University Times

The numbers say that the academic quality of Pitt freshmen has been rising steadily since the mid-1990s.

Among last fall’s Oakland campus freshmen, 43 percent graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes (up from 19 percent eight years ago) and the average, combined SAT score was 1213 (up from 1100 in fall ’95), according to Pitt’s Office of Admissions and Financial Aid.

But better SAT scores and high school grades don’t guarantee undergraduate success, as university educators, admissions officers and coaches know all too well.

So, the University Times recently asked almost two dozen Pitt faculty members who teach large numbers of freshmen: Are you seeing intellectually sharper, better-prepared undergraduates in your courses?

Yes, most of those interviewed said, although a few expressed reservations.

Representing a cross section of disciplines in the arts and sciences as well as the College of Business Administration and the schools of engineering and nursing, most of the faculty members said that, on the whole, undergraduates in their classes these days write, reason, argue, perceive, calculate — and, in many cases, study — better than Pitt undergrads of a decade ago.

A few profs said they’ve seen marked improvements in the average Pitt student’s academic preparation and performance even in the last several years.

While the opinions of 21 faculty members aren’t conclusive at a university of Pitt’s size,  the following comments do support, anecdotally, claims that undergraduate quality is on the rise at Pitt.

Fittingly, mathematics professors John Chaddam and Thomas Metzger used addition and subtraction to back up their shared opinion that recent crops of freshmen have been coming to Pitt with stronger math skills.

“What we’re seeing is that more incoming students are opting to start at a higher level of math courses than in the past,” said Chaddam, who chairs the math department. “More freshmen are enrolling in Calculus 1 or higher. At the same time, the number of students taking pre-calculus, preparatory courses is going down.

“My feeling, and I would say the feeling generally among our faculty, is that Pitt students’ math skills today are better than they were five or 10 years ago.”

Enrollments in the two most basic courses that meet the math requirement for School of Arts and Sciences (A&S) undergraduates — College Algebra and Applied College Algebra — are 56 and 94 students this term, respectively.

“Five years ago, we were enrolling more like 200 students per term in Applied College Algebra alone,” said Metzger, the math department’s director of undergraduate studies.

More and more freshmen are coming to Pitt having already earned credit for Calculus 1, Metzger said. “We’ve been seeing a good-sized increase in the number of students jumping right into Calculus 2 and Calculus 3.”

As for Pitt students who major in math, Metzger said Pitt’s Honors College “has done an amazing job of bringing in excellent students in all kinds of majors, but math has been exceptionally blessed.”

He noted that Pitt senior Cynthia Kinnan, the University’s most recent Marshall Scholar (she’s currently attending the London School of Economics) is double-majoring in math and economics. Other Pitt math undergrads recently presented research papers at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, and department graduates have gone on to do doctoral work in elite math departments such as Princeton’s, said Metzger.

“We’ve had great students in the past, but I think we’re getting even more of them today,” he said. “Instead of the one or two really brilliant students you might have gotten in an upper-level math course here say, five years ago, today you’ll see six or seven. That gives you a critical mass that can raise the whole level of the class.”

Stephen Carr, an associate professor of English, said he’s seen the same phenomenon in Pitt upper-level literature courses. “We’ve always had some wonderful students here, but I think we’re getting more and more of the very best students,” he said. “Instead of one or two really excellent students in an upper-level class, you’ll get five or six these days.”

As for incoming students, Carr said: “The freshmen we’re seeing in our department have done a lot more writing in high school. They’re more interested in working on their writing, not just because it’s a requirement but because they actually want to become better writers.

“Overall, I would say that today’s freshmen are better writers than freshmen of five or 10 years ago,” said Carr, who teaches Seminar in Composition (freshman writing) and Introduction to Critical Reading (the first course for English majors and also a writing-intensive “W” course taken by freshmen and sophomores from other departments).

James Seitz, director of composition in the English department, said he’s discussed student quality with numerous colleagues who teach freshman composition courses regularly. “Without exception, everybody has said that they’ve seen a striking improvement in recent years,” Seitz said. “And I say that as somebody who normally would be skeptical about upper-administration claims that we’re going to be seeing stronger students just because of improvements in SAT scores.

“I don’t know that SAT scores make much of a difference in student quality,” Seitz said, “although the fact that we’re getting more students who graduated in the upper quintile of their high school classes probably illustrates that these students worked hard in high school and probably did better in their high school English classes than students who enrolled here in the past.”

Nearly all A&S undergrads take the English department’s freshman composition course; earning an exemption requires a score of 600 on the SAT’s verbal section as well as a 5 (the highest score) on an English advanced placement test. “So, we’re seeing freshmen from all kinds of [A&S] majors,” Seitz pointed out. Most of these freshmen come to Pitt having already mastered basic writing skills such as producing well-constructed, 3-page essays, he said.

“In the past,” Seitz said, “many of us would have seen it as a primary obligation to get freshmen up to speed on elementary things. But today, most freshmen come here with the basics down and they’re ready to make the leap to more advanced forms of academic literacy.

“Now, that doesn’t mean that you won’t have two or three students in any class of 19 [the enrollment limit for freshman composition] who are struggling, whom you send to the Writing Center for extra tutorial help, whom you meet with in your office to go over basic things. But even as recently as several years ago, you typically might have seen 8-to-10 students like that,” said Seitz.

Chemistry professor Peter E. Siska, who teaches a general chemistry course for Honors College students, said: “I think the number of students who are really very well qualified to do honors-level work in chemistry has been going up.

“My class closes at 80 students and I’ve been getting close to that in recent years” whereas previous years’ enrollments were considerably lower, said Siska, who was a 2003 winner of A&S’s Tina and David Bellet Teaching Excellence award. (The other winner was Seitz.)

A faculty member here for the last 33 years, Siska said one of the biggest changes he’s seen among Pitt’s undergraduate population is the increase in out-of-state students. “I think this has had a ‘cosmopolitan-izing’ effect on western Pennsylvania students and a great effect on out-of-classroom activities, in the lab and just in social interactions among my students,” he said.

The percentage of non-Pennsylvanians among Pitt freshman classes increased from 4 percent in the mid-1970s, to 19 percent in fall 1995, to 21 percent last fall.

“A lot more students seem to be looking at Pitt as a desirable place to come, even if they’re not from Pennsylvania and have to pay the higher out-of-state tuition,” Siska added. “I was just talking the other day with a young woman who had to choose between coming here and accepting an offer from an Ivy League school. She ended up enrolling at Pitt. Partly, it was an economic decision — our out-of-state tuition is still less expensive than what you’d pay at an Ivy League school — but she’s happy to be here.”

Economics professor David DeJong said “the higher quality of students is certainly showing up” in his upper-level, writing-intensive Theory of Economic Growth course. “I’ve received some amazing essays in this class. It’s struck me, reading these papers: ‘Boy, I could never have written anything this high-quality when I was an undergraduate.’”

DeJong also said he’s spending less time bringing students up to speed on math needed for the course. “That means I can cover more material and spend more time talking about economics, which is what I want to be talking about.”

He added: “It’s readily apparent, just from casual conversations I’ve had with other faculty members in my department, that my colleagues are seeing the same thing” in terms of improved student quality.

“Students today just seem to be more on top of things,” concurred Shirley Cassing, the economics department’s associate chairperson for undergraduate studies. She teaches Introduction to Microeconomics among other freshmen-dominated intro courses.

“I’m finding that I get fewer lame excuses from students for not taking exams, for example. You tell students what they need to do and they end up doing it and showing up for class. They seem to have a different attitude and show more initiative, even compared with students from five years ago.

“I get the sense that other economics faculty feel the same way,” Cassing said.

John Beverley, chairperson of Hispanic languages and literatures — Pitt’s largest foreign language department — cited a “pretty dramatic” improvement in the department’s majors since the 1980s but noted: “Assessing the quality of students in our beginning language classes is more complicated because they’re required courses, and students who enroll in them don’t always have the highest motivation.”

Hispanic’s coordinator of undergraduate language instruction, Beatrice DeAngelis, said the anecdotal feedback she’s gotten from the department’s teaching assistants has been mixed. “Some TAs rave about their students. Some complain about their students. I’m sorry to say this, but I think there’s a lot of grade inflation going on at the lower levels, so grades alone aren’t indicative of how well the students are doing” compared with previous years’ students.

The Hispanic department is working hard to curb grade inflation, she added.

“In physics, we are seeing improvements in student performance. There is no doubt about that,” stated Chandralekha Singh, a senior lecturer who has won Pitt’s highest teaching honor, the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

“I’m not certain, though, exactly what these improvements should be attributed to,” she said. “It seems that students’ preparation in high school is getting better, and that must factor in. But then, I myself have been using more and more innovative strategies and methods in trying to help my students do better, so that may also be affecting their performance.”

In his honors physics course, populated mainly by freshman engineering students, University Honors College Dean G. Alec Stewart said he’s seeing “increasingly sophisticated academic backgrounds among these students, which leads them to ask increasingly probing questions.

“The combination of ability and intellectual curiosity is increasingly characteristic of Pitt undergraduates,” Stewart declared. “I know there are a lot of really satisfied Pitt faculty out there who are enjoying being stimulated by students willing to engage them in serious discourse  — basically, picking a fight with them, intellectually.”

Two other professors said they’re seeing some better-prepared undergrads, but that Pitt still admits plenty of students who aren’t ready for college.

“Am I seeing an improvement in student quality?” said physics professor Peter Koehler. “It depends on which of my three courses you’re talking about.”

Koehler teaches a course for freshman engineering students, a general introductory course for non-science majors, and an introductory sequence for pre-med students as well as majors from biological sciences, chemistry and some Health Sciences schools.

“I certainly have encountered some very good students in all of those courses,” Koehler said. “Unfortunately, I’ve also encountered students from the other end of the spectrum. Has the average improved? I think so, although it’s not something that blows you away.

“Certainly, the exceptional students are really exceptional; they’re wonderful. The problem is, the best students get pulled out into Honors College courses. I feel that particularly in my course for engineering students. Alec Stewart is fortunate in getting some 30 or 40 engineering students from the top of the group” to enroll in his honors course for engineers. “Those of us who teach the rest of them wish we had those 30 or 40 students in our classes.”

Koehler attributed his less-successful students’ problems not to a lack of intelligence but, rather, to poor study habits, inadequate math skills and a misunderstanding of the nature of physics. “It has to do with the generally poor state of science education in the high schools,” he said. “Students come to us with the wrong impression that physics is a field where you get a formula, you plug in numbers and you come out with an answer. When we say to these students: ‘In physics, you develop equations from general principles, these are the general principles and now you’re going to have to think’…the students are overwhelmed.”

Koehler, the immediate past dean of Pitt’s School of Arts and Sciences, said he finds that some freshmen just aren’t ready for university life. “An SAT score is not necessarily a good measure of whether students can study or handle the workload that is thrown at them as freshmen,” he pointed out.

“I spend a lot of time meeting with students in my office, and much of the discussion is about how to study, how to get organized and how much time students should devote per week to each course. Some kids just need that kind of parent-like advice — not that they would take it from their own parents, of course,” Koehler said with a laugh. “I know that from having raised kids myself. But when someone else tells them, they tend to listen.

“It’s extremely rewarding when some of these kids really catch fire and then come back and tell you about their successes later in their academic careers.”

Like Koehler, biological sciences professor Iain Campbell said he regularly encounters freshmen who didn’t receive adequate science teaching or mentoring in high school.

“I am completely convinced that academic achievement is catalyzed by committed mentors — good teachers, in other words,” said Campbell, who volunteers to tutor undergrads at his department’s Help Desk in the Cathedral of Learning’s Commons Room.

“Help Desk sessions later in the evening tend to get a wee bit more philosophical and I often ask students, ‘What turned you on to pursue a certain intellectual interest?’ The answer invariably is: A person. Someone who told them something like ‘Go read this book,’ and that book made an impact on their lives.

“When you get freshmen who had at least one really inspiring teacher in high school, those are the kids who have the flame burning already and you can run with it. But I suspect that many of the students coming to Pitt now with great SAT scores never really encountered a great teacher while in high school. In fact, I’ve talked with a lot of disgruntled students who left high school without much respect for any of their teachers.”

Campbell said he’s seen an improvement in academic quality among Pitt undergrads in the last decade “but I wouldn’t say it’s been a major improvement,” he added. Looking back over his 40 years of teaching here, Campbell concluded: “I’ve no documentation to prove this, but I don’t think there has been a significant change in the intellectual caliber of undergraduates here.”

One thing that has increased dramatically, Campbell noted, is the proportion of Pitt undergraduates working one or more outside jobs, even full-time jobs — consistent with another national trend. “On top of this, undergraduates today are pursuing internships and research opportunities that didn’t exist for previous generations of students,” he said.

“I don’t know that I could have coped with that kind of workload back in the 1950s when I was an undergraduate.” In his native Scotland back then, the only time that university students were supposed to have jobs was during summer breaks, Campbell recalled.

The biological sciences professor lamented what he described as “a decrease in the intellectual breadth of entering students. This is not a Pitt-specific thing; I think it’s true nationwide. Even 10 years ago, I could easily use analogies culled from Shakespeare or some non-science area in teaching my biology or biochemistry courses, but not anymore. A lot of the students today wouldn’t understand what I was talking about.”

Having helped to coach Pitt Marshall and Rhodes scholars, Campbell has first-hand experience with what he calls “the really intellectually engaged and prepared” students that the University is enrolling in growing numbers.

“But that’s still such a small fraction of the undergraduate population,” he noted. “At the other extreme, I’ve had some really ‘iffy’ students in the freshman studies courses I’ve taught over the last 20 years,” Campbell said. “I don’t think the proportion has changed all that much.

“When I say ‘iffy,’ I’m not talking about students who are shy or under-prepared,” he explained. “Essentially, I’m talking about students who don’t have an awful lot to say about anything, who seem to be very shallow vessels. I never call into question a vessel that is deep but empty because I know we can fill it. It’s the shallow ones who worry me. And I’m afraid we’re still getting a lot of very shallow vessels at this University.”

—Bruce Steele