Or apparently the shift key.
Well, as a general principle, i don’t think that requiring regular written work is necessarily a sign of hand-holding anyway. Some teachers might feel it’s the best way to evaluate student understanding; some may not.
As for your claim about not expecting students to do certain things in US colleges, can you give an example of something a Doper has said that they can’t expect students to do? Because, as i said i attended university outside of the US, and i now live in the US, and while there are differences between countries, and between different types of institutions, in general the expectations at American universities are not very different from expectations elsewhere.
Well, you’ve probably seen brochures for pretty exclusive schools. The United States has literally thousands of four-year colleges and universities, ranging from huge state schools to tiny liberal arts colleges, with plenty of different types in between. It’s very hard to generalize about the system as a whole, because it isn’t really even a system.
And i’m not sure why you’re surprised at the emphasis on personal attention from professors. Universities hire people who are experts in their field, and top universities often have world-class people working as faculty. Isn’t it reasonable that potential students might want to learn some stuff directly from these eminent scholars?
As for class size, in my own field (history) i do, in fact, firmly believe that students learn better in smaller classes.
Sure, large lectures can convey important information, and a good lecturer can be both entertaining and extremely informative, but the crux of this subject is reading and analyzing historical arguments, and developing your own ideas and arguments. Both as a student, and as a teacher, i’ve found that an understanding of history as process and as a complicated and contingent phenomenon (rather than just a series of events and dates) is far better developed by looking at primary source documents and scholarly historical works and discussing them in a seminar-style environment.
I happen to think that i’m a pretty decent lecturer, and i have friends who i know are excellent lecturers, but just about every historian agrees that understanding is developed better in a small-group setting. The main reason that history classes are taught in lecture formats is economics: it’s cheaper to have a professor lecture to 500 students, and then have low-paid grad students run smaller discussion sections. Sit in on a history department faculty meeting sometime; you’ll see pretty quickly that the big lecture courses are generally the least popular, because they give the faculty no real opportunity to get to know their students, or for the intensive reading and small-group discussions that are so important to historical learning.
I agree that they should have learned this is high school. And in many cases, they have.
But the American public school system is a bit of a fucking shambles, and plenty of students end up in university barely able to put together a coherent sentence. It’s ineffably sad, but it’s true. Here are three sentences from a student paper about the treatment of indigenous women in Spanish California:
This student is a college junior, so has been in post-secondary education for at least two full years.
At my university, your grade was not “based on” attendance in the same sense that it was “based on” your exam scores. Instead, above a certain threshold, your grade was whatever it was based on your other work; below that threshold, you failed, regardless of the quality of your work.
I don’t disagree. So if the student is going to fail anyway if they choose not to attend, why do we need a special mechanic to force it? Why not let their grade be their grade?
And I’ll agree 100% with **mhendo **that a lot of people going to college these days are incredibly underprepared. A lot of time gets wasted on things that they should already know how to do. I think at least part of this, besides being a symptom of how broken our educational system is in general, are also indicative of the way people’s perceptions of a Bachelor’s degree have changed. Now, the expectation is that pretty much everyone will go to college. Jobs that could have been done 20 years ago with a high school diploma or, at most, a certification from a two-year college now require the applicants to have a BA or a BS as a baseline. Consequently, the bar for performance at the undergraduate level has been pushed lower. He’s not kidding about the kind of writing you see from people, either–I’ve worked as a tutor and seen it, too.
He’d pass signup sheets around. And yeah, he apparently had TAs who were supposed to be graders playing forensic signature analyzers. The worst part is that at the time he didn’t even have tenure, but the business department ignored the student evaluations and TA complaints because he was some bigwig from Goldman-Sachs (as he took pains to remind his classes on a fairly regular basis) who had taken a huge pay cut to “give us the benefit of his experience”.
I didn’t say it worked, I was just making the point that some professors are egotistical enough to try to require attendance in situations where doing so is abjectly retarded.
Amen. Every time we score assessment essays (my second job on campus; the first is teaching), we are placing more and more incoming students into remedial English. How they’re graduating from high school is beyond me. And I don’t even know how many people are being sent to remedial math and reading.
Sure, the ESL/international students have problems, but they tend to work harder at them and stick around even if they’re going to fail the class in the end. I’ve already had several native-born students quit coming to class and/or quit turning things in because they cannot produce a five-paragraph essay that actually has a sentence in it that makes sense. They’re not registered with DSP&S, and I am not convinced that there is a learning disorder anyway (which is not to say that those with such disorders can’t write; they just need some extra time, usually).
What they write is mostly gibberish. I have sent them early-alert notices but I doubt very much that they will try to get any help.
Approximately 30% of Colorado high school graduates require remedial education of some kind when they get to college. At the community college level, that rises to approximately 53% (ranges from 44% to 69%, depending on the community college). And I don’t know how to fix that situation.
All I do know is that my students, in general, cannot recognize a sentence that they’ve written that lacks a subject. Or a verb. Or both. They can’t accomplish subject/verb agreement. They don’t know that a paragraph generally should focus on one topic.
And they don’t know enough to recognize that they can’t write. They don’t understand when I make copious notes about their writing mistakes - they claim that they wrote fine in high school! They made As or Bs in their English comp class here last semester! (the sad part about that statement is that it’s often true, which…I have a running beef with the English department about).
I provide them with examples of A-level work from prior classes (with permission from those students, and identifying information removed), and they literally cannot see the different in their writing and the quality of those examples.
In my department, we have English and reading skills prerequisites, assessed by a computerized placement exam. We’re in a push to develop a seamless educational system which includes duel-enrollment in college classes that are offered at the high schools (a dumb idea, I believe, but no one’s asking me). One of the wealthiest counties in our state is the most eager, and has been working with our institution for a few years to develop college classes offered in their high schools.
During the first administration of that computerized test, 40% of the students (from the wealthiest county in the state, one of the wealthiest in the country) did not score sufficiently high enough to place into the classes we had designed. Needless to say, that was a bit of a shock to this enclave of privilege.
I blame the interwebs where these students see people writing “sentences” like those bolded above.
So how’s that work? Do they get to choose between swords, rapiers, or dueling pistols? Is it high school students vs. college ones? Or students against professors?
Or perhaps you meant to say dual-enrollment?
Creativity is welcomed on the intartubes!
See, and I thought I’d caught the only example of Gaudere’s Law in that post.
And it’s already students against professors. And they’re winning.
just another symptom of the dumbing down of America.
It’s that time of the semester again.
During the first week in late August, I told every student NOT to copy and paste text from various websites, weave it into an essay with no attribution, and pretend they wrote it themselves. I told them cautionary tales of students who did this or who stole entire essays verbatim from the web and did nothing but put their own names at the top. I told them that I use the same internet that they use, that I know how to Google, and that I turn in the papers along with print-outs of the stolen material (I don’t turn in anyone if I don’t have physical evidence of wrongdoing). I gave them all a quiz. I showed them the ever-growing file folder I have that is loaded with copies of the letters that are sent to offending students when they get busted for plagiarism.
I said it was okay to use supporting material from others IF it was properly cited and attributed to the original author or source. I went over the citation methods.
And I just found four plagiarized essays, one of which was 100% stolen from somebody’s blog archive. Not a single word had been changed, except that the student had put her own name at the top left corner. Oh, and another one was stolen from MegaEssays and not changed at all.
:smack: What good does it do to warn and inform people anyway?
Because you do deter MOST of them. You’re never going to deter 100%. There are always going to be the 3 or 4 in every class that think “She’ll never catch me! I’m smarter than her!”
:rolleyes: You think Kolga doesn’t know full well that those two sentences lack subjects?
“No Initial Coordinators” is a zombie rule taught by no contemporary writing guide. It is taught almost exclusively by high school and grade school teachers, and when they teach it, they are wrong.
I’m pretty sure psychobunny was joking, there.
In one class of 18 students, 14 of whom had completed the written assignment on time as required, I found 3 instances of plagiarism. “And lo, the hammer of the F grade was wielded soundly, and the wrath of the teacher didst smite among the heathens.” And then I had a stiff drink.
For the edification of the watchers, much like people engage in “debates” with certain posters here who have no intention of engaging in good-faith discussions.
Not necessarily. Many people have a psychological barrier utterly preventing them from admitting they lied, cheated or committed some other amoral or wrongful act; much like the child, with chocolate icing on his face, denying he ate the chocolate cake, or, as in your case, people stoutly defending obvious cheating and lies. They reckon that as long as they defend (deny) the act, then it is not true and there is a chance someone will be persuaded by the perpetrator’s conviction.
You are lucky your school allows you to do that.
I have a friend who is an adjunct professor in a large university grad school, and he says that the school won’t allow him to give below a B- or a C grade (as 'strongly discourages it, and calls the teacher in to ask why they can’t seem to teach the student better and possibly not hire them to teach the course next term). Because if the school gives grad students grades of C or lower, they transfer to another school, and take their tuition with them. So the school clearly discourages teachers from giving low grades, even when they are deserved.
I realize this is backtracking a little bit but I just want to mention that I’ve taken a lot of classes that didn’t “apply” to my major and frankly, I’ve enjoyed every one of them. Several have actually bolstered my performance in classes that I was required to take and others just made me smarter. I took essentials of calculus despite only needing a math proficiency class and now understand a little bit about integrals and derivatives instead of just how to balance my checkbook. I truly don’t understand people who go to a university and complain about having to take other classes.
Later in life, such people end up as politicians. Or lawyers. Or both.
[Rant]
How the hell am I supposed to raise my children to be truthful, law-abiding moral citizens, when journalists, politicians and celebrities alike stick to that strategy? Even worse, if someone does the right thing and admits failure, you can be damned sure that the journalists will have a ball ripping that person to shreds. For some weird reason, it doesn’t seem to be that much interest in slaying (not in the literary sense) the liars who keep on lying in the face of proof. Society actually encourages that kind of immoral behavior. And we wonder why students use that strategy?
[/Rant]
Yes, I am. Although I am not allowed to fail them for the course for the first instance of plagiarism. They receive an F on the plagiarized assignment, and an unpleasant face-to-face conversation with me. If they plagiarize a second assignment (and it’s happened), THEN they fail the entire course and have a disciplinary file opened with the Director of Student Affairs.
I’ve heard (and read on the Chronicle of Higher Education fora) many horror stories of professors not being allowed to punish students for plagiarism, and being forced to inflate grades. I am lucky that right now, my Dean and current administration (as much of wankers as they are for other things) are hesitant to say flat-out that we can’t fail students.
That day is coming, I fear, based on our new college president.