A nationwide survey conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles, found that professors raised concerns regarding the level of academic preparedness of undergraduate students.
The study, The American College Teacher: National Norms for the 2004-2005 Higher Education Research Institute Faculty Survey, found that, of the professors polled, overall only 36 percent think most students are sufficiently prepared for collegiate work.
The report, which was originally administered in 1989, has been reissued every three years. Jennifer Lindholm, associate director of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA, said HERI continues the research because it is important for college and university officials to know faculty members' opinions.
When broken down between public and private universities, statistics show that only 37 percent of the surveyed professors at public institutions feel most undergraduates "are well prepared academically," as compared to private schools' 67 percent.
The 2005 findings point to a growing gap between students' levels of academic prowess leading to problems for professors, Lindholm said.
"There are more students coming in that are extremely prepared and extremely unprepared academically," Lindholm said. "It's very difficult then from a practical standpoint to teach the most students in the class."
University faculty members said their opinions on the study's information seem to deviate from the findings for public universities.
"At U.Va., even though we're a public university, we have such an academically well-qualified undergraduate population that the faculty here find themselves with students who are generally well-prepared," Environmental Science Prof. Janet Herman said. "I think we come out looking a lot more like the survey response for a private university than the typical public university."
Herman, who is also an academic advisor for first years and a member of the Faculty Senate's Academic Affairs Committee, said she is surprised by the study's emphasis on solely applied, critical qualifications.
"There was no mention of quantitative skills in terms of preparedness," she said.
Herman said the opinions of her first-year advisees particularly struck her as different from the findings in the report.
"When I think of the concerns of my first-year advisees, they seem most worried about their mathematics preparation and their success in science and mathematics courses and less worried about their ability to write or to master the knowledge in a new discipline," Herman said.
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