Accoring to a new study High School Survey of Student Engagement, high school students just aren’t doing too much work. The study shows that 55% of all high school students don’t spend any more than 3 hours a week in preparation for their courses. However 65% of all kids say that they have grades of “A” or “B”.
However, the report, titled Getting Students Ready for College states that freshmen college students spend twice as much time preparing for classes than high school seniors do. That sounds impressive, unless you consider it is only a few more hours than the high school students prepare. What’s more, college students attend about 10 hours less in classrooms than their high school students counterparts.
I certainly believe that we could make the students work harder to earn the “A”s and “B”s that they say they are getting. But if the colleges and universities don’t become more selective about who they admit, what incentive is there for students in high school to work hard?
For what it is worth, I found the article from a link to the USA Today newspaper. The title of the article is “Survey: High school fails to engage students”. Apparently it is our fault for not making quadratics more sexy.