Why are there so many poorly written Personal Statements?

[EMSArtist]

@Anderson- The sad fact is that most prePA students are barely out of college or still in it. Of course that doesn't mean the same thing that it meant even 10 years ago. Being an 11th year senior (yes really- I am in year 11 of my BFA) I have noticed that college becomes more and more like high school every year. Every year it is more E for effort than the year before. People are getting B's on papers that wouldn't have gotten a D in 8th grade.

 

I hear complaints that professors are really hard and mean when they still apply some standards for grammar and punctuation, not to mention a logical structure. I recently sat through a 200 level english class where students were learning the proper structure for an essay for the FIRST time. I always thought that this was taught in middle school, but apparently now that sort of thing has fallen out of favor as students are taught how to pass standardized multiple choice tests rather than actually communicate.

 

So yeah students feel like they have to get as many opinions as they can, because they instinctively know that what they wrote sucks, but nobody ever demanded that they develop the skills to fix it themselves.

[chiaroscuro27]

Amen, EMSArtist! Unfortunately, you'll see the same type of behavior in PA school.