Great advice to college students and their parents from a recently read article: Have a conversation with your kid about the differences between high school and college as academic environments. This may require you learning new language yourself, and familiarizing yourself with contemporary college practices. For example: 1. We don’t assign “homework” in college. We assign “work.” It has an entirely different function than most high school homework, and we do not repeat that work in class. We usually spend class time on something else, so not preparing assigned work is a huge mistake on the part of the student. 2. A practice that seems to be common in high school (especially in the top tracks) of allowing students to rewrite work, retake tests or hand in extra credit for a higher grade does not exist at the college level, unless a course is explicitly designed that way. There are no do-overs in college, except at the professor’s discretion. High school students also seem to have their deadlines extended ad infinitum (at least the kids I have known have had this experience) and this simply will not happen in college without some kind of penalty attached. 3. Sending a paper home to parents for a final edit and handing it in as the student’s own work is usually a violation of college honor codes, unless the student acknowledges that help. However, let me emphasize my larger point: even if you have been doing your kid’s homework helping your kid with homework since the first grade, students are supposed to manage their own work and complete their own assignments in college, unsupervised by their parents or anybody else. If they need help, that is what professors, TA’s, writing and math workshops are for. 4. If you are on a team, unless it is an NCAA Division I team with a squad of tutors, students are not automatically excused from class, nor do they have tests and papers rescheduled, to accommodate practice and competition. Any student-athlete needs to find out what the regulations are for such conflicts and make the practice and competition schedule accommodate her academics, not the reverse. This often requires higher-level planning skills, something to work on this summer whether your kid is an athlete or not. 5. High school teachers are geared to helping students perform well. In contrast, college faculty have a very defined sense of what they are, and are not, responsible for, and it varies from professor to professor. Hence, the most frequent complaint I hear from colleagues is that students who have been given a syllabus never read it or refer to it to answer their own questions. Hence, they are perpetually blindsided by the requirements, readings and deadlines that are outlined in the syllabus, and they reveal this shortcoming when they ask questions that have already been answered. Some faculty will have the habit of reminding students about assignments that are due; others do not, and that doesn’t make them bad teachers. READ THE SYLLABUS. OFTEN. 6. Staying up all night to write papers, beginning your study for a test at the last minute, doing your class prep in another class, and reading Cliff’s Notes instead of the book may have worked in high school: it will produce mediocre to inferior results in college. One reason I think many students complain when they receive bad grades is that they are doing exactly what they have always done. In addition, they often fail to understand that the quality of their work is expected to rise in college, not remain the same. 7. Being sick is not always a good excuse, and the professor is not responsible for helping a student catch up after a common cold. In fact, one reason for a student to be caught up in her work for classes, is that she might get sick. Temporarily falling behind is one thing: having deferred deadlines on top of deferred deadlines is a recipe for disaster.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 16:45:53 +0000
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