THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, December 23, 1995 TAG: 9512230368
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 127 lines
Nearly one in five Old Dominion University undergraduates was placed on academic probation last spring, ODU records show.
Old Dominion's 19 percent probation rate was much higher than those at four other state-supported universities in Virginia. The probation rates at the other schools surveyed ranged from 5 percent at Christopher Newport to 11 percent at Norfolk State.
ODU administrators and professors have been alarmed by student performance after discovering that 42 percent of freshmen last spring were on probation because their grade point averages fell below a C.
That led the Faculty Senate and Board of Visitors to approve tougher admission standards earlier this month. The new standards would have excluded 60 of this fall's 1,600 freshmen.
Jo Ann Gora, Old Dominion's acting president, called the overall 19 percent probation rate ``disappointing. . . . This doesn't make me happy. You don't want students to experience failure.''
She said she didn't know why ODU's rate is higher than those of neighboring colleges, but she said it wasn't necessarily the students' fault.
``I think we have very high standards, and our faculty are very demanding,'' Gora said. ``At smaller institutions, it's easy for faculty members to say, `Well, these are freshmen. They're probably just going through first-semester jitters.'
``Here, there's much less of that. Faculty treat all students the same,'' she said.
Gene Morris, a senior from Virginia Beach majoring in English, said the high probation rates reflect a variety of problems among professors and students. ``You can't put the blame on either one party,'' he said.
Some faculty members are too demanding, he said. But some students have to work to support themselves, and their grades suffer. Others, especially freshmen, get distracted from academics because ``they have a lot more freedom and a lot less looking over the shoulder'' in college.
And, Morris said, ``there's the good ol' trying-to-skate-by principle. That also contributes to the problem.''
At ODU, a student on probation for failing to meet minimum academic standards is allowed to take only four courses a semester. Depending on his grades, he either returns to ``good standing,'' remains on probation or is suspended for a year. A student who returns from suspension and again fails to meet minimum standards can be suspended indefinitely.
Probation doesn't necessarily lead to the end of a student's academic career, said Judith M. Bowman, executive assistant to the provost at ODU.
``I'm sure a good number of them graduate, especially if you start on probation early,'' Bowman said. ``If I have 24 hours (of classes) and a 1.8, if I take the next 24 hours and get Bs, I'll be in good standing. A lot of students do turn it around when they see what happened.''
State education officials reacted cautiously to the numbers, refusing to draw conclusions about students' abilities or universities. The State Council of Higher Education does not track probation rates but intends to begin collecting that data to better assess colleges.
J. Michael Mullen, the council's deputy director, said probation rates could vary widely, depending on regulations at individual colleges. ODU, in fact, has tougher standards than almost all the other four schools surveyed.
Virginia Commonwealth is the only other university that puts all students with less than a C average on probation.
The University of Virginia's cutoff point is a 1.8 average, slightly lower than a C average. Christopher Newport and Norfolk State have sliding scales, with tougher requirements for students who have taken more courses. NSU has the easiest standards: Students who have completed 29 semester hours, or the equivalent of a year, need only a 1.47 average to avoid probation.
The talk of probation rates and admission standards has renewed attention to a nagging question plaguing public education across the country: Are students coming to college with less preparation than ever?
Not everyone thinks so.
Jean R. Halladay, an associate professor of English at ODU, said: ``My experience with my own students has been that their performance seems to go in cycles over the years. . . .The students I have just finished grading have done really well. For the first time in a long time, nobody in my freshman literature class failed.''
Yet the ODU numbers show a substantial rise in the probation rate for freshmen since at least 1988, when the figure was 30 percent.
Donald H. Smith, an associate professor of sociology and criminal justice, said: ``There's just no question that our students aren't as well prepared for classes as they were five years ago. . . .
``They just don't read. I have students come to me and say, `I don't understand why I did poorly on this class,' and they hand me a book and open it, and it'll go crack. It's a virgin book. . . .They look at me like I'm from Mars when I say they have to read the book. The high schools haven't expected them to do it.''
Gora said ODU's research showed that the students most at risk of getting on probation either had low high school averages or have no strong desire to be in college.
``Students who don't know what they want to major in but are interested in learning - they'll do just fine,'' she said. ``But the kids who aren't sure whether they even want to be in college - those are the one who fail out.''
Norfolk State's probation rate was 19 percent in the spring of 1994. Vice President Jesse Lewis said that number dropped to 11 percent this year because of new counseling programs that increase contact between faculty and students.
``We think that maybe the fact that we are insisting that faculty devote sufficient time to students is having an impact,'' he said.
At ODU, Gora said part of the problem is that ``students who need help don't go for help even though it's available.'' She said professors in math and sciences have been increasing tutoring sessions and working harder to get students to attend.
But part of the solution, she said, is also to toughen admission standards to screen out students who aren't likely to succeed. Smith agreed: ``The community colleges are supposed to deal with remedial problems; we're not supposed to.
It's a horrible waste of time teaching students what they should have learned in high school just so we can let them in.'' MEMO: PROBATION RATES
This is the percentage of undergraduates on probation at various
Virginia colleges and universities in the spring of 1995:
Old Dominion.........19%
Norfolk State........11%
Virginia Commonwealth....7%
University of Virginia.....7%
Christopher Newport...5%
SOURCE: Virginia colleges
NOTE: U.Va. figures reflect only the College of Arts and Sciences,
where most undergraduates are enrolled, and are for the fall of 1994,
the last semester for which data were available.
KEYWORDS: ACADEMIC PROBATION by CNB