conuly

Yeah, we’ve pushed college to such a degree that everyone in upper education has to deal with this! Professors are faced with students who wouldn’t have gotten into the program at all ~40 years ago; students who CAN handle a college-level course aren’t given the full experience because the majority of their classmates can’t, and the prof has to adjust accordingly; students who might enjoy certain classes are unable to because it’s taught above their level, and they aren’t prepared, so they resort to apathy and cheating, just trying to get through.

I don’t have data to support this, but I had a sneaking suspicion that the 4 proficient readers may all be male. The example given of a proficient response struck me as a very “male” answer — in general I’ve noticed that female students tend to censor themselves and keep everything brief when responding verbally in class, while male students have the confidence to expound at length and never worry that they’re annoying the teacher or going too far. Not sure if sexism played a part here; not necessarily in the test itself, but the way the subjects were raised, how they’ve been taught to behave in academia. wouldn’t be surprised.

Side note: I’m confident that I’m in the proficient reader category, but I KNOW I wouldn’t score well on this test, for a variety of reasons! (I’m sure EVERYONE thinks they’d be proficient, and you have no reason to trust my self-analysis lmao). But the thing that stuck out to me the most is the focus on looking up and thoroughly understanding Lord High Chancellor, Lincoln Inn Hall, and the Court of Chancery. If it were me, I might look up those terms briefly during a test like this, but I certainly wouldn’t waste my 20 minutes researching them in-depth enough to understand what the Court of Chancery was, which seems to be the expectation here. I would think, “This is Line 1, and that means it’s pretty damn important to the book as a whole. I can definitely keep reading and pick up what the significance is through context.” By the end of 7 paragraphs, I’d know that this was a legal situation, but not precisely what chancery entails, and that might knock me down into “competent” or even “problematic.” But if you read the whole book, or even one chapter, you know!