Friday, August 19, 2005

Ready or not

From a New York Times article, "Many Going to College Are Not Ready, Report Says":

Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.

The report, based on scores of the 2005 high school graduates who took the exam, some 1.2 million students in all, also found that fewer than one in four met the college-readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested: reading comprehension, English, math and science.

"It is very likely that hundreds of thousands of students will have a disconnect between their plans for college and the cold reality of their readiness for college," Richard L. Ferguson, chief executive of ACT, said in an online news conference yesterday.
And what happens when a student experiences the disconnect? Disbelief, indignation, and complaints that "This teacher cannot teach."

[Use mediajunkie as your name and password to read the Times online.]

comments: 1

Anonymous said...

I worked as an English tutor in my community college for 3 years, and it never ceased to amaze me how many students could not form a complete sentence. They think that if there are numerous words in a phrase that it is a sentence because of the amount of words; I told them that a sentence only needs two words--a subject and a verb. They always seem surprised, then asked. "What is a verb?"