Gradatorium: This is a B

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The topic of this discussion is the college preparation of high school students. I feel that High schools today are attempting to better prepare students for college than they were 10-20 years ago. The math classes are more challenging and students are required to do more writing in their English classes. Young people need to learn discipline, especially when it comes to doing school work, so that they can demonstrate this discipline when they go on to further their education in college. Schools should hire more teachers, who are dedicated to the nurturing of students, encouraging them to work hard and to assist them when they need additional help in their courses. Schools and parents have to work together to make sure that the students are well informed on what courses they need to have in order to get into college. Parents need to communicate with the guidance counselors to make sure the counselors are meeting with their children and keeping them up to date on their individual progress; answering questions students may have about the SAT's; what colleges to apply to; informing them about financial aid, and eligibility for scholarships and grants . Lucy Cheser Jacobs, author of "How College Freshmen View Their High School Preparation" and James Rosenbaum, author of "Unrealistic Plans & Misdirected Efforts: Are Community Colleges Getting the Right Message to High School Students?" agree that there is a need for high schools to better prepare students entering colleges. J. Michael Pitts, William G. White and Andolyn B. Harrison, authors of "Student Academic Underpreparedness: Effects on Faculty", discuss the outcome of students who aren't able to handle the college curriculum and the strain it puts on the professors who have to teach them. We will also look into the programs that the New Jersey State College Governing Board Association, Inc. has produced in "Turning Challenges Into Opportunities For Minority Students At New Jersey State Colleges" which is geared to attract and motivate more qualified blacks and Hispanics into going to college and remaining there until graduation and also to aspire them to further their education towards the masters and doctoral levels. And finally "Preparing for College - Beyond the Getting In Part" by Jean Sunde Peterson, discusses not only the academic concerns of gifted students, but also the social and emotional challenges they are faced with while attending college.

In 1981 and 1983 Lucy Cheser Jacobs, a journalist, conducted studies of academic preparation of university freshmen and found that a majority of the professors at the university were not satisfied with the students' basic verbal and math skills and felt that they had shown a continuing decline (Jacobs 1981). Jacobs also asked the professors what basic academic skills and competencies they considered essential for students to have when entering college. "The faculty members identified a number of specific skills in English, reading, mathematics, reasoning, speaking/listening and studying" that they expect entering freshmen to have when they come to the university" (Jacobs 1). Because there was not much data on how students themselves felt about their preparation for college, Jacobs decided to conduct a survey of 530 freshmen at a large Midwestern University in the Spring of 1984. "In College Freshmen View Their High School Preparation", the freshmen agreed "that college work is a great deal more challenging than high school, and almost half of the students felt that most of their high school classes were not challenging" (Jacobs 7). I agree with this totally, especially in high school English. In my English class we did a lot of reading and not enough writing, and the writing that we did was basically answering questions on what we read. The students who were surveyed said, "they learned how to write papers in English, but they wished that they had been required to more writing in all their high school classes" (Jacobs 7). According to the survey, a number of students said they would learn all they could rather than just try to get good grades. They wished they had acquired better study habits, and really learned the material instead of just doing the homework and ending it there. Students who participated in this survey also said they wished they would have paid attention and taken high school seriously. The students also said they would make sure their guidance counselor was helping them to choose the right classes needed for college. This is a very important process in the student's high school years; to keep in contact with their counselor. Rosenbaum, a Professor at Northwestern University, finds that there is a lack of communication between guidance counselors, colleges and students and is the cause of the many problems students face when entering community college. He says that,"community colleges are being criticized for "cooling out" students plans when they enter college" (Rosenbaum 1). But the problem actually arises in high school where students fail to properly prepare for college. Students believe that they can attain a degree even if they do poorly in high school, and so this "cooling out is merely the process for cleaning up afterwards in a way that reconciles the victim to the situation and causes less trouble" (Rosenbaum 3). A lot of students feel that community college is an easier way of attaining a degree. Not only is it less expensive than a four year college, but it also serves as an avenue for many students to take because they didn't do well in high school. I think when students realize their inability to go to a four year college for whatever reason, they tend not to work as hard as they could in high school, and so they settle for community college. Rosenbaum is saying that "colleges, especially community colleges are failing to communicate information about the preparation that high school students must get to have a strong chance of finishing a degree" (Rosenbaum 3). For some students attaining an associates degree is their main goal, but for a majority of students, a Bachelor's or beyond is what they want to achieve. Rosenbaum goes on to suggest that along with community colleges, high school counselors and student themselves are to blame. Counselors do not give specific expectations to students, who in turn inappropriately plan and fail to take appropriate actions to prepare for community colleges' requirements. This is why it is so important for parents to be involved in the education of their children, to ensure that they are given the proper information regarding their educational future. Students at this age are not mature enough and some do not realize the importance of taking as many college prep courses as possible, getting good grades, and maintaining them throughout their high school years.

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Here are comments from different teachers on how they would grade this paper:

1. This is a B-level paragraph because the writer has succeeded in bringing two sources, Jacobs and Rosenbaum, into real dialogue on the issue of student preparation for college. Jacobs found in her study that college professors report significcant under-preparation when asked about their students; Rosenbaum concurs, and suggests that the cause of the problem lies with counselors, students, and parents, who emphasize getting out of high school or community college rather than preparing for university-level education. Because the research is strong and the sources are relevant to each other in a cause-and-effect pattern, this paragraph succeeds in teaching the reader about the attribution of college problems to high school backgrounds. One thing to notice, however, is that it takes the writer a very long paragraph to make these straightforward points and link them together while offering evidence from the source texts. This is characteristic of the B-level: if I were advising this student about strategies for revision, I would ask her to see which sentences could be removed from the paragraph without a loss of strength in the argument. Another possible strategy would be to chop the paragraph into two, each concerning one source, and build strong transition sentences between them to show the cause=and-effect relationship in the research itself.
   

2. One of the challenges faced by the B-level writer is to maintain a clear position of her own while presenting strong and relevant source texts. It's clear from the above paragraph that the writer is unsure of what to do with these sources other than agree with them. In part, this stems from her success in choosing sources-the evidence from them is so relevant to her argument that she can let the sources do the arguing for her without a loss of clarity. Unfortunately, this leads to a loss of the writer's voice in the dialogue, at least to some extent. If I were advising this writer about revision, I would ask her to do a free writing exercise in which she took her own position on the relationship between high school preparation and college success. She appears to readily agree with Rosenbaum that parents, students, and counselors are all at fault, without considering what other factors might be involved. I would therefore encourage her to do so and to incorporate the results of her free writing into the paragraph that follows this one.
   

 

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