[Ambolia]

>“The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”

Are the standards to get into university that low?

[SL61]

Based on my experience in a liberal arts program in a state school, yes.

Professors can't assume the students learned anything in high school, so it takes a few semesters just to get the students to a college level. A lot of students graduated with nothing more than a passing knowledge of their subject because they took so long just to catch up.

Many students in the US are working full-time while seeking their degree, so they don't have a ton of time to study or write papers. Most professors understand this and assign a less-demanding load.

Another factor that I strongly suspect but can't prove: You have to have a college degree for most jobs, so professors feel like they're hurting a student's future prospects when they give a bad grade.

Keep in mind I'm talking about state schools - I would expect Harvard to be better!

[kjellsbells]

I'm sure I'm just an old curmudgeon, but when I heard that undergrads were using ChatGPT to write essays my first instinct was to wonder how university standards had gotten so low that a generated essay would not simply be dismissed as a feeble attempt.

500 words on the Thirty Years War generated by an AI and submitted by a high schooler I could understand. But arent college standards higher?

[notafraudster]

It depends on the college. I have two friends who are professors in the same subject (a humanities-ish subject that is reading/writing heavy).

One is a professor at a low end CSU. The way she describes her students is roughly high school level; they struggle with tasks like writing a 2-3 page, 3-point, sandwich-style essay. They struggle with reading primary source material. Her senior students typically seem to have the kind of skills I would expect of a college freshman. Many students have severe life disrupting issues (rehab and court are common). Deadlines seem to mostly be a suggestion.

The other is a professor, again in the same subject, at a relatively well ranked and famous north eastern liberal arts college. The way he describes his students is that they engage, handle very dense primary source readings, and that many of them are on track for grad school or law school. I am not sure what he assigns them as final assignments, but I would assume 10-20 page final papers are not uncommon. He's never mentioned anything about behavioural issues, though like every other professor he notes that accommodations/mental health stuff is worse than it used to be.

I also thought "boy, ChatGPT seems to be closer to what was expected of me in 10th grade English than it does to any university course I ever took", and frankly I went to a mediocre Canadian university and didn't really go to a competitive world class university until my PhD.

So it's possible that the push towards everyone has going to colleges has created greater stratification from college to college. The CSU system's mandate is to serve the underserved, so it's probably not a stretch to say many of the people in my colleague's classes wouldn't have gotten into college without an explicit effort to make a college for them.

[Veen]

I know that in Oxbridge Universities, that wouldn't cut it. The teaching method revolves around writing essays and attending small tutorials where you discuss your arguments with a subject-matter expert. The problem with that approach is that it doesn't scale.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/student-life/e...

[twic]

Although of course from the point of view of someone enjoying the benefits of an Oxbridge degree, that probably doesn't seem like a problem!

[iLoveOncall]

As part of my CS studies, I went a year in a US university, where I had to take a random class on top of CS classes. I chose a cinema class, where we were watching movies, discussing with the teacher or the director and had to write a 2 pages essay on it.

English is not my mother tongue and it was my first time living in an English speaking country, and of course I had 0 background in anything related to cinema.

The level of the other students was so abysmal that I was got the best grade of the whole class for every single essay.

It was not a great university, but the level of students with even 1 or 2 years of college education is appalling.

[SL61]

In most of my classes, the professors were just happy to get a paper with proper spelling/grammar and some degree of coherence. Strength of argumentation might be the difference between an A- and an A.

For context, I graduated in 2020.

[cpr]

Don't assume that!

When I started undergrad there in '72 (yes, even some generations ago), if you didn't have close to an 800 verbal SAT, you had to take a remedial writing course as a frosh.

[SL61]

We had remedial classes at my university, with the same test-score-based selection system. Everyone had to take two English classes: ENG 101 and ENG 102.

Students with very low SAT/ACT scores in reading/writing needed to take ENG 50-something before moving on to 101 and 102. Students with high test scores could take an Honors version of ENG 101 that also fulfilled the requirements for 102 (so they would only need to take one class).

The problem was that the overall bell curve was so low. The students in remedial courses tended to be extremely low performers - learning disabilities, serious issues at home, or older adults who hadn't been in an academic environment in decades. Those students' writing would have basic grammatical and structural issues leading to unreadability, and ENG 50 was focused on teaching them how to form a sentence or techniques to memorize spelling. There were some downright heroic ENG 50 professors, but the students who made it into ENG 101 had passed a very low bar.

I don't know if the standardized tests have become easier over time. I took the ACT a couple times in 2014 and 2015 but I don't really remember it.

I forgot to mention in my original comment - I graduated in 2020.

[codeulike]

For context, the Scarlet Letter is pretty annoying. Halfway through each of these sentences I feel myself losing patience

A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

[mock-possum]

Annoying? Really? Man, I think this is some beautiful prose - have you tried reading it out loud to yourself?

> Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era.

Like tell me that doesn’t paint a picture - in a fine narrative voice!

[SamBam]

I loved it too.

Then again, I read a lot. I imagine this kind of thing is like exercise. This morning I followed along with a 20 minute "beginner yoga" video, and hated it because it felt painful and incomprehensible to my stiff, aging body.

[goalieca]

My brain also shuts off after a few commas. This style just does not speak to me.

[olddustytrail]

Well, sure, of course, if, you like, William, Shatner as, a, narrator,,,

[jwestbury]

It does, but periodic sentences can be hard to parse, because you've got to keep a lot of context in your head at once. I can't read French, but my English translations of Proust have single sentences which span a full page and more at times, and whilst I love Proust, I must certainly admit that those sentences require multiple readings to fully understand!

[codeulike]

Reading it out loud does improve it, you're right

[kemayo]

Definitely a pain if you're trying to teach it in a sentence-diagramming kind of way. That said, I kind of wonder why you'd be bothering to do that unless the kids are literally not able to understand what's being said and you need to work through it from first principles. (Which I guess is possible? That all reads as a bit of a ramble but perfectly understandable, particularly if you read it out loud.)

For my part, I've never once in my academic career had to explicitly identify sentence parts.

[bitwize]

> Definitely a pain if you're trying to teach it in a sentence-diagramming kind of way.

I can definitely see the first sentence, alone, serving as an extra credit question on a high schooler's English test: Diagram this sentence!

But that's a high schooler from my era (first half of the 90s). Much less seems to be expected of today's high schoolers.

[Koshkin]

The attention deficit in action. (Not to blame you personally, this is what the modern communication style does to us in its pervasiveness, and the delicious "long form" characteristic of the "olden times" is no longer easily digestible by anyone with the prolonged exposure to texting and such; even when it comes to email, people often have enough patience to only read the first sentence.)

[codeulike]

Sorry can you explain that again a bit more briefly?

[akiselev]

The 21st century in a nutshell: too long; didn't read.

[ryandrake]

Modern technology makes people's brains impatient.

[kridsdale1]

I’m sorry I lost interest by word three.

[klyrs]

take longer; don't relent

[claytongulick]

Care to elucidate?

[watwut]

To be fair, more readable 19 century texts definitely exists. Not every writer was writing in such convoluted way.

[Apocryphon]

> Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

"Not every writer was writing in such convoluted way."

Sure there were. But unless they're Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce, they're probably not much worth reading.

[jeffjobs4000]

I find this passage to be far more readable than the Scarlet Letter one posted above. Sure, it's long, but it's developing the character.

Before screens, people must have gotten far more enjoyment from authors painting mental pictures in tiny detail.

We have HD video as an option now. A long description of a rose bush doesn't do it for me unless it's needed for the actual narrative.

[SyzygistSix]

What is different about literature is that things are being described through the viewpoints of particular people.

[watwut]

> But unless they're Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce, they're probably not much worth reading.

I strongly disagree. Being convoluted does not make the text more worth reading. It makes it more fun for one kind of reader. That is about it.

Being well written and pleasant to read does not make the text, whether fiction or real like account less worthy.

[Apocryphon]

Right, but much great writing from that era was convoluted, like the work of Herman Melville.

[cpr]

Are you kidding me? The greatest American novel of all time? Not worth reading?

[Apocryphon]

I was dismissing the previous post that claimed that "more readable" - less "convoluted" - 19th century texts existed by saying such texts are probably not worth reading, as the much more complex works are heralded as classics of English literature.

[twelfthnight]

Oh. That's funny I find this kind of beautiful. I think the contrast between the man made structures and the wild roses is poetic and highlights the cruelty of capital punishment.

EDIT: I wonder if maybe the long florid sentences are the entertainment of that time, kind of like how folks 100% video games today, spending a lot more time than necessary for fun. Definitely it is... Verbose though.

[codeulike]

There is some lovely stuff in there but the way the commas are used keeps tripping up my head. I suppose I would adjust to it after a few pages.

[chris_wot]

You need to literally slow down. I genuinely think it is far harder to find inspiration in sound-bites, and that is what we are increasingly used to.

What you have quoted, incidentally, is complex because it combines a lot of ideas that follow on from one another. The second paragraph, in particular, starts with the forefathers of Boston allocating land for a prison and ends with disappointment and sadness that prisoners are not even afforded the beauty of nature.

In between it observes that the prisons decays rapidly and is a “gloomy” place with poorly maintained grounds, and observes the general air of hopelessness of the prison.

It’s kind of beautiful, really. It gives a lot of context.

Edit: FWIW, I have ADHD. This wasn’t an easy read, but it was worth it.

[98codes]

I actually had a _lot_ more trouble with the first sentence oddly enough; the proliferation of commas where (in modern syntax at least) there should be no commas kept placing unnecessary and unwanted breaks in the language flow.

It's entirely possible that by the time I was into the second paragraph that I had simply adjusted to the writing style and was able to proceed without any issue; I haven't the time to properly compare the two.

[bitwize]

To be fair, that kind of verbosity is an obvious belt onion: it was the style at the time.

That said, after struggling through it a couple of times, taking time to reread portions, it really painted a vivid picture, casting a Gothic pall over the scene in ways a more to-the-point passage might not.

[politician]

> Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era.

Poignant. Thanks for sharing.

[bcbrown]

That's beautiful. It makes me want to re-read the Scarlet Letter.

[PuppyTailWags]

When I graduated university, it was very clear to me that my peers couldn't communicate adequately at that time. A lot of essays are effectively cheated on and the students are taught mostly to pad as opposed to have serious consideration and thought on the literature. None of this contributes to mastering structure or craft in any way. There's a lot of pressure to graduate students by parents/the board/local government, especially in highschool, especially when English is continually marginalized as a field of study. Where do you, an English teacher at highschool, get off failing a rising star athlete, young mathematician, engineering passionate, or any number of categories that is "worth more" than the capacity to read and write intelligently?

[dkarl]

My father taught at a local state university, nowhere near state flagship level but still a "university" in name, and he occasionally had kids in class who were close to functionally illiterate. His reading for the semester was very light (something you would get through in a competitive university in a week) but from helping kids who came to his office he could tell it would have been a hundred hours of reading for some of them, even if they skipped all the words they didn't know.

I think I approve of letting every kid take a crack at college. If they graduate high school, there should be a school somewhere that gives them a chance. The problem is that if they aren't ready, there's no place they can go. They can't go back to their old high school and demand to be taught what the teachers pretended to teach them. The best they can do is take remedial reading classes at the university, borrowing money to learn what their local schools were supposed to teach them for free.

Most (maybe all?) of the kids like this that my dad encountered came from rural schools where you have a similar range of preparedness and home situations that you see in an urban setting, but you only have enough kids the same age to fill one or two classrooms. A teacher can't personalize the curriculum for every single student, so a kid who falls significantly behind will, after a certain point, no longer receive a meaningful amount of instruction, because the curriculum that's appropriate for the bulk of the class is beyond what they can engage with. Schools that recognize the unfairness of failing a kid that they're not even teaching tend to pass these kids along from grade to grade and then graduate them, and it's hard to fault them for it. If you think of instructional level as a spectrum from remedial to advanced, rural schools only have the resources to cover the middle part of that spectrum where 90-95% of their students are. All they can do for the rest is give them an apology and a diploma.

[notafraudster]

A lot of colleges now have what amount to transition classes for high school kids who can't hack it in college. The upside of these is that they seem to actually help students who went to shitty high schools or who needed a change of environment. The downside is that typically they don't count for credit but they still cost money.

[bitwize]

Community colleges also deliver this kind of education, and can be quite affordable. Chris Rock may have made fun of community colleges, but they fill a glaring need in society that can be difficult for us smart, well-to-do people who went to good schools to understand.

[red-iron-pine]

That's great and all, but how did those kids get into real colleges, then?

That's a seat that could have gone to someone else.

Community college is a different story, but those are open for the greater public for the most part.

[xenon7]

Yes. I'm guessing it's because nearly every American needs to go to college nowadays (sure, there are other options, but college is the most practical) and as a result they had to lower standards. I mean, I've heard that some universities don't even require SAT/ACT scores anymore. That doesn't mean that "prestigious" universities don't exist, but generally speaking they've really dumbed-down things a lot.

[justinator]

Even 20 years ago, I had a class that was struggling to get through the introduction of a book. We spent a few weeks on it. I became frustrated and just checked the book out of the library and read it entirely one afternoon.

It took me awhile to realize that what most of the class were struggling with was not a grasp of the English language per-se, but the overwhelmingly majority of people in the class were dyslexic. And because of that, they were in an art and design college.

[BeFlatXIII]

…if they had dyscalculia, they'd be studying elementary ed.

[watwut]

42.1% of American 18- to 24-year-olds are enrolled in college or graduate school

https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics

[xenon7]

It's really that low? Ah, my bad. That's surprising to me.

[red-iron-pine]

And 41% is just enrollment -- many will never finish.

Maybe 30% of the US actually holds any sort of degree.

[SketchySeaBeast]

The college diploma is yet another victim of Goodhart's law.

[pdntspa]

A lot of pre-20th century writing is absolutely awful. Long, pretentious, rambling run-on sentences and authors seemingly in love with the sound of their own voice.

My biggest complaint with old books is I want them to STFU and get to the point!

[randcraw]

I think the literati of any age are a major source of bad writing, or at least, fluff. Many authors dedicate their efforts to writing stylishly, encumbering the reader to wade through excessive windy sentences and irrelevant minutia, or worse, obnoxious proselytizing. I have no love for any American writing before 1800, and little before 1900, especially the New England romanticists (e.g. Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, etc) or public men like America's Founding Fathers.

That said, the most brilliant writing I know came from the 1800s, especially the American Civil War: Abraham Lincoln, Sullivan Ballou, and popular novelists like Charles Dickens. Perhaps their extraordinary expressiveness arose because, for the first time in history, writing could be appreciated by many. Certainly authors of those times more often wrote from the heart, not just to entertain.

[Jevon23]

>authors seemingly in love with the sound of their own voice.

They should be. And if you’re not in love with the sound of the author’s voice too, you shouldn’t be reading their works.

Literature is a luxury. It’s not constrained by utilitarian purposes. Save the short and concise sentences for the newspapers. (Not to say that simple and clear sentences can’t ALSO be beautiful, of course; it’s just that that’s not the ONLY type of beauty to be found in literature.)

[pdntspa]

> They should be. And if you’re not in love with the sound of the author’s voice too, you shouldn’t be reading their works.

Please, tell that to my high-school English literature program directors

[rawgabbit]

I agree. Scarlet Letter is an example on how not to write. It is steam of consciousness without a modicum of merit. I don't think I learned anything from it. I read half of the book and was completely lost on what the author was trying to say. Maybe that was the author's point. But the writing is god awful. Below is a passage where the dude who got Hester pregnant confessed? Or is it her husband who felt cheated? Uggh. Who cares.

“Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the pit, or say rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy, on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness. I,—a man of thought,—the book-worm of great libraries,—a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge,— what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girl’s fantasy! Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people. Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path!”

[mock-possum]

I mean this is a monologue though, and it’s specifically self indulgent self deprecating content, this poor guy is whining about how he’s so smart and so old and ugly and how could he have ever thought that someone as young and got as Hester would be satisfied with him. It’s character voice, and it’s illustrative - “without a modicum of merit?” Really? This passage tells a whole story in itself, and it’s a familiar, human story, that bitter men have always told and will always tell anyone with will listen. “I wasn’t good enough.”

[rawgabbit]

My point is that Scarlet Letter is taught to students. Usually it is taught as an example of good writing. I would argue it is an example of what not to do. If you want to convince people. If you want to get your point across. It is absolutely the wrong thing to do. The reader is drowning is on the author's verbosity.

If it is an example of poetic literature. Ok sure.

[Apocryphon]

> steam of consciousness

I've got bad news about the 20th century- James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Jack Kerouac, the hits don't stop coming

[yamazakiwi]

I don't know if I can say it has no merit, but I also find this type of writing annoying.

You can be verbose and interesting without so much padding and flowery speech. When you have this much to say about something, you have this much to say about everything, and I don't care to read long-winded analogies that the writer thinks are cute or wait for them to paint the picture in much more words than necessary.

Maybe people who enjoy this get some sort of energy thinking about well-developed, stylish prose, and it's easy for them to see the scene or this character's anguish but for me it's distracting and takes me out of the moment to focus on the writers "poetry".

[rawgabbit]

Agreed. If I was the editor, I would have hacked this pompous paragraph into a concise form; the author would have hated it but I would tell him I was saving the reader from his PTSD inducing writing.

e.g., “Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the pit. It was my folly. Your youth and beauty! Misshapen from birth, how could I delude myself with the idea that my intellectual gifts might veil my physical deformity! Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people in this land. Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our story!”

[yamazakiwi]

This is MUCH better!

[istjohn]

Eh, I'm enjoying the excerpts in this thread. It would be annoying in a newspaper, but the imagery and metaphors are beautiful. If there ever's a place for poetic prose, surely it's in a novel.

[SamBam]

I know, I'm enjoying the excerpts too. This whole thread seems to be split between readers of literature, and those who want to most-fully embody Sam Bankman-Fried's philosophy that every book ought to have been a "6 paragraph blog post."

"What's the one-liner on The Scarlet Letter? It's 'adultery is bad,' right? I'll just assume it is and stick it in my Second Brain on Notion, and it'll be like I've read it."

[gemstones]

The husband is complaining that he should have foreseen that adultery was the logical outcome of marrying someone who is much more physically attractive than him.

[jacooper]

Funnily enough, it kind of applies to this article too.

[AlbertCory]

Leo Tolstoy would like a word with you.

[randcraw]

Or several.

[browningstreet]

Based on my son's freshman year at a big university, all the 101 and 102 classes assume no prior knowledge, of almost anything. Grammar, the desktop/filesystem metaphor (which, I'm told, a whole lot of students still didn't understand even after spend a couple of classes on these basics), what a cell is, and in physics classes... what a proton is. Just to name a few examples.

[98codes]

We can thank iOS and Android for the death of desktop/filesystem knowledge for people at large. Universities will need to start requiring a General Computing course to close that gap, if they aren't already.

[alistairSH]

And that's at Harvard! Wow.

"The Scarlet Latter" was an 11th grade book for me. I remember it being a typical difficulty level as other pre-20th century literature - reading and understanding it was work, but not unusually so.

[bell-cot]

Important context - that quote is attributed thus: "Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor".

Harvard's admission standards are seldom criticized for being too low. Though one might ask whether the struggling students were ones admitted on the basis of academic merit, vs. family connections...

[modernpink]

Not to mention __________ ______.

[CrazyStat]

Student athletes?

[econonut]

Affirmative action.

[bell-cot]

Admitting that it's been [cough] decades since I was anywhere near an English Lit. course...even back then, the workloads (hours/week of required reading) were notorious. Similar for the lackluster job market for English Lit. majors. That does not sound like a combination to attract many marginally-qualified students, regardless of affirmative action.

[CrazyStat]

Major donors?

[econonut]

My extensive hangman experience leads me to believe that's not what the commenter is suggesting.

[SketchySeaBeast]

Rorschach tests?

[disambiguation]

>Are the standards to get into university that low?

Universities aren't what they used to be.

In the modern world everyone has access to college, no one is denied, and it has become a necessity to get a degree. Something as simple as running a daycare requires several degrees or credentials in order to be competitive. [1]

In short, today you must pay an exorbitant sum of time and money for credentials simply to have access to the labor market. [2]

[1] https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/certifica...

[2] https://www.thoughtco.com/indulgences-their-role-in-the-refo...

[pclmulqdq]

Yes they are. Kids in lower schools are generally not taught how to read or write well at all. When they do read books, the books are either distilled into key ideas in class (so you don't really have to read them aside from the occasional quiz) or very easy reading material. When they write, it's usually a "5-paragraph" essay that is more about regurgitating the distilled points than any form of original thought. That is, if they don't cheat on the essay.

I recently did an MBA program (yes, pile on the hate) where the average student I worked with had a very hard time reading complex documents or stringing together sentences to form a coherent argument. They even struggled to read reports from consulting companies, which are full of pictures and written in very plain grammar, so I doubt most could tackle "Ulysses," "The Wasteland," or "The Scarlet Letter."

By the way, I think this is why the PG writing style is popular - it's very easy to understand the words and sentences, so you can convey an idea to a lot of people, albeit in a not-very-nuanced way. It also makes it fairly easy to write an argument - there is no flowery language around to distract you from the fact that you are saying nothing.

A lot of people attribute this to the fact that there are a lot of people who have English as a second language or speak a different dialect of English (Indian English is very common), but I'm not so sure. I have often found that many non-native speakers actually have larger vocabularies and a better understanding of grammar than typical native speakers.

[imbnwa]

My Philosphy 101 was me having a conversation with the grad student lecturer over Plato's dialogues. After class one day, this STEM student, likely taking the course for the easy credit as I don't believe anyone failed the course, asked me "How do you read this stuff?" in what I interpreted as a mixed tone of condescension ("why would you read this stuff") and surprise ("how do you read this stuff").

Luckily for me I competed in high school policy debate where I learned (the hard way, by losing a lot) how to assess text within the framework of constraints it implies, as well as how to challenge those specific constraints.

Lotta people can't do that and end either up being that person in a philosophy course going on a long, idiosyncratic rant that's based on word associations they're making, or just remain silent and merely endure the course for the credit.

[BitwiseFool]

>"having trouble identifying the subject and the verb"

In my experience English class was primarily about reading literature with the goal of teaching morals and values. There was very little information about the structure of the English language. I actually learned far more about grammar, syntax, articles, etc. through learning Spanish.

[cafard]

The impression that I get from my brother, who teaches as an adjunct at a couple of state schools in the Midwest, is that yes the standards are that low.

[jakeinspace]

To be fair, I found that an extremely tedious book, probably my least favorite required high school reading.

[throwaway1777]

If standards are this low we need English requirements in university more than ever.

[siva7]

Standards can also act as a gatekeeper, discriminating against the underprivileged. So i'm glad that everyone gets the same chance, if rich or poor.

[CrazyStat]

> So i'm glad that everyone gets the same chance, if rich or poor.

They don't, though?

> The median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.8% of students at Harvard came from a poor family but became a rich adult.

From a NYTimes analysis [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

[Ambolia]

I suppose this is trolling, but if it's not everybody doesn't really "get a change", you are just turning an english major into a different thing while keeping the name and trying to keep the prestige, though that won't last for long.