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Education in America

Life in the Academic Trenches

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Today I’ve GOT to read student papers, having put it off way too long. Friday I finished the last raft at midnight, as new papers were pouring in. Yesterday I had the temerity to invite friends over, which required me to clean the shack as well as fixing an actual meal. And I made doing the proposed new client’s editing test a priority. This left a half-hour to read papers, sandwiched between the time all the work was done and the time my guests showed up…not long enough to read even one magnum opus.

Next week’s set of papers is the last of the semester. Thank God. Let’s hope it’s the last of my career. Reading incoherent, barely literate copy generated by university juniors and seniors is actually painful.

Here are some examples from the fourth iteration of the same assignment, a proposal that a local company establish an on-site child-care center:

Children learn best when they are actively involved in group activities and also encourages socialization to prepare them for elementary school and set them on a path of life-long learning.

Research has established that women, on average, do miss more work days than men and unscheduled absenteeism has nothing to do with illness as it has to do with family issues or personal needs.

Having sufficient child care will be helpful when the company has high volume periods and employees will be able to work overtime. This problem is evident with employees having to take personal time from their work to either pick up their children, or find sufficient care. Most child care facilities charge late fees for picking up their children late, and employees would have to leave early from their work to pick up their child at a certain time. This problem is caused by not having sufficient space to build a facility. Most corporations that are already built are surrounded by other buildings, and there is no space to build another place of business. No provision of child care for employees has been a known problem and has played a role in not meeting deadlines for projects.

A member of the same group recently posted a paper titled “Sumary.”

In about three weeks, the Great Desert University will confer the bachelor’s degree on authors of this C-minus material. Why are they passing? For the same reason my young plagiarists are passing: check it out. Add to that situation the fact that a very fine colleague short-listed for a position at a California university failed to get the job because of defamatory remarks posted on Rate My Professors, and you get the picture, eh? When hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions are made on the basis of popularity contests, one does what one can to keep the customers happy.

Interestingly, one of last night’s guests is a sociologist. She doesn’t even teach writing, yet she also used the word “painful” to describe the work of reading our marginally educated students’ efforts. It is painfully sad to see how badly America—or at least Arizona—has done by the last generation or two of its young people. Really, there’s no excuse for it.

Well, I’m glad I’m not waiting tables, soliciting people over the phone, cleaning house, or digging ditches. And I’m thankful I don’t have to risk my life fighting fires, even though a friend makes a very good living at that. But if I had to advise a young person about a future career, I’d tell her to stay away from university teaching unless she has a heart of steel. The problems in our educational system are so vast, there’s nothing a single person can do about them. If altruism is your life’s goal, there has to be someplace where you can make a difference.

Comments from the iWeb site:

2 Comments

BeThisWay

How terribly depressing.

While part of me wants to call you on not standing alone in the drift, I can’t and won’t because I can see that the power of the current would knock you down before the first objection left your lips.

I wonder, though, what change could be implemented with an organized effort of educators who are like-minded.I’m not saying that you should throw caution to the wind and lead the charge yourself, but I’d like to see someone do it.

Preferably before Son starts school.Anyone want to take the reins sometime in the next sixteen months?Thanks.

Sunday, April 27, 2008 – 03:49 PM

vh

IMHO, parents today have three choices:

Buy or rent in a decent school district and ride herd, every minute of every day, on the kids’ progress and on what goes on in their classrooms; also add plenty of extra educational enrichment at home in the form of books, magazines, field trips, and travel; or

Put your kids in private school and ride herd, every minute of every day, on the kids’ progress and on what goes on in their classrooms; also add plenty of extra educational enrichment at home in the form of books, magazines, field trips, and travel; or

Home-school your kids and ride herd, every minute of every day, on the kids’ progress; also add plenty of extra educational enrichment at home in the form of books, magazines, field trips, and travel.

At this point, it looks like educating your kids is largely up to you. Possibly it’s ever been thus.

Sunday, April 27, 2008 – 04:32 PM

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How we teach our children to cheat, lie, and steal

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Why do college students plagiarize? Why do they cheat on their assignments? This is something that has always bamboozled me.

After all, they cheat no one but themselves. When you pay to attend classes, it’s your money (or Mom and Dad’s) that you’re shelling out for the privilege. When you cheat to wangle yourself a grade you don’t deserve, you end up paying for something empty, a course that does not do for you what it is advertised to do: furnish your mind. It’s like going into a furniture store, buying a chair, and taking home one with rotten wood and no stuffing—on purpose!

Probably the main reason is the idiotic and corrupt grading system. Grades debase education. They function as a monetary system through which students are “paid” to perform. Grades are the currency of the classroom. And like money, they are the root of much evil.

Students are so greedy for high grades that, like a loan officer in an unscrupulous financial institution going after the gold, they readily compromise ethics and common sense to get them. They steal or buy content for their papers, present it as their own, and then are surprised that anyone cares when they get caught.

Once nabbed, these rip-off artists produce a fine array of predictable excuses. The most common is “it was inadvertent. I didn’t know I couldn’t just copy that and stick it in a paper with no acknowledgment.” The best is “what a coincidence!”

Yes. I actually had a student tell me, after she turned in a paper she had copied from a government pamphlet right down to the heads and subheads, that it was an amazing coincidence that her paper consisted of the same, exact words as some federal information specialist’s. Wonders never cease.

One reason I have students collaborate on group papers (in addition to the obscene overenrollment that makes it impossible to read papers from every individual) is to circumvent plagiarism. If you organize the group well—with at least one A student and at least one B or another A student—you usually end up with one or two people who are too smart to plagiarize and at least one who is too scared. Then of course you have to create an assignment that is so individual there’s no way to find an identical paper on a term paper site or in a fraternity’s file cabinet.

Didn’t work this semester, though. For the first time in recorded history, I received a plagiarized group effort. When I called the little darlings on it and asked why I shouldn’t flunk all six of them in the course, they wailed that they didn’t mean to do it.

Understand. These are university juniors and seniors who claim they don’t know any better than to cheat. To cheat themselves, let us say.

Hey, if it’s only themselves they cheat, why do we care? Why do we care, dear future employers of these fine folks?

Here’s my response to the young things:

You claim that the copy-and-paste effort you turned in was inadvertent (we didn’t mean to highlight, copy, and paste passages of someone else’s work, slap them together unacknowledged, and call it a paper). I suppose anything is possible. Some people don’t mean to get into their cars when they’re three sheets to the wind and weave off down the highway. Others don’t mean for a T-bone steak to leap off the Safeway’s meat counter into their purses. Many a mortgage lender didn’t mean to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars to borrowers who had no believable means to repay the loans and did not understand the concept of “variable rate.” Could be. I suppose.

It’s odd, though. Yours is one of thirteen collaborative groups in this course—eighty students. None of the twelve other groups had any problem with this issue. Where the other seventy-four students used source material, they cited it. Matter of fact, they seemed a bit smug about demonstrating that they’d gone to the trouble to google their subject and actually read something about it. It suggests that people who have reached the elevated rank of university junior or senior might be expected to know what plagiarism is (it’s a very simple concept, related to the idea that T-bone steaks ought not to be permitted to jump into your purse).

Then we have the nature of the paper itself. Six people are in your group. But the magnum opus is only five paragraphs long. This means we have six people who could not bring themselves to write one paragraph each. Whoever did manage to crank out a few words couldn’t quite work up enough energy to write her own words, or to acknowledge the source of the words she lifted somewhere else.

This suggests the paper probably does not represent the work of six people—possibly a couple of people said they would do this assignment and a couple more said they’d do the next one. That’s fine. However, the point of collaborative work is for everyone to at least look at the thing. If two people wrote it and four other people read it, then at least one of the four people should have noticed that it contained no documentation, that it is oddly brief, and that it goes nowhere. It contributes nothing to an argument: all it does is regurgitate. And since a proposal tries to persuade, well…leaving the argumentation to the last minute risks the possibility that no persuasion will ever appear and the proposal will end up being a report, not a proposal.

So, intention or no intention, much is wanting here.

Plagiarism is a reason to fail a student in a course. Not only can you fail the student, you can flag the grade so that it appears in the person’s transcript as a failure by reason of dishonesty.

However, if I try to flunk six students out of my course, I will wish I’d never thought of it. Failing even one student can lead to an enormous hassle. They appeal, they go to the dean, their parents go to the president or the board of regents. Failing six would create a hideous nightmare. I would end up in front of a committee explaining how I designed my course, how I built the assignment, what I expected, what they produced, what everyone else in the class produced, how I know they plagiarized, why the ripped-off passages are plagiarism (no joke!), why plagiarism is not a good thing, why all six of them should be held responsible for one plagiarized paper, and why I dare to think young adults who steal copy from the Internet deserve to fail the course.

For $3,500? Divided by four and one-half months: for $778 a month, less taxes, less deductions? For take-home pay of $440 a month, I should put myself through the tortures of the damned? Not bloody likely.

Instead, I proposed to forgive their crime if they shovel out the Augean stable: They’re to read five documents on plagiarism and on techniques of collaborative writing, editing, and revising-four of which have been posted on the site since the start of the semester-and create a 60-item exam on the material, with the correct answers.

This will get them out of my hair and, should my sanity ever lapse again to the extent that I agree to teach another online course at GDU, will provide a well of questions for an exam on the subject.

But trust me: that lapse will never happen. This incident reminds me why I burned out on teaching five years ago. It’s a good reason to seek another line of work.

Comments at iWeb site:

5 Comments

Mrs. Micah

Wow. I know Micah hates grading, especially freshman papers. And every year, there’s plagiarism (which is fascinating because he makes them write papers about a song or movie…depending on the semester and how it relates to specific course topics. secondary literature is optional and it’s really not writing a paper on hamlet or something common). Anyway, he hates it too, but has only failed one student for it. The rest he’ll just fail the paper, give a stern lecture, and make them write a new and non-plagiarized paper for the 2nd version (he always does a rewrite assignment).

Fortunately it’s something like 1 student per class.

Did I ever tell you my college mentor’s way of putting it? “Grading papers is like holding urine in your mouth.” Yeah.

Thursday, April 24, 2008 – 03:00 PM

vh

There are ways to discourage the practice. Assigning group projects is one. Wily crafting of the assignment is another.

But nothing works 100 percent.

Some faculty no longer care. When the subject of plagiarism comes up in Faculty Senate meetings, many of those present argue that it’s not worth worrying about, and that threatening to flunk a student for this particular form of cheating is an overreaction.

I dunno. Personally, it leaves me thinking there’s just gotta be better ways to make a living.

Thursday, April 24, 2008 – 03:10 PM

BeThisWay

How sad, for everyone.

It’s not hjust about the student, though.Thatstudent is going to be a (hopefully) contributing member of society.

Makes me wonder how deeply cheating really affects our society.Did the doctor about to perform my surgery cheat his way through med school?

Shudder.

Thursday, April 24, 2008 – 04:00 PM

Rachel @ Master Your card

I could never understand why students did this either. I guess they are just too lazy to do the work or leave it too late but surely no one gets satisfaction out of a grade that they did not earn themselves …or do they?

Friday, April 25, 2008 – 02:38 AM

vh

If grades are money, why wouldn’t one get satisfaction out of an unearned grade? Aren’t we all thrilled when we win the lottery or wangle a bargain? There’s not much difference.

Many undergraduates are not in college for the learning experience. They’re jumping through the hoops we require of young people before they can get a decently paying job.

Universities, clinging to the outdated idea that they’re in the business of educating minds rather than providing vocational training, demand that students fulfill gen-ed requirements, courses in writing, math, and cultural literacy. Few students see much value in these courses, and many highly resent having to take them.

It’s only to be expected, under those circumstances, that students would try to get through the hoops with the least amount of effort possible. As a culture, we don’t do a universally good job of transmitting ethical values to young people, and that is reflected in their inability to see plagiarism as a very serious issue.

Friday, April 25, 2008 – 05:07 AM

Stealing from the students

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The Great Desert University has put the eefus on my scheme to earn enough to pay off the Renovation Loan by teaching a couple of sections of excruciating undergraduate literacy courses each semester.
First, pleading penury, the West campus canceled all 2008 fall courses taught by adjunct faculty (part-timers).

Next, the administration announced that henceforth tenure-track faculty will be discouraged from teaching in summers and intersessions. Instead, adjunct faculty will teach those sections.

Why?

Consider: if you’re full-time faculty, GDU has to pay you a percentage of your salary for each summer course you teach. When I was on the teaching faculty, I earned over $4,000 for teaching a summer section; today, with the raises in pay I would have experienced during the past five years, they’d have to pay me around $6,000. But as adjunct? I earn $3,500. Without the Ph.D., an adjunct gets a munificent $3,200. So, you see the motivation.

Moving on, the next fiat announced that all on-line courses henceforth will have no enrollment caps!

Understand:

* The National Council of Teachers of English recommends that college writing courses enroll no more than 20 students per class.

* I personally did a study comparing two concurrent sections of Writing for the Professions, each with 30 enrolled students, with identical syllabi, one on-line and one face-to-face, and discovered that the online section required exactly twice as many hours to prepare and teach as the in-class section (“Parallel On-Line and In-Class Sections of ‘Writing for the Professions’: A Practical Experiment.” Educational Technology and Society, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2000).

At GDU, Writing for the Professions . . .

  • is one of two courses that fill the upper-division literacy requirement (the university has more than 64,000 students!)
  • is required for the global business major.
  • is required for the post-baccalaureate teaching certificate.
  • fills a requirement for the B.A. in English education (i.e., the undergraduate teaching certificate).
  • fills a requirement for the accounting major.
  • fills a requirement for the social work major.
  • is the course to which upper-division students with substandard writing skills and with learning disabilities are referred.
  • is a recommended course for students whose first language is other than English.

Every section offered on-line fills within days after the course schedule is published, leaving students begging for overrides.

All of which is to say that demand for the course is huge, students by and large loathe it, and half of them would kill to get into an online section that at least doesn’t make them traipse to campus and spend three hours a week sitting through a class they don’t think they should have to take in the first place.

apr5hellIt is, in short, a demonic course from Hell.

Removing the caps for on-line sections means any on-line section will enroll upwards of 100 students. Possibly LOTS upwards. Think 200. Think 300. In a writing course!

Well, thanks to GDU having “accidentally” double-enrolled the two sections I agreed to teach this semester, I have 80 students right now. But at least I’m being paid to teach the equivalent of four sections.

What this new policy will do is require FAs to teach possibly twice that many (possibly more) students for one-fourth of the pay. Yes. In a five-week summer session.

There’s only one way anyone dumb enough or naïve enough or desperate enough to agree to any such arrangement could possibly survive: cheat the students. Deny them anything even resembling “education.” The sole way you could cope would be to have every single assignment be a group project, so that instead of 100 or 200 papers to grade per assignment, you’d have 20 or 40.

I do group projects right now to cut down the workload. But I start with two or three individual assignments, so that I can identify the strongest and weakest students and so the students have an opportunity to get some one-on-one instruction. Reading the last raft 80 papers of drivel damn near killed me. The next five papers will come over my transom in the form of five group projects, each on average six or eight pages long. Let’s say the average length of papers handed in for these next five assignments is seven pages. That comes to FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE PAGES (count’em: 525) of copy in which verbs don’t agree with subjects, facts are wrong, words are used incorrectly, paragraphs are incoherent or nonexistent, logic is tortured, grammar is even more tortured, punctuation is wrong in every way imaginable. And on and on.

That’s for 80 students, divided into 15 groups. Five hundred twenty-five pages of bad copy to read, analyze, think about, comment upon understandably, and try to explain how to fix, in one month. That follows the two individual papers they’ve written so far (about 320 pages), coming to a total of 845 pages to process over the semester, in addition to three online quizzes. That’s more pages than War and Peace! And Leo Tolstoy this bunch ain’t.

Imagine the workload for a class of 200 “writing” students. Even if you made every assignment a group project, the number of hours required to cope with the tsunami of careless, toss-it-away, don’t-give-a-damn copy would reduce your $3,500 pay to well below minimum wage.

Better to greet customers at Walmart! At least most of the customers want to be there.

And indeed, what on earth would be the point of enrolling in such a course? The only point is to get a rubber stamp in your transcript so you can proceed through to your rubber-stamp degree in accountancy or social work or global management, a meaningless degree if ever there was one. To say nothing of the vacant teaching certificate that ensues from courses like this.

So it is that one of the great universities in the land (as it would style itself) defrauds its students, exploits part-time faculty, and makes a joke of what America calls education.

Artwork: Gustave Doré, Illustration no. 34, Divina Commedia (L’inferno)