Casting Out Nines

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!

Editorial: This is article number 7 in this week’s retrospective series, and the first article I’ve reposted that wasn’t posted in 2006. That was a pretty good year for me, blogwise!

My calling as a prof means getting my hands dirty with the lives of students and trying to have some kind of positive influence in how they make meaning out of things. I categorize such topics here at CO9s under “Student Culture“. One major subtopic of student culture is the Greek system. I’ve blogged many times about it, mainly wondering what exactly it contributes to the life of a college — and implicitly wondering whether the benefits are worth the cost.

Those questions are still open, and the real issue is probably more complex than I make it out to be. But this article came out of a story that happened not too far from here, at DePauw University, that for me encapsulates and justifies my ongoing criticism of the Greek system.

The purging of a sorority

Originally posted: February 27, 2007

Permalink

The powers-that-be of the Delta Zeta sorority have decided to clean house at the DePauw University chapter, and it’s (if you’ll pardon the expression) not looking pretty:

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

(more…)

My college’s official policy on academic dishonesty (cheating, plagiarism, and the like) goes as follows. When a student is “convicted” of academic dishonesty on a course assignment and it is their first offense, then:

• The student receives an automatic “0″ on the assignment.
• The student’s final letter grade in the course is reduced by one full letter. (An earned B- becomes a C-, etc.)

And should the student ever commit academic dishonesty a second time, the student is expelled.

This policy is pretty typical of a lot of colleges. But I am beginning to think it doesn’t go far enough. Here’s what I am thinking ought to happen to a student caught in academic dishonesty:

• The student gets a grade of “0″ on the assignment and a reduction of one letter on the final grade, as is currently the case.
• The student is barred for one year from holding any officer position in any official college organization. If the student currently holds such a position, the student is to be removed from that position immediately.
• The student is barred from membership in the Student Congress and any other form of student government for one year.
• The student is barred for one year from being an admissions counselor, campus tour guide, or any other function in which they represent the college to the general public.
• If the student is an athlete, the student is given a five-game suspension.
• If the student is a member of a fraternity or sorority, then the student is banned from the fraternity or sorority for one full semester except for the use of study tables.

All students take their studies with varying degrees of seriousness at any given time, but when a student commits plagiarism or cheats, or deliberately allows it to happen, I think the gloves are off, and colleges need to start hitting these people where they live.

Additions? Comments? Accusations of draconianism?

If you read enough edublogs, you begin to encounter the factions that believe that students today are digital natives and have all sorts of rich information experiences all the time in their everyday lives. This is usually taken to mean that they use all kinds of electronic means of sending and receiving information, such as email. I’m already skeptical of that claim, and after the following experience from today I am even less sure about it.

We had some high school students visiting the math department at my college, and part of the program was a discussion panel with current math majors. One of the math majors was asked about some of the main differences between high school and college, and he mentioned the quantity of email that one has to keep up with as a major difference. He asked the high school students how often they checked their emails now. They all looked at each other sheepishly. The math major then asked how many students have email accounts at all. Less than half indicated that they did.

Less than half. How can that be, if they are digital natives? I think have at least half a dozen email addresses just for myself!

So now I am wondering: Do most of the students not have email accounts because they simply aren’t as technologically immersed as some people think they are? Or do they have some other electronic medium for communicating, like text messaging, that they use more frequently than email — so much more frequently that they don’t even have email accounts? I know texting is big among the 18-22 year old set right now, but it’s hard to imagine texting simply usurping the role of email, when you can get email accounts for free all over the place.