Students need more of a challenge

A new wave of freshmen enter the ranks at UNF every fall, their experience in high school quickly washed away in the wake of financial aid, registration and college coursework.

In many cases, the 12 years of grade school education is in preparation for a college career, but recent studies show many students have no idea what is expected of them when entering college.

Diploma to Nowhere, the report released this year by Strong American Schools made a shocking statement.

According to SAS, 70 percent of all eighth grade students are not proficient in reading, and most will never catch up.

In Florida, that is the last year of middle school, so a grand majority of students are not reading at a competent level by the time they are starting to make collegiate considerations.

The findings even reflect the students with promising futures. One-third of all incoming college freshmen are expected to take remedial coursework, and the survey found four of five remedial students had a high school GPA of 3.0 or above. These are students who considered themselves to be hard-working in high school.

Few college remedial students found their high school coursework to be challenging, and nearly half of them would have preferred harder classes to better prepare them for college, according to the report.

In Florida, the figures give testament to the true exclusivity of those students who can tough the four to six years it takes to graduate with a bachelor’s degree.

In 2005, the Florida high school graduation rate was 61 percent, and of those, the college enrollment and graduation rates were 54 percent and 59 percent, respectively.

At UNF, these shortcomings translate into denied admissions based on placement test scores and GPA, usually until the student completes remedial math coursework.

Unfortunately, UNF does not offer remedial English courses, and in the 2007-2008 school year, 1,423 students were denied admission because of these reasons, according to the Office of Institutional Research.

That’s quite a figure considering the average number of students denied admission based on this same criterion for the seven years before that was 504.

And while state legislatures argue about standardized testing and the almighty No Child Left Behind reformation, they haven’t seemed to grasp the simple notion that reading and writing skills are the keys to building intelligent critical thinkers.

High school is not the time to be learning English fundamentals, and to think college professors need to teach basic grammar and sentence structure is absurd.

And it’s costing the nation more than nearly $3 billion to fund remedial courses: Students are being cheated out of their futures.

And with the current economic conditions, our nation has to confidently rely on educated leaders to bring the U.S. back to a satisfactory level of progress.

College level coursework and standard procedures should be applied in the high school classrooms.

Being babied week-by-week won’t prepare students for the rigors associated with a binding contractual syllabus or the intense grading systems.

Let’s give our students more of what they need – a true challenge.