JONATHAN JANSEN | It’s time for university students to learn the rules of engagement

I am sorry, newly minted ‘matric’ (National Senior Certificate, or NSC) learners but you are about to find out that your seven (or more) distinctions are pretty meaningless when it comes to the hard reality of university academics.

Of course, congratulations. The top performers among you worked hard and it shows in your results. You drank champagne for the first time (openly?) and found yourself courted by politicians, senior education officials with our obedient media in tow. It must have felt good and I am happy for you.

Now, back to reality. Seven distinctions mean that you have three qualities that other students do not have. One, the capacity for memory work, to be able to recall a massive amount of information across seven or more subjects. Two, the ability to sit still for hours on end and concentrate on schoolwork. And three, the mastery of examination technique. Spoiler alert: none of those matters in higher education.

It is so easy to pass the NSC these days compared with 15 or 20 years ago. You now have scores of online sites that not only give you instant access to every examination paper of the past five or more years, they also give you the memoranda! How on Earth can you not get seven distinctions?

Online companies have narrowed down the essential learnings in every subject to a fine art. Teachers have discovered how to teach the three or more levels of smart embedded in question design: do the easy ones first, the low-hanging fruit, they call it. Then spend more time on the higher-order (whatever that means) questions. If your teacher is a grade 12 exam marker every year, they have an edge over new teachers or those blocked from marking for various reasons. If you fail after all of this, you must be on something.

As I prepare to teach a class of undergraduates, I know exactly what is going to happen. With my first test, the students will fail like flies. There will be long lines outside my office and a lot of tears.

Expectedly, the students who now rise to the top of the class are not only the ones with bags of distinctions but the middle-rangers from high school, those who have figured out that success in learning and in life requires a different mode of operation in which critical thinking and original work counts much more than low-level mastery of familiar texts.

They come from some of the most prestigious schools in South Africa. Their lament is straightforward: ‘in all my life I have never achieved 0% in a test.’ Sometimes I cry with them. It’s not their fault, after all. They are products of a broken school system that long ago traded education for exam prep, deep learning for algorithms, knowledge for ‘notes.’ One year I found hired ‘note takers’ in one of my university classes, I lie to you, not.

In a brilliant article in The Atlantic this week, Walt Hunter implores university teachers to “Stop meeting students where they are”. They don’t read whole books but sit on phones in the classroom and outsource their education to artificial intelligence.

Our duty is to encourage deep engagement through reading, and then this: “to ‘meet them where they are’ is a bromide that has become doctrine for higher education…[rather] stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up.”

That indeed is the job of higher education teachers. Not to reinforce the bad habits of learning in high school but to stretch students intellectually with demanding tasks that require them to think beyond the context of original application. To teach them the art of reading deeply, of asking original questions, and of questioning their most cherished assumptions. Where else but in university (certainly not church or mosque) can you learn the value of uncertainty and the vantage of restraint?

It takes a full academic term for my university students to learn the new rules of engagement. By the end of the year, they are scoring in the upper 70s and then comes the messages of appreciation on email and in person. They are now more willing to take risks, more able to ponder difficult questions, and much more likely to express in eloquent writing an independent analysis of a complex problem. They have, in short, unlearned the bad habits that come with repetition and rehearsal in high school exam preparation.

Expectedly, the students who now rise to the top of the class are not only the ones with bags of distinctions but the middle-rangers from high school, those who have figured out that success in learning and in life requires a different mode of operation in which critical thinking and original work counts much more than low-level mastery of familiar texts.

Needless to say, I am very proud of my students who make this important shift in how to learn and succeed. For the rest, they should not be surprised at all if AI does take their jobs.