New blog title: Camila Talks About Going To College Because That's All She Does

no but seriously.  The only exception is that I also read about what other people write about going to college, which brings me to...

NEW RESEARCH!  Academically Adrift: Limited Learning in College is the catchy title of this new book.

From the NYT gloss:  "The study, by two sociologists, Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia... found that half of the students surveyed did not take any classes requiring 20 pages of writing in their prior semester, and one-third did not take any courses requiring 40 pages of reading a week."

Side note:  This fairly-representative week, from 4 classes, I have 368 pages of reading.  But of those same four classes, the approximate number of pages of formal writing due for the entire semester are 28, 14-17, 10-14, and 8-10. So I only scrape above their standard there.  Um, yay?

Obviously quantity of work and depth of learning are not necessarily correlated.  I mean, it's obvious to me.  The really shocking part of this research - or so I hear - concerns scores on the CLA, a test supposed to measure overall writing, reasoning and analytical skills.  Tested freshman year and then senior year, 36% of students showed no improvement.  But the book just focuses on the first two years, when 45% of students showed no real difference in scores.

This neither startles nor alarms me, really... The tests don't measure how much people learn in their own major, and I expect that somebody very interested in learning enough biology and chemistry to go to med school could get certainly the education they want without necessarily improving their scores on the CLA.  And then there's the question of what the CLA (or any test) really measures anyway.  And then the fact that what you get out is correlated to what you put in, and there's certainly a percentage of a college's population that ain't putting in much.  

And, of course, that it's mostly the liberal arts students who do improve, and the business and communication majors who don't...

Add all those up and consider that, for whatever it's worth, a clear majority of college students are showing improvement on the test anyway, and frankly I think we're all doing fine.  I understand why people might be upset by these results (especially if they're paying for somebody's massive tuition) but we should all take some deep breaths before we start freaking out.

That said... studying less than five hours a week (37% of students)  is just appalling.  Step it up, kiddos.