Todd 1 Lemuel Todd Dr.

Mason English 1101 8 June 2013 Problems Facing Undergraduate Education In his article A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education Thomas Benton states that todays undergraduate programs are in a bad state. I agree with Bentons assertion that undergraduate education faces major issues. He brings up several valuable points such as lack of student preparation, grade inflation, student retention, student evaluations of teachers, enrollment minimums, lack of uniform expectations, contingent teaching, time constraints, curricular chaos, and demoralized faculty members as factors that are considerable problems with education. Out of these points it seems that the lack of student preparation, lack of a universal standard, and enrollment minimums to be at the forefront of the issues that need to be addressed. While Benton does introduce very solid facts and arguments that I agree with; I recognize that not every school has these problems and that the severity of the problem varies from school to school. Even though Benton brings up specific problems in a manner that makes them seem solvable by blanket solutions it is undeniable that there are deeper sources to these issues that require complex and specific solutions in order to solve. Students arriving to college unprepared is not necessarily by their own error. There is evidence that grade inflation, another of the issues that Benton mentioned, may have a hand in the situation as well. According to research by act.org, high school teachers they have been inflating grades even more in recent years, and students may arrive to college with a false image of their own academic prowess. As the students gain a false sense of their own skills and build their entire self-esteem around their bloated view of themselves they become less prepared to deal with the reality of the situation. By the time most students reach college they arrive to a rude awakening. No longer does their trivial effort earn them an A. For many the blow is

Todd 2 devastating and they refuse to learn under any of the conditions because they dont get that easy A any more. These students then flock to a more understanding professor. Because this harms the schools entire infrastructure they are forced to conform to this new grading system, which is part of another problem in these cyclical issues. This in turn can cause problems in the job markets because getting a bachelors degree is about the same as graduating high school. This is slowly turning graduate programs into the new undergrad school and instead of going to graduate school you know have to show that your masters or doctorate actually means something. With their inflated grades in tow, students arrive to college life with no idea what to expect; there is no universal standard when it comes to undergraduate education, just as there is no national standard for any education from Kindergarten through high school graduation. Although the curriculum for any school is available to anyone who wishes to know, Robert Schoenberg states that many faculty members teach without clear strategies pedagogy or knowledge of what institutional or departmental goals their courses should address. Even if the instructional organization is set up strong as more professors retire out of the system and the young professors take over you get a department filled up with professors that havent had to learn the skills necessary to properly run their jobs. This feeds into a spiral of new professors being ill equipped and future generations being taught useless skills. However this problem poses a more complex situation than it appears on the surface; it would be extremely difficult to isolate a single solution that could be applied on a national level. That being said, I do believe that it is necessary to have a national standard that is adhered to. Finally, the previous two issues are part of a vicious cycle that also includes minimum enrollment. While a minimum enrollment amount is not necessarily an issue by itself, it stokes the fire of grade inflation thanks to the need for student retention and those students subsequent evaluations of their professors. The evaluations, whether official or found on internet sites such as ratemyprofessors.com, can directly affect the number of students that

Todd 3 register for any professors class. If a professor is judged as tough then he or she may see a decline in student registration for any class he or she teaches; this is one of the causes of grade inflation - if the class is considered an easy A then students tend to try to get into that class. The minimum enrollment cut-off indirectly causes the professors to inflate students grades for the sake of student retention. In conclusion the situation that undergraduate education finds itself in is very complex; as Benton states I have presented the issues affecting undergraduate learning as a list, but it makes more sense to think of them as an overlapping Venn Diagram of overlapping and mutually reinforcing circles. The problems with undergraduate education are not only massive, they are also difficult to solve. Even though the problems are a nationwide issue, it is impossible to remedy in one go.