These children are our future?!?!

After grading two freshman classes quizzes, I must remark that these are either the most unmotivated or plain dumb group of students I have come across since high school. A basic map-quiz filling in the blank of major cities and rivers in Medieval Europe and Ancient Egypt where the maps and answers were available to study a week ahead of time elicited only one perfect score and averages in the lower 50’s. A majority of students left a third of the spaces blank, where others had a good time making up answers. One student identified Iran and Iraq inside Italy. Another, for three successive responses, wrote “Italy”, “more of Italy”, and “even more Italy.” Too bad “Italy” was not even one of the choices… I feel sorry for the class of 2010 that does not even know the difference between Greece and India, or Scotland and Ireland, or Poland and the Soviet Union (for a quiz covering the year 1600). Is this a Baylor phenomenon or nation-wide epidemic?? They had the material ahead of time, spend 20 minutes before class memorizing the answer bank and ace the quiz... We need to stop sending everyone to college, some people obviously don't appreciate the opportunity or are too plain dumb for the challenge.