- Admissions 101
- Trading tips with Jay Mathews on winning at college admissions.
How do you decide if a college is teaching well?
For many years the National Survey of Student Engagement has rated colleges (mostly for their private use, without public release) on how well they teach students. They put heavy emphasis on student-faculty contact outside to class, student ethnic diversity, special research projects for undergrads and one feature that particularly interests me, writing. The Indiana University professors who designed and run the survey say they have research showing that the best teaching---in terms of producing good writers---involves a lot of short papers, not just the standard one big one, in humanities courses. Does that make sense to you? I have never seen a document from NSSE explaining why that feature is so important. What other signs of good college teaching do you look for?
- Jay Mathews
The Post MostMost-viewed stories, videos, and galleries in the past two hours
Loading...
Comments
The Washington Post commenting system will be disabled for several hours while system upgrades are made. User will be unable to leave comments during this time.
If you have any problems accessing Washington Post content during this time, please email our Interactivity department at comments@washpost.com.