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Creepy? Or Just Helpful?
Sep. 19th, 2012 09:48 pmThe college where I work is trying a new application where students fill out a ten-minute survey with questions like:
* How well are you getting along with your roommate?
* Are you homesick?
* What grades do expect to get in college?
* How many hours do expect to study each week?
Basically, they are testing for risk factors for dropping out of college. Based on the answers, they assign the student red code, yellow code or green code. And based on that, various strangers will try to help the student, or at least the student gets directed to various campus resources.
I don't know if the student gets to find out what their own rating is, or even that this is about risk factors.
When I started college, I thought I was at zero risk of dropping out or taking more than four years to graduate. Based on my experiences there and those of my friends, I still think there was virtually no risk of my not finishing in four years.
Yet, I definitely had risk factors:
* I was a first-generation college student. Actually, both my parents had taken some college courses, but I was the first one to go to a four-year college. I would have never guessed this was a risk factor as a student--who cares if other people in my family didn't go? What matters is that _I_ had never been to college and didn't know what it would be like. So I read up on everything I could about what college would be like. I was worried that if it was much harder than high school, I would have serious trouble. But it was only slightly harder, and since we were in class a lot fewer hours, there was plenty of extra time available for homework and studying.
* I had no friends at first. I knew no one at my school when I first got there, and didn't even have a dorm room due to some kind of confusion (but I was on the wait list). And when I did get a roommate, she spent all of her time at her new boyfriend's place. Well, that's why I picked a college where most people lived on campus. And with a 50/50 male/female ratio. Fortunately, I met lots of people during the orientation activities, although I ended up in a different dorm (and different major) than all of them.
* I was lonely. My friends spent A LOT of time studying. But my best friend and I wrote each other daily (for the first couple of years, anyway), and I didn't have homesickness. I'd been away from home many times and moved many, many times, so even though I'd never lived in New England before, it was no big deal.
* I had no idea what to major in. Or what kind of career I wanted.
* My parents had a pretty low income those years, so they might have concluded I was in a low socioeconomic group. In fact, I did go to Head Start (after which they made me skip kindergarten) and we were on food stamps for a while once. But I had both parents, they valued reading and school (and Girl Scouts), and I went to the same high school as the kids of NASA employees went to, so no. That was not a problem. Actually, my grandma worried that I couldn't afford to go to school with so many rich people, and I had indeed never met such rich people before, but, again, we all lived on campus, and they spent all their time studying, not buying expensive things or whatever.
If I had learned or suspected that I was code red or code yellow, that would not have been at all helpful. I think it might have added more doubts rather than inspiring an I'll-show-them response.
Having somebody try to counsel me on how to find better friends probably wouldn't have helped. I'd already taken personality and career interest tests. And having various random strangers who had all read the same results contacting me one after the other asking me about how I'm doing would have just been extremely annoying. (Because they want to involve academic counselors, mental health counselors, career counselors, dorm RAs, maybe even professors and TAs, and who knows who else. I might have had nightmares about the omelet guy at the cafeteria, passing Buildings-and-Grounds guys, and bookstore cashiers all, one after the other asking me, "Are you okay?")
Oh yeah, and these different staff can all get together and talk about you behind your back, too.
I think I could have profited from knowing that study groups and tutoring are helpful and that neither one of those things (or seeing professors during their office hours) is even remotely considered cheating may have been helpful. (Although, of the three times I did talk to a professor, exactly zero times were helpful, and one actually made things worse.)
But studies have shown that graduation rates are better after using this program, blah, blah blah. So it probably helps some people keep from getting lost at their new school.
**
In other news, I'm trying to learn to say "jaguar" with a British accent (closer to JAG-you-er than JAG-wahr), but I still don't have it.
Cake of the Day
Here's a pretty one:
Even though it's broken. I love the 3-D fish swimming around in front.
Here's a view showing more of the pieces:
* How well are you getting along with your roommate?
* Are you homesick?
* What grades do expect to get in college?
* How many hours do expect to study each week?
Basically, they are testing for risk factors for dropping out of college. Based on the answers, they assign the student red code, yellow code or green code. And based on that, various strangers will try to help the student, or at least the student gets directed to various campus resources.
I don't know if the student gets to find out what their own rating is, or even that this is about risk factors.
When I started college, I thought I was at zero risk of dropping out or taking more than four years to graduate. Based on my experiences there and those of my friends, I still think there was virtually no risk of my not finishing in four years.
Yet, I definitely had risk factors:
* I was a first-generation college student. Actually, both my parents had taken some college courses, but I was the first one to go to a four-year college. I would have never guessed this was a risk factor as a student--who cares if other people in my family didn't go? What matters is that _I_ had never been to college and didn't know what it would be like. So I read up on everything I could about what college would be like. I was worried that if it was much harder than high school, I would have serious trouble. But it was only slightly harder, and since we were in class a lot fewer hours, there was plenty of extra time available for homework and studying.
* I had no friends at first. I knew no one at my school when I first got there, and didn't even have a dorm room due to some kind of confusion (but I was on the wait list). And when I did get a roommate, she spent all of her time at her new boyfriend's place. Well, that's why I picked a college where most people lived on campus. And with a 50/50 male/female ratio. Fortunately, I met lots of people during the orientation activities, although I ended up in a different dorm (and different major) than all of them.
* I was lonely. My friends spent A LOT of time studying. But my best friend and I wrote each other daily (for the first couple of years, anyway), and I didn't have homesickness. I'd been away from home many times and moved many, many times, so even though I'd never lived in New England before, it was no big deal.
* I had no idea what to major in. Or what kind of career I wanted.
* My parents had a pretty low income those years, so they might have concluded I was in a low socioeconomic group. In fact, I did go to Head Start (after which they made me skip kindergarten) and we were on food stamps for a while once. But I had both parents, they valued reading and school (and Girl Scouts), and I went to the same high school as the kids of NASA employees went to, so no. That was not a problem. Actually, my grandma worried that I couldn't afford to go to school with so many rich people, and I had indeed never met such rich people before, but, again, we all lived on campus, and they spent all their time studying, not buying expensive things or whatever.
If I had learned or suspected that I was code red or code yellow, that would not have been at all helpful. I think it might have added more doubts rather than inspiring an I'll-show-them response.
Having somebody try to counsel me on how to find better friends probably wouldn't have helped. I'd already taken personality and career interest tests. And having various random strangers who had all read the same results contacting me one after the other asking me about how I'm doing would have just been extremely annoying. (Because they want to involve academic counselors, mental health counselors, career counselors, dorm RAs, maybe even professors and TAs, and who knows who else. I might have had nightmares about the omelet guy at the cafeteria, passing Buildings-and-Grounds guys, and bookstore cashiers all, one after the other asking me, "Are you okay?")
Oh yeah, and these different staff can all get together and talk about you behind your back, too.
I think I could have profited from knowing that study groups and tutoring are helpful and that neither one of those things (or seeing professors during their office hours) is even remotely considered cheating may have been helpful. (Although, of the three times I did talk to a professor, exactly zero times were helpful, and one actually made things worse.)
But studies have shown that graduation rates are better after using this program, blah, blah blah. So it probably helps some people keep from getting lost at their new school.
**
In other news, I'm trying to learn to say "jaguar" with a British accent (closer to JAG-you-er than JAG-wahr), but I still don't have it.
Cake of the Day
Here's a pretty one:
Even though it's broken. I love the 3-D fish swimming around in front.
Here's a view showing more of the pieces:
