Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ncis.llnl.gov!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!rochester!udel!princeton!phoenix!dykimber
From: dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: engineering students and verbal skills
Message-ID: <5618@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 20 Jan 89 04:44:31 GMT
References: <19244@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg)
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 47

In article <19244@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff) writes:
[Norm's original statements deleted so inews won't barf]
[this is me, then his response:]
>*Maybe you've just never met any students who've held full time jobs.
>
>If you trace back the train of articles that led to the one in question,
>you'll see that the discussion had already excluded the people who had
>worked full-time before returning to school.

Right, I actually meant students who'd held full time summer jobs in which
they had to do things like give presentations, document their code, write
grant proposals, etc. (depending on the job)  I think that this covers a
pretty respectable percentage of college students, and I don't think these
people would be ignorant of the environment in which they had worked.

>Among the other students, I certainly have observed this quite a bit myself, 
>both when I was in industry and now in academia.  Of course, I am not alone
>in this at all.  One often sees "Why can't Johnny write?" articles in the
>engineering trade papers.
>
>Also, the discussion certainly does not mean 100.000000% when it uses
>language like, "Students do such and such ..."  I made an explicit
>disclaimer to the contrary in my first posting in this discussion,
>and I think that one is implied anyway.

Right, well perhaps the point I intended was that anecdotal evidence is
the worst sort of way to support an argument like this.  Every student I
know is at least literate enough to function in the workplace, if not to
pen the next Anna Karenina.  I'm not arguing that the literacy problems
are unreal, but it's obvious that anecdotal evidence is going to make things
sound worse than they are.  How many people have ever told a story about
someone being able to write an excellent inter-office memo, or give a concise
presentation, even if these things happened?  Almost by definition, the more
shocking pessimistic stories are going to be more widespread.
    Sure, it's easy to make a generalization such as that students are not
aware of the problem of illiteracy.  And I don't mean to imply that you're
forced to prove 100%.  But since this runs contrary to my observations,
I want more support than just a few anecdotes, or pleas of someone else's
personal experience, or even articles that were written more with an eye for
flashy statistics and shocking results than actual validity.
    I don't mean to confound literacy and awareness of the problem of
literacy here, by the way, but I think the same arguments apply to both.
I suspect that on the whole, college graduates are fairly literate, and to
some extent aware of the importance of literacy.  Also, I've been using the
term literacy in place of something like "communication skills".

                                                    -Dan