Are UNC and Virginia the only public schools in the entire list? That's surprising.
Colleges with a four-year graduation rate of 75 percent or higher in 2011-12 are included.
This is a fairly high bar to clear.
Especially if you have a state mandate to enroll as many residents as possible or need to win 9 games to keep the alumni happy.
3: Doesn't it describe them as 'elite'? That actually struck me as a neat way of picking out a category of elite college.
Basically state schools have too many students take an extra semester. (E.g. Berkeley has a 90% graduation rate, but "only" a 72% 4-year graduation rate.)
A definition of "elite" that doesn't include Berkeley or Michigan but does include Dickinson is broken.
Also I find something annoying about taking the pride and selling point of the lower 90% of schools, and ranking the top 10% of schools based on how well they achieve that measure.
I wonder why UNC has a higher 4-year graduation rate than the other top publics. (UVA and Cornell are obviously weird and different.).
The CLA-job thing is really interesting, because it shows the CLA is actually measuring critical thinking. This is something I've long believed about the CLA.
This is actually something I'm going to forward to my colleagues. We've been engaged in a prolonged debate over the definition of critical thinking, mostly based stemming from the fact that everyone wants credit for teaching "critical thinking" in their course, but no one wants to actually do any of the difficult stuff involved with teaching it.
7: The newspaper I worked on in college used to be terrible for that. There was a whole section of newsroom staff who would take 1 or 3 credits a semester and live really cheaply so that they could go on working there. Then the newspaper bumped the minimum up to 6 credits, which basically made it impossible to do that economically, and the school made 13 credits mandatory for all undergrads and within 2 or 3 years the culture and length of tenure had totally changed.
On the other hand, as you point out, taking semesters off for any reason is probably more prevalent at Big State -- here, for instance, everyone has access to lots of internship opportunities and the like that you're not going to see at some SLAC in Mudville.
I'm very glad to see this post, because I had seen the NYT blog post on the CLA and I didn't know how seriously to take it.
I don't know anything about the CLA, but I do have quite a lot of experience in working with college-age and recently-graduated young people, and there is often poor correlation between their critical thinking skills and their perception of their critical thinking skills.
everyone wants credit for teaching "critical thinking" in their course, but no one wants to actually do any of the difficult stuff involved with teaching it.
Oh man, this. It is also my experience that a lot of people in teaching roles don't actually understand cognitive development -- school came easily to them, and they don't really know how to work with students who don't already have the cognitive scaffolding in place.
It's why I really value teachers who DO know that stuff, and are willing to do the hard, labor-intensive work of helping students meaningfully improve their ability to think.
Semi-related, I toyed with the idea of calling a graduate student's advisor to ask if he/she had seen the "survey" she was sending out, but have thrown out the idea as too likely to result in either a) being ignored, or b) the student getting slapped without any learning taking place.
I wish I knew what to do with this stuff, though. I get an ostensible adult who sends around five poorly conceived and badly written questions, and a couple of tables she copied from another source (but did appropriately footnote).
The tables allegedly illustrate three separate program models, but in fact they simply detail a progressively more comprehensive and better-functioning model. OF COURSE respondents are going to choose the better-functioning one when asked to make a recommendation!
I cannot believe that this constitutes a capstone project for a master's degree. From a generally respected institution.
I wanted to call her advisor because I kept thinking "What would I want someone to do if I were the student? If I were the advisor?" but experience shows that that is actually a horrible heuristic. So instead I'm venting on the Internet.
I don't know anything about the CLA.
The CLA asks you to imagine you are making a purchasing decision involving airplanes for a large company. You have to synthesize a variety of information presented in different ways to make an evaluation. At one point, you are informed of a plane crash involving a model of airplane that had been looking reliable to you up to this point.
I haven't actually taken the CLA tests, or looked at any of their other material directly. Basically, I read the first half of Arun and Roksa's first book. But my takeaway was that the CLA really is measuring the thing we are trying to instill in our students. It is a good measure of outcomes. The problem is that it tells us that very few of the things we are doing are working, and that we need to come up with all sorts of new things to do.
but I do have quite a lot of experience in working with college-age and recently-graduated young people, and there is often poor correlation between their critical thinking skills and their perception of their critical thinking skills
Its the Dunning-Kruger effect all over again.
14.2: My least favorite teaching technique (seen more than once) is watching a male TA say to a female undergrad, "Don't you just SEE it?" about 3D figures. No, champ, she doesn't just SEE it. That's why she's at your office hours.
15: Sounds like the student will realize the problem when she goes to write up the results. Data she can't analyze, conclusions that she can't draw? I have a loose policy telling students I'm around that they've screwed up when I notice their error, because I think it's a dick move to leave things wrong when I know it's going to cost them, but I know lots of people figure that they want the student to have the experience of screwing up so they learn how to recover and not make the same mistake.