Outrageous Statements I Will Probably Regret
This website has been up for about 4 years, and the book that was the impetus for it has been out for the same amount of time. In the early days, I did a fair amount of traveling around the country giving workshops, but as the economy tanked, those opportunities pretty much dried up. I retired completely this year, and started my second career as a railroad historian. However, I still retain a strong interest in “professional” college teaching, and try to keep up with what’s going on. Unfortunately, I don’t like what I see.
There are two things that have changed rather dramatically A) After many years of crying wolf, the wolf has actually walked in the front door of many of our good-to-great universities, and he is having a pernicious effect on our large classes. B)Social and psychological changes in our incoming students have affected both their preparations and their expectations. The former are lower, and the latter are higher.
Grade inflation is perhaps the most dramatic and visible effect. On the first day of class in a large class, if you use “clickers” you can ask your students what they got in their equivalent high school class, say biology. Typically they got A’s and B’s. If you ask them what they expect to receive in your class–A’s and B’s.
If you then give them a first exam that is the equivalent in challenge to one you gave, say, 15 years ago, the difference is dramatic, and the students are outraged, bearing torches and clubs as they storm the dean’s office, followed by a phalanx of their parents and their lawyers. If you are a senior, tenured faculty member as I was, you can say pleasantly and politely, “Bugger off.” However, for the untenured or uncontracted, this would not be prudent.
Large classes are increasingly being taught by adjuncts, and these poor souls are confronted with several uncomfortable facts of life. First, if they are to be rehired, student evaluations are going to play an important role, and although unofficial, “Ratemyprofessors,” will give the department chair an early hint of what the formal evaluation instrument will reveal. Intuition and a number of studies now tell the adjunct that a happy student gives good evals, and what makes students happy is good grades with no work. So, you want your job next semester, your path is clear. Give exams that are straight from the lecture notes you give to the class. Hide the fact that you are giving out good grades like candy not by lowering your cut lines between grades, but by making your exams easier, and more dependent on rote memorization.
The college administration, if it is fiscally responsible, will turn a blind eye to these shenanigans. Frankly, we need the tuition, and the bottom line is dependent on the body count. The surest way to retain students is through “engagement,” and in a big (or online) class, a student who can get a B though an all-nighter (and nothing else) is engaged. So lip service will be paid to “standards” but it is laughably easy to lower standards with little probability of detection, and if everybody else is doing it, you are doing your students a disservice by holding them to a higher standard than their competitors face.
This little column is primarily a venting and catharsis, but if anybody else DOES read it, I’d be happy to have a dialogue.
