College ruins learning. It takes a beautiful and exciting thing and destroys it. Learning should be beautiful, exciting and engaging. If learning was all that it could be, children would be motivated and would be more willing to make an effort in school.
College made me hate learning. I spent four years of my life busting my butt, and getting a pretty good GPA to be denied by four out of the five graduate schools I applied to, and still not knowing about the last one. Nothing kills motivation for continuing school successfully than seeing all your hard work go to waste. It sucked.
A typical college student is likely stressed out, overwhelmed, burnt out and exhausted. Yes, they chose their class schedules. Yes, they know how many credits they decided to take. YES, they take other classes taught by, surprise, different professors.
Giving students assignments, papers, presentations and quizzes the last week before finals is insane. Jamming everything that needed fit in before the end of a term is awful. Students do not learn when they cram. You learn that in educational psychology, right before the professor tells you about a quiz, a paper you could write for extra credit, and a homework assignment that are all due next week. It's hypocritical. It's inefficient.
Having one to two large tests define an overall grade for a course is not a correct judgement of knowledge. Tests are not an acceptable way to define someone's intelligence to begin with. Of course, there are always those douchey professors who put everything on the test that you didn't really study. This can be partially due to the fact that there was an insane amount of information being covered by one test, or because what you studied happened to be the most discussed. It would make sense to test students on topics that you thoroughly talked about the most, right? Wrong.
Lectures are the bane of a student's existence. If you want students to learn something, engage them. Get them to participate in the discussions, don't just read off a PowerPoint too fast for anyone to even write anything down. Teach students how to build things, how to actually do what you're teaching them, and how to make a difference while learning. Students can barely sit still or hold attention to begin with, let alone listen to someone talk on and on about a topic for over an hour.
No, students should not be handed an A for their efforts. Yes, educators should be fair. A GPA defines what you do with your life, and quite frankly I think society is wrong on this point. As a student, a GPA defines how well you applied yourself for every course you've taken throughout college. That out of a major gen-ed requirement that you never understood? Yep, that will affect your GPA.
Instead of defining students by their GPA, maybe we should try something else. Let's say, define the student by their understanding of the topic. How well can they teach someone else the same thing they just learned themselves? How many activities are they involved in, do they have a leadership position? Students are so much more than a calculated averaged number. It's time we act like it and teach them as such.
