Failure And Soft Courses Essay, Research Paper

Failure and Soft Courses

High failure rate in college has been traced back to the taking of soft courses in place of real hard working courses. Some say these soft courses affect minorities more than others do and should be abolished for good. But I say these classes are destructive for anyone, minority or not, and should be strictly limited.

The first reason they should be limited is that they result in dropout and failure rates rising. To end this trend the administration need to make core adjustments to fix the problem of soft courses. The reason these courses are doing damage is because of the sheer amount of crap they throw at you. At my school there were probably three soft courses for every one solid class. Even the solid courses had two versions, one of which turned a solid class into a soft one. So with the lack of courses to choose from and a large amount of classes needed to pass, you ended with maybe one or two real classes. If they limited the number of electives you were allowed to take and eliminated some of the soft courses that pose as solid classes, I think students would get a generally better education.

Next the administration must regulate teaching methods and limit the number of teachers they hire. Core classes need to regulate themselves better. In my school the same teacher would teach two versions of the same class. One of these was a softer, easier class, the other harder. The problems with these classes were the only difference was you wrote three essays in the hard version and in the soft you only wrote one. Everything else was the same because the teachers did not want to make different lesson plans. So even if you tried to avoid soft classes you ended up with them anyway.

My school also hired tons of new teachers every year to teach the soft courses. The problem with this is they teach soft courses for a couple of years. And when older teachers retire, they take over the core classes. Now these teachers are used to soft courses and teach the solid courses as if they were soft. If this was changed it would, hopefully, result in better schools and I believe dropout rates due to failure would decrease.

Another reasons I think soft courses hurt is because they don t teach you any study methods. Soft courses are filled with junk work like group projects and crossword puzzles. These types of assignments are pointless and do not help you learn. In fact, I think it is destructive. I found myself skipping pointless work taking zeros and only passing tests and quizzes. This proved enough to pass courses but destroyed my perception of school. I became lazy and started to lose all my good study habits. So I believe most of these courses must be eliminated to raise the quality of education.

So, in conclusion, soft courses must be abolished. In doing so quality might return to education and the raising failure rate may see a decline. If this is the experience I had in a Blue Ribbon school was of substandard quality, I fear greatly for others education.