University Times

Faculty Assembly members last week held an impromptu discussion about whether a significant number of incoming freshmen are entering Pitt unprepared academically.

The discussion emerged following reports from the faculty presidents of three of Pitt’s regional campuses.

University Senate President Michael Pinsky said at the Oct. 5 Assembly meeting that high schools are failing to teach some of the basic skills necessary for success in college, such as critical writing, mathematics and science.

“I see a dichotomy of students with extremely high scores on their SATs, and the poor way in which they write even an argumentative paragraph,” Pinsky said. “Students are not learning the same basic things they were before because of the structure of public education, and I’m not sure private education is much different.”

Assembly member Carey Balaban said another factor in the mix is the improvement in Pitt’s reputation, which has raised expectations for the quality of students. “A growing national and international reputation, that raises the bar. I think we’re getting better students, but that the students’ mastery of what we would consider to be the prerequisite materials for doing college work is not that apparent when they show up for some of the courses,” Balaban said.

He said when that is the case the faculty member has to bite the bullet and help the underprepared student.

“It simply makes a challenge for staffing, particularly at the regional campuses: There are other sections that have to be offered, and decisions have to made about how to manage this in their individual departments. It’s a challenge we face [in Pittsburgh] too,” Balaban added.

John Baker, a member of the Senate admissions committee, said the issue is not with substandard students per se. “A lot depends on the criteria you’re looking at. SATs are higher, the number of students in the top 10 percent of their class is higher. So I think we’re getting good students,” Baker said.

“A lot of the problem when you say students are unprepared is simply the fact that competition is so much higher here. When you have a student in the top 10 or 20 percent I don’t think they have had to work as hard [in high school] as they have to here to get high grades. I think a lot of people would disagree that the quality of students we’re getting is substandard,” Baker said.

Assembly member Linda Frank said the issue may be an intergenerational one. “Perhaps the students are different. When you look at students when the baby boomers came to school, we had a different attitude about education. A lot of students are being admitted now to college when it was their parents who did their homework. When you look at the X generation and Y generation and the millennials, they’re all different,” Frank said.

“As somebody who teaches in a graduate program, I do get students who cannot write,” Frank said. “That’s a big problem, but I don’t feel like I should have to teach people how to write. I’m not sure it’s the job of higher education to teach people how to write. I understand the point that there is potential for people who may not be performing. As a baby boomer my idea would be to say ‘You’re going to have to go out and get those skills yourself.’”

Assembly member James Becker said he was confused by an apparent contradiction in the discussion. “The standards for admission are getting higher, applications are going up, SAT scores are going up, et cetera, but the consensus among the faculty here is our students come in unprepared. What am I missing?” Becker asked.

If the latter is the case, Becker continued, “My concern is I don’t want the day to come when graduate schools come back to us and say, ‘You’re sending us substandard students and we can’t get them out of here in less than 10 years.’ Maybe colleges will have to go to five years to have a year to remediate everything that happened in high school.”

Vladimir Savinov, a physics faculty member on Assembly, said, “In my 10 years’ experience at Pitt I can see that every year we get more and more excellent students who are ready to go really far. Every year graduates from our department go to the best graduate schools in the world.

“However,” Savinov continued, “if you have a class of 200 students, I can say without hesitation the top part of a class like that has been improving over the past 10 years. But the bottom part is not only staying where they are but they are culturally changing. They come from places where parents and teachers are not pressing them to work harder and school boards are not acting because of parents’ complaints. The way we deal with this is we try to teach the students at the bottom of the class as much as they’re willing to learn. We cannot force them to change.”

Savinov advocated a system of required remedial courses, should a student be found unprepared.

Pinsky said, “Every college will tell you that if our graduates get jobs and they’re getting paid well, or if they get into a grad school where there’s a significant amount of quality, then our education has worked. Whether we like it or not our job is to see that they do that.”

He recommended establishing freshman courses that teach basic skills necessary for academic success in college, such as time-management skills, how to navigate library resources and how to write clearly and critically.

“Our students are smart people and, because smart people learn fast, we can get them up to speed,” Pinsky said.

In other Assembly business:

• The fall plenary session will be held noon-3 p.m. Oct. 26 in the William Pitt Union Assembly Room. (See Senate Matters column, this issue.)

• Nicholas Bircher reported on plans for the Faculty Assembly outreach program, which he co-chairs with Irene Frieze. Bircher and Frieze are looking for volunteers from Faculty Assembly and Senate Council who will schedule meetings at the departmental level to apprise faculty of the role of Faculty Assembly in the University’s shared governance structure.

—Peter Hart