When you’re teaching a class and students are having trouble understanding the textbook, usually the responsible thing to do is provide them with some form of clarification in the form of a handout or some web links to additional resources. But apparently that’s a firing offense if you’re an adjunct faculty at Indiana’s Ivy Tech Community College:
Pejman Norasteh — like many adjuncts — didn’t have much control over the material he was supposed to cover [in his statistics class]. But students started to send him e-mail saying that the textbook was unclear. One student said he was getting “depressed” and giving up when he didn’t understand the required assignments. Another student wrote: “As usual, our textbook does a poor job of explaining concepts. I am adding this chapter to my list of examples of how poor our book is….”
In response to the e-mail messages and personal requests, Norasteh started handing out supplementary materials to cover the same subject matter as the textbook, but with his own explanations. While the students who complained were happy, some others were not. They sent e-mail messages to the division chair saying that they were being asked to do extra work on top of the syllabus because the supplementary materials were not mentioned on the syllabus as required reading. That of course was true, since Norasteh didn’t start the course thinking he would add to the reading beyond the textbook.
At that point, Norasteh received an e-mail from Mark Magnuson, division chair for liberal arts and sciences, and general education at the campus. Magnuson wrote that it was clear to him that “you are not using or following the syllabus or textbook,” adding that “all instructors, adjuncts and full-time, are required to use the syllabus and textbook in each course to meet the statewide agreed upon course objectives. Individual instructors do not have the option of straying from the syllabus and/or textbook.”
Ultimately, Noratesh was not kept on at the college. Never mind the fact that Noratesh was not “straying” from the textbook but merely doing his job as an educator to clarify the textbook and maximize the students’ learning experience.
There are actually two appalling things about this story. Perhaps foremost is the fact that Noratesh lost his job because he was doing his job, which is to teach students and give them the best learning experience possible. Apparently, according to Ivy Tech — which here in Indiana serves mainly as a transfer institution where students take courses and then transfer the credits to four-year colleges — the need for consistency in coursework trumps the need for clear exposition of the course content, which might (and frequently does) involve the instructor using his or her best judgment and creating materials of his or her own to supplement the standard materials. What’s more important here, Ivy Tech?
The other appalling thing is the reaction of those students who got upset because they were “having to to extra work”. God forbid that you should have to work harder than the absolute minimum to understand the course content — even if the absolute minimum, which involves using an impenetrable textbook, gets you nowhere. Will these same students be raising the same objections on their jobs after college if their bosses give them “extra work” to do or if they have to do “extra work” to make their clients happier? Shame on that attitude.
Final note for full disclosure: Jeff Fanter, Ivy Tech’s communications director who is mentioned in the original article, happens to be my next-door neighbor. He’s a good guy.
Filed under: Higher ed, Life in academia, Teaching , Higher ed, higher education, ivy tech, noratesh, Teaching
- How to deal with feelings of inadequacy, from xkcd.
- edwired has some thoughts on the future of the academy in an economy where giving away your product doesn’t necessarily make your business unprofitable. Academhack follows up with related thoughts on using video podcasting to replace the usual lecture format. Interesting idea in giving away the podcast and then charging for in-class activity.
- Why pay dues to join a fraternity or sorority when you can pay one low price and have all the drunken party games on your Wii? I find it ironic that the Association of Fraternity Advisors would be so shocked. Where do you think the idea for the game came from, people?
- I’ve had a couple of posts lately about what I’d do if I were the university president. Now there’s a series of articles out on the same subject except with contributions by people who are probably a lot more qualified for that position than I am.
- Here are some updates on Xian-Jin Li’s purported proof of the Riemann hypothesis which I first blogged about here. Summary: There are some flaws, but it might be fixable.
- 50+ productivity blogs you’ve never heard of before. So please, spend lots of time reading those productivity blogs instead of getting stuff done. (Or better yet, write blog posts about spending time reading those blogs instead of getting stuff done…)
Filed under: Education, GTD, Higher ed, Humor, Math , GTD, higher education, li, links, riemann hypothesis, video podcasting
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
Good article here at the Chronicle on balancing teaching with research, from a neuroscience professor who makes it work for him.
The reality of modern academe is that, no matter what your institutional affiliation, the time you can devote to research is being squeezed by multiple competing demands. No simple solution to that problem exists for any of us. But I have found that rethinking the nature of our professional commitments, such that teaching activities bleed into research ones (and vice versa), can be an effective way to reduce the time crunch. Academics describe their workload of scholarship, teaching, and service as if those were entirely separate entities. In reality, the line between teaching and research is usually much fuzzier.
Read the whole thing, in which Prof. Gendle writes at length about the potentially prosperous symbiosis between teaching and research. He points out three key scholarly skills which teaching reinforces: developing your presentation skills, responding appropriately to odd questions, and making connections across fields. He emphasizes his success in maintaining an active research agenda while keeping a “moderately heavy” teaching load, which for him is 5-6 courses per year. My teaching load is 8 courses (6 preps) per year, and to that situation Prof. Gendle says:
I am fortunate that my teaching load still allows some dedicated time for research. That may not be the case at institutions with teaching loads of seven or more courses in a single academic year. Teaching loads of that magnitude often pass a tipping point for most faculty members (myself included). With that many courses, there simply are not enough hours in the day to conduct classes, grade papers, etc., and still have time left for research.
Gendle is in the psychology department at Elon University, which is well-known for being an undergraduate institution with a reputation for engaging students in meaningful scholarly work.
Do any of you teach at institutions with a 7+ course-per-year teaching load, and still manage an active research program of some sort?
Filed under: Education, Higher ed, Life in academia, Scholarship, Teaching , academia, elon, higher education, research, Scholarship, Teaching
…then I might be driven to drink because of the job stress, but I don’t think I would drive around drunk either:
The president of the University of Evansville was arrested for driving while intoxicated Wednesday evening.
Stephen Jennings, who has been president since 2001 at the dry campus, was driving with a blood-alcohol content nearly twice the level at which a driver is considered intoxicated, according to a probable cause affidavit posted online by the Evansville Courier and Press.[...]
“I have obviously made a very serious mistake, and I apologize to the campus community and the community at large,” Jennings said in the statement. “I will take every necessary action to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”
Jennings pleaded guilty to two counts of operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated Thursday morning via video from the Vanderburgh County Jail, according to court records. He was allowed to enter the deferral program because it was his first offense.
If Jennings successfully completes the program, the charges against him will be dismissed.
According to the article, Jennings was pulled over after weaving his car between lanes on a major highway. Then, after police “immediately smelled a very strong odor of alcohol beverages” and noticed his “bloodshot and glassy eyes”, Jennings refused a field sobriety test; then he claimed he hadn’t been drinking; then he admitted to having two beers. Then they found his blood alcohol content to be 0.14, which is way more than you’d get after two beers. Unless those two beers were in addition to a bottle of scotch.
The trustees at UE are rallying around Jennings:
“The board feels he has done a wonderful job for this university and this community,” board Chairman Niel Ellerbrook said in the statement, “and it is our intention to do whatever is needed to help Steve.”
That’s nice, but if I were a trustee and not just a university president, I’d have to think that raising money and representing the institution to the public — which are two of the main jobs of the president — are going to be a lot harder when you’ve been arrested for DUI.
Filed under: Higher ed, Life in academia , academia, administration, drunk driving, evansville, higher education, president, university of evansville
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
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
Some quotes from the Inside Higher Ed article:
“At times, however, the value of the Church’s contribution to the public forum is questioned. It is important therefore to recall that the truths of faith and of reason never contradict one another. The Church’s mission, in fact, involves her in humanity’s struggle to arrive at truth. In articulating revealed truth she serves all members of society by purifying reason, ensuring that it remains open to the consideration of ultimate truths. Drawing upon divine wisdom, she sheds light on the foundation of human morality and ethics, and reminds all groups in society that it is not praxis that creates truth but truth that should serve as the basis of praxis.”
“Truth,” he continued a little later in his speech, “means more than knowledge: knowing the truth leads us to discover the good. Truth speaks to the individual in his or her the entirety, inviting us to respond with our whole being.” [...]
“While we have sought diligently to engage the intellect of our young, perhaps we have neglected the will. Subsequently we observe, with distress, the notion of freedom being distorted. Freedom is not an opting out. It is an opting in — a participation in Being itself. Hence authentic freedom can never be attained by turning away from God. Such a choice would ultimately disregard the very truth we need in order to understand ourselves.”
Some interesting comments as well about academic freedom in that article, too.
The comments thus far appear to come mostly from hardcore rationalists who appear to think that if you cannot taste, touch, feel, see, or hear it, then it doesn’t exist; and that rationality and the vague concept of “enlightenment” apart from faith is the ideal end state for humanity. I’ve learned that there’s no point in trying to engage such people.
For my part, I found myself wishing that we Protestants were half as articulate about the relationship between faith and reason as the Pope is (and perhaps the Catholic Church is).
Filed under: Academic freedom, Christianity, Education, Higher ed, Life in academia , catholicism, faith, higher education, pope, ratzinger, reason
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
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
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