[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.