University Times

Student quality also is on the rise — with some exceptions — in Pitt professional schools that admit freshmen, according to faculty at the College of Business Administration (CBA) and the schools of engineering and nursing.

Business Administration

Robert Atkin has taught the introductory course Management in Complex Environments since CBA opened in fall 1995. A lecture and recitation course with a required final team project, it still covers basic concepts, tools and skills needed in the business world, said Atkin, but the course content is vastly more complicated today than nine years ago.

Part of that is due to globalization and the rapidly expanding discipline of management, he said. But another reason the course has been toughened, Atkin said, is that CBA students today are smarter and can handle the added challenge.

“When the CBA first opened, there was a boom of students. Honestly, many of them thought that if they could do two out of three among walk, talk and breathe, they could land a good job,” said Atkin, an associate professor of business administration who has been on the Katz Graduate School of Business faculty since 1987. He teaches MBA students as well as CBA freshmen.

Today’s CBA students “know they have to work, and they are motivated to work,” Atkin said. “And that’s new. Their basic knowledge of business is generally better, and they have some modest knowledge of what’s going on in the world.”

Atkin wrote the textbook that accompanies his intro course. “As the result of having smarter students, I have to continually increase the difficulty of the course to keep them from being bored and all getting A’s. This includes adding conceptual depth — agency theory, the asymmetry of information, advanced marketing, economy break-ups — fairly sophisticated topics. I have to add about 15 percent to my textbook every year,” he estimated.

As indicators of higher quality in CBA, Atkin cited an increase in students who take courses above required levels, improved computer skills and anecdotal feedback from colleagues and former students.

“I’d say about 12-15 percent of CBA freshmen [out of approximately 280] are taking higher-level math courses than they have to. It used to be we’d get maybe 2 percent of students who would do that,” Atkin said. “And it’s more than thinking ahead to graduate school, because this is a higher level than they need even for graduate business degrees. We also have a good number of students enrolled in honors economics and honors courses in general.”

While computer literacy among CBA students has increased dramatically over the years, this is a double-edged sword, according to Atkin. “Students think they can download anything and present it without attribution, and they think that everything they find is factual,” he said. “So, we have to teach them about inconsistencies of data.”

Feedback from former students who return to CBA to recruit for their companies indicates that today’s student cohort “is not only much better prepared for the world of business, but also much more serious than [the former students] themselves were just a few years ago,” Atkin added. “I think business students are and have always been job-focused, but now they’re willing to work harder for that job and work harder in that job. I’m not sure what to attribute that to, but it’s noticeable.”

Teamwork skills are improving among entering freshmen, particularly women, Atkin said. “More women are going into business and they’re coming to us with as much or more team-based background, whether it’s from competing on athletic teams or other high school activities. They’re remarkably well-equipped for teamwork, often better than the men students.”

Unfortunately, writing and analytical skills continue to be poor among CBA freshmen, according to Atkin.

“Let’s put it this way: The best students write well, but the average students do not write well,” he said. “I also think that, no matter how strong the secondary education, critical thinking is not something they come to us with, so we really have to teach that almost from scratch.”

Engineering

The strongest indicator of rising quality among School of Engineering undergraduates is that the school is working to establish a flexible, interdisciplinary program for its undergrads, modeled after the University Honors College, said Jayant Rajgopal, associate professor of industrial engineering.

“Students who want to do something far out would have the opportunity to explore working across the various departments” through the proposed program, he said. “This new program has been approved by the school, and we’re taking it to the provost [for his approval] very soon.”

In his three years of teaching freshman courses, Rajgopal said he has seen “an incredible range” of educational backgrounds among the school’s incoming undergraduates.

Some freshmen come with very strong computer skills but about 10 percent of them are comparative novices in working with computers, he said. “Similarly, in math preparation, which is crucial to engineering, some are very well prepared in calculus and some have had no calculus at all.

“It’s not that they’re any less bright, but many high schools don’t have calculus teachers,” Rajgopal noted. “So I think that one of my biggest challenges teaching freshmen is getting a balance, feeling my way through how to keep the bored students interested while the others can still catch up. Usually, though, by the end of the sophomore year, there is much more equality of math and computer efficiency.”

Rajgopal said Pitt’s engineering school gets two types of freshmen: those ready to work hard, and those who come expecting that an engineering major automatically will lead to a lucrative career. The latter tend to get weeded out quickly, according to Rajgopal, who said he tells his freshman classes: “You’ll be the hardest-working student in your dorm, because this program is very difficult.”

“It doesn’t take long before they believe me,” he said.

Daniel Budny, academic director of the engineering school’s freshman programs, said he and other professors have been seeing better analytic, writing and team-work skills among Pitt engineering freshmen in recent years.

“We’ve adjusted our freshman curriculum to be more sophisticated. We’ve raised the bar, with additional challenges to the student. But despite increased demands, grade point averages have increased, and retention rates are about the same or a little improved” over the past decade, said Budny, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.

“I don’t think you can say that an alum from 10 years ago could not complete our program today. But I think with the improved quality and sophistication, the demands and challenges of the curriculum, you now need students who come in with a strong willingness to work, with strong motivation.

“And I’ve seen students in my classes who also are not afraid to fail; they’ll take on a task even when they know they can’t complete it. That shows a mature confidence that I’m not sure was there 10 years ago.”

Results of the engineering school’s most recent freshman survey revealed that freshmen averaged almost 22 hours a week of homework, which Budny said at least matches the homework load in any other field.

“It’s kind of the chicken or the egg: As we get better-prepared students graduating, and as we invest in our labs and classrooms, we’re seeing an increase in freshman applicants where Pitt is [the applicants’] first choice. Ten years ago, Pitt might have been down the list, behind Penn State, Carnegie Mellon and others.”

“I can say that the students who enter our freshman program are very bright” — but that has nothing to do with higher SAT scores among incoming Pitt students, said John Patzer II, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, who has been teaching freshmen since 1986.

“SATs reflect how well a number of test-takers did on a particular day, but it says more that their secondary education includes teaching for these tests,” said Patzer, who believes that students drilled to score well on SATs tend to compartmentalize knowledge rather than viewing physics, biology, writing and other disciplines as being part of a comprehensive whole. “Frankly, that is not the type of student we want, the kind of student who is taught well how to take a multiple-guess test without learning how to attack a problem analytically,” he said.

What has really influenced the world-view of today’s students, and made them different from students of a decade ago, is the impact of technology, according to Patzer.

“The widespread use of the computer, the influence of the ‘MTV world,’ competitive video gaming, these are all influences on the way students learn,” Patzer said. “Their attention span has decreased considerably. The students are bright, but our challenge is getting them to use their brightness. How can we properly motivate these students so that they will want to work?”

Unlike Budny, Patzer says writing skills, in particular, are poor among Pitt engineering students, “maybe even poorer than a decade ago.”

Nursing

Compared with Pitt School of Nursing freshmen a decade ago, freshmen at the school today are making more sophisticated intellectual connections between the classroom and hospital — seeking to understand how drugs are designed, for example, and why a knowledge of chemistry is relevant to their future careers, said George Bandik, who every other year teaches a chemistry course for freshman nursing students.

“In no way do I want to put down the kids I was teaching 10 years ago, because they were wonderful students who worked really hard and did what was within their ability to do,” said Bandik, director of undergraduate studies in the chemistry department and an assistant dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. “Back then, nursing students also were coming in with a desire to learn, but the educational system at the time was more about rote memorization. Today, guidance counselors and teachers are telling prospective nursing students: There’s a lot more to nursing than that.”

Bandik said he’s noticed this year, particularly, that Pitt nursing freshmen aren’t content to learn course material just for the sake of passing his course. “Instead of coming here with the attitude, ‘I’m afraid of taking chemistry. I don’t want to be here,’ they’re more likely to say, ‘Tell me how it relates to nursing.’ They’re asking hard-core questions: Why are certain drugs designed the way they are? How do certain properties of a drug affect its ability to cross a cell membrane?”

Bandik said his students don’t complain about coming to class at 8 a.m. for a four-hour chemistry lab that has no direct connection with health care. “Another noticeable difference over the last several years is that a lot more students come to the voluntary recitation sessions that I hold” after class on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, said Bandik. “Sometimes, out of a class of 150 freshman nursing students, 70 will come to these sessions for an additional hour, to continue discussing course material.”

Jake Dechant, who teaches anatomy and physiology courses to nursing school freshmen, said he’s been adding material to his courses as students demonstrate that they can absorb more. “Among other things, I was making them learn all of the bones of the body. Their reaction was just, ‘Okay,’ and they memorized that information, so I went ahead and started teaching in-depth about the physiology of how bone develops. They absorbed all of that information, too.”

With increasing frequency, Dechant said, a nursing student will ask him a question in the middle of class “that just stops me dead, it’s so insightful. I really have to stop and think of how to answer. You think students are dozing off or not paying attention, and suddenly one of them comes out with something like that….”

Last fall, Pitt’s nursing school received 800 applications for 100 freshmen slots, said Associate Dean Susan Albrecht. The average, combined SAT score among admitted freshmen was 1165, up from 1109 the year before; 75 percent graduated in the top 20 percent of their high school classes, up from 66 percent the year before.

“Susan and I have been nurses for a long time,” said Jacqueline Lever, the nursing school’s executive director of student services. “We know that part of the reason the school is getting more applications and student quality is improving is market-driven. With today’s nursing shortage and Pitt’s growing reputation, our graduates can work anywhere in the country and make nice money.” As upperclassmen, most Pitt nursing students take advantage of career opportunities within the UPMC or the city’s other health care systems. “And these systems will accommodate [the students’] academic schedules — letting them work four-hour shifts instead of eight-hour shifts, for example — in the hope of recruiting them after they graduate.”

But the school’s increasing selectivity and student quality also can be attributed to better preparation by students and the changing image of nurses, she and Albrecht agreed.

“We’re been working very hard over the last 10 years to get the word out to guidance counselors, parents and prospective students that if you want to be accepted into Pitt’s baccalaureate program, you need to be taking strong academic courses in high school such as advanced chemistry and biology,” said Lever.

Albrecht noted that nurses today are earning greater respect as health care professionals and critical thinkers. “Today, when a patient’s blood pressure changes or the pulse shoots up, nurses aren’t just running and calling for a physician. They’re expected to make decisions and take appropriate action themselves,” Albrecht said.

Dechant commented: “I think today we’re getting a number of students who, in years past, would have enrolled in majors like pre-med. My students know that nursing isn’t just about changing bedpans or whatever. They know that if they enroll here, they can explore various career options including advanced practice.

“I see it in the way they apply themselves to their studies,” Dechant continued. “They’re coming here because they want to be nurses, not because they couldn’t pass Calculus 2 and so they settled on nursing because they couldn’t get into a pre-med program. I don’t see our students bowing down anymore to that idea that the physician is the almighty position to aspire to.”

The last word on Pitt’s increasing selectivity goes to Dechant, who earned a B.A. degree in anthropology and a master’s degree in biological anthropology at Pitt, and is working on a Ph.D. in epidemiology at the Graduate School of Public Health. His wife, also a Pitt graduate, is starting a doctoral program here, too.

“The other night, my wife said to me: ‘Do you realize that, with our SAT scores and class ranks, we wouldn’t even be looked at by Pitt today if we were applying right out of high school?’ Dechant recounted, with a chuckle.

“It was kind of uncomfortable to acknowledge, but it’s true.”

— Bruce Steele and Peter Hart