Casting Out Nines

This story out of Norfolk State University has been lighting up the internet in general and the edu-blogosphere in particular. It revolves around Steven Aird, a biologist at Norfolk, who was denied tenure for failing too many students: 

The report from [Dean Sandra DeLoatch] said that Aird met the standards for tenure in service and research, and noted that he took teaching seriously, using his own student evaluations on top of the university’s. The detailed evaluations Aird does for his courses, turned over in summary form for this article, suggest a professor who is seen as a tough grader (too tough by some), but who wins fairly universal praise for his excitement about science, for being willing to meet students after class to help them, and providing extra help.

DeLoatch’s review finds similarly. Of Aird, she wrote, based on student reviews: “He is respectful and fair to students, adhered to the syllabus, demonstrated that he found the material interesting, was available to students outside of class, etc.”

What she faulted him for, entirely, was failing students. The review listed various courses, with remarks such as: “At the end of Spring 2004, 22 students remained in Dr. Aird’s CHM 100 class. One student earned a grade of ‘B’ and all others, approximately 95 percent, earned grades between ‘D’ and ‘F.’” Or: “At the end of Fall 2005, 38 students remained in Dr. Aird’s BIO 100 class. Four students earned a grade of ‘C-’ or better and 34, approximately 89 percent, received D’s and F’s.”

These class records resulted in the reason cited for tenure denial: “the core problem of the overwhelming failure of the vast majority of the students he teaches, especially since the students who enroll in the classes of Dr. Aird’s supporters achieve a greater level of success than Dr. Aird’s students.”

But you really have to go read the whole thing to get the full complexity of the issue. Read especially the comments at the end. This situation has really touched a nerve among higher ed people.

And it’s not hard to see why, either. This story brings up in great clarity a profound conundrum in college teaching: When students fail, whose fault is it? Is it: 

• the students‘ fault, for not working hard enough or putting forth enough effort or so forth? 
• the professor’s fault, for not working hard enough to reach and help his/her students? 
• the university’s fault, for creating a culture of low expectations? (This is Aird’s argument.) 
• the students’ high schools’ fault for not adequately preparing them for college? 
• somebody else’s fault, for example the admissions department for allowing students who are knowingly unprepared for college to enroll, thereby forcing the university to hold lower standards in order to maintain decent retention rates? 

Virusdoc, always the prolific commenter, has left another comment that raises the issue of how a professor should actually deal with academic dishonesty when it occurs. What follows is my own procedure for handling these situations; I’m sure it’s not perfect, and I’m open to suggestions for improvement, but it’s worked pretty well for me over the years. 

The overall strategy for dealing with academic dishonesty is that the students involved should be confronted with the issue promptly after it’s been discovered, given a chance to give their side of the story, and then the professor can move forward on the dual basis of the evidence in front of her/him and the student’s own statements. This strategy is opposed to two other possible strategies: 

• Avoiding doing anything about the academic dishonesty at all, either by simply looking the other way and pretending it didn’t happen, or else using the suspected academic dishonesty as an occasion to give an alternate exam or some kind of second chance assessment. I’m not against second chances or mercy in general, but look: academic honesty is bad. It’s more than just youthful indiscretion, like drinking too much at a frat party or sleeping through an exam because you were up all night studying (or drinking too much at a frat party). Academic dishonesty is a willful, intentional violation of trust, and if you are a professor and have a shred of respect for the life of the mind, you have to do something about it, even if it might earn you a reputation as a mean SOB among students. (This goes double for new faculty, for whom academic dishonesty is often perpetrated by students as a means of testing boundaries.) 
• Executing a summary judgment on the basis of evidence alone, without the students giving their side of things, even if you are within your rights as a prof to do so and even if the evidence for academic dishonesty is overwhelming. First of all, I’ve had many cases of something I thought was academic dishonesty that could be logically explained away by students when I confront them with the work; or at least, I could see that the student was so scared and authentically sorry that I can at least scale my recommendation for their punishment back a little. Second, many times students will simply confess when they are confronted. 

Academic dishonesty is not only easy to catch, it’s a horrible miscarriage of the mutual trust upon which all of education is built, and students who willfully engage in it deserve all the punishment they receive, if not more. There’s simply no rationalizing it, and I don’t think we in higher ed do nearly enough to eradicate it. 

I bring this up because of virusdoc’s comment, just made on an old post: 

Resurrecting an old thread, but I just graded my first ever take-home essay test (open-book, open web, but no collaboration allowed and students were instructed to make sure their ideas and words were their own).

Out of 30 tests graded thus far, there were two students who boldly copied and pasted huge blocks of text from multiple websites into their test answers, without so much as an attempt to change any words or even alter the font from that in the website. It was horrific. In addition, I uncovered one clear example of two students who almost certainly shared answers. One of them had screwball, left-field answers for two questions in a row, using examples that weren’t in our text and I hadn’t discussed in lecture. This was odd, but I dismissed it as a singularity. Several tests later, another student used exactly the same screwball examples for the same two questions. (no other student has used these examples). Further comparison of the two students’ tests side by side reveals multiple verbatim quotes in their answers, and several of the answers that are not verbatim are structurally highly related.

I never anticipated senior level students would a) cheat so frequently, and b) do so in such stupid, obvious ways.

Yee-ha for higher ed!

Yep. I’m actually a little (pleasantly) surprised that I haven’t had a clear-cut incident of academic dishonesty yet in my own courses this semester. But that could be because I’ve taken to designing my courses specifically to avoid assessments with a high risk of cheating or plagiarism. I have very little in the way of take-home assignments that are worth very much.

That doesn’t seem right for higher education. Profs ought to be giving assignments that are challenging, engaging, and therefore take time and effort outside of class. But when we do that, there’s all this rampant and ridiculous cheating that takes place. So we profs feel this intrinsic pressure to make most of our grades come from timed assessments which are easier to manage, but which by definition operate at a lower cognitive level than the kinds of assignments we would like to give (and which college students ought to be getting). So cheaters and plagiarists are ruining not only their own education, but the education of others as well. 

I don’t want to leave the impression from my earlier post that making a college education worth something is all on the students. It’s most certainly not. There are three other factors, at least, that play in to making a college education valuable and not just 4+ years of wasted time:

1. The faculty. Faculty have to teach and manage courses so that all students are challenged and pushed, to their intellectual limits, and also that being “intellectually inclined” as I interpreted that term earlier is rewarded. Not just making classes hard, in other words, but setting classes up so that there are amazing intellectual insights and learning experiences — and those are almost always gained by hard work.
2. The curriculum. The curriculum that students encounter has to also reward intellectual inclination and demand that all students
3. The administration.  Administrations have to manage human resources and the curriculum (and all the other stuff involved in running a school) with a view towards the question “Does decision X make the learning experiences of our students more intense and rewarding, or less?”

Phrased in the negative, you can’t have a vital college experience if your faculty are mainly interested in making students feel good and avoiding generating a lot of work for themselves; or if your curriculum is set up so that there’s no real incentive or push for students to be intellectually inclined (i.e. where the slackers end up being the heroes of the student culture and not the achievers); or if your administration doesn’t work to foster an institutional infrastructure that drives toward intellectual pursuits. You can put the best students on the planet into a college like this and absolutely nothing will happen except you’ll have a bunch of very bored and frustrated students.

From George Leef in this post at Phi Beta Cons (responding to this earlier post):

The fact is [sic] the matter is that some bright and energetic young people do extremely well in life without ever earning a degree, while on the other hand, many others who get their college degrees wind up doing jobs that call for no academic preparation whatsoever. Formal academic coursework is of little benefit to students who are not intellectually inclined, and as our K-12 system deteriorates and graduates increasing numbers of disengaged students, college will do less and less good.

It seems like there is a growing refrain that unless a kid gets a college degree, that kid has no chance of getting a job that will earn a living wage, and  that kid will be something of a liability rather than an asset to society. Barack Obama was in Indy a couple of weeks ago and said this almost word-for-word; I believe his exact wording was “The days when a person could earn a living wage on a high school degree are over.”

That may be true, but it’s not an if-and-only-if proposition. A college education is no guarantee of anything, and in fact it’s useless if it is expended on people who are unprepared for college and uninterested in learning. The real value of a college education is realized only when it is joined by students who are well-prepared and, as Leef says, “intellectually inclined” — which I take to mean having a good work ethic and some modicum of a desire to learn for the sheer pleasure of learning, rather than some mistaken idea that college = job.

A blog post at Wired claims to give the Top 5 Reasons It Sucks to be an Engineering Student. Discussion is in the comments there and at this lively thread at Slashdot. The reasons given at the Wired blog are (in reverse order):

1. Awful textbooks
2. Professors are rarely encouraging
3. Dearth of quality counseling
4. Other disciplines have inflated grades
5. Every assignment feels the same

It sounds to me like the blogger at Wired is stereotyping, based on what goes on at large research universities. A student could avoid #2, #3, and maybe #5 just by doing a 3+2 program where the first three years are done at a liberal arts college (…shameless plug alert…).

As for the grade inflation, I admit there’s no solution to this short of doing the right thing and forcing real academic standards on some of the touchiest-feeliest portions of the liberal arts world. But I think that would lead to mass chaos, as the stability of many liberal arts college depends on having some department on campus to be the “good cop” which offers refuge to students who just aren’t that interested in getting good at something difficult. All I can offer is some sympathy, that math and science professors are often eviscerated on course evaluations by those very students, who are shocked — SHOCKED — that deadlines would be enforced, hard material would be on tests, and so forth.

So to all engineering students out there, keep on keepin’ on. It might suck a little in the short term, but when it’s over you get to run our entire society!

Back in September 2006, I wrote about a new and innovative approach that Georgia Tech was taking towards its computer science curriculum. It appears that this approach, plus an improved job market for computing professionals, is helping turn around a fairly gloomy period for the field:

The Georgia Institute of Technology has revised its computer science curriculum to move away from a traditional hardware-software approach to much more emphasis on the creative process and the roles computer science majors go on to assume in their careers.

Giselle Martin, who directs student recruitment for the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, said that undergraduate applications are up 15 percent this year — in part due to new approaches to explaining the field. One key audience is parents, Martin said. Many remember the horror stories of the job market a few years back and Georgia Tech believes that it can break through that out-of-date mindset most directly with actual employers. So in April, when the college holds a series of events for accepted applicants, there is a panel for parents featuring employers who recruit at Georgia Tech talking about the jobs available and how much demand there is for new graduates.

And there’s this from Virginia Tech:

A new course focuses on problem solving, and several courses are being shifted to focus more on “how to think like a computer scientist,” he said. “We are thinking about how we portray ourselves and what we do,” [Cal] Ribbens [associate department head in computer science] said. “We do not want to be seen as just offering a bunch of programming classes.”

Indeed. There’s a lot of talk going around our campus and at the ICTCM about offering intro courses that focus on problem-solving and the methodology of the discipline, rather than just one little (but deep) slice of content. That certainly seems to make the front door of a major easier to get into. Right now, at least in math, it seems like many students who might do well in a math-related major are either turned off to the subject, or even shut out of it, because their first introduction to math is a technical calculus course, which is almost nothing like what the discipline of mathematics is actually about.

[h/t Inside Higher Ed]

One of the reasons I brought up the notion of getting rid of our current conception of student evaluations is that I’ve had too many courses in which things seems to be going just fine during the semester, and then I get comments on student course evaluations about things that I cannot even recognize as having happened in the class. Something minor happens, for example, in week 5, and it goes unchecked, and grows ineffably until what the student sees is some huge shortcoming on the course’s part — on my part — and I get hammered on the evaluations for it, even though when I read the written comments I cannot even usually fathom what it is the student is referencing.

So this semester I decided that I needed to do something about this, namely just simply paying more attention every week to how students are doing, generally, in my classes. Especially in the freshman classes, where the expectations for college are still being calibrated and the emotions about grades and coursework run high — and where the probability of the evaluations described above is highest — I need to be more intentional about getting student feedback. And so I gave out an informal evaluation  to go with our “quarter-term exam” in my calculus courses. Here’s the form: quarter-term-course-feedback.pdf

The first page is just some questions about how the course structure is working so far. But the really interesting information-gathering part of the form is on the back. In the syllabus, I laid out a set of expectations for students in the class, and for myself. And so I just asked students to review those expectations and assess how they are doing on each one, and what plans they have to improve. And then they do the same for me. It’s been fascinating to watch people’s responses to these questions and I am learning a lot about how students are approaching the course.

I am also catching several of those minor problems that end up exploding in my face. For instance, one student said s/he felt like I was not respecting students’ time because I was always holding them over late after the class period has ended. I was puzzled because I am pretty sure I never do that. But then it dawned on me that the clock in the classroom is 3 minutes fast, so when the class lets out at (say) 3:30, it reads 3:33. If you didn’t realize the clock was fast, you’d think I was holding people 3 minutes over time. I’ve mentioned the fastness of the clock before in class, but I guess I wasn’t clear enough about it.

These voluntary course evaluations aren’t rocket science, and many of my colleagues do this on a regular basis, and so did I, once upon a time. So I don’t want to break my arm patting myself on the back here — I’m just pleased that I’m getting good information from my students in a time frame where I can work with it.

I missed this the first time, but Study Hacks posted this article on Getting Things Done for College Students back last summer. It’s basically a self-contained overview of GTD, although it differs from “canonical” GTD in that it takes into account that college students don’t have a fixed 8-5 work day. Instead, they propose fixing down “work hours” and making that be your work day. There are other college-student specific variations in the main article. Well worth a look if you are a college student needing a trustworthy system for productivity.

That article is just one link in this massively-link-filled post on being productive and happy in college in general, which contains so much good advice on time and “stuff” management for college students that I think the average college student would be overwhelmed by it all. But it’s definitely deserving of a read from all students out there.

How come they don’t teach stuff like this in the freshman year, or in freshman orientation?

Coming fresh off my two-week stint doing promotion and tenure portfolio evaluations, I’m in the middle of a three-day blitz to design and prepare all three of my spring semester courses — Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Equations. Why go so fast, you ask, since classes don’t start for another week? Simple. I am wanting, badly, to go see Cloverfield and the only hope I have of doing so with two kids under 4 is to go during the day when they’re in school. So I need to get stuff done!

That bit of professionalism aside, I was going to say, course design has been on my mind a lot in the last few days. Especially assessment. I wanted to throw out a major change in the way I approach assessment in my classes that I started to use last semester and am building in prominently in my spring courses. The model is as follows:

• Assessments are to be clearly delineated into two types: Formative and summative. Formative assessments are intended to gather information on short-range, micro-scale student performance on small amounts of material, with my feedback mainly being used to flag areas of concern and give students a chance to improve. Summative assessments are intended to see, basically, if the formative assessments have done any good — whether the students have attained the course goals on the material.
• There are to be no more than three summative assessments in the course (including the final exam) and collectively they should be worth at least 50% of the grade. So, a small number of high-point-value assessments to gauge whether students actually know what they are supposed to know in something like a final analysis.
• On the other hand, formative assessments are to be short, graded quickly, and handed back no more than two class meetings after collection. And there should be a lot of them. So, a large number of low-point-value, quick-turnaround assessments that help correct student’s conceptions more or less “on the fly”.

The old model was to have three tests, a final, and several assignments that involve lengthy problem solving and/or writing. I had two problems with that model. First, everything took a long time to grade; students always complain about work not getting handed back quickly, but in my case they were justified — and how could I not have a problem with being timely, when every assessment was such that it required 5-10 hours of grading? The second problem was cheating. All those lengthy, high-cost, out-of-class, writing-intensive assessments fed naturally into problems with academic dishonesty. The potential repercussions of getting caught were small when compared with the amount of work to be done and the ease with which plagiarizing could be accomplished.

So I realized that my problems with students cheating and plagiarizing on everything, and bad course evaluations having to do with handing back work quickly, were rooted in a common problem: having a concept of assessment that featured assignments that took a long time to grade, didn’t provide immediate feedback, and lent themselves to cheating. And rather than try to crack down harder on cheating on the one hand and grade faster or spend more time grading on the other, I decided the way to go was to reinvent the way I assess.

This is a simple, perhaps obvious, way to do it. But I’m pretty good at missing the obvious.

Educators, does this sound like something you do? Or would like to do? Or tried and it didn’t work for you? Or what?