Casting Out Nines

Blogging’s been light lately because of the push to finish spring semester courses. I did so today, turning in my last batch of semester grades. So maybe now I can get back into a regular swing of posting. 

My main role this summer will be that of the stay-at-home dad. Our two girls normally attend preschool and daycare during the week, our 4-year old full-time and our 2-year old part time. This summer, the 4-year old will be going just three days a week and the 2-year old just one day a week. I will have one day a week to myself (see below), but the other four weekdays will be spent either one-on-one with my 2-year old or two-on-one with both of them. It’s a role that I am greatly looking forward to playing. 

I will be “Mr. Mom” during the day, and then I will be teaching not one but two classes in the evenings. I signed up to teach our 8-week summer calculus course on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays from 5:30-7:30; and I am directing an independent study for one of our seniors, the meetings for which will be on Wednesdays 5:30-6:30. (We’ll be working through selections from Edward Bender’s Mathematical Methods in Artificial Intelligence.) 

The girls will remain in their current preschool/daycare schedule until the start of summer classes, so I do get a couple of weeks for my own “vacation” in the interim… which will be spent writing up a paper for the ICTCM proceedings and finishing up a book review for the MAA which I should have submitted back in March. I will also need to work on adapting my 14-week calculus course to an 8-week format, which is harder than it sounds. 

Between potty-training by day and derivative-training by night, I don’t expect to have tons of free time to spend on projects like I did last summer, when the girls went full-time five days a week to daycare while I whiled my days away as a gentleman of leisure read and studied for the Reconnect 2007 workshop. Actually, it was about three weeks into that summer break that I decided I would much rather have the girls at home with me than sit around surfing the internet and pretending to learn about machine learning. The bulk of the “projects” that I have for summer involve reading, and you’ll hear more about what I am working through as it happens. (Don’t want to be too ambitious at this point and lay out a reading list.)  

For the moment, though, it’s nice not to have the pressure of prepping for the next day’s classes and keeping up with the grading stream. 

From the Indianapolis Star online: 

It’s apropos of this story about how a court ruled that a teacher who allegedly slapped a student while trying to restore order in a gym class was protected from battery charges under the state’s corporal punishment laws. Saying that what the teacher did — and it’s not obvious that anybody got actually slapped in this incident — under duress is protected under law, and saying that teachers “should” slap students — as if it were a first line of defense — are, of course, very different things. But I guess the interns writing the poll don’t really grasp that.  (The headline at the link Sun-Times article is almost as badly off.) 

The scary thing is that the voting is currently 51%/49% in favor of slapping as a classroom management technique.  

A key element in being a college-educated person, especially in mathematics, is what athletes call mental toughness. This term can be a pop-psychological artifact with no real meaning, but if you look here and here and other places on the web, the general idea is that mental toughness is a combination of resilience in the face of minor and major failures; the ability to cope with difficult and numerous demands; confidence; focus; and  determination. Or better yet, it looks like this:

I believe mental toughness is key because, in college, you are preparing yourself for the rest of your life out of school, where the edges are harder and the difficulties far greater than just doing well on the next exam or getting a decent grade in your calculus class. Real people in the real world have to handle adversity, especially the particular adversity that comes from having ideas, thoughts, and proposed solutions shot down in flames.

College is an excellent training ground to develop mental toughness, and in mathematics that development is particularly acute because of the clarity with which right things are right and wrong things are wrong. Math students, especially math majors, ought to have the toughest minds around, because they have been tested and pushed to their utmost, they have summoned the intellectual honesty to admit it when their work has flaws — sometimes major ones — and they have developed the habit of working on through the injuries to finally win the match, so to speak. They should not be the ones who, when confronted with flaws in their performances, simply take it as a personal offense and fold up, unable to summon the will to keep on working.

So, a question:

How can an academic course or program, accomplish this task, when the very thing that catalyzes mental toughness - adversity couple with reality — is seen as offensive and humiliating? I can understand it if the professor is visibly and intentionally acting to humiliate or intimidate students; but if the prof is impassively and objectively pointing out problems in a student’s work, and the student feels that the prof is intimidating and humiliating them, then what is to be done? Does the prof overcompensate and become a sort of Barney-like figure, exuding love and goodwill while at the same time pointing out that does not, in fact, equal ? At what point should the student just take his/her lumps and deal with it?

Having been on the Promotion and Tenure Committee now for two years, and having the job of reading reams of course evaluations for not only myself but many of my colleagues to determine how good a job (or not) they are doing at teaching, I have a new appreciation for just how bad of an evaluative instrument the typical student course evaluation really is. I say let’s ditch the whole system and start over.

I suppose I should elaborate. The whole point of any kind of evaluation on anybody is to gather information. And I think of information the way Claude Shannon did, i.e. information is that which reduces uncertainty. Alice does an evaluation of Bob for some official purpose because the people in charge do not themselves have a clear idea of what Bob is doing, and it would be a little biased to have Bob evaluate himself, so Alice goes in to provide some kind of substantive information that clears up the picture and reduces the uncertainty of the people in charge. Maybe it’s not a single Alice but a whole roomful of Alices, all of whom have been taking a course from Bob for the last 9-10 weeks. With all that information, you might have some outliers in the positive end (”He’s great!”) or the negative end (”He’s awful!”) but on the average you should get a pattern of information that provides a little more certainty as to the kind of teacher Bob really is.

Except most of the time, you don’t get the kind of information you want, or for that matter any kind of information at all. There are all kinds of problems with the evaluation form itself most of the time. The questions that ask students to give a numerical response are often ill-posed, inappropriate for students to be answering, or simply absurd. Examples:

• Ill-posed: “The professor handed out a syllabus on the first day of class.” This (or pretty close to it) is a question on our evaluation forms, and students are asked to give an answer on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). But this is obviously a binary question — either I gave the syllabus out on the first day of class or I didn’t. You don’t “strongly agree”. Or what if I don’t hand out a paper copy but rather post it to our course web site and show students where it is? This question is kind of innocuous, so the fact that it yields no useful information due to its ill-posed nature is OK in some ways because you can just ignore it if you’re the prof or the P&T committee. But if we’re ignoring it, why is it on there in the first place?
• Inappropriate: “The professor’s teaching methods are appropriate for this class.” Another item off our evaluation form, and I have a hard time believing most students have any idea what’s an “appropriate” teaching method or not, unless they are junior or senior education majors who have done some crossover thinking about what high school teaching techniques work for the college classroom (and what teaching techniques are ineffective in K-12 but still effective in college). If I were a student, I’d interpret “appropriate” to mean “amenable to my lifestyle”, which is not what the question has in mind at all. So again, you might get a strong pattern of data from a question like this, but it actually increases uncertainty rather than decreases it. If a prof gets evaluated really badly on an item like that, does it mean that his teaching methods are really inappropriate, or that they are but students don’t care for it? We don’t know. More uncertainty.
• Absurd: I could go on and on. I’ll mention my favorite, which was mercifully removed from our course evaluations some years ago: “My instructor senses when some students are not understanding.” Pardon me? Sensing? I’m not a frickin’ Betazoid, folks.

Written comments are a little better but not by much. You get some very useful written comments sometimes, but you also get very many comments that are way out of context or simply unintelligible. A student may have gotten a test back with a bad grade the day of the evaluation — possibly even in another person’s class — and walk in with a chip on his shoulder and selectively ignore a semester’s worth of hard, quality work on the professor’s part just to make a point on the evaluation. The professor gets this and wonders who this person is and what class they thought they were evaluating. The P&T committee reads this and wonders what the deal was, and there are lots of questions about what really happened and what was really going on — again, the uncertainty level is raised, not lowered.

In the worst cases, students will create a meme that continues throughout all the comments on the evaluations for a single class. It’s easy to spot because it’s as if the students were copying down the same slogan onto different evaluation forms. “The professor thinks this is the only class we are taking” is one you see, verbatim, multiple times on the same evaluation — a sure sign that students have decided to group-think rather than honestly give their reasoned assessment of the course in light of everything that has taken place. This is just as bad when the meme is positive as it is when the meme is negative. When students, many of whom have been studiously avoiding being honest with the professor about their difficulties with the course or coming to office hours to talk about things, get together and adopt a slogan rather than give their own honest opinions, it raises rather than reduces uncertainty for the professor and the P&T people.

So like I said, I advocate a wholesale, unilateral rejection of the student evaluation system as we know it. There’s no point in holding fast to an information-gathering system that actually requires more information to interpret the results of the system than the system itself generates.

I do think students need to have a voice in evaluating their professors, so I wouldn’t recommend simply not having student evaluations in any form. But my ideal form sounds a little like what I used to do when I worked for the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University. My job was to go do a “small group analysis” (SGA) for TA’s in different departments. We’d have the TA end class 20 minutes early, and then I would go in and lead a discussion among the students where they had to voice, in person and out loud, their thoughts on a series of well-designed questions about the TA’s teaching. (I’ll try to go find a copy of the questions I used.) I took notes and directed traffic. The SGA’s were great because the students who had issues which were merely personal issues disguised as real pedagogical problems were often shouted down by other students who felt those issues were as ridiculous as they sounded. For example, a student would complain that homework wasn’t returned fast enough. “What are you talking about? He hands them back within four days, and anyhow you don’t even come to class but once a week, so what do you know?” the others would say. I saw exchanges like this, usually less pejorative but always very revealing, almost every time I did an SGA.

That’s information — a comment arises from one student and is put into context by another, and it all appears on one set of notes that the TA gets. And it takes no more time from class than the usual evaluation session. (At Vandy, students did traditional course evaluations too.) You have to hire and pay for people to run the SGA’s, but personally, I’d do it for free at my current job if I knew that I’d be getting a more sane and informative evaluation process out of it.

Here’s a problem I have with the way most calculus textbooks are written, and therefore by default the way most calculus courses end up being taught. Tell me if I am crazy or missing something.

We teach calculus from a depth-first viewpoint. That means that whenever we encounter a concept, we go as deeply as possible in that concept before moving on to the next one. There are some subjects where this makes sense, but in calculus we have a small number of main ideas that are made out of several concepts, and if we stop to attain maximal depth on every single thing, there’s a good chance that we never arrive at the main idea with any degree of understanding.

The big ideas of calculus — the rate of change (derivative) and accumulated change (integral) — are actually really simple if you consider them simply for what they are and what they were invented to do. Derivatives, for instance: You have a function, and it is changing in all kinds of ill-behaved ways. The object is to find out exactly how quickly it is changing at a given point. We quantify that rate of change by sticking a tangent line on the graph of the function at that point and measuring its slope. Really, that’s it. Slopes of lines. The rest are technical details on how to calculate this slope with some degree of accuracy, and those details range from graphical estimation to interpolation tricks to algebraic techniques.

But in Stewart’s Calculus book, the coin of the realm of calculus texts, here’s what students have to study before the derivative is defined: an entire chapter of precalculus review (a mind-numbing section 1.1 on functions and notation, mathematical models, families of functions, exponential functions, inverse functions and logarithms), then a chapter on limits in which students have to master finding limits from graphs, calculating limits using the Limit Laws, the epsilon-delta definition of a limit (mostly untaught these days), continuity, and limits at infinity.

Then there’s a section on “Tangents, Velocities, and Other Rates of Change” followed by two sections on the Derivative.*

This approach plays directly in to the greatest weakness of the average calculus student, which is algebra/precalculus content mastery and the ability to master technical details of calculations and theory. How likely is it, for the student who struggles to read mathematics or use algebra correctly, that this student will be in any shape to learn what a derivative is, and what one is for, by the time they get there?

You want students to master those technical calculations and theory, of course. But you also want those to be mastered in context, not just as mathematical tricks to be learned as parlor games. The few students who survive the onslaught of detail mastery and are still psychologically around to learn what a derivative is, often find it extremely hard to know what f’(3) = 2 actually means. All they know is that you bring the power down and subtract one, and maybe the Product Rule.

I’d prefer some kind of approach to calculus that is not depth-first but more like breadth-first, where students get a good grounding in the overall ideas of calculus and do some basic work before mining into the really deep details. Not all students really need those deep details, after all.

* OK, there is a section (2.1) where the ideas of tangent lines and velocities are briefly introduced. And then summarily ignored until the end of that chapter. The students typically ignore that material right along with the book.

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?

This is the last in the series of “How to Make a Syllabus” articles, and I wanted to focus on an element of syllabi that I don’t hear talked about much: their life cycle. Namely, now that we know what a syllabus is for and what sorts of things ought to be on one (and not be on one), let’s talk about how to disseminate it and — very importantly — how to keep it in the game as the semester moves past day 1.

A well-constructed syllabus is a one-stop shop for all the information students should need in a course. Any question, any piece of information that pertains to the course and is not already easily available elsewhere ought to be clearly written and easily accessible in the syllabus. A well-written syllabus has the power to remove a lot of guesswork and unpleasantness from the task of course management. But only if the syllabus is itself easily available, and only if students are constantly made aware of how useful it is.

That is, there are two very important things to keep in mind about your syllabus once it is made: (1) it must be ubiquitous, being distributed in as many different formats and locations as possible; and (2) you must constantly refer to it as the main information source about course management to the students.

Making the syllabus available is usually a no-brainer — you just photocopy the thing and hand it out on the first day of class. And most teachers realize that making the syllabus available in multiple formats is important; you can post a copy on your course web site, or email it out as an attachment after the first day. So this point isn’t difficult to grasp.

The only thing to keep in mind is to carry this to extremes. Make the syllabus available in as many formats as possible: on paper, to be sure, and electronically in multiple file formats, making sure that PDF is one of those formats. For my part I usually do the following with my syllabi:

• Print up paper copies for the first day of class.
• Print up some more just to have on hand in the office if a student needs one.
• Make electronic copies in PDF, MS Word, and RTF formats and post those on the course Angel site.

This way, a student in the class is going to be practically bumping in to a copy of the syllabus wherever they go. That’s the idea — make the syllabus not only logical and transparent but also easy to find, or rather hard to get away from.

In the past, I’ve also posted HTML versions of the syllabus on the web. HTML is an especially good format for syllabi because syllabi work well as hyperlinked documents. Students usually don’t read the syllabus in a linear way, starting from the beginning and working to the end; they read nonlinearly, diving in and searching for whatever piece of information is relevant to the question they have about the course. So I’ve made my syllabi before with hyperlinks to the main concepts and sections of the syllabus, allowing for nonlinear reading.

Nowadays, you don’t really need to make an HTML document to accomplish this searchability, because PDF, Word, and RTF files can be searched. But how many students know how to implement a word search in their PDF viewer? So there’s still something to be said for hyperlinked syllabi. Or you might try making a syllabus wiki instead, using Wikispaces or something similar. (Wikispaces allows for on-the-fly LaTeX typesetting which makes it an especially good solution for hyperlinked online mathematical documents.)

Now to the second point: What happens to the syllabus after day one. It’s very easy for the instructor to forget about the syllabus after the first day or the first week, and if the instructor forgets, then surely the students will too. So the instructor has to refer to the syllabus constantly when informational questions come up.

I’ve had to develop the discipline, whenever a student asks an informational question such as “When are your office hours?” or “How many points can we total in the class?”, to NOT answer these questions directly, but rather answer with “That’s in the syllabus.” Where is your office? That’s in the syllabus. When is the final exam? That’s in the syllabus. What do I need to make on the final to get a C+ for the class? Use the formula I gave you in the syllabus. To the student, I’m sure my flat answer of “that’s in the syllabus” sounds like I am brushing them off. But what I’m doing is referring them to the place where all that stuff is written down. And frankly, a syllabus is good because it is a place where it’s all written down, and you don’t have to remember any of it. (Sound familiar?) Besides, students begin to realize that any question of this sort is always going to be answered the same way, and so they simply stop asking and look it up instead. Which is the whole idea.

I don’t do this personally, but I have also heard of profs who include syllabus-related questions on tests and quizzes, perhaps as extra credit. That’s a pretty good way to make sure students are looking at the syllabus occasionally throughout the semester and come to see it as a “friendly” document, a document that is on their side and helping them navigate the course.

That’s about all I have to contribute on the topic of course syllabi. To sum up:

• A syllabus is an information dump for all the parametric and structural information in the course.
• A syllabus can have too little information in it, and too much information in it. Hitting the sweet spot is the challenge.
• An item is to be included in the syllabus if and only if it is information that is relevant to the course that is not readily available elsewhere.
• Make the syllabus readily available in a multitude of different formats and locations.
• Refer to the syllabus constantly and explicitly throughout the semester as the main repository of course management information.

Do these, and I think you’ll find a great weight lifted from your shoulders as you teach your course. And your students will have a little more brain power to devote to actually learning things in your class.

Since I’ve discussed what should go into a syllabus, it makes sense to say a few things about what to leave out. You could take my list of things to put into a syllabus in a “strict constructionist” kind of way, so that anything that’s not on that list shouldn’t go in. In general, my rule is that an item is to be included in the syllabus if and only if it is information that is relevant to the course that is not readily available elsewhere.

Here are some special cases of items that often show up in syllabi but really ought not to, or at least ought to be kept to a minimum and out of the way:

A lengthy discourse on the class, why it’s cool, and what it’s good for. I used to use my syllabi to write a mini-article on the course and how I conceive of it. If well-written, that sort of thing can be good for students to see. But is it syllabus material? I think not — mainly on the basis that students simply never read what I wrote. If they read anything at all, they would skip right to the stuff that is pertinent information — grading standards, attendance policies, etc. More often, they fell victim to the tailing-off effect I described that happens when the syllabus becomes bloated with too much stuff.

Save the discourse for a short lecture on the first day of class that gets repeated in some way each day. Your enthusiasm for the course comes across more effectively if lived out day-to-day in the classroom, rather than ensconced in a syllabus that doesn’t get read.

Words of encouragement. “You’ll be just fine in this class if you work hard and come to office hours“, and so on. Again, not that encouraging students is a bad thing, but the students who read through the syllabus carefully enough to see those words are precisely the ones who don’t need much encouraging. The students who will need to hear the message need to hear this message, not have it in a syllabus which they are instead instructed (over against all their academic issues) to go read. Encouragements are another thing that professors have to live out in the classroom. In the syllabus all they do is collect dust and contribute to the bloating effect.

Graphics. I have seen syllabi which are peppered with those cutesy MS Word clip art graphics. All those things do is distract. I subscribe to the Edward Tufte school when it comes to graphics, namely that graphical items need not to detract from the content, and if possible should enhance the content. My policy is to include maybe one graphic as a sort of course icon that appears at the very beginning of the syllabus, just to draw the reader’s attention. And that’s it, unless it’s some sort of visual that illustrates a piece of information in the syllabus.

Do you have anything that you like to include in a syllabus, or pet-peeve items you wish teachers would leave out?

Yesterday we looked at a philosophy of the college course syllabus and talked some about the legal and quasi-legal roles the syllabus plays. Now let’s get down to business — what do you put in one?

First of all, remember that the syllabus is a repository of information that is supposed to be complete and well-constructed. But it’s important to realize that the level at which students attend to and comprehend the syllabus is related to the sheer amount of stuff that’s in it, and it’s not a linear kind of relationship. I see it like this:

That is, students will either ignore, or else read and then not comprehend, the syllabus if there is either too little information in it… or too much. The way in which the information is organized is also important — we’re getting to that — but the first barrier for students is simply the quantity of stuff that’s in it. We need to find that absolute maximum, the amount of content that maximizes attention and comprehension.

My personal checklist for what to put on the syllabus is the following.

1. Course logistical information. List what days the course meets and where. Possibly this could be left out since obviously that info can be found elsewhere. But it’s usually short and doesn’t contribute to the content-bloat that decreases the effectiveness of the syllabus, so why not.

2. Professor contact information. I include my name (including my Ph.D. title, which is important for freshmen who are used to calling their teachers “Mr.” or “Mrs.”), my office location, my office phone, my email, my AIM screenname, and my office hours. I’ve considered putting my Twitter info on there as well in the future. The idea is to present all the possible channels for how a student may contact me, so it’s all in one place for later reference.

3. A BRIEF — as in two sentences or fewer — description of the course. Don’t just reproduce the catalog description, because that’s printed elsewhere. Don’t go off on a multi-page rhapsody about the history of the course, its relevance to life, etc. — you can talk about that on the first day of class, and anyway that sort of thing is not really information. Boil it down to something very short and sweet, so it can be used as a platform for…

4. The goals or instructional objectives for the course. Here, you are describing to the student what s/he ought to be able to do once they have completed the course. This section is very important, because in a well-designed course everything that happens in the class meetings and in the assessments is supposed to, in some way, be directly connected to one or more of these course goals.

Note two things. First, since the attainment of a goal is measured by whether you can do something, goals need to be stated in concrete action verbs. Never, ever use the words “understand”, “appreciate”, or similar ambiguous verbs as goals. Sure, I want my students to understand and appreciate the role of calculus in their majors. But how will I know if they have that understanding? What are the students going to do that demonstrates their understanding? That is the real goal. Second, these goals are the big, zoomed-out goals for the course and not the zoomed-in content goals of individual sections out of a book. I wouldn’t put “Perform the chain rule successfully” here.

5. Prerequisites, required equipment or texts, and expectations. I think the “expectations” part of this is really important, especially for freshman courses where the students are undergoing a major shift in the way they encounter classes. Keep the expectations short, few in number, and if possible phrased in a way that makes it easy to remember. These are the advertising slogans that you will use throughout the course to remind students of their jobs.

6. The types of assessments that students will do, along with their frequencies, projected dates, and point values or relative weights in the semester grade. It also helps, although it’s not always possible, to have a calendar for the semester that indicates in a visual way when things are going to happen. I used to think that you couldn’t plan that far in advance. But once I tried creating a semester-long plan for the course and trying diligently to stick to it, a lot of problems I was having in my teaching — creating examples that were too complicated, spending too much time on one thing and not enough on another — went away.

7. A precise, formulaic description of how the semester grade will be calculated. Don’t be afraid to put formulas in the syllabus if necessary. You want to give students the means to calculate or estimate their grades at any point in the semester. Don’t hold back any algorithmic information about this. If the students have problems using the method you devise for computing their grade, then help them. (Or make your computation method simpler.) Also, include a rubric for how letter grades will be assigned.

8. Course policies regarding attendance, deadlines, makeup work, and academic honesty. It is crucial that syllabi be crystal-clear on these policies and that professors follow to the letter what they put here. Otherwise students have every right to do what they want with regard to these issues and can legitimately take issue with you if you try to enforce a “policy” that was not well-formed. Having clear rules about these things also takes disciplinary matters out of your hands and makes it a matter of policy rather one of personal liking or disliking of a student.

Example: Usually my policy on work handed in past its deadline is that I will provide feedback on the student’s work but will give it a grade of “0″. I’ve had many students over the years turn in late work and expect it to be graded. When they get the grade of “0″ back, they usually want to know why. Answer: It’s the syllabus policy. If they complain about it, I just say that the policy on late work was made clear in the syllabus on day 1, and if you want me to run class that is fair and unbiased, then I am constrained to stick to what I say in the syllabus. (Which reinforces my belief that many students, although they claim to value fair, unbiased classrooms, really instead want unfairness that works to their advantage. But that’s another issue.)

9. Finally, any boilerplate that is required to be on the syllabus. Most colleges have these. For example, I have to insert a short paragraph in all my syllabi about accomodations for students with disabilities. And in classes taken by education majors, I have to insert a blurb from the state department of education explaining how the course satisfies a laundry list of professional standards. Check with your department chair, teaching/learning center, etc. if you’re not sure if you have all the information you need for this.

All this stuff, if written tightly and without fluff, should fit into four pages or so of a normal-sized font. That’s two pages front and back, which is a pleasing size for students.

Since this post has already gotten pretty long, in part 3 I’ll give some thoughts about what should not go into a syllabus to avoid the tailing-off effect of having too much content, and also some ideas for organizing this stuff.

Since the majority of college professors out there are just about to begin spring semester courses, let’s talk about that course document that is as ignored by students as it is referenced by faculty: the syllabus. The syllabus is the central document of a college course, but many professors either give their syllabi no thought at all, leading to a document that doesn’t contain much useful information and therefore gets ignored by students; or else they put too much in it, and it suffers the same fate. I’m going to take a couple or so articles here to give my ideas about what a syllabus is for; what ought to go in one; how it ought to be formatted; and what role it plays in the course after the first day.

This first article will focus on my philosophy behind the syllabus and some issues about the status of a syllabus as a legal document.

It’s helpful to understand first what an academic course is supposed to accomplish. Obviously a course is supposed to accomplish learning and broadened intellectual horizons on the part of the students. A great college course challenges students and takes them to an intellectual, and one also hopes a moral, place that is further along than when they started the course. These are lofty ideals — and not very concrete ones. And the problem is that we can’t create a course that is simply lofty. We must also have a structure that explains how we will know if the students have learned what they are supposed to be learning, and parameters that describe how the conduct of the course will proceed.

That structural, parametric information is housed in the syllabus. The syllabus is the skeleton of the course, supporting and giving form to all the things in the course which the professor and (hopefully) the students want to do. But like a skeleton, the syllabus for the course is not really meant to be seen. It supports from within. Therefore it must be strong and dependable and fitting together well at every joint. But at the same time, the syllabus cannot be so prominent or gaudy that the course is mistaken for it. It must be reliable and well-built but also unobtrusive and clear.

That’s my philosophy behind the syllabus. One other important thing to consider is the syallbus’ status as a legal document. This helpful guide titled “Legally Sound Syllabi” from Hampton University in Virginia spells out the legal standing of a college syllabus. From that web page:

In constructing course syllabi that are legally sound, you are basically focusing on avoiding educational malpractice. Just as a background, “Educational Malpractice” is a claim generally based on contract law and is a claim which is generally unsuccessful for the student/plaintiff. The claim arises from the duty assumed by a professional not to harm the individuals relying on the professional’s expertise. You, as a professor are required to exercise that degree of skill and knowledge usually had by members of your profession.

Although a syllabus is not considered to be a legal document, it is a good safe practice in this litigious society, for you as a professor to treat it as one.[...] [I]n constructing syllabi that are legally sound, and in turn avoiding educational malpractice, it is first and foremost important for you to comply with the contractual documents of the institution, such as the Faculty Handbook and the student catalog. Courts view these as legal contractual documents. Make sure that the description of the course in your syllabus is consistent with the description of the course in the student catalog.

So in other words, it’s not the case that syllabi are legally binding contracts — but it is possible to misrepresent university documents which are legally binding, and that will get you into a lawsuit. Tip: Universities don’t like lawsuits.

Apart from the actual legal standing of the syllabus, a well-constructed and clear syllabus is the professor’s first line of defense against the disgruntled student who brings a charge of unfairness or obscuring information against the professor. A syllabus which spells out the grading policies of the course in clear, definite language will make the professor immune to charges of favoritism or unfairness in grading (provided the professor follows the syllabus; more on that later).

Or put more positively, a clear and well-constructed syllabus makes it very easy for the student to understand her/his standing, roles, and expectations in the course at any time, and relieves the student of having to guess at these things all the time. So in other words, a good syllabus is just an extension of good teaching. And it makes a powerful first impression — a student who receives a bloated or carelessly-made syllabus on the first day will think of the course in the same terms. Similarly if the syllabus is well done.

So that’s what’s at stake when making a syllabus. In the next article we’ll talk about what goes into one — and what shouldn’t go into one.