I teach a science course at a PUG. 20% of my students will not even attempt to answer short answer questions on exams. I don't believe they know how to write.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Collapse
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what is PUG?
Primarily UnderGraduate. We have some masters and doctoral programs but no medical or law school and no animal research. It's larger and more comprehensive than a SLAC - Small Liberal Arts College. The next step up is either a comprehensive or research university depending on your country.
As someone who arrogantly assumes that I'd be in the 5% that had a "detailed, literal understanding of the first paragraphs of Bleak House" since I achieved a 36 on my Reading ACT many years ago (and yes, I feel like a loser even writing that), I'll give a tiny defense of at least some of these participants and their results.
The study says that:
Students read each sentence out loud and then interpreted the meaning in their own words—a process Ericsson and Simon (220) called the “think-aloud” or “talk-aloud” method.
I feel like that, in combination with the potential stress of the situation, might lead to really stupid sounding answers, like some of those quoted in the article. I personally tested myself using the "mud" example, and while I think I gave a passable initial answer, a verbal answer that accurately matches and translates the original text on a sentence-by-sentence basis is fairly difficult to construct verbally for me, at least within the first pass. That job of translating the text into modern English is difficult, and is a synthesis of information that requires far more cognitive reasoning than just understanding the text. Give me a pen and paper, and I think I could do a far, far better job, and I would assume the same of a lot of the participants.
Additionally, many of the words and phrases in those samples are very archaic. Participants were allowed to search up definitions, which would definitely help to clarify those archaic terms, but again, I'll note that this seems like a stressful test, and participants may feel like they're being negatively judged for even looking up terms like that. One of the examples highlighted by the article could even be interpreted as showing exactly that:
And I don’t know exactly what “Lord Chancellor” is—some a person of authority, so that’s probably what I would go with. “Sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall,” which would be like a maybe like a hotel or something so [Ten-second pause. The student is clicking on her phone and breathing heavily.] O.K., so “Michaelmas Term is the first academic term of the year,” so, Lincoln’s Inn Hall is probably not a hotel [Laughs].
[Sixteen seconds of breathing, chair creaking. Then she whispers, I’m just gonna skip that.]
The article uncharitably attributes her behavior to "the cognitive load of reading these archaic terms and complex sentences," but I don't know, that just seems like plain test-related stress to me.
many of the words and phrases in those samples are veryarchaic
Some even come with scientific baggage from that era.
The dinosaur, in particular -- during that era, it was believed that most of the great sauropods were too large to exist unencumbered upon land; that they had to be partially or fully aquatic in order for buoyancy to permit them to actually stand on their legs. Plus, most ambulatory references were made to modern lizards and reptiles, the majority of whom walk with legs out to the side instead of directly underneath the body like most mammalian quadrupeds. So the characterization of the dinosaur’s shambling gait was a mischaracterization that arose from assumptions and insufficient data.
Dickens is not difficult and none of those passages need translation. It's just plain modern English
I mean, the study itself seems to disagree with that sentiment:
A principal concern for us was to test whether the subjects had reached a level of “proficient-prose literacy,” which is defined by the U. S. Department of Education as the capability of “reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences” (National Center 3). According to ACT, Inc., this level of literacy translates to a 33–36 score on the Reading Comprehension section of the ACT (Reading). Literary prose can be even more difficult to comprehend because it requires the ability to interpret unfamiliar diction [End Page 2] and figures of speech. Dickens’ novel worked we [sic] as an example of literary prose because his writing contains frequent complex sentences and language that often moves from the literal to the figurative. In Bleak House, Dickens also mixes specific, contemporary references (from the book’s first publication in 1852–3) to his 1820s setting.
I get it, I read that too. Maybe my opinion shouldn't count for much.
I hated the gatekeeping and “wash-em-out” attitudes of MA and PhD English programs so much, but maybe now after ChatGPT and a couple years of hybrid learning it’ll serve its purpose more fairly.
Back in the early 1980s, one of my friends was taking a high school English class where they had to read Bleak House. He was not much of a reader, and there was no way he was going to read 1100 pages.
I asked him questions about the book, the basic plot structure and the characters, then I wrote an essay for him including the kind of mistakes that I thought he would make.
He got about the mark that he was expecting, and paid me 20 bucks or something.
hah , i did some girls college homework paper in like 20 minutes the other day then put it in AI and told it to rewrite it as a C student paper so she wouldn't get in trouble. lol