What ‘college-ready’ really requires

“The real world is definitely not high school.”
— 2008 Bushwick HS graduate, enrolled in Borough of Manhattan Community College

Below are two questions for required papers — one in history and one in science — drawn randomly from undergraduate courses given last year at Brooklyn College.

In response to disturbing rates of college failure, President Obama has proposed that federal K-12 education standards shift to a goal of making all students “college- and career-ready,” instead of the current goal of “adequate yearly progress.”

But what are the changes that should be made in high school coursework, requirements and assessments? What do college professors want?

A few years ago, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Open Society Institute hosted a series of reviews of New York’s Regents exams, conducted by panels of college professors, complemented by a few college admissions officers, newspaper editors, museum curators and public officials.

By and large the panels were not impressed by the Regents tests, which they thought mostly reflected students’ test-taking skills. Success in the various disciplines in college, they said, demands more.

Social studies: clashing interpretations

The largest issue he faces as a history professor, one panelist said, is that new college students cannot distinguish between an assertion and an argument. College professors have to “wean [their] students off multiple-choice tests,” the panel wrote in its report, because even if the student answers all such questions correctly, “they are all assertions.”

“We all agreed that in college-level history courses, history is contested; it’s not a neat and tidy sequence of events. There is a disjunction between how high school approaches history ... and the way college does,” they wrote. “We [have to] teach them how to question the text.”

A Columbia University historian, Eric Foner, agreed. In a documentary film about assessment at the alternative Urban Academy Lab HS in Manhattan, Foner said what he needs students to understand is that “just because something is in a book doesn’t make it true.” Understanding there are “clashing interpretations” of historical events is what it means to be a historian, Foner said.

English: developing ideas

“College requires critical thinking and the weighing of evidence; this test does not,” the Rockefeller panel on the English Regents wrote. They wanted to hear more than simple, fact-based answers.

They focused especially on the skill of speaking. “The professors in our group felt that oral presentations skills were invaluable for success in college,” the panel report said. But because it is not valued on the Regents, “we felt certain that teachers preparing students for the Regents test would simply drop that portion of the curriculum in favor of drilling for skills that are on the test.”

Judith Walzer, a college professor of English at the New School who was also interviewed for the Urban Academy film, observed, “You ask a question and there’s a one-sentence answer. It’s not a question of shyness or dumbness or anything like that, but the person hasn’t learned how to develop an idea, how to make a statement and then qualify, describe, give examples, illustrations.”

Science: curiosity and excitement

The science professors sounded the least academic. Students should have “a few basic underlying scientific habits of mind: estimation, correlation and causation and the difference between them; reading graphs and graphical representations of data, a little bit of probability and statistics, so that they have some way of making judgments about issues they will be facing,” the panel said.

But love of science was the goal. Memorization of content — “bold-faced terms,” they said — doesn’t teach genuine scientific understanding. “In science, the content changes every day,” one reviewer said. “What’s more important is making them excited about science. If curiosity is being removed from instructional technique and what’s happening in the class, if excitement is being taken out, you’re really destroying a huge pool of students who could ultimately enter the field of science.”