During my college workshop at the University of California, San Diego, on Saturday, I asked the parents in attendance this question:

What percentage of high school seniors do you think got accepted into their No. 1 college last year?

One dad blurted out, “Six percent.” From the other side of the room, a mom provided this answer: “Two percent?”

I was surprised by the low-ball answers, but it certainly illustrates something that is not surprising at all — families are stressed about college.  I had no idea, however, that some parents are that pessimistic about their teenagers getting into good schools.

The actual percentage of students who manage to get into their top choice is actually quite high at 76%. The number of students who received acceptance letters from their first choice school did decline from 78.9% in 2010, but it’s still represents great odds.

These figures come from the latest annual study from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute that has been surveying college freshmen, who attend four-year institutions, since 1966. UCLA surveys more than 204,000 freshmen, which when adjusted statistically reflects the responses of 1.5 million full-time freshman.

 College Freshman Facts

I thought I’d share with you some of the fascinating facts about this year’s college freshmen.

 Freshmen are self confident.

While American teenagers perform poorly on math and other standardized tests compared with students from plenty of other countries, the Yanks excel in self confidence and that comes through in the latest survey. Nearly half of freshman believe they are either in the top 10% or above average in their academic ability.

It’s understandable that so many teenagers think they are hot stuff academically because of the number who graduate from high school with inflated grade points averages! Here are the UCLA stats:

Interestingly enough, 25% of college freshman thought they would need tutoring or remedial work in math.

Students seem to be taking high school a bit more seriously.

High school seniors spent less time partying, more time studying and tackled more Advanced Placement courses.

Freshman stay within two hours away from home.

Freshmen continue to stay close to home for college. While there are plenty of  students who don’t have the maturity or the money to attend a distant school, far more should be considering this alternative. The number of students attending school 500 or more miles away actually dropped this year from 15.5% to 14%.

Here are some blog posts that I’ve written in the past about the admission advantage you can capture by casting a wider net when looking at colleges:

Where Most Students End Up Attending College

Where Are the Freshman Coming From?

University Reveals the Secrets of Winning Merit Scholarships

 Teenagers aren’t applying to as many schools as you may think.

Twenty one percent of last year’s high school seniors applied to seven or more schools, but an equal number applied to only one or two.

 Freshman are becoming increasingly liberal on social issues.

An unprecedented 71.3% of freshmen indicated that same-sex couples should have the right to marry, which is a 6.4 percentage point increase over the response that freshmen gave in 2009. Support for same-sex marriage was 99.3% among liberal, but even many conservatives (42.8%) approve.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and She also writes a college blog for  CBSMoneyWatch and US News. Follow her on Twitter.

With crazy amounts of psychic energy being spent on getting teenagers into college, too many students and their parents think getting admitted is the hard part of the college process.  Actually, it’s not. Squeezing as much value out of the college experience once you’re a student is far more important.

Unfortunately, however,  many students are graduating from college without learning much. From a parent’s perspective that’s a lot of wasted money. And, of course, there are serious ramifications for students who have spent their college years living in a Bud Lite commercial.

Here are a pair of  college blog posts that I’ve written in the past about this problem:

Do Undergrads Learn Much in College?

Expecting More Out of College Students

Today I’m  sharing with you a professor’s thoughtful column in The Chronicle of Higher Education that attempts to explain why so many college students seem impervious to learning. While professors should certainly take some of the blame for student underachievement, William Pannapacker, an associate English professor at Hope College in Michigan, explains the harsh realities of educating undergrads in the 21st century.  You can read his column here:

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I

I am sharing just three of Pannapacker’s observations:

1. Many students are poorly prepared academically when they arrive in college. With rampant grade inflation, earning “A’s” in high school doesn’t guarantee success in college.

2. Untenured professors don’t want to grade too hard or challenge students too much because they might receive poor students evaluations which could hurt their prospects for tenure. Here is an excerpt of what Pannapacker said:

The common wisdom, for the untenured, at least—whether it is true or not—is to find ways to keep the students happy: Expect little, smile a lot, gesture freely, show movies, praise them constantly, give high marks, bring cookies on evaluation day.

3. Demoralized professors. Professors believe they are unappreciated by non-academics and they are discouraged that they make far less than Americans with comparable educations.

What I found curious is that Pannapacker didn’t blame higher ed’s obsession with research as part of this widespread problem.  I wrote about this reality for my college blog for CBS MoneyWatch a year ago:

Why Don’t Professors Like To Teach?

My Son’s Experience

Make sure that your high school students are truly prepared for college. I’d suggest that if your child’s GPA is far higher than his or her standardized tests, there is a problem. Consider tutoring or possibly community college classes  if the “A’s” your child are getting  are simply because the high school classes are too easy.

Our family followed that advice. My son’s high school — High Tech High — was philosophically opposed to AP classes, which was fine. The charter school, however, required all the students to take the same math courses. Students who were struggling with math along with those who hoped to eventually major in engineering and math all took the same classes, which had to be watered down. Ben was getting easy “A’s,” but under the circumstances the grades were meaningless.

My husband, son and I considered this arrangement a disaster so Ben trotted off in the evenings to take community college math classes for five semesters. My son could not have hacked advanced math in college without these extra classes. Ben, a college sophomore at Beloit College, recently declared himself to be a math and art major with a physics minor.

Read more:

25 Colleges With the Best Professors

25 Colleges With the Worst Professors

College Where Professors Are Easy Graders

Searching for the True Price of a University

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of a workBook, Shrinking the Cost of College.  Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

What is the best way to ace your final exams?

This is a timely question as millions of high school and college students are taking their final exams.

You might assume that reading textbooks and notes over and over again is the best way to study, but researchers from Purdue and Washington University insist that it’s not the best approach.

Listen Up Test Takers

Here’s a better way to improve test scores:

You should practice retrieving as much information as you can from memory just as you would have to do on test day. You can do this by writing down what you absorbed — without consulting your notes or book — or you can review what you know out loud. And you should do this several times.

Even if you think you know it, the research shows retrieving it about three or four more times can achieve big gains in learning.

What the Experts Say

In contrast, simply reviewing your notes or textbook can provide you a false sense of confidence. In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, here’s what one of the researchers, Jeffrey D. Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue, had to say about this phenomenon:

“When you’ve got your chemistry book in front of you, everything’s right there on the page, it’s all very familiar and fluent,” says Jeffrey D. Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University and lead author of a paper in the May issue of Memory about students’ faulty intuitions about effective study habits.

“So you could say to yourself, ‘Yeah, I know this. Sure, this is all very familiar,’” Mr. Karpicke continues. “But of course, when you go in to take a classroom test, or in real life when you need to reconstruct your knowledge, the book’s not there. In our experiments, when students repeatedly read something, it falsely inflates their sense of their own learning.”

Learn More Here

To learn more, here is a press release from the Purdue study about the research on performing better on tests and here is the final exam article from The Chronicle.

Who ever thought that hitting the books might not always be the best strategy to acing your finals?

I also found some great advice from a professor writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education on how to take an exam after the studying is complete:

How to Take a Final Exam (Part 1)

How to Take a Final Exam (Part 2)

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller and a workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College: Great Ways to Cut the Cost of a Bachelor’s Degree. Follow her on Twitter.

Learn more:

Last week our son Ben called the house wanting to know if we wanted to Skype. We usually call him every Sunday to find out how he’s doing so whenever he contacts us it’s a big surprise.

His primary reason for calling was to share with us how hard he was studying for his math final exam. He ended up having three hours to complete 10 problems and it was a brutal test.

Ben flew home yesterday afternoon and will probably sleep until noon today. I’m mentioning my son, who is a sophomore at Beloit College, because it’s providing me with an excuse to share a fascinating story that I stumbled across last week in Time Magazine about the study habits of South Korean students. In South Korea, students treat every day as if they were cramming for finals.

Students there study so much after school that there are laws against excessive studying. Here is how the article begins:

One student was quoted in the story as saying, “All we do is study, except when we sleep.”  The typical student begins classes at 8 am. and stops between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m.

Seventy four percent of all South Korean students participate in private after-school instruction. In South Korea there are more private tutors than their school teachers and the most popular ones make millions of dollars of year in online and in-person classes.

Cramming is an entrenched tradition in Asia where typically grades and test scores are what counts to succeed professionally.

South Koreans kicks American kids’ butts on standardized testing and, in fact, beat almost all other nations, but they are paying a price:

This story reminded me of an article I read several years ago in The New York Times about South Koreans’ desire to  get into Ivy League institutions. It highlights residential academies whose focus is to get students into top American universities. Their days begin at 6 a.m. and for some they don’t end until 2 a.m. when the dorm lights are turned off.

President Obama has talked longingly about the South Korean educational system and the South Koreans have talked about Americanizing their system. Too bad we couldn’t combine the American and South Korean systems of education.  Now that would be impressive.

In the meantime, if you child complains about his or her exam schedule, pull out this post.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of a workBook, Shrinking the Cost of College: Great Ways to Cut the Cost of a Bachelor’s Degree. She also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch. Follow her on Twitter.

Are college students getting smarter?

If you looked at the grades they are “earning,” you might assume the answer is yes.  The average GPA in college is 3.1. At private schools, the norm is a 3.3 GPA. In contrast, the typical college student had an average GPA of 2.52 in the 1950s. (That’s just about the GPA that my dad, an engineering major, graduated with in the 50s.)

In nearly every decade, the GPA has inched up. Clearly grade inflation is at play, suggests Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor, who is the guru of grade inflation research.

You can see tons of Rojstaczer’s  grade inflation evidence at his website – GradeInflation.com.

This will probably surprise you, but students who attend Ivy League institutions benefit from some of the easiest grading policies in the nation. At some of the most elite schools the average GPA is 3.5 or even 3.6. At Brown University, two thirds of the grades are A’s!

In contrast, students who attend public commuter schools and engineering schools get graded most harshly.

The brutal  grading of students in the STEM majors (science, technology, engineering and math) help explain why most students who start out in these majors eventually switch to easier ones. I’ve read a lot of stories and reports about this unfortunate phenomenon, including an article yesterday in The Wall Street Journal: Generation Jobless: Students Pick Easier Majors Despite Less Pay.

Average College GPAs

In the chart below, which comes from GradeInflation.com, you can see how average GPAs have been creeping up since the early 1990s:

3 reasons for college grade inflation:

1. At expensive private schools like the Ivies, students and their parents expect high grades to match these institutions’ high price tags. One notable exception is Princeton University, which has been trying to combat grade inflation.

2. Professors don’t want to jeopardize students’ chances for graduate school and jobs after those fun college years are over.

3. Professors can be cowed by the teacher evaluation forms that students complete. No teacher wants a terrible rating on RateMyProfessors.com, it could impact their chances for tenure.

Universities With the Toughest Grading

About a year ago, I wrote an article that listed the schools where it’s toughest to get good grades including MIT, Boston University, Reed College, Harvey Mudd, Purdue University, Auburn University and California State University-Fullerton. Here is the post:

Grade Inflation: Colleges With the Easiest and Hardest Grades

If you have thoughts about grade inflation, please share them in the comment box below.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of Shrinking the Cost of College, a financial workbook that can help you make a college degree more affordable. Here’s where you can buy her money-saving workbook.

What is the best way to ace your final exams?

This is a timely question as millions of high school and college students are preparing to take their final exams.

You might assume that reading textbooks and notes over and over again is the best way to study, but researchers from Purdue and Washington University insist that it’s not the best approach.

Listen Up Test Takers

Here’s a better way to improve test scores:

You should practice retrieving as much information as you can from memory just as you would have to do on test day. You can do this by writing down what you absorbed — without consulting your notes or book — or you can review what you know out loud. And you should do this several times.

Even if you think you know it, the research shows retrieving it about three or four more times can achieve big gains in learning.

What the Experts Say

In contrast, simply reviewing your notes or textbook can provide you a false sense of confidence. In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, here’s what one of the researchers, Jeffrey D. Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue, had to say about this phenomenon:

“When you’ve got your chemistry book in front of you, everything’s right there on the page, it’s all very familiar and fluent,” says Jeffrey D. Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University and lead author of a paper in the May issue of Memory about students’ faulty intuitions about effective study habits.

“So you could say to yourself, ‘Yeah, I know this. Sure, this is all very familiar,’” Mr. Karpicke continues. “But of course, when you go in to take a classroom test, or in real life when you need to reconstruct your knowledge, the book’s not there. In our experiments, when students repeatedly read something, it falsely inflates their sense of their own learning.”

Learn More Here

To learn more, here is a press release from the Purdue study about the research on performing better on tests and here is the final exam article from The Chronicle.

Who ever thought that hitting the books might not always be the best strategy to acing your finals?

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller and a workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College: 152 Ways to Cut the Cost of a Bachelor’s Degree. Follow her on Twitter.

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