Middle East not scary enough for you?

Try this magnificent analysis by Thomas Benton of precisely why US undergraduates are now locked in to a cycle of lame underperformance and associated petulance when their failings are pointed out to them:

Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities.

So college professors routinely encounter students who have never written anything more than short answers on exams, who do not read much at all, who lack foundational skills in math and science, yet are completely convinced of their abilities and resist any criticism of their work, to the point of tears and tantrums: "But I earned nothing but A’s in high school," and "Your demands are unreasonable."

Such a combination makes some students nearly unteachable.

The same folly has gone deep into our educationalists’ psyche too.

A relative of mine chatting to an Oxbridge entrance interviewer in Maths, the latter bewailing the desperately poor intellectual level of so many A-level candidates even in this supposedly tough subject:

"I ask them how to deal with 12/17ths minus one half – they either can’t work it out or think it’s an impossible question and refuse to answer."

[CC: The correct answer is, of course …?]

Higher education in the USA seems to be an area where (unlike almost anything else one can think of) intense competition lowers standards and creates worse outcomes:

Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education. Some students may rise to a challenge; many won’t. They’ll drop, withdraw, or even leave a college that they find too difficult.

If you are untenured and your courses do not attract enough students, then you can become low-hanging fruit for nonrenewal. If you are tenured, then it means being "demoted" to teach service courses.

In such contexts, the curriculum—populated by electives and required courses competing for the lowest expectations—is driven increasingly by student demand rather than by what a community of scholars believes undergraduates should know…

All this, by the way, shows itself even in the FCO too. In my latter years there I detected (as did many other senior) a steady growth in a creepy reluctance on the past of younger officers to accept any criticism about their performance, as if such criticism was ‘judgemental’ and ipso facto illegitimate, if not tantamount to bullying.

I’ve no idea what if anything can be done to dig out this psychological cancer of accepting accelerating declining expectations. I read a fascinating analysis of this phenomenon somewhere today – there is even a word for it – but I can’t trace the link any more. Ring any bells?

Ho hum.

Who will be quickest on the draw and send in the answer to that sum?

Update  The proud winner is Austin Lane for speedily sending in the right answer faster than anyone else, ie 7/34. Special mention also to illman for giving us the elegant working – see comment below. And to glenn for reminding us about the value of precision in framing a question