I’m not the one to be venting at.

@wundayatta I’m not saying I don’t see the issue, I’m saying that as much of a problem as it is, if you take the student’s evaluation out of it, you’re going to have other problems. Plus, how do these professors know all of this – aren’t the evals anonymous?

@MyNewtBoobs I am not saying it’s right, but I myself occasionally vent on whoever is nearby whether they deserve it or not, and I am far from the only person who does so. When I do it, my wife usually hits me with a rolled-up newspaper, so maybe you should try that :D

@jerv I don’t find “we all do it” to be a good excuse for poor behavior.

@MyNewtBoobs What part of, “I am not saying it’s right” was not clear?

@jerv I understood. I didn’t agree. And I can’t hit @Electra with a newspaper.

@MyNewtBoobs The evaluations can not be attached to a student, but the professor still gets the summarized results. That’s all you need to make a correlation between grades and evaluations.

@wundayatta Correlation doesn’t equal causation. There’s a huge difference between feeling that a teacher is bad because they expected an unreasonable amount out of a 101 class, and feeling like a teacher is bad because they gave you, personally, a bad grade for being a different religion (or whatever), which seems to be what some people are accusing students of doing.

@MyNewtBoobs I think your experience differs from that of many here. While you are correct on many things, you seem to be overlooking that there are a lot of lazy, selfish, petty douchebags in the world, and it seems that those with rich parents have a sense of entitlement and expect good grades just for paying their tuition, Maybe not as often as one would think from the ventings of teachers, but more often than you think.
Of course, there are plenty of those types of people outside of the college classroom, but they are usually less demanding of people who pay them than on people they pay.

@jerv Or, we could not label people as lazy, selfish, petty douchebags, but rather as complex characters who sometimes act in lazy, selfish, petty, and/or douchebaggy ways. But to simply say that x% of the population is just shit, and the rest are good seems dualistic and overly simplistic.
I’m sure that things are different at colleges where the vast majority of students have their parents paying for their tuition. However, as tuition prices rise, more and more students have to take out loans and are going into debt in order to get an education – it seems like it out be only the students at Ivy League schools, and not the standard public state schools where this stereotypical entitled behavior goes on. Even then you have a good number of students paying their own way, since the Ivy League likes to look “diverse”.
And if the world is filled with lazy, selfish, petty douchebags, then they can’t all just be students, but teachers as well.

@MyNewtBoobs I’m all ears. Let me hear your explanation for the correlation between grades and reviews?

MYNEWBOBS: @Electra Holy… See, this is why I think you hate them and don’t try to see their side.

Electra: There’s no basis in any of my posts for your statement; trying to demonize me (I “hate” them?) shows you have a personal bias.

MYnewboosb: I’m a A/B student. I’ve given horrible reviews to teachers who gave me an A not because I felt they make me work too hard for it but because I felt they were incompetent at their job.

Electra: Actually, a lot of students who are flunking state on their course reviews that they are getting an ‘A’ to make their bashing of the teacher sound more valid. Your statement as to your grades, coming from someone who tried to demonize me for saying some students are slackers who get away with grades they don’t deserve, makes you sound like one of them.

I’ll tell you an amusing story—I once got a course evaluation from a student who wrote that I was horrible, etc etc, and who stated on the evaluation that she was getting an ‘A’ for the course. This was impossible because I gave no ‘A’s for that particular course. ;)

mynewboobs: Not all teachers are good teachers, and many at universities are hired for their ability to get research money, not effectively teach. You can’t have an education crisis in which people are constantly saying that there are too many bad teachers, but then have every teacher be teacher of the year. Honestly, I’m really trying not to vilify you, but when you explode on these horrible students so irrationally, it’s hard for me to believe that they’re the psychotic ones.. I know I’d be scared shitless to ask you for help.

Electra: Nothing in my posts is irrational—I’ve cited NEA articles concerning the fact that the university course evaluation system puts pressure on teachers to give grades they don’t deserve—but everything in yours is. You “know” people who refuse to do work in my classes would be “scared to ask me for help” and this excuses them from all blame for their grades? My professional observers have said that I have a naturally gracious voice and am particularly good at inviting student discussions—and they actually had the benefit of meeting me and seeing my class, as opposed to someone who encountered a statement you didn’t like from an anonymous person on line and decided to demonize me as a representative teacher who has wronged you for ahem giving you what you deserved. Gosh, you don’t sound like an A/B student to me—those are not bitter and so ready to vilify anonymous representative teachers. But, like I said—it’s your problem, not mine—and I’m glad of that. :)

Boobs: @jerv I do see a teacher’s side after years of mistreatment. But it’s seems like at this point, it’s a vicious cycle where the abused has become the abuser. And it’s a lot easier to sympathize with someone when they seem like they’re trying to find a good, balanced, sane position and not just spew vitriol at anyone who reminds them of their bad experience. And I know many of my peers aren’t good students – but I also don’t think that good students are really that hard to find.

Electra: Vitriol? YOU accused ME of being psychotic and scary in so many words. It sounds like I’ve reminded you of the fact that you’ve had bad experiences in college that were entirely your responsibility, so you want to point fingers at someone on the Internet. Hilarious.

Booobs: @jerv I do see a teacher’s side after years of mistreatment. But it’s seems like at this point, it’s a vicious cycle where the abused has become the abuser. And it’s a lot easier to sympathize with someone when they seem like they’re trying to find a good, balanced, sane position and not just spew vitriol at anyone who reminds them of their bad experience. And I know many of my peers aren’t good students – but I also don’t think that good students are really that hard to find.

Electra: And now you infer my perspective isn’t “balanced and sane.” No where in anything I said states that good students are hard to find—I’ve gotten teaching awards from good students’ evaluations. Your attacks show a lot of vitriol—typical for people who flunked out of college, actually. I’ve seen a few of those.

@wundayatta: Thank you. I can show you articles from the NEA that support my comments—and which actually contain a lot more vitriol than my comments here do.

It’s not that I’ve been mistreated—I had two semesters at a low ranked community college that admitted everyone with utter disregard for proficiency tests; I had five years at a top ranking research institution, during which I received no negative student evals and no complaints—and a lot of praise.

What I am is disgusted with what the educational system has become on its basic levels—community colleges graduate a huge number of people who go on to do things like become nurses. Would YOU want a nurse sticking you with a needle if she deserved to flunk half her courses but was pushed through via complaints and whining?

I am disgusted with the risk people are taking with poorly educated people who don’t deserve their degrees and the denigrated quality of the American educational system—every time a student is graduated who hasn’t earned her degree, our country suffers in many ways. As a worker in the educational system, I don’t want to see it disintegrate because of name calling directed at people who merely tell the truth about what’s going on—as you’ve seen on this board alone, I’ve been called a psycho in so many words and imbalanced and insane directly MERELY for stating what almost any professor would say if asked by someone who wouldn’t take their answers back to people who are worried about PR and professors speaking the truth and spilling the beans as it were.

MyNewBoobs: Correlation doesn’t equal causation. There’s a huge difference between feeling that a teacher is bad because they expected an unreasonable amount out of a 101 class, and feeling like a teacher is bad because they gave you, personally, a bad grade for being a different religion (or whatever), which seems to be what some people are accusing students of doing.

Electra: HA! Now we have it folks—this person thinks a negative course evaluation is warranted if “a teacher expects an unreasonable amount out of a 101 class.” So many drop outs have complained that I expected “too much work” when all I wanted them to do was be able to construct a literate thesis statement and complete two essays. I allowed them to revise their essays as many times as they wanted to get the grade they wanted to earn. And that IS the most common complaint of drop outs and complainers—they couldn’t pass the course because of “too much work.”

Call me vitriolic if you want, but I have a very low opinion of slackers and whiners who think any work at all is “too much work” or “unreasonable expectations.” If people won’t bother to do work, they don’t deserve degrees. That’s really the bottom line—I am afraid that people have been getting degrees they didn’t earn because they complain that demonstrating literate writing abilities constitutes “unreasonable expectations.” I’ve seen more than one student be given a change of grade and a pass because of this totally irrational whining—and absolutely no demonstration of work above the ‘F’ level; these students had their grades changed to ‘D’s (which is passing, you get credit, you can eventually graduate if you browbeat someone else into giving you a ‘B’ to even it out to a ‘C’ average) for no reason but that they felt they couldn’t do college level work.

The irrational thing going on here is that people feel that “college is too hard for me” is a valid excuse that merits a grade change—and that this has been TREATED as a valid excuse that merits a grade change by administrators who want that federal loan money per student head to keep coming in. It’s absolutely shameful.

@mynewboobs: @jerv Or, we could not label people as lazy, selfish, petty douchebags, but rather as complex characters who sometimes act in lazy, selfish, petty, and/or douchebaggy ways. But to simply say that x% of the population is just shit, and the rest are good seems dualistic and overly simplistic.

Electra: The thing with teachers is that we grade. It is up to the psych department of the student clinic to decide what is the matter with these complex people who cannot manage to pass their courses. But the bottom line is that no student gets graded on what sort of complex person he believes that he is—he gets graded on his work.

Pretending you deserve a certain grade because “you’re a complex person who only acts like a douchebag in class” and whine until you get it from a greedy and so overindulgent system is worse than simplistic—it’s infantile behavior that shouldn’t be rewarded by giving the said student what she wants.

mynewboobs: I’m sure that things are different at colleges where the vast majority of students have their parents paying for their tuition. However, as tuition prices rise, more and more students have to take out loans and are going into debt in order to get an education – it seems like it out be only the students at Ivy League schools, and not the standard public state schools where this stereotypical entitled behavior goes on.

Electra: Actually, my years and years of good teaching experiences come from teaching at a university that has many academic programs that rank with Ivy League colleges. This university SCREENS its students before they’re admitted—these schools don’t just take anyone. THe problem is with small colleges with low rankings and low expectations who only want the business from as many students as they can get enrolled—and federal loan and grant money is still money. The better ranking institutions are funded so that they don’t rely so much on student fees—and that’s why the problems that happen in the low ranking community colleges don’t appear to nearly such a degree in the institutions with a much higher academic ranking.

MyNewBoobs: And if the world is filled with lazy, selfish, petty douchebags, then they can’t all just be students, but teachers as well.

Electra: What’s lazy is to just give students grades because they tell you they’re good people who are only lazy douchebags in academic settings—that way you don’t have to hear the lazy, worthless people whine and complain and the said people usually give you quid pro quo: the people I mention give EXCELLENT ratings to those lazy, mediocre, incompetent teachers who only want a job and have no professional honor that would stop them from merrily handing out grades to the undeserving.

But hey, you wouldn’t call one of these lazy, characterless professors a douchebag, psychotic, scary, whatever, because such a professor would be all too happy to give you the grade you want and such a professor wouldn’t expect you to do any work at all to pass the class. :)

Unrelated to the recent posts, let me just add another brief anecdote about critical thinking skills. This week in the lab course I teach, students had to use a computer simulation of a rat to run experiments and then answer questions about what they observed.

One of the questions asked, “based on the data you collected, what can you conclude the function of this particular brain structure is?”

You know how my students answered it? They googled the name of the brain structure. They didn’t think about what the data might mean and try to draw a conclusion. They tried to find someone who would just hand them the answer.

After I realized what was going on, I pointed out to them that the brain structure in question isn’t real. It’s part of the computer simulation. So, google wasn’t much help after all.

@Electra My name is MyNewtBoobs. With a T. Also, you can simply type @ and the users name in order to reply to them, you don’t need to copy what they said.