Bruins should think better of themselves

  Cass is a first-year undeclared student who thinks
everyone can excel. For a pep talk contact him at [email protected]. All UCLA students
have one thing in common: they demonstrated an immense talent or
accomplishment in high school, either inside or outside the
classroom. A few lucky and talented students got in on musical
abilities, artistic skill or the coveted athletic scholarship. Most
Bruins, however, had to prove their mettle in the academic
arena.

Any lack of confidence in these accomplishments, however, can
prove to be devastating at the college level. Astounding
achievement on this campus is limited not by mediocre aptitude but
rather by mundane expectations.

The strong academic success of applicants prior to entrance to
UCLA at first seems to translate into success at the university.
According to the most recent U.S. News & World Report college
ranking, UCLA is the fourth-ranked public university in the
country, No. 26 overall. Speakers at College Honors Day and
Freshman Orientation went even further, boasting that UCLA is also
the most well recognized collegiate identity in the world.

Sadly, these statistics don’t tell the whole truth. It has
taken me only a week of classes to realize that there are people in
all of my courses who don’t deserve to be here.

Irrelevant questions, incoherent statements and mindless
conclusions are almost commonplace in most lectures. The first week
is spent teaching concepts and techniques that should have been
learned in grammar school. Two of my classes spent entire lectures
explaining the scientific method. My roommate had to make a
sentence in which the first letter of every word corresponded to
the first letter of the planets. Countless Bruin freshmen seem to
be sadly under-prepared and unready for the collegiate level.

And don’t think that it’s just my imagination. In
1996, the Higher Education Research Institute conducted a
nationwide study showing that only about 45 percent of college
students earn a bachelor’s degree in six years or less. That
means there’s a good chance that more than half of my
classmates will fail to graduate. I cannot bring myself to believe
that the UC application process is porous enough to admit a class
with a college success rate of anything close to a lowly 50
percent.

UCLA was the most popular and one of the most selective
universities in the country this past year, admitting only about 10
percent of 40,000 applicants. SAT scores and personal statements
are safeguards against rampant grade inflation and students that
fake their way to a respectable GPA in high school. The people
reviewing these applications are some of the most experienced and
best-educated minds in the country. The application process is far
from perfect, I know, but it is sound at the very least.

The fault for the low retention rates, therefore, lies not with
the university but with the students.

According to HERI, nearly two-thirds of entering students did
less than six hours of homework per week in high school. These
students know that such a slight workload isn’t going to cut
it in college; they’re warned of outlandish amounts of
reading and nightmare cram sessions as the fear of failure is
pounded into their consciousness. For some students, this results
in an expectation to struggle, which is detrimental to college
success.

In fact, Linda Sax, an assistant professor of education at UCLA,
says, “healthier self-confidence levels ““ no matter the
source ““ contribute to success in college” (HERI).
Students entering with a lower level of self-confidence undoubtedly
have a greater proficiency to self-destruct when instruction
begins.

This leads me to believe that the traditional explanations for
students struggling in college are completely erroneous. I’ve
heard countless explanations about poor work habits and study
skills, but those excuses are fallacious. Even students who skated
through high school and got A’s with the minimal effort
necessary generally have the aptitude to have a successful college
career. Work habits and study skills are taught at workshops or can
be learned individually in a relatively short amount of time by the
determined mind.

Poor study habits are not the culprits here, but the
students’ belief that they will struggle.

Students doubt their own abilities. Furthermore, students’
expectations of themselves are largely based on high school
experiences, meaning that they often will fall a step short of
those expectations in the college environment. In other words, a
student that expects to be exceptional will excel, a student that
expects to excel will do well, and a student that expects to be
average will struggle.

Lowered expectations are a chronic problem in today’s
society as a whole that are especially evident in the scholastic
environment we make our home. The population as a whole has begun
to accept mediocrity as a sufficient requirement for recognition of
an individual. Society’s first step toward self-improvement
is the same as the struggling student’s first step toward
completing their degree: expecting better of themselves.