2 Rs Left in High School
High school junior Dominique Houston is a straight-A student enrolled in honors and Advanced Placement classes at Northview High School in Covina. She is a candidate for class valedictorian and hopes to double-major in marine biology and political science in college, preferably UCLA or the University of San Diego.
But the 17-year-old said she has written only one research paper during her high school career. It was three pages long, examining the habits of beluga whales.
Houston frets over whether she will be able to handle assignments for long, footnoted research papers once she gets to college.
"Bibliographies? We don't really even know how to do those. I don't even know how I would write a 15-page paper. I don't even know how I would begin," she said.
Her experience appears to be increasingly common. Across the country, high school English and social studies teachers have cut back or simply abandoned the traditional term paper.
Although some students and critics contend that teachers are lazier than in the past, many educators say they can't grade piles of papers for overcrowded classes while trying to meet the increased demands of standardized testing, many of which involve multiple-choice questions. Other teachers believe that term papers are meaningless exercises, because the Internet has made plagiarism more common and difficult to spot. And many say long (10- to 15-page) research papers are pointless, because many students' basic writing skills are weak and are more likely to improve with shorter and more frequent assignments.
A report by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, a panel of academics gathered by the College Board, found that 75% of high school seniors never receive writing assignments in history or social studies.
The study also found that a major research and writing project required in the senior year of high school "has become an educational curiosity, something rarely assigned." In addition, the report found that, by the first year of college, more than 50% of freshmen are unable to analyze or synthesize information or produce papers free of language errors.
Commission Chairman C. Peter Magrath blamed societal changes. "We don't write letters anymore, because we use telephone and e-mail and watch television. We communicate in all kinds of other ways," he said.
