conuly

After writing a post about this study on my own blog and sleeping on it, I've come to the conclusion that the authors chose the most difficult passage they could find from a famous canon author. They already knew what conclusions they wanted to draw with their so called "study" and they rigged the game to make sure that as many students as possible would do poorly.

So not just incompetently designed: malevolent.

That the study is evil crap and its conclusions (especially the proportion of poor readers to skilled readers in 3rd/4th year English classes) cannot be trusted does not impact on the undeniable fact that lots of university students with high GPAs are ill prepared to handle the kind of reading that one is expected to do in liberal arts classes. This is the inevitable result of decades of teaching to the test in K-12 schools, plus the credentialism that has caused vast numbers of young people to go to college because they know they need a degree to get a job at all, regardless of whether or not they have the skills required to do well in a university setting (all this to get jobs that their grandparents would have been able to get with a high school diploma, and which do not demand any of the skills one obtains with a four year degree).