Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

nb don't take advice from me

Several Canadian universities have now switched to a pass/fail system, which I think was the correct call.

I'm going to leave it up to the student...if they can get the rest of the work in by Saturday, then they might eke out a D. But I'm not chasing them around like I've done in the past.

sounds perfect

All I can say is bless that column in the excel sheet that is for "homework" because lord knows I do not grade homework and that column will allow me to jiggle a grade if I need to.

my students can opt for pass/fail and this semester I'm much more likely than in past ones to help nudge them over the 'pass' margin.

They can only take one class pass/fail at this institution, which seems objectively bizarre to me.

I went to a college where that was ALWAYS an option. In fact, you could just "Credit/No Entry" a course, and if you failed it, it would be as if you were never in the class at all.

at other places I've been you could do pass/fail but only if you set it up that way from the start; here right now students here can take the class as normal and decide at the very end if they want the actual 0 - 4.0 grade or a satisfactory/not satisfactory.

i actively found ways to nudge every person at least to a passing grade. it helped to just decide that deadline are there as guidelines to keep ppl generally on track, not as justifications to chip points away here and there. at least this semester. so i went back and removed late penalties from the entire spreadsheet, and then was very willing to round up any grade that was reasonably close to the next tier, etc.

like... we just have so much less a sense of what's going on with them than normally. someone who just looks, assignment-wise, like a disinterested student who slacked off and stopped doing the regular weekly homework, could actually be someone in a really dire situation. of course, that's possible in any semester! but i just have so much less information. at least one guy who i couldn't really get a bead on, it turns out his grandparents were in the hospital with COVID. couple of kids who started really strong and then fell off, it turns out they had health problems, one had COVID in their immediate family. so who knows if somebody else is dealing with something as bad or worse, but isn't telling me?

also, almost all of my turkish and east asian students had huge internet issues that i sincerely believe kept them from participating in section the way they normally would. so should I give them low participation grades just so i can "reward" the people who navigated Zoom well and were really talkative? that didn't feel right either, so i just said eff it and gave everybody full participation grades. IMHO, it doesn't take anything away from my A students for there to be a greater number of A- students than usual, or Ds that "would have" been Fs.

basically, i say give the benefit of the doubt. if they're actually really disengaged students, that can get detected and come out in their grades some other dang semester, y'know?

I like it. Sounds like principled, compassionate educatin’ to me.

Thanks, Doc. I am giving the benefit of the doubt to most students... To be honest, I really like this student, but their writing is incomprehensible. In fact, it's so bad that it made me do research into their background, because no student who writes like this should have been able to pass Comp. But they're a transfer, and the institution lowered standards this semester for transfer students in particular. The problem is that they need the grade in order to graduate on time, and they don't have money for summer courses, etc. It's a stupid bind to create for myself— do I pass the student with the lowest grade possible, grade on effort (which is there) rather than content, etc? I think for this particularly student, I've got to really just grade on effort.

In other news, it seems like there might be a course for me in the spring, which would be a godsend, since this medical editing gig I just started is FUCKING BORING ME TO DEATH.

As a former comp teacher, I can say that I've passed a few students with pretty terrible writing skills because they showed up and did the work - and maybe even improved, just not to the standard you'd want in a university class.

I cannot say the same— definitely have had students show up, do the work badly, and not pass. But things are slightly different now.

What I'm trying to get at is this student doesn't really seem to have a grasp on basic sentence structures.

does your school have any kind of system where you can flag the student for advising/counseling? we do, it still feels a little weird to me but in an ideal world, if the person who acts on the flag is someone whose job is to reach out thoughtfully to help the kid, it can mean that someone who's really struggling in whatever way doesn't slip through the cracks. may just be buck-passing, idk.

I would get in huge trouble with my supervisor if I failed students and they complained, even if they'd plagiarized every single thing they wrote. Much easier to pass them with a C- than to risk not getting hired back next semester.

Does your university have developmental/remedial comp classes? Students like that occasionally slipped through the cracks and made it to my English 111 class, but usually they got stuck in DEVE 070 or whatever.

(xpost to self - we're also supposed to do it if students are at risk of failing at the midterm, so their advisor knows that's happening, can see if it's happening in multiple classes, and hopefully put together some bigger picture problems the kid is dealing with, or whatever? the loop isn't really well closed though in that i don't always know what ends up happening.)

ugh yeah the plagiarism thing. at one institution the word on the grapevine really was that if you fail someone for plagiarism, it'll be more a hassle for you than for the plagiarist.

actually did not even fail my plagiarists this semester!! D's all around. one was super egregious, very obviously had used an automated thing to run sentences through a thesaurus so that copy-pasting would be less detectable.

Oh yeah, if my students plagiarized on the final paper (worth 30% of the grade), I was expected to give them an Incomplete and make myself available to work with them for the next year to get the work in. Which led to me getting irritated emails from my former supervisor after I had left the university and was teaching in another state, because a student had all of a sudden decided to turn in her late work and I wasn't grading it fast enough for her.

The students who just didn't turn in the paper, OTOH, I was allowed to fail. So if you couldn't get your work done, the smart thing to do was plagiarize; either you'd pass the class or get a free year-long extension.

The issue is that with the pandemic and campus closed, a lot of those resources are curtailed. I can make it absolutely necessary for comp students to go to the writing center for assistance, but for a 2000 (aka 200 level) literature class, I don't have that authority. I can simply suggest it, which I did.... But again, online consults with limited hours for a student who is working full-time? It's a hard road.

They turned in revised or more complete versions of their work. If they're any better than previous efforts, a C- it is.

@ Lily - yup we also have the effective secret cheat code: if you want two more weeks for a paper, just plagiarize! we'll give you the chance to do it over again to learn the lesson! but i don't think any student actually knows this is what's gonna happen until it does, and we DO flag it in that system and somewhere there's an academic integrity office that would notice if they've done it more than once, maybe. mainly I just hate having to review a second paper after catching, checking and documenting the plagiarism made the first one already take four times as long as commenting on a regular paper. sigh.

If some company were to write AI software that could automate the process of reviewing papers for internet-based plagiarism, flag the passages it considers plagiarized along with link(s) to the source(s) it has identified, so the teacher could quickly evaluate the extent of plagiarism, if any, then that company could easily sell a few million licenses and make a mint.

There has been such software for a decade at least! But it's been expensive. The university I joined in September is the first one I've worked at that has a license to one of these, and I've been using it.

One term maybe 10 years ago, I caught 17 students plagiarizing in a single course. It got written up in Readers' Digest! Every university I've worked at has given the benefit of the doubt to faculty over students, though it's possible that the decisions were reversed upon some higher-level review to which I wasn't privy.

Over time I've adapted by choosing texts to which I could find no reference online. Then asking students to write about those texts is more secure. I've also favored more in-class writing when giving basic prompts like "explain this text", leaving for homework more individualized semester-long projects.

It's been a lot of work.

I had access to one of those detectors, Turnitin, in a previous teaching gig. It did double duty as an online classroom/submission portal so it wasn't just nakedly "you have to submit your papers this way so they can be scanned." One upshot is that it can also tell if students are copying from other students in a different instructor's section. It had plenty of limitations, but it certainly could catch the most nakedly obvious C&Ping from Wikipedia and online articles... and would auto-highlight the passages, super helpful. If plagiarists were industrious enough to plagiarize out of an old book, it probably wouldn't catch that, but that's pretty rare anyway.

the worst institution i ever worked at, p4c3 university in nyc, had a faculty that was OBSESSED with running every through turnitin, just a fully paranoid fixation on the idea of a student getting something over on them.

now i work at a much fancier design school and no one gives a fuck

in my view, if a student successfully plagiarizes, they really are taking a slot away from someone else who didn't get in the program but would have done the work for real... and yet, if preventing this rare case ends up driving everything, then you arrive at a state of suspicioning and policing your students that does not lend itself to anything else good or constructive. the main problem is that the more engaged, restorative-justice attitude towards these things, which i believe in philosophically, also ends up being a bunch more work for the instructor which is never really compensated, lauded, or spelled out as an expectation.

in professional development courses for the military and civil service, wherever writing assignments are part of the grading, HUGE emphasis is placed on catching out plagiarism, I think because the students/trainees are all expected to adhere to a higher level of ethics than the “average” student at your institution of higher learning. I’m pretty sure they all use Turnitin religiously. And if you get caught it’s like an instant fail because it means YOU LIED which is like right up there with only sort of defending and upholding the Constitution, making you literally the worst.

Then of course after graduation everyone goes back to their staff jobs where their elected or politically appointed bosses are often completely unconcerned with such things (lol Biden) and copying each other’s homework is considered a best practice because it’s a smart way to get stuff done and who’s going to read this crap anyway.

I've only had issues with Turnitin catching students copying papers by their friends, since it also works across Turnitin submissions at one's institution.

Did have an incident this fall where another prof found a student had copied the paper of a student of mine from last spring. My student eventually had to withdrawal from the class because of attendance issues (prior to the pandemic) and just unbelievably bad papers, stuff that wasn't even put through spell-check, just sloppy crap. And they gave this paper to a friend of theirs to use this fall. Remarkable, in my mind— I never would have thought to have done anything like this, ever.

Awkward…

https://www.chronicle.com/article/dead-man-teaching

yeah I saw that story, pretty funny / lame on the uni's part.

any thoughts here on the Kansass tenure business? I used to teach there & one big reason for getting out was how cavalierly my colleagues treated a similar threat in 2008 and refused to say that they'd do anything to protect untenured tenure-track faculty from culling.

I would expect tenure to be a hot-button item here now that very few tenure-track faculty remain on the board. For my part I think efforts to preserve tenure for university faculty without concomitant job security reforms for workers in nonacademic fields are doomed to failure.

Tenured faculty never seem huge on solidarity with the immiserated ranks of adjuncts and grad students making their 2/1 teaching loads possible

ime that varies by school/department. in general the tenured faculty i know supported our grad worker union - signing public letters, inviting union reps to speak at conferences they were hosting, accepting invitations to speak at union rallys during our strike, etc.

ime it varies so much on how many of each camp there are, what kind of classes get taught by which department in which college or other administrative unit, what sort of union situation there is for nt faculty, etc.

my wife is tenured and i am not nor will be so i have access to both sides of it which can be good and bad

IME the the tenured profs are the most useless shits to ever breathe air while NTTs, adjuncts, and grad students make their useless research possible. They wouldn't even support a resolution calling for year-long contracts for adjuncts, and meanwhile, they ask advice on how to teach from those same adjuncts.

Like you're tenured and you don't know how to teach Foucault? Maybe I should have your job then instead of begging my husband not to quit his job so we can keep his good insurance.

Charming as ever.

fuck off islamophobe

Creative too!

It's amazing how tenured profs such as yourself will rally around their colleagues at other institutions, even when those colleagues are demonstrably bad at their jobs and act terribly toward the people who make their jobs possible.

my wife is tenured and i am not nor will be so i have access to both sides of it which can be good and bad

― joygoat, Monday, February 1, 2021 2:06 PM (two hours ago)

similar situation here. I'm currently a phd student but in the past have been university staff and the differences in both cases were/are instructive. Also, she was adjunct & staff for 6 years before getting a tt job, so we've held various perspectives over the years.

It's nowhere near perfect, but I'm glad at my current Canadian institution the full-time faculty, part-time faculty, and TA/RAs all have separate unions. The contrast with past US institutions is remarkable. I am deeply disgusted when I see full-time/tt faculty opposing unionization

Or refusing to support their NTT and adjunct faculty in any meaningful way— many belong to the union, but seem to believe that solidarity should only be shared among themselves.

Including TT and NTT faculty in the same union is a joke afaic, the power differential is ludicrous.

the table is the table, the way you talk to me on here is shitty. In this thread you’ve called me one of “the most useless shits to ever breathe air” and an Islamophobe. What are you hoping to gain by this? The second is untrue and the former, well, if that’s what you really think, why engage with me at all? Or with my tenured Muslim colleagues, with whom I work daily? And why do you think you know me so well that you think I’m not fighting for my untenured colleagues? We don’t have to live out the thread’s title in here!

I called you an Islamophobe because I've read your posts on other threads.

I never called *you* a useless shit, I wrote "IME the tenured profs are the most useless shits to ever breathe air." You included yourself in that equation, I did not.

I admit to being hyperbolic— I have great respect for some of my tenured colleagues and friends.

But at the institution where I've spent most of my time, the huge number of NTT-but-pulling-a-4/4 faculty and contingent faculty do the majority of the teaching. Many of the tenured faculty seem to be upper-middle class people with kids who don't understand or care about their students. And many of them are terrified that showing a little solidarity with their non-tenured colleagues will get them in hot water, so they throw us under the bus on a regular basis.

Situations like the one I describe and those tenured folks who whinge endlessly about "having to read horrible poetry by dumb teenagers"— a complaint I've heard more than once from *tenured* creative writing/english profs— are evidence enough for me that many of the tenured faculty in my given field are running a grift, suck at their jobs, and are bad human beings.

I don't necessarily think you're one of these people. I just don't like your weird support of obviously Islamophobic policies of the French state.

As a friend who recently defended said to me on the phone, "I am glad that I have a job at a local high school and editing a journal, because all the academics I've met in all my years in academia are sociopaths"

Many of the tenured faculty seem to be upper-middle class people with kids who don't understand or care about their students.

many of the tenured faculty in my given field are running a grift, suck at their jobs

I'd say most of the "good" academics I know - the well liked teachers and colleagues, tenured or otherwise, who do all sorts of above and beyond work for their students and are genuinely interested in doing work that benefits society and are terrified as being seen as ivory tower intellectuals - are absolutely convinced they're running a grift and suck at their jobs. Conversely a lot of the real assholes think they're amazing and talented and the world revolves around the fact that they're extremely familiar with Chaucer or 18th century british history or whatever.

And not trying to be BUT NOT ALL PARENTS!!! here but a lot of the academics I know without kids (or those with kids who are obviously not interested in parenting) are fucking terrible at teaching and any sort of administration where they deal with students (grad / undergrad directors, advising, committee work) because they're hyper-focused adult-children who devote all their energy to whatever their interest is and resent anything that dares intrude into that space. The academics I know with kids, for the most part, have to strongly compartmentalize their life and work and tend to have a much greater sense of empathy towards the needs of others because kids constantly need empathy and people to do shit for them.

But really, I don't understand why anyone would be surprised that academia is just like any other workplace with different strata of power and money, some number of people who are really great and caring and good at their jobs, and a number who are incredibly lazy / malicious / entitled assholes who have failed or scammed their way upward.

Oh wow I don’t think having kids has anything to do with it but this conversation is not going anywhere productive imo. Idk what the purpose of it is.

As of Dec I got RIFed and am no longer tied to the higher ed grind, at least not formally. It’s a huge relief!

What an asshole, and I feel doubly ashamed due to the fact that the instructor is Romanian. Surely he remembers December 1989?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/19/canada-lecturer-myanmar-student-exam-web-blackout