Tough Talk About Academic Rigor

The Winter 2009 issue of Liberal Education contains a thought provoking article about how to improve students' academic performance in college.  In "Expecting More: On Elevating Academic Standards in Public Universities" the authors stress that faculty ought to test the limits of students' learning and challenge them with the realities of their academic abilities, degrees of competitiveness, and levels of motivation. Even in nonselective and poorly funded institutions, faculty, individually and collectively, can reassert the value of education by acting to raise academic standards. In this article, the authors offer a list of politically and personally difficult actions that would help accomplish that important goal.

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/45/b1/b0.pdf