Schneier on Security

Dr. T • November 16, 2010 5:34 PM

The problem underlying academic cheating is that most educational institutions care not one whit whether students learn anything. Schools are run by bureaucrats and by power-hungry or money-grubbing administrators.

In public schools, the administrators are concerned about average scores on standard exams and dropout rates. They address the latter problem by never investigating why 16-, 17-, or 18-year-old students stop coming to class and pretend that the students’ families moved. They address the former problem by teaching to the standardized multiple-choice tests.

In colleges and universities, it’s all about money. They now accept students who would never have been considered smart enough to attend a community college back in the 1970s. They cram students into massive lecture halls, spoon feed them pap from high school-level textbooks, give multiple-choice tests with simplistic questions taken directly from lecture notes, and either give no writing assignments at all or ones that require little work and are graded by teams of grad student teaching assistants who receive no guidance.

The outcome of this indifferent and uncaring approach to education is obvious: college graduates who wasted four to six years getting a Bachelor of Arts degree but no real education. Cheating is rampant because students put no value on learning a subject; they value only the credit hours and the grade.

I was a medical student in the late 1970s, and I have taught medical students and residents since the mid-1980s. Each year, the average first-year medical student arrives with less background knowledge and a lesser ability to learn complex subjects than the year before. The decline is appalling and partly explains the large increase in the numbers of incompetent practicing physicians. (The other parts of the explanation are that medical schools also fail to educate, and the residency training process rewards memorization and pattern recognition over knowledge and a skillful approach to diagnosis and problem-solving.)

Our entire educational system needs to be redesigned to focus on learning rather than bureaucratic needs or ineffective teaching paradigms created by idiotic pseudoeducators. The new educational system needs to address the needs of all students, including the one in nine with IQs below 80 and the one in nine with IQs above 120. It needs to tailor education to students with different learning styles and be flexible enough to teach those who learn by handling and doing as well as those who learn by reading. It needs to allow students to choose education options that span from minimal formal training to trade schools to focused higher education classes to graduate schools. But, it is my belief that this will not happen, and that we will muddle along as we are for decades.

Dr. T • November 17, 2010 12:37 AM

@Random Prof:

We have NOT cut education funding. We spend more and more on public schools and colleges for less and less education (and more and more waste and bureaucracy). In public school districts salaries paid to administrative staff approach those paid to classroom teachers. At universities, despite increased funds, the ratio of tenure-track professors to students gets lower and lower. Administrators are sucking down the extra money and are hiring part-time faculty or poorly paid, nontenure-track instructors to handle the massive influx of students. Lecture halls, classrooms, labs (and dorms) are packed. I had medical students who told me that their undergrad science classes had over 300 students. Labs were essentially worthless. Not one of my students had dissected anything more complex than a frog before medical school. That’s pathetic.