Is online college easier now?

[Vle045]

It really depends on the student and on the class. My ex's in-person college work in the 90s from what I remember seemed much more rigorous than anything I've experienced in the modern erea.

My high school teachers always gaslit us with horror stories about how hard college supposedly was and how we were not nearly prepared for the amount of work it would take to even pass English Lit 101. "You'll have to read Chaucer for 6 hours every day just to make a B! You have NO IDEA what you're in store for!"

I've taken probably 15 credit hours worth of lit. I hold an English degree. Never had to reach Chaucer once. To this day I don't know if they were just gassing us up or if the rigor of my HS teachers really was significantly harder back in their day. The truth may be somewhere in the middle.

But I remember high school being more actual writing/homework/labor than any college class I've taken. My significant other did undergrad before there was such a thing as Google Docs and was FURIOUS that I could just write into an APA or MLA template and not have to manually set the margins, fiddle with other formatting at all, and can just use bibliography citation generator plugins. All of which they had to do manually in Microsoft Word at the time they were in community college.

I suspect think in the really broad, high-level view, college education has probably gotten significantly less rigorous over the last several decades.

Thank you for sharing.  This is kind of where my head was at. My son’s high school is insane with some of their policies.  They get zero credit for late work.  My son has ADHD. They will not provide any grace.  They say they are preparing kids for college. So multiple due dates for multiple classes is hard for him. You’d think planners would help, but for him that’s like another assignment.  (Drives me nuts).  His grades are all over the place and don’t reflect his ability. That HS English class you describe would be like torture for him. But I feel like he still has options.

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These are two subjects that I can talk about. I earned a Bachelors of Music in the early 00s and I wished online education was as popular back then as it is today. The university where I earned my BM, as it was learned latter, we had several misandrist professors who radically changed students grades based on their sex. I recall the one student who sat next to me, we were perplexed as to why she would get more exam questions incorrect than I, but still managed to "earn" a higher grade than I. At that time, I never knew I would encounter professors who were bigots.

I'm currently pursuing two online graduate degrees at the moment - one in aeronautical and the other in electrical engineering. I found that grade inflation is far more rampant with on campus schooling simply because not everything is monitored unlike online education. Even in public school grade manipulation is rampant. A friend teaches in a NJ school district and she showed me the grade schedule they are to use. The schedule is based on the pupil's race and sex. For instance in her school district white male grades need to be multiplied by 0.8 while black females grades are multiplied by 1.65.

In regards to difficulty, that comes down to the subject and the student. For instance, I'm doing really well in school. But that's because I spent 7 years of my life studying the aforementioned subjects on my own time. There is one exception to this, my one professor just can't communicate rendering many of his recorded lectures pointless. He's a brilliant man, but the two skills one needs to teach include 1) knowing the subject and 2) being able to communicate. This particular course I speak of, because of his inability to communicate it has many of us students to seek out other knowledgeable people who can communicate on this one particular subject.

Hahahaha this is fake af. Nobody does grade multipliers to reduce white peoples grades and increase black peoples grades. This isn’t real.


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Joe

I agree. There’s no way.  Teachers don’t even grade fully by hand anymore.  It’s all put into a program like GradeBook (part of a suite by ProgressBook).  Assignments have a rubric and point value.  The points translate to grades based on the percentage.  An administrator sets up the grading scale for what constitutes an A, A-,B+, etc.  It’s  applied to the entire school.  I can say this with confidence because I have had access to this area of the program and verified that it was correct each school year.  I also ran our honor roll and merit roll lists and had to set up the algorithms for those. (For instance Merit roll was a certain GPA plus no more than one C and the C couldn’t be in Math or English)  

If that story were real, someone would be in serious trouble.