Posted on 05/21/2010 5:46:33 AM PDT by mattstat
I have long predicted that as the proportion of high school graduates attending college increases, the classes offered at colleges would have to become easier. If they did not, then the proportion of students failing courses would increase to intolerable levels.
This prediction was correct. As proof, I offer you the story of Dominique Homberger, who tried teaching Biology 1001, “a large introductory course for nonscience majors at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge.” A lot of kids flunked her first exam. And then a lot failed her second exam. In the end, about one out five students dropped out of her course.
Get it? Students were receiving bad grades! Grades that would decide their very future and control their fate. Horror!
The Dean, Kevin Carman, flew (well, walked vigorously) to the rescue. He booted Homberger from the classroom and had Homberger’s replacement artificially boost every kid’s grade.
“Don’t worry, poor children,” Dean Carman told the sobbing students, “Here are the As you deserve. You are not stupid. You are smart. Bad grades aren’t your fault. Remind your parents to send in your tuition checks.”
But, really—what excuse did LSU offer for this extraordinary act?...
(Excerpt) Read more at wmbriggs.com ...
At Purdue we took the same first course (EE201). The second course was dumbed down I guess since it had to do more with the type of stuff MEs would see in Electrical Engineering (granted you guys probably did not have much reason to do Dynamics after college). Those three one hour courses have since gone away as a requirement (I remember they had to do with diodes etc). The EEs now at Purdue only need to take one out of EE major engineering class (like Statics, Thermo, etc) - I remember my EE roommate did not need to take Dynamics (the only B he got was in Statics, but he sandbagged in protest - the guy was incredibly smart went on for a PhD.).
Don’t get me started on Bio prof’s. I had one at Penn State who was an absolute b****. EVERYONE hated her because she took such pride when the WHOLE class was failing.
About 10 years ago I was teaching a 5000 level course. Most of my students were either juniors or seniors or first year grad students. Had one young lady who looked and acted like she had just graduated from high school. What she was doing in an upper division class, I don’t know. The first assignment was a paper. Hers was awful, no structure, just a bunch of statements with no supporting evidence. She didn’t present a position, she just repeated a lot of things we had covered in class without making a case for any of them. I wrote a LOT of comments on her paper, graded it a “C” and handed it back.
She came up after class in tears. Told me she couldn’t believe I had “given” her a “C” on her paper. Then she said she had never gotten a “C” before in her life. Me, being the heartless meanie I am, before I could stop myself said, “Well, if you write another paper like that, you’ll have two of them.” I asked her if she had read the comments I had written, and she admitted that she could see what I was talking about, but she still didn’t think the paper was worth a “C”. At which point, I told her it was normally worth a “D” but because it was the first paper of the semester, I had been generous. At this point, she really burst into tears and sobbed, “I think you just don’t like me.”
I responded, “I have over 100 students that I have had in class for all of two weeks. Lady, who ARE you??” Then, it finally dawned on her that she wasn’t being persecuted, it wasn’t personal, she wasn’t in high school any more, and that I wasn’t like any instructor she had ever had. To give her credit, she calmed down and asked to rewrite the paper. I told her she could, as long as she didn’t just regurgitate the feedback I’d given her. Interestingly enough, this young lady actually got the message that I expected her to think for herself. She wrote a much better paper and became a better student in my class.
After she got that rewrite back with the better grade on it, you would have thought I was her new best friend. She also worked her tail off the rest of the semester.
That art course was the toughest-graded course I've ever taken. 30 students, no A's, two B's, the rest C's and D's and there were IIRC four outright F's from guys who figured they could skate and didn't get the message early on. Mind you this was the early 70's when a professor could get away with that stuff, but he was tenured, brilliant, and didn't give a rip. Try to imagine the screams. And I'm still proud nearly four decades and two professional careers later that I earned one of the B's.
And I can still sketch, even a talentless klutz like me. He's long dead now but I'll tip a glass to him because that guy could teach, but only if you wanted to learn, and God help you if you didn't and wasted his time.
One other story - he came in one day and canceled class, saying "Mahalia Jackson died yesterday." None of us knew who she was. He said "That's what I thought. Go home and find out. Don't come back until you know." It didn't have much to do with drawing but it had everything to do with education. I feel sorry for a generation that is denied that sort of challenge.
Having taught in a college for 12 years, my perspective is a little different. College instructors tend to be some of the most naive people I've met. Many of them go from undergrads to grad students to professors, never having lived in the real world.
In my subject matter, fire technology, many students come in with a questionable academic background. I view it as my job to take them where they are and adapt my course to make them reach for the next level, but not kill them. You can't take a junior high football team and having them line up against an NFL squad. You have to start at their level and push them to the level they need to be by graduating the steps in ways where they have a reasonable expectation of success IF they work hard. It frequently takes a couple of steps to get them to this level. I start with 100 question multiple choice tests, and graduate by degrees to 300 question tests. Not everyone makes it, but the PATH to success is clear.
If the student doesn't learn, the teacher hasn't taught.
As to the eighteen year old pampered juvenile, yep, they show up. My job is to get them past that. Body slamming them doesn't work that well. I have better success pushing them to handle their own situations and attempting to guide them in that direction.
No, NC State.
I think that that method of teaching is excellent, particularly for people who want to gain an appreciation of a subject but know that they will never master it.
Kosmic, teachers at our school have the same problem—many students don’t bother showing up the 2nd half of the semester, AFTER they receive their financial aid checks. They don’t care whetheer they flunk ut or not after that.
Another true story: a local high school had a real good math teacher. But she graded so tough that eventually a) the students complained, then b) students stopped taking her class and took the class of other math teachers.
Result? Since she couldn’t get the minimum numbers for her classes, the school put her on a sort of paid internal leavc!
My mother was an ENglish teacher and whenver the sports coach would ask her to make special exceptions for team members whow eren’t doing the work in class, my mother would say, “of course, I’ll be glad to, as soon as you put the short person on the basketball team and the 98 pound glasses-wearing weakling on the football team.”
It always shut them up.
That so sad. I’ve had tough teachers myself (see post #28) but you can really learn from them and if you get an A, you, and everyone else, knows that you busted your butt to get it and you deserve it!!
Perhaps I should have added the the teacher was, as Harry Reid would put it, “light skinned”, while the school board and most of the students were Black.
At my school students take the financial aid book money, buy the textbook, then return to the bookstore the next day and pocket the refund. Every time you give them an in-class assignment, they claim to have “forgotten” to bring the book that day and ask to share with a neighbor.
Governments could save millions by paying out financial school aid at the END of the semester, and make class attendance a requirement for the aid. As it exists, the “system” is too easy to scam.
I agree!!
I was wondering why so many students who got financial aid just stopped coming after one or two classes. I couldn't understand why they didn't just withdraw. Finally had a student explain to me that getting an F or an N (N was the grade to give students who didn't show up to enough classes to get any grade) meant you didn't have to pay back your financial aid. If you withdrew from a class, the student had to pay back the tuition before they got any more financial aid.
So many of these kids were just scamming the system and had no intention of actually getting an education. I can't understand why any student who gets less than a passing grade doesn't have to pay back their tuition, book fees and so on. That would eliminate the kids who weren't there for an education.
At Arizona State if you drop before 60% of the semester is finished you have to repay the financial aid.
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