Skipping class

Good quote about attendance via Study Hacks:

“The following are valid excuses for skipping class: I have a fever of 105 degrees; I need to fly to L.A. to accept an Academy Award; today in class we are reviewing a book I wrote; my leg is caught in a bear trap. The moral of this exercise: Always go to class!“
– from How to Win at College

Here are some memorable excuses I’ve had before:

• A student missed class because, he said later, he had to go to the doctor. Fine, I said, just bring me the doctor’s note and I’ll excuse the absence. Instead of a doctor’s note, he brought me a bottle of pills that he said the doctor gave him. The bottle didn’t have a label on it.
• A student approached me the day before a final exam to request that he be excused and take the final exam later in the week. The reason? He claimed his dad was a famous NASCAR driver and had called him up that morning telling him to come work with the pit crew at a big race. I told him to tell his dad that as soon as the final is over, he could join up with the team. (This was while I was at Vanderbilt,  so it’s actually possible that his dad really was a famous NASCAR driver.)
• A student missed three days of class. Later, he explained: He was in jail for a week. Turned out it was true. So I’d add incarceration to the list in the quote.

What good skipped-class excuses have you heard (or can you make up)?

Filed under: Education, Higher ed, Life in academia, Student culture , attendance, class, college, higher education, Student culture

Melinda Gates’ idea of improving education

Bill and Melinda Gates, whose charitable foundation has done much good in the world, are now focusing on education with a program called Strong American Schools and a companion web site, EDin08.com. Given the Gates Foundation’s success in helping improve public health in third-world countries, one might be optimistic about what they might do with our struggling public school system.

However, my optimism suffers a big setback when I read stuff like this from Melinda Gates, in an interview with NPR:

Can we reasonably expect 100 percent of high school students to become college students?

Yes, I think we can. And, in fact, I’m here today in the Chicago school district visiting with students – huge number of Latinos and African-American populations, and guess what? I’m in schools where 95 to 98 percent of these kids are going on to college, and it’s because they started freshman year with teachers who believe in them and said, ‘These kids can do it.’ And maybe they are not coming in with the right reading or math skills, but we are going to bring them up, and we are going to have high expectations of them. And guess what? Those kids are succeeding, and those kids are getting into college.

I’m baffled as to why reasonably intelligent people like Melinda Gates continue to think that having 100% of high school students go on to college is necessarily a good thing, much less a “reasonable” thing to expect. College is not supposed to be only for the elite, but on the other hand college is supposed to be for those who are truly equipped, intellectually and psychologically, for the rigors of the system. And that’s not everybody. And the fact that it’s not everybody is not necessarily a bad thing. I have had plenty of students in my classes who just simply weren’t cut out for the college life, and they were miserable right up until the day they decided to drop out.

The only way in which 100% college attendance makes any sense at all is to lower standards and include massive amounts of high school remediation, or perhaps have some “colleges” set up to service those students who need “bringing up”, as Ms. Gates puts it, and give them a “college degree” that is really on par with a high school diploma, further devaluing the already steadily-dropping value of a college degree. Either way, you’re talking about creating a huge influx of students into a higher education system that is already suffering from the effects of grade inflation and lowered academic and intellectual standards, a group of students who otherwise would look at themselves and reasonably and correctly conclude that they’d be happier doing something else. Why this would constitute an improvement in education in this country is anybody’s guess.

Do you think that, in 20 years, the Gates Foundation will be pushing for 100% of college students to get into PhD programs? What’s the logical end of all of this? Why not instead just let students do what they want, and use the K-12 system to equip them with the basic skills to do whatever that is, and stop telling them implicitly that if they don’t go to college that they are losers doomed to a life of failure?

(And by the way, Ms. Gates, when you say that “we” are going to bring up their reading and math skills, am I to assume that you’ll be right in the trenches with the teachers? Because “believing in” students is not enough.)

[h/t Joanne Jacobs]

Filed under: Education, Teaching , college, Education, gates foundation, melinda gates, strong american schools

Graduation in the Arctic

Fascinating story in InsideHigherEd this morning about graduation day at the University of Alaska’s Chukchi campus, located in Kotzebue, Alaska — 33 miles above the Arctic Circle.

Today, at commencement, it is a sunny and crisp 33 degrees. Younger residents don T-shirts and shorts.

The college, in Kotzebue, a settlement of 3,000 people, clings stubbornly to a gravel outcrop on the edge of the Chukchi Sea, where flat snow-covered tundra meets icy waters. Kotzebue is accessible by boat or air during three summer months; and by air, snow machine and sled in the winter. Residents, students, and faculty live peacefully without ordinary facilities such as a dry cleaner, saloons, discos, or a car dealership. There are more snow machines and dogs than cars in Kotzebue. The town includes an airstrip for bush pilots. People headed to the landfill must pause for incoming and outgoing planes the way most students in America pause at a stop sign, looking for approaching vehicles. An itinerant hairdresser visits once each month and folks desiring a haircut schedule appointments. Only in late June and July are seagoing barges able to deliver gasoline. [...]

On the graduation platform, as caribou meander outside, each graduate tells a story, each becoming a commencement speaker. Some depict amazing journeys through time and distance. Words are also spoken by students born into a U.S. territory, prior to Alaska statehood in 1959. There are palpable signs of relief and joy about obtaining degrees, even as the changing physical environment forebodes a warning more immediate than the tight job market.

Go read the whole thing.

Filed under: Education, Higher ed , alaska, chukchi, college, Higher ed, higher education, kotzebue

Simul kids et adults

I’m working on updating some of my professional documents, including my curriculum vitae and my Statement of Teaching Philosophy (SOTP). Both of these are badly out of date; I don’t think I’ve touched either one since I was up for tenure in 2005. That’s too bad, especially the SOTP; it seems like professors ought to be constantly re-examining their core philosophies behind teaching and having a critical look at what really characterizes what they do in the classroom.

The new SOTP is absorbing some flavor of recent developments in my personal life on the faith front. Since joining the Lutheran church, I’ve become more exposed to — and more appreciative of — the concept of holding paradoxical pairs of ideas in tension with each other and having a real truth emerge out of the dialectic between the two. In Lutheran theology, for example, we have the idea of simul justus et peccator — the notion that a Christian is, at the same time, both righteous and a sinner. My teaching philosophy turns out to have some of the same kinds of pairings.

The pair of opposing ideas that struck me as I was brainstorming it out was the following:

• Teaching is best done when the teacher remembers that each of his students is somebody’s child.
• Teaching is best done when the teacher remembers that none of his students are children.

(This is being written in the context of undergraduate education. In K-12 the students really are children.)

On the one hand, my teaching changed drastically once I had kids of my own, because getting an up-close look at how kids act, think, and react makes me a lot more sympathetic to them and to their parents. There were times past when I would get extremely upset at students for some kind of (truly) dumb behavior and have some awfully unkind thoughts about them. I can’t say I don’t do that anymore, but it is a lot less frequent and I feel the wrongness of it much more viscerally when it happens. Because those students are somebody’s kids. My girls, as smart as they are, have a long way to go before they can do the kinds of things my students do. Once they get there, I am going to be extremely proud of just about anything they do. The thought of having some priggish college professor ripping into them — even if they deserve it — for something they do or don’t do in class just makes me horrified.

So these days I tend to view my students as products of a long (long!) process of development, having gone through years of trial and risk and hard work on both their parts and their parents’ parts. Yes, students do dumb things and make bad choices and are often ill-prepared. But to even be in the position to do those things implies that they have come a long way, and I guess I “get” this and respect it more than I used to. And my teaching is better when I don’t objectify them. (I’d also argue that their learning is better when they don’t objectify me, but that’s another post.)

On the other hand, I really bristle when we profs refer to college students as “kids”. They aren’t children, not in the developmental sense at least. College students are fledgling adults. They don’t necessarily know how to act like adults (I didn’t, at that age) or even desire to act like adults (I didn’t). But that doesn’t mean that professors absolve them of the very adult world of actions, responsibility, and consequences. Just because those students are young and look like they are just out of high school, it doesn’t mean that we conceive of them as children — taking on their responsibilities, absolving them of the consequences of bad choices, etc. — and thereby teach them that they are children and can be expected to be treated as such.

And the truth that seems to emerge out of the tension between these two ideas is that teaching involves respect at its core. Profs ought to respect students for getting to where they are, and respect their intrinsic value as human beings. (Which is something Christian professors ought to find to be second nature.) But respect also means respect for who those students will be. If we cut students breaks all the time or give second chances when settling for the consequences of a bad choice would make them better-equipped to face the future, then we might be acting nicely towards our students and winning their approval, but that’s a long way from respecting them.

Filed under: Christianity, Education, Higher ed, Life in academia, Student culture, Teaching , college, Education, philosophy, professor, students, Teaching

When students fail, who’s responsible?

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? 

There is no one-size-fits-all answer, of course; every instance of student failure is some linear combination of faults. Looking at Aird’s case, it’s not obvious what that combination is. Is Aird simply an uncaring elitist — or an outright racist, as some critics are claiming (Aird is white, and Norfolk State is a historically black university) — who is refusing to help students who need it? Is Norfolk State pulling a Benedict College and enabling an academic climate so anemic that any professor who assesses students with halfway-decent standards ends up flunking the vast majority of his students? How did it get to the point where only 10% of his intro biology students are earning a C or higher? 

Again, it’s hard to say exactly what happened here without more information, but there are a few things for sure about this case: 

• The overwhelming instinct among professors is to lay the blame somewhere else besides themselves. One look at the comments at the IHE article will tell you so. And this instinct may be justified; the plain fact is that many students do fail in spite of the resources available to them, because they are not prepared, or because they have too many distractions in life, or because they are lazy and won’t utilize what’s available to them. But I think profs must beware of transferring the behavior of some students to the behavior of all students. How many of Prof. Aird’s students were adequately prepared to do well in the course, and would have done so with a little more work on Aird’s part or the students’ advisors’ parts? 
• The overwhelming instinct among some other people is to lay the blame squarely at the feet of the professor. “If students fail, then it’s the teacher that failed” is the common aphorism. But this simply isn’t true all of the time. One of the main distinguishing factors between education at the college and university level from that at the K-12 level is the degree to which students are responsible for their own learning. A university education is a meeting of the minds. The professor’s job is to craft a well-structured course that enables students to learn. But the professor cannot make learning happen — the student must pick up the ball at some point and take initiative, by doing homework (especially when it’s not required), coming to office hours, asking questions, and investing time in struggling with material that might be difficult. If the professor does her/his part and the student opts out and then fails, it’s not the professor’s fault for not going farther and doing more of the student’s work for him or her. Some times — many times — teachers pass but students fail. 
• The university or college itself bears a big responsibility: To create and foster a campus culture where the two-part meeting of the minds I just described takes place on a daily, ever-increasing basis. And by implication, it’s the university’s responsibility to eradicate anything that stands in the way of this. If the university fails to enforce its own academic rules (which appears possibly to have been the case at Norfolk regarding an “80% attendance” rule), or allows co-curricular or athletic activities to usurp the primary role of teaching and learning on campus, then nobody is going to win. 

If more universities would simply take up the challenge of being intentional about the primacy of academics on campus, and conduct itself likewise, then I think fewer cases like this would happen. 

Filed under: Education, Higher ed, Life in academia, Teaching , academics, Aird, college, higher education, Norfolk State, Steven Aird

Handling academic dishonesty

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. 

So now, my means of working through an academic dishonesty situation goes like this: 

1. Make a paper trail. Make photocopies of all the suspected dishonest work. Make copies of the syllabus policy or any other pertinent document where the rules against cheating are stated. Make printouts of the Wikipedia article that was copied. Save and print any email exchanges on the subject that you have with the students. We do all this because you should never underestimate how litigious a situation like this can get. I’ve never been sued for writing someone up for cheating </knock on wood> but I have had angry parents show up in the office before, one time with a firearm. But that’s another story. At any rate, having good documentation takes a lot of pressure off. 
2. Contact each student individually for meetings to discuss their work. And phrase it that simply: “I’d like to meet with you to discuss your work.” No mention of academic dishonesty yet. And if there’s more than one student involved, don’t meet with them in a group — because they will likely meet before your meeting to get their story straight. Or, phrased more positively, if it’s a group of students involved and they all have the same explanation with the right details even when meeting separately, you can be confident they are telling the truth. 
3. Start each meeting by getting the student to discuss the work itself. This will help you gauge the extent to which the student really understands the material, and consequently how likely it is that the student actually cheated or plagiarized. 
4. Then, after you have gathered some information about the student’s skills with the material, shift the discussion to the academic dishonesty. Something like this: “I had something else to discuss with you about this work. Here’s your work. [Lay out the student's work.] And here’s [another student's work | a Wikipedia article | a website | whatever]. These are very similar as you can see. Can you give me some context for what happened here?” I’ve seen this called “the reveal” ala Trading Spaces. In other words, confront the student with the problem: They’ve turned in something that appears to have been lifted from something else without attribution, and you would like to know what the deal is with that, from their perspective. 
5. One of three things will happen at this point. You will get (a) a believable explanation, (b) a crap explanation, or (c) a confession. If (c), then that student’s case is, sadly, pretty straightforward from this point onward. If either (a) or (b), then you will eventually have to weigh the student’s words against the evidence. But for now, all you do is listen and ask questions to clarify what the student is saying. And make notes — make notes and add them to the paper trail. Above all, be nice. The student is probably about to crap his or her pants out of fear and uncertainty, and so being a professional who is merely seeking understanding of a questionable situation will make the student more comfortable and more likely to think straight. 
6. Once you’ve met with all the students and heard everything that needs to be said, you now have to take the evidence in the work, each individual student’s words, and the interactions between the words of different students, and figure out which student crossed the line into academic dishonesty and how willful and bad that crossing was. I can’t offer any rules or procedures for that, other than general advice to be professional and to seek a proper combination of justice and mercy. Also, I’d say that if you have any doubts about whether a student crossed that line, then it’s better to err on the side of mercy and give the student the benefit of the doubt — along with a serious lecture about how close they came to getting their grade nuked for cheating — rather than administer a punishment you’re not sure is deserved. 
7. Finally, based on (and partially guided by) your institution’s procedures for academic dishonesty, you probably have to write a report and send it up the chain of command to the Dean. At my college, we profs have the option to suggest restricted punishments for academic dishonesty if the circumstances merit it. The standard penalty is a 0 on the offending assignment, a lowering of the semester grade by one full letter (on top of grade damages caused by the 0), and expulsion upon the second offense. If my interview with a student leads me to believe that they were guilty of academic dishonesty — but their behavior was closer to indiscretion than it was to cold-blooded cheating, and they were not giving me a crap explanation in step 6 — then here’s my chance to suggest they not be punished as badly. I almost always have plenty of cause to call for mitigated penalties, because students are usually pretty forthcoming in their interviews. 

I wish I could describe some specific cases I’ve dealt with to show how my way of doing things usually leads to conclusions that I can feel relatively good about, but there’s FERPA and all that. But suffice to say that while every academic dishonesty investigation for me has been distinctly unpleasant — it takes a lot of time and a lot of energy to do things this way — I’ve never come away from a case feeling like I did the wrong thing, either letting someone off too easy or being too heavy-handed. 

Filed under: Academic honesty, Life in academia, Teaching , academia, academic dishonesty, cheating, college, higher education, plagiarism

I’ll say it again:

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. 

Filed under: Academic honesty, Life in academia , academic dishonesty, cheating, college, Education, higher education, plagiarism

Re: Quote of the day

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.

Filed under: Education, Higher ed, Life in academia , college, Education, george leef, higher education

Quote of the day (so far)

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.

Filed under: Education, Higher ed , college, Education, george leef, higher education

The suckage of being an engineering student

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!

Filed under: Education, Engineering, Higher ed, Liberal arts, Life in academia, Student culture , college, Engineering, Liberal arts, slashdot, Student culture, wired