Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Once again we have reached the midpoint of the semester and this year, more than any since I've been here, I'm hearing the tales of woe from the faculty about the students. While the data is anecdotal at best, it seems that more of our studnets are withdrawing from classes, failing their mid-terms and/or skipping class on a regular basis.

I'd really like to know why.

In my allied health physics classes I started with 31 and now have 12 and in physical science I have gone from 31 to 19 prior to actually grading the mid-term exams. One colleague who teaches Western Civilization said that his class started with 31, 20 actually take the mid-term and only 10 passed it. Another who teaches Organic Chemistry started with 24, had 20 take the mid-term and had only 5 pass it.

What is going on?

I really thought we'd start seeing an improvement in our students with the implementation of end-of-subject exams at the high school level here in Georgia. Maybe that's going to take more time for us to see the results of but man these kids are bad. Even my good students aren't that great sometimes. Usually, in every class you have a couple of studnets who really nail your course. Right now I don't have anyone doing better than about a 92.

Since I sit on the Executive Board of the College this year I'm going to bring this up for discussion and see if we can get some hard data. I'd like to know what our DWF (drop, withdraw or fail) rate is compared to years previous in both the freshmen and sophomore classes. I know that many of my colleagues are somewhat demoralized by the performance of the students and I'd like to know if there are grounds to feel that way or if the problem is more in our perception of our students' performance.

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