Is a school "too easy"?

[Vle045]

Years ago, I went to a "business school" where I was getting straight A's.  Having never been a straight-A student, I wondered if the school was "too easy."   I talked to one of my teachers, who was also a lawyer.  (It was a paralegal program).  She advised me to switch schools to another local university that was  ABA-approved.  I already had my bachelor's degree at that point, and according to her, the business school was taught at a 10th-grade level.  I followed her advice and ended up at a more reputable school for lower tuition (they had a scholarship I qualified for).  The business school really was too easy.  It also went out of business eventually.

So this got me wondering....  is there a reliable resource to find out if a school is "too easy"?

[ss20ts]

Define too easy. Everyone doesn't find the same subjects to be easy. I see many people struggle with courses which I found to be a breeze. We all have different knowledge, experience, and skills. These 3 things will have a major impact on the easiness of a course.

[Pats20]

I think that as long as it’s regionally accredited that it will be comparable to most other regionally accredited with the exception of maybe top ranked programs. A top ten business school will probably be more rigorous than an unranked. By how much ? Idk. I think that regionally accredited with a additional business accreditation would be suffice evidence for rigor for most.

[freeloader]

Absolutely. If you aren’t learning anything, aren’t being intellectually stimulated, and/or aren’t being prepared for a career/licensure/etc, it’s likely too easy.

Two anecdotes though:

One of my best friends graduated as the valedictorian of our high school class, 1600 SAT. Went to Harvard and finished his bachelor’s degree with honors in economics. Said our good (but not great, not prominent, etc) high school in a mid-sized city in flyover country required more work to get good grades and was “harder” than Harvard.

After completing my BA and MA at prominent universities and doing PhD work for a number of years at another prominent university, I wanted to take calculus at my local community college. It was really easy  I made an A. Half the class failed. 1 other person in the class made an A. The professor encouraged me to take more math classes and, since I had told her a little about my background, encouraged me to consider becoming a math teacher and going straight into a math education master’s degree at our local university. I politely declined.

I am not a genius and am not actually that great at math. I just like math, know how to study, had the time to study, and am driven to do well. Most of the people in my CC calculus class lacked one or more of those attributes. It was easy to me. Around 20 students (the ones who failed) would probably disagree with my assessment…

[Vle045]

Define too easy. Everyone doesn't find the same subjects to be easy. I see many people struggle with courses which I found to be a breeze. We all have different knowledge, experience, and skills. These 3 things will have a major impact on the easiness of a course.

Too easy would be like, all students graduate with honors.  Or some very high percentage.  Like 95% graduate with honors (or whatever might equivocate to that).   Obviously everyone is different…. But everyone shouldn’t be getting straight A’s.  I wasn’t sure if that kind of data is tracked somewhere.

[Maniac Craniac]

That's a good question that I have no answer for, just some personal observations.

The biggest challenges I've faced in education have been courses that I consider to be artificially difficult. So, either courses where the amount of busy work required far exceeded what was reasonable in the given timeframe, or courses where the textbook, exams, or other required materials were so badly worded that it took extra brain power just to figure out what it was trying to say.

Some of the most frustrating occurrences I've experienced have been exams that use entirely different terminology than the text books to describe the same concepts, and text books that take 12 pages to badly explain what I was then able to find clearly and comprehensively explained in a 2 minute YouTube video.

So, the question for me is whether or not the rigor a program provides is the kind that strengthens your skills or the kind that just beats you up for the fun of it.

[davewill]

A friend of mine used to complain about the school where he got his CS degree. He liked his professors, worked hard, and got a lot out of all the technical courses, but was exasperated that a lot of his classmates were skipping class, and turning in minimal effort assignments, and getting A and B grades nonetheless. He felt it was reflected in the experience of employers who had hired those grads and found them lacking, and thought it held him back a bit.

It's worth noting that this was a long time ago, and I think accrediting bodies are better at keeping this from happening now.

Ironically, modern school scandals have been because the underprepared students who were pushed to enroll anyway were flunking out, rather because they were just passed and handed a piece of paper.

I do think we have and will continue to see "too easy" happen with alt credit providers, with the response being our favorite schools turning pickier over which courses they will take and what kind of credit they will grant.

[ss20ts]

Define too easy. Everyone doesn't find the same subjects to be easy. I see many people struggle with courses which I found to be a breeze. We all have different knowledge, experience, and skills. These 3 things will have a major impact on the easiness of a course.

Too easy would be like, all students graduate with honors.  Or some very high percentage.  Like 95% graduate with honors (or whatever might equivocate to that).   Obviously everyone is different…. But everyone shouldn’t be getting straight A’s.  I wasn’t sure if that kind of data is tracked somewhere.

I definitely haven't seen any school where all students graduate with honors or anywhere near 95%. I haven't seen a school where everyone or even the majority are getting straight A's. That would be a diploma mill not an RA school.

[dfrecore]

I've read, but haven't verified, that individual "schools" within colleges in general may be too easy; the Education department generally has students with the lowest qualifications overall (as a whole they come in with the lowest GPA's, and lowest SAT/ACT scores) but get the highest grades in the university. So as an example, if you look at College XYZ, the School of Ed students may have an average 2.8 GPA, 1 AP course, and 1000 SAT during admissions, but will have a 3.8 GPA when graduating from college; while the School of Engineering students may have an average 3.7 GPA, 7 AP courses, and 1350 SAT's, but will have a 3.2 GPA upon graduation from college. So if the "lowest" college-bound students, academically speaking, manage to do better in college than the "highest" ones, that seems sketchy. And like the Ed school isn't real challenging overall.

That's just a made-up example but it's what I've heard multiple times over the years when listening to podcasts or things about grade inflation, and other issues at colleges.

[davewill]

My son has said that his Psych courses were really held back by the large number of students who were taking psych as a "default" degree. Class discussions would never really get much beyond the basic because too many students weren't really serious about the subject. I would guess that the profs were probably reluctant to push these students since they were enjoying a much bigger budget to go with the larger enrollment in the program.