Please don't flame me...3 "A" papers...Have Universities gone to shit?!

[JanMichael]

Seriously! I'm taking a graduate course and have submitted what I consider massively mediocre work. Ok, that's not entirely true, the papers have been excellent content wise. I know the subject well.

But the writing has sucked!

The first paper was "ok" and got an "A". The second paper has been the best, an "A". The last paper was total garbage. I wrote it fast, hadn't read the assigned readings and the grammer went to the wolves, "A".

This is a top-notch university too.

Have expectations of the students fallen so far or have financial pressures made them all desperate?

What's the deal?

EDIT: I should state that this is not an original idea of mine. I've heard it from quite a few returning students...

2nd EDIT: I've also been told that several of the formerly elite schools in my neck of the woods are really no better that heavily hyped diploma mills. How sad...

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. Jan:

Learn how to take "yes" for an answer, bubba. Just maintain your high personal standards while you do so.

[Guaranteed]

2. Yeah, I get that sometimes, too...

Course, other times I think I kicked the crap out of it and it comes back bleeding red ink...

Go figure.

[lenidog]

9. Same here

every damm paper I ever wrote I thought was crap and they came back with A's on them

[greymattermom]

3. the deal is

that professors are graded by student evaluations. The whole process becomes what I call "I'll give you an A if you give me an A". Student evaluations go in to annual salary discussions and promotion and tenure documents.

[JanMichael]

4. Really? Is this common?

Dear gawd.

[susanna]

5. Are you serious?!

This must be some new phenomenon, huh? I want to go back in time and kick the crap out of one of my old Psych professors via a "student evaluation." Born too late, AGAIN.

[bobbieinok]

11. student evaluations are a good idea, but then admin uses them to

dump on the faculty

at our school: for a long time the head of professional develpment for faculty completely handled the evaluations and worked with them on a computer not tied into any other computer in any way......eventually that person was 'let go' and the admin now runs the whole thing.......dept heads monitor every negative evaluation as a faculty problem (about half the time, that's probably correct)

also, as is done in many schools, the evaluations are done in class with the instructor out of the room......many times students talk about how they're evaluating......in one class with which I had EXTREMELY bad rapport, one student (who liked me from a previous class) told me many students said 'now's our chance to get Dr ZZZ'.....in another class, it was obvious from the written comments by an international student that the one student in the class with whom I had clashed, really talked negatively during this period

I do think evaluations are helpful both for students and for faculty....how to do them so that they don't get misused is a real problem

[Lisa]

12. ours are done in a "focus group" style

The way the questions are pitched actually encourages as much negative feedback as possible. One psych prof who studies the negative aspects of focus groups has complained about this, but admin has decided that it would cost too much to change the approach.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. Yeah, the way evaluations are done is deeply flawed

Administrators take them as the gospel truth. I think they see the students as customers who need to be catered to.

I heard students urging others to give a certain business professor bad evaluations because particular student had been offended.

A Japanese instructor at another school said that students actually threatened her with bad evaluations if she "didn't make class easier and more fun."

I once got bad evaluations from one section of a course and good evaluations from another section of the same course, even though we covered the same material in much the same way. The difference was that the "bad" section contained a Japanese-American student who was convinced that a Caucasian had no business teaching Japanese and constantly complained to the other students that he wished he could take the session taught by a native speaker. The "good" section contained two adult students, people older than I, who sometimes helped keep some of the brattier young students in line. Classes definitely have personalities!

One year I had a Japanese teaching assistant, sent over on an exchange program, who was hopeless as a classroom teacher. Realizing that he didn't want to take orders from a woman (he was giving me what I recognized as Japanese-style passive-aggressive behavior), I asked some of my male colleagues to work with him. They, too, came back shaking their heads, telling me that he just didn't get it. But he partied with the students and bought booze for them, and the frat boys in particular thought he was great.

I had to return to Minneapolis for a family funeral, and there was nothing to do but put this TA in charge of the class. It was clear when I came back that they hadn't accomplished much.

When it came time for student evaluations, a bunch of my C and D students gave me terrible evaluations, said that I was "mean" to the Japanese TA, and that he was a far better teacher than I was. On the same set of evaluations, two of my A students complained that the classes the TA had taught during my absence had been a complete waste of time, because he had just stood in front of the class and bullshitted.

But what the administrators, being of the bean counter mindset, really paid attention to was the numbers, where the students evaluate the instructor on a 4-point scale. "This instructor held class regularly and on time" "this instructor motivates me," "this instructor is helpful during office hours," etc. From these answers, they literally gave each professor a GPA, with all evaluations weighted equally. They didn't say, "Hmm, this student wrote a thoughtful and intelligent evaluation in the comment section, and that student just scrawled 'Professor Leftcoast is a bitch from hell'.' so maybe we should give more credence to the first student."

When you went in for your performance review, the dean would give you your GPA and how it compared to the rest of your department, the college as a whole, and yourself the previous year.

I was once in a divisional meeting at which the dean presented us with the new faculty evaluation form. It had all these items like the ones I have mentioned above. One of my more vocal colleagues remarked, "All that goes into their record from us is one letter grade, and they get to write a two-page report on us. I'd like to fill out a form that graded each student on things like, 'This student attended class regularly and on time.' 'This student couldn't be motivated to jump if I set his shoes on fire,' or 'This student actually came for help during office hours.'"

After leaving academia, I had occasion to take classes and write student evaluations. In two cases, I had absolutely dreadful TAs. I gave them bad evaluations, but the evaluations were very detailed, explaining why what they were doing was not effective. When I got good instructors, I always explained exactly why they were good. In one case, I didn't like one instructor, but I could separate that from the fact that she wasn't actually doing anything seriously wrong in her teaching methods. It was just a personality clash.

A lot of college students don't have the discernment to separate personality clashes from bad teaching, especially if they've been spoiled at home. Their college professors may be the first people who have ever made serious academic demands on them.

If I were designing student evaluations, I would make them all open-ended essay questions. The administrators would hate that, because they couldn't get their grubby little number-crunching minds around them, but too bad.

[barb162]

6. grade inflation is one of the things screwing up our education

system. People who can barely write a compound sentence think they are geniuses and have the "A" grades to prove it. And the situation is getting worse; it seems as if every car I pass has a bumper sticker saying their kid is on the dean's list. The local newspaper lists the kids with a "B' average and it's 3/4 of the school. Can these kids spell? No.

[brokensymmetry]

7. You don't know the half of it.

Take a hard look at undergraduate grading standards if you really want to be disturbed. More and more students are borderline literate (at best), and fully innumerate. Yet, they pass courses and graduate with degrees from fully accredited public universities.

Academic dishonesty? You could have video tapes from three independent sources, sworn statements from a half dozen eye witnesses, and it STILL wouldn't go forward.

[JanMichael]

8. They'll be great consumers though. They'll buy a degree, a job...

...and some other shit.

Scary, very scary.

[Lisa]

10. If you structured your arguments and found peer-reviewed sources ...

.... and did in-text citations ... that may have been enough to make your prof weep with gratitude!

I've been grading papers by 4th-year students (some of whom are trying to get into grad school) -- and there's been a parade of people at office hours, upset because I docked marks for using dubious websites, not bothering to cite passages they'd obviously quoted, or throwing a whole bunch of out-of-context sources together at random and hoping that would suffice for a persuasive argument.

And this was after I'd distributed a handout earlier in the term, about "things to avoid". The chair even told me that someone had been kicking up a row about being dropped from an A to a C because of "a couple of typos", and when I showed him my marking key (spelling/grammar errors would only lose 10% at the most -- in that case the problems were a lot more serious) he just shook his head and sighed. Several of my colleagues have said that they've noticed an increase in the number of students reaching grad school who aren't sure how to find good sources, or do independent research. Given how much our library shelled out for electronic journal indices (way easier than the old Citation Index), it's alarming.

Are you in a Master's or PhD program? If most of the people in the course were Master's level, the faculty might be using this as a "warning shot" to catch grads with serious problems before they get further into their degrees. They might think your writing is okay by comparison (for now).

[MissBrooks]

13. punish yourself

You should go immediately to the nearest dominatrix and have her punish you.

[JanMichael]

19. Nah. A waste of beer money.

I'll take a hang-over as punishment.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. There's a reason why I was glad to be done with academia

after having gone into it thinking that I had found the ideal way of life.

It's hard for a university to be demanding when the schools that feed it are not, and since schools are locally controlled, Americans have only themselves to blame if their high schools are graduating semi-literates.

I saw my local high school in a suburb of Minneapolis deteriorate in the late 1960s to early 1970s for two reasons. One was the election of a pro wrestler and his buddies to the school board. The school had a poor record in interscholastic athletics, and they were obsessed with building it up, so they fattened up the athletic programs but had no money for improving academics.

They were abetted in the ruination of the school by a large number of parents, who didn't want their young angels to be disciplined for bad behavior, to be burdened with homework, or to be exposed to "crazy" ideas. In particular, they hounded one of the English teachers out of the system because he tried to get his honors English classes to discuss the issues raised in literary works instead of just answering content questions. Other teachers found not only that students wouldn't do homework on nights when popular TV shows were on but that parents got mad when teachers gave their kids zeros for not doing homework.

Yes, I agree that the public schools could do much better, but I disagree with the Republicans on the cause. It's not the teachers, who are only doing what the community demands. It's the bean counting administrators and the "dumb and proud of it" parents who elect the school boards.

[WMliberal]

16. grade inflation IS rampant. Elite schools have just as much reason

to do it as degree mills. Harvard, in fact, is a well-known example.

Here's one article I got: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/fyi/teachers.ednews/04/19/harvard.grade.inflation.ap/

"...Last June, a record 91 percent of Harvard seniors graduated with some kind of honor on their diploma, The Boston Globe reported. About half the undergraduate grades last year were A or A-minus..."

[Cuban_Liberal]

17. UIUC has begun to crack down on grade inflation.

We're now in the process of grade DE-flation. As our new chancellor said, "I want a degree from this university to mean something."

:)

[SKKY]

18. Being in the Military, I get that quite a bit...

...In the Navy, it's very difficult to do both when you take into account deployments, OP tempos, etc. but it can be done. I've turned in absolute crap, stuff I pulled out of my "culo" the night before and been given A's and B's because, "...I understand you're extremely busy and you did as much as you can." I appreciate it, but I have to admit it's not fair to the others in the class.