Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Lazy Students, or Just Clueless?

There is an interesting divide. Some of my students work, and some don't. Most of the ones who work, do well. (They got into Duke, so they have SOMETHING going for them)

And some of the ones who DON'T work much, still do well, at least in the B+ range. To be honest, Poli Sci is just not that hard. If you are smart and write well, you can write a perfectly acceptable paper in four days. Even just crunched in at the end of the semester.

An interesting article, on working and time management. The amazing thing is that you just need to work a little, every day, to succeed.

Same thing for faculty: 3 hours actual work, writing, every day and you will be pretty successful.

6 comments:

ericmc said...

does that mean i should apply to the econ grad school at duke?

Anonymous said...

Devoting 3 hours a day to writing is excellent advice. I'm curious how flexible "writing" is. Do you include reading for a paper or collecting data as part of "writing"? Also, does this rule apply to days one is at a conference or traveling?

- El Gordo

Norman said...

I'm curious how this idea of doing well meshes with the notorious grade inflation / compression at many top universities, including Duke.

Michael Munger said...

Writing means WRITING. Not reading, not thinking, not traveling.

Writing.

Now, I haven't done it for years, though I "work" now more than ever. But my work is on budgets, reports, evaluations, and teaching plans. NOT work, from an academic perspective, but that is the job, as chair, that I accepted.

BUT: I'm done, in June! 10 years of chairitude, finished!

And, yes, of course this is the problem with grade inflation. I sometimes get formal grade complaints from 10%, or even more, of my classes. In one class of 120, I had 28 grade appeals. They seem to think that if they show up for the final, they should at least get an A-.

Anonymous said...

Political science--as much an oxymoron as I've seen

ardyanovich said...

That article that you linked to seems to really like international students. However, I don't think that they are anything special. The admissions standards for Americans are much lower than they are for international students, so one should expect international students to outperform Americans on average.