Students should not be spoiled, professors should not pamper
It never ceases to amaze me how many college students missed the maturity memo when they enrolled in higher education. The jump from high school to college is supposed to signify the move from youth into adulthood, but it seems many at JMU don’t grasp the distinction between the two educational system or the different abilities that are required of us when we reach college. Since it seems many of us are still stuck in the world of high school, it is only appropriate to review what kind of scholarship is expected from college students.
A term we frequently used during our K-12 schooling was “spoon-feeding.” It basically implied that the teacher fed us exactly what we needed to know to pass state tests and little brainpower was required on our part. Often it referred to those times the teacher would hand out a review guide for a test and the test would magically look exactly the same as that review guide. Education was as easy as memorizing a few fill-in-the-blank questions.
While spoon-feeding wasn’t the most beneficial instructional method, none of us could really blame our 10th-grade biology teacher for making basic genetics into a matter of memorizing a study guide. After all, we weren’t choosing to learn the material; the state mandated that we did.
In college, however, students have made a conscious effort to pay thousands of dollars in tuition and enroll in classes ranging from managerial science to abnormal psychology. For the most part, we get to select the classes we take and even with whom we take them. We have chosen to be in charge of our own education.
With that said, much more is expected from college students who choose to learn than high school students who attend school out of fear of the consequences of truancy. As college students, we are supposed to be striving for expertise in an area that we, out of our own free will, have chosen. Yet judging by the behavior of many of my fellow classmates, one would think we were still in high school, having class material crammed down our throats.
It never fails that the class period before a test, a student will grill the professor about every aspect of the exam: How many questions will there be? Will they be multiple-choice questions? What about essays? How many paragraphs should the essays be? Do they need a thesis sentence? What should we study? What material should we concentrate on? Should we only study last week’s notes? Do we need to know the material from week three?
Not only does that student ask the professor about a gazillion questions, he inevitably grumbles when he gets a “C” on the test because the professor didn’t specifically say to study the material on page 65. The student also whines about the lack of a study guide. Apparently he or she was taking notes just for fun — because last time I checked, the point of taking notes is for the express purpose of remembering the information and using it for studying purposes. Go figure!
There’s nothing wrong with inquiring about an exam. Personally, I like to know if I’ll be expected to write an analytical essay or just fill in some multiple-choice bubbles. But I think it’s ridiculous that college students expect their professors — people with PhDs — to make up high school-level study guides when they just spent the last eight weeks presenting highly-researched lectures, or to basically give away the test questions by describing the exact material that will be tested.
If you really want to know the specifics of a test, show up to take it. I guarantee you’ll find out.
There has to be a greater level of personal responsibility from college students, especially since we have all made the choice to delve into learning at this institution. We shouldn’t complain when our professors refuse to spoon-feed us information. Doing so would be detrimental to us, because we would learn nothing meaningful about analysis, study skills or the subject we’ve chosen to pursue.
If education is nothing but study guides for you, I hate to burst your bubble, but we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Kathryn Manning is a senior history and political science major.
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