It's a familiar refrain: the students are ill-prepared, uncommitted; they will not read, cannot write; they used to be better; they only want the piece of paper; they work too much outside. These are not new observations. But they seem to be exacerbated at York, a commuter school populated by students many of whose families have had no previous experience with university, by a period when York's forte, the liberal arts, is under unprecedented attack by the provincial government.
These observations resurfaced at a session of the York Assessment Forum (YAF) in early 1999 and led to the formation of a subgroup and an Assessment Project on Student Lives which has been active since last spring. Early on, the project group members addressed the question of the validity of these perceptions, or unarticulated assumptions, as we tended to call them. Some of the questions were:
To investigate some of these questions we decided to interview a cross-section of faculty members mainly in Arts, Education and Science. Alexandra Emberley, graduate programme in Education, was hired to conduct the interviews during the summer and fall of 1999. The project group met at least monthly during this period and reported verbally to meetings of the YAF on several occasions. On March 1, 2000 we had a lively dinner meeting, chaired by Didi Khayatt and attended by many of those interviewed, to compare notes and decide on further actions.
The interview results (reported anonymously to the project group) and the March 1 discussion revealed major areas of concern but a lack of unanimity on what can or should be done about them. It will be important to get information also from students in order to round out the picture. The information available from ISR surveys is useful but not of a sufficiently detailed nature to throw light on the extent of the problems identified in the faculty interviews.
Respondents frequently refer to students' preoccupation with simply getting a qualification, external pressures from employment and family responsibilities, York's location ("faculty prefer to work at home so the student finds a hallway of closed doors and the frustration of no one there...") and the lack of community ("a commuter school which has failed to re-invent itself") as serious problems.
Some faculty members are very pessimistic in their view of today's students. They find that the students simply do not enjoy or want to read as much as they did in past years. Others are dismayed that students simply do not want to study:
"I gave them a problem I solved in class for the exam. I gave them the answer and they still did not answer it. They simply do not do the work. It was very depressing."
"There is a demand to do less and students want information given to them – they want the answers... they should go to a community college. They want study sheets... Students are not interested in an intrinsic experience of learning."
Many respondents recognize that some of the resistance to studying can be attributed to students' need to seek paid employment. However, they also wish that students would opt for lower course loads:
"If you're going to be a student you should be a good student. Take fewer courses, I don't think the degree should be compromised – the degree should continue to mean what it meant to past generations".
Other faculty take a realistic attitude:
"We should teach the students we have rather than those we wish we had."
"I'm explaining things in the text that once I didn't have to."
"I have cut down the reading list by a fair amount and shortened the length of papers. They can't write long papers."
"I give a third as much reading...as in the seventies,"
"I still think it's part of my job to get students to do a little bit more than they want to do."
"My assumption is that with the advent of electronic communication, we are working with a less literate and less interested student population...."
But not all despair. Several faculty members are excited by York's students:
"I find students to be enthusiastic, exuberant, keen and curious and I quite enjoy working with them. I like the age of the students at the Keele campus – they're so eager and open to ideas and how to think about them."
"There is...a strong ethnic, gender and queer multiplicity at York which is great for courses."
Others have striven hard to adapt to the changed situation:
"There is a pressure to make it enticing – to use videos and resource people."
"Only time students [are] involved in high engagement is when they are discussing..."
"Make their own questions part of the course".
The Assessment Project on Student Lives aims to deepen awareness and understanding about the lives of students and how that knowledge impacts on teaching and learning at York. We hope that the results will inform future planning considerations by individual course directors, curriculum and program development committees and policy-makers about academic standards and expectations for students at all levels.
Project members include Gottfried Paasche, Didi Khayatt, Martin Muldoon, Jana Vizmuller-Zocco, Georges Monette, Joanne Magee, Alexandra Emberley and Ellen Hoffmann.