Orange County Register

Chapman students walk past Leatherby Libraries. Image courtesy of Chapman.

Chapman University President Jim Doti asked his faculty to make their classes tougher after alumni said in a survey that they wished that some of their course work had been more challenging.

“I encouraged them to be mindful of the fact that, year by year, it might not seem like students are very different, but when you look at longer periods of time you realize you’re looking at night and day,” Doti said in a phone interview. “We’re attracting students who are better prepared and they expect rigorous classes.”

Doti’s plea, made at a faculty retreat in August, was first reported on Monday by Daniel Langhorne, a reporter for The Panther, a campus newspaper.

Chapman regularly surveys its alumni on various matters. Graduates are asked such things as how challenging they considered their classes to be. The university uses a sliding scale of 1 to 5, with 5 representing the upper range of toughness. Students who graduated in 2007 placed the toughness level at 3.90, which was down from 3.98 in 2001.

Doti said such seemingly small changes can be meaningful, and that he read survey comments in which alumni specifically said they wished that some of their classes had been more challenging.

“The survey also showed that the quality of our faculty is higher than it’s ever been,” said Doti, an economist. ” But I felt that I should bring it to their attention that some alumni felt this way.”

In the mid-1990s, Chapman accepted about 75 percent of its applicants and was known as a “safety school” for students who might not get into the college of their choice. The campus now accepts about 50 percent of its applicants, and US News and World Report says the university is among the most selective school of its kind in the western part of the country. The magazine’s  latest rankings place Chapman 9th best among comparable Master’s-level schools in the West. (Chapman also awards law degrees.)

When asked how Chapman can respond to the concern of alumni, Doti said faculty could do such things as “assign more papers and expect better work in those papers.” In areas like economics, a teacher might “go from general questions about how the Federal Reserve works to asking how the fed would react in a specific setting if certain things happened. The students would have to do a lot more digging for information.”

Doti emphasized that he praised the quality of his faculty at the retreat. But he added, “I am expecting more of faculty. The students are up for a greater challenge.”

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