AFT: Publications: American Educator: Spring 2004: What Does It Mean To Be Prepared for College?

What Does It Mean To Be Prepared for College?
(or for Jobs in the High-Growth, High-Performance Workplace)

English Benchmarks
The ADP college and workplace readiness benchmarks for English are organized into eight strands: Language; Communication; Writing; Research; Logic; Informational Text; Media; and Literature. Shown in these excerpts are all of the language, research, and literature benchmarks, plus about half of the communication benchmarks.

Language
Writers and speakers are taken seriously when their vocabulary is sophisticated and their sentences are free of grammatical errors. Without fail, employers and college faculty cite correct grammar, usage, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling as absolutely essential to success in classrooms and workplaces beyond high school. Whether presenting a marketing concept to a team of colleagues or clients or presenting an interpretation of a secondary source in a college seminar, students and employees will need facility with these fundamental skills for the successful exchange of ideas and information.

Communication
Employers and college professors cite strong oral communication skills as being so essential to success that they insist schools should emphasize them, simultaneously with the transmittal of other academic knowledge. Success in credit-bearing college coursework, whether in the humanities, sciences, or social sciences, depends heavily on effective communication about the concepts and detailed information contained within readings, lectures, and class discussions. Success in the workplace, whatever the profession, is also heavily dependent on one’s ability to listen attentively to colleagues or customers and to express ideas clearly and persuasively.

Research*^{(see below
*)}
Research requires the ability to frame, analyze, and solve problems, while building on the ideas and contributions of others. As future college students or employees, students will be asked to hone these essential skills with increasing sophistication. Credit-bearing coursework in colleges and universities will require students to identify areas for research, narrow those topics, and adjust research methodology as necessary. College students will be asked to consider various interpretations of both primary and secondary resources as they develop and defend their own conclusions. Thorough research is the foundation of the free exchange of ideas in a postsecondary academic environment. Similarly, in the workplace, employers depend heavily on employees to evaluate the credibility of existing research to establish, reject, or refine products and services.

* These skills, although critical to the study of English, are also necessary to the study of many academic subjects. Therefore, the study and reinforcement of these skills should not be confined to the English classroom or coursework.

Literature
High school graduates today need to be well read to succeed in college, in careers, and as citizens in our democratic society. Whether navigating the editorial pages of a local newspaper or communicating ideas to fellow colleagues or classmates, high-school graduates who have been asked to analyze a variety of rich literature will be well prepared. Among the benefits of reading literature and carefully analyzing significant works from the literary heritage of both English and other languages is the appreciation of our common humanity. Regular practice in identifying and analyzing the aesthetic and expressive elements of literature also improves the quality of all kinds of student writing. Practice in providing evidence from literary works to support an interpretation fosters the skill of reading any text closely and teaches students to think, speak, and write logically and coherently--priority skills identified by employers and postsecondary faculty. Employers report that employees who have considered the moral dilemmas encountered by literary characters are better able to tolerate ambiguity and nurture problem-solving skills in the workplace. Postsecondary faculty from a wide variety of disciplines note that the skills required by thorough literary analysis are applicable in a range of other humanities, science, and social science disciplines.

Sample Postsecondary Midterm Exam in Introductory English

Tests in first-year English courses often require students to identify excerpts from course readings and to explain their significance. To perform well on this midterm exam from Western Nevada Community College, an open admissions institution in Carson City, Nev., students must have a solid understanding of the themes and literary techniques employed in a broad selection of short stories and poems. Students must also be able to describe how the works relate to one another. To do well on this exam, students must bring with them from high school a strong background in writing and analyzing literature; specifically, they must be completely comfortable with language benchmarks 1 and 6, as well as literature benchmarks, 1, 3, 4, and 5, and benchmarks from the other strands such as writing and logic. The readings for this exam are all from The Norton Introduction to Literature (shorter eighth edition edited by Jerome Beaty, Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, and Kelly J. Mays) and were written by authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, and Elizabeth B. Browning. About half of the exam is shown here.

Part one: Fiction
Explain the significance of each excerpt, especially the section in bold, as it relates to each story’s theme (not plot) or to the story’s main character.

1. "Jupiter was an anomaly. His retrieving instincts and his high spirits were out of place in Shady Hill... Jupiter went where he pleased, ransacking..." ("The Country Husband")

2. "I replied to the yells of him who clamoured. I re-echoed, I aided, I surpassed them in volume and in strength. I did this, and the clamourer grew still." ("The Cask of Amontillado")

3. "Her poems are always cool and intellectual; that is their form, which is contradicted or supported by a gravely sensuous texture." ("Our Friend Judith")

Part two: Poetry
Explain the significance of the excerpted lines, focusing especially on the words that are in bold type.

1. "Back from the hospital, his mind rattling/Like the suitcase, swinging from his hand,/That contains shaving cream, a piggy bank,/A book he sometimes pretends to read." ("Alzheimer’s,"
p. 637)

2. "My mother, after a life/of it, says, ‘This is the last straw.’/And it is. We’re all clutching." ("You Didn’t Fit," p. 635)

Part three: Essay question

Refer to stories we have read ("How," "Hills Like White Elephants," "No One’s a Mystery," "The Country Husband," and "Our Friend Judith") as well as several poems ("The Tally Stick," "love poem," "Wedding-Ring," and "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why" or any other 20th-century poem we have read) and write an essay on the following topic:

The nature of love and marriage (these are two topics), as depicted in 20th-century fiction and poetry, IS or IS NOT consistent. (Choose whichever point of view you think you can best defend by using the above stories and poems as your "support.") You will first have to identify what is the nature of love and the nature of marriage and state each definition. You also need to explain how you understand the term "is consistent" or "is not consistent."

Mathematics Benchmarks
The ADP mathematics benchmarks are organized into four strands: Number Sense and Numerical Operations; Algebra; Geometry; and Data Interpretation, Statistics, and Probability. In addition, because the study of mathematics is an exercise in reasoning, the report lists a set of critical reasoning skills that are woven throughout the four strands. These include checking for errors and reasonableness of solutions, distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information, and making judgments about which operations and procedures to apply in order to solve a particular problem. Shown here are the algebra benchmarks that all students should master. In the full report there are additional higher-level algebra benchmarks that are required for students who plan to take calculus in college, a requisite for mathematics and many mathematics-intensive majors. To make it easy for readers to refer back and forth between the full report and this excerpt, we have preserved ADP’s original numbering system.

Algebra
Mathematicians regularly identify sources of change, distinguish patterns in that change, and seek multiple representations--verbal, symbolic, numeric, and graphic--to express what transpires. The language of algebra provides a means of operating with these concepts at an abstract level and extending specific examples to broad generalizations. Predicting savings based on a rate of interest, projecting business revenues, knowing how costs will increase as the square footage of a building increases, and estimating future world populations based on known population growth rates are all possible once a pattern has been identified. Such relationships can be described in terms of what has changed and how it has changed.

Incremental Steps Will Bring the Benchmarks Within Reach
What will it take to make the high school diploma signify readiness for college or a good job in the high-performance job sector? First, state policymakers need to anchor high school graduation requirements and assessments to the standards of the real world: to the knowledge and skills that colleges and these employers actually expect if young people are to succeed in their institutions. In return, colleges and employers need to start honoring and rewarding student achievement on state standards-based assessments by using these performance data in their admissions, placement, and hiring practices. Although most states have worked hard in the last 10 years to raise the quality of academic standards and the rigor of assessments, the ADP benchmarks may seem even more demanding. For example, no state currently requires all students to take Algebra II to graduate, and few high school exit tests measure much of what ADP suggests that students need to know. In some cases, the knowledge and skills in the benchmarks are not sampled at all on state tests. Incorporating ADP benchmarks into state education systems is a long-term agenda, and progress will be measured by incremental steps rather than radical shifts. State education and business leaders must devise strategies that build on, rather than discard, ongoing standards-based reforms; that sensibly ratchet up the rigor of standards, assessments, and course-taking requirements over time; and that blend them into a coherent system of requirements for earning a high school diploma that signifies college and workplace readiness.