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Education in America

What’s your conspiracy theory?

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Over at CBS Marketwatch (my favorite portal to the Wall Street roller-coaster ride), Paul B. Farrell has an entertaining post highlighting his theory that big business has sabatoged democracy.

It’s a little oblique to my own conspiracy theory, which is that democracy in this country evaporated a long time ago, replaced by a latter-day incarnation of what Dwight Eisenhower first called the military-industrial complex. Exactly as he warned, it has taken over the functioning of this country to such an extent that our much-vaunted “freedoms” have effectively disappeared. The citizenry has been too busy sucking on the pacifier of material plenty to have noticed that little factoid.

I have even gone so far as to theorize (hang onto your black helicopter helmets) that huge pan-corporate interests (which we see manifest in the puppeteers behind the Bush administration) are responsible for the dumbing-down of public education in this country. Universal education in Western government-run schools has never existed to train brilliant minds; from its outset in 19th-century Prussia, its purpose was to develop compliance. Schools exist to teach kids to do as they’re told, so that as adults they will cooperate quietly with what the government wants them to do. It’s an effective device to create a nation of sheep.

The way to make sheep out of American citizens is to see to it that they know nothing about the history and ideas that brought their nation into being, and by design to avoid teaching them how to think logically or coherently: hence the erasure of history and literature in grade school, of civics courses in high school, and of Western civilization courses in college. Indeed, it was Eisenhower who warned,

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Dumb down the citizenry and you get your way. There’s a reason college juniors and seniors will tell you Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state and World War II happened in the 19th century. This is not something that happened by accident. It happened because over the past forty years public schools have systematically been commandeered to teach compliance, not to furnish young minds with facts and thought.

Over time, functions that once were performed by the government have been taken over by private entities which, because they are nongovernmental, do not have to abide by regulations designed to protect your privacy and your civil rights. Consider:

• Federal law forbids the use of the Social Security number as an ID number. But try to get a credit card, a home loan, or medical care without forking it over for use as exactly that. Even if you refuse to reveal your Social Security number, insurance and financial companies already have it, and they use it as an ID number in national databases designed to track your behavior. How can they get away with it? Because the law applies only to government bureaucrats…not to corporate bureaucrats.

• Big Brother watches you in every store, every parking lot, almost every intersection in this country. Every purchase you make is tracked on store “club cards,” on credit cards, on debit cards. Every step you take is recorded on cameras. Who is Big Brother? He ain’t Uncle Sam. He’s corporate America.

• By law, the government is not allowed to violate your privacy and to track your every movement in this way. Government agents have to get a court’s permission to do this sort of thing. But corporate interests do not.

• You can write to your Congressman about an issue and be damned. If you don’t have enough money to purchase representation, the only way your wishes will be considered is if they happen to coincide with those of the lobbyists who do own your elected representatives. Who can afford to buy representation in this country? Only very large, allied corporate interests.

• Prisons, schools, medical care, and most social welfare programs are now the province of industry, not your elected government.

• Every time you pass through an airport, enter a public building, or go through the electronic examiner at the door of a retail store, you are searched without due cause.This is a violation of the United States Constitution, a fact ignored because the illegal searches are conducted by private entities, not by government agents. You accept it because you have been trained to comply and because you have been told that you should be scared, very scared.

• The reason we no longer have the basic access to decent medical care that Americans enjoyed thirty or forty years ago is that corporate interests took over that access, bringing us “managed medical care” that places an army of corporate bureaucrats between you and your doctor. These same interests have fought a one-payer medical system—expensively and efficiently—for decades. They have played a major role in running up the cost of medical care and have seen to it that most Americans are discouraged from seeking good, consistent care…what propagandists call “Cadillac healthcare.”

Habeas corpus? Oh, that… If we don’t like you, you’re not eligible for it.

So it goes. Or, we might say, so it went…

And you…what’s your conspiracy theory? Is the truth out there? Is George Busha robot? A stuffed puppet? Is Barack Obama a Muslim terrorist? Are black helicopters operated by aliens? Is truth beauty? Beauty truth? Is code poetry? Who made us think so?

Stop the presses…literally

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Word on the street has it that The Arizona Republic, the only daily metro newspaper serving the fifth-largest city in the nation, is laying off most of its photographers and much of its editing staff. A few unseasoned reporters will be retained. In the fall, we’re told, the Republic is slated to morph into a tabloid. Those who will staff this downsized entity, the ghost of our right-to-work state’s flagship newspaper, will have no health insurance and a pension plan that will be, shall we say, commensurately downsized. Thus saith the paper’s present owner, the Gannett Corporation.

The Republic, having abandoned journalism years ago, no longer has much of a readership. It’s losing readers even as the population of the Valley grows. There’s a reason for that: it doesn’t publish news.

This is no exaggeration. One year a mayoral campaign came and went with almost no mention of the candidates. Yesterday (we’ll give it this much), its print edition mentioned that unless Our Esteemed Legislators approve a budget within the next two weeks, the state budget will expire and state employees will not be paid on July 3. Having heard this from La Maya and having a vested interest in getting paid on July 3, I went to the Republic‘s online edition and found not…one…word about the possibility that Arizona’s largest employer may fail to pay its workers and that state government is, as we speak, preparing to shut down all nonessential services. The lead online story concerned the recent opening of a new ice cream store.

Turning this formerly major metropolitan newspaper into a throw-away tabloid will put it head-to-head with New Times, which succeeds because it has verve, sass, only the thinnest veneer of journalistic ethics, and lots of advertising. Lots and lots of advertising. New Times is entertaining but devoid of credibility. On the other hand, it does attempt to follow local politics. You can’t believe a word it publishes about local government, but at least it has some words!

Newspapers that abandon their mission to deliver the truth to the public and forget the importance of that mission have nothing to sell. For a long time the Republic has staggered along with dwindling advertising, but as readers lost interest in the paper’s content, advertisers lost interest in its ballooning space rates. Who reads the local newspaper’s classifieds when you can go to Craig’s List? What’s the point of pawing through page after page of irrelevant retail adds to clip a few coupons when you can download what you want from the Web? And why pay to advertise in a newspaper that nobody reads?

I canceled the Sunday Republic when I realized that the only things I was reading were the front page (part of it) and the funny strips; it felt ugly and irresponsible to throw away three or four pounds of advertising to read a half-dozen pages of ephemera. Just the thought of how many trees were pulped only to be tossed directly into the trash disgusted me, and I decided to stop abetting that kind of criminality. Not long after, I realized I’d rather pay to have The New York Times delivered to my house and so canceled the Republic altogether.

It’s a sad development. There’s a reason journalism is called the Fourth Estate. It’s an important part of the polity of a democratic republic. When we cannot get information about what’s going on down at City Hall or over at the State House, we as voters are in the dark. And our path through the darkness, as we have already seen over the past decade, is inexorably leading us toward tyranny.

Are college degrees overrated?

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On Monday, NPR’s Talk of the Nation chatted with career coach Marty Nemko, who recently published an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education arguing that the bachelor’s degree is one of America’s most oversold products. He stops short of calling the marketing of undergraduate degrees to those who are unqualified for university work a scam. But after twenty years in academe, I surely would go that far.

Nemko points to the vast numbers of college graduates who end up in jobs they could have had with a high-school diploma, and then goes on to cite figures showing that only 23 percent of high-school students who take the ACT are prepared to perform at the college level in English, math, reading, and science. That just about accords with my experience. As I’ve explained in earlier posts, I organize students into groups, each of which is led by a classmate who, in the absence of grade inflation, would genuinely be an A student. Any given class of thirty students will have at most six who really do perform at the A level: that’s 20 percent. The rest are folks who tell me that Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state and World War I occurred in the nineteenth century, and who turn in papers with their own names misspelled.

According to Nemko, of the four-year college students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high-school classes, two thirds had not managed to finish the bachelor’s degree after eight and a half years! Meanwhile, however, universities merrily collect these kids’ tuition, running them deeper and deeper into debt as the young people continue a fruitless pursuit.

And fruitless, he suggests, is le mot juste. The claim that workers with college degrees earn more over their lifetimes is, he says, “misleading”:

You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they’d still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound—they’re brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

While that is not 100 percent so—thank goodness, we still do have some social and economic mobility in this country—the truth is that class matters. Students who do well in school often are those whose parents were well educated and have provided their kids with a fistful of educational, social, and economic advantages. Not least of those is Dad’s old college chums now in a position to hire Junior. The uphill climb for a first-generation college student is a lot steeper than it is for a kid whose parents have graduate or professional degrees.

He adds that as increasing numbers of decently paying jobs are sent off-shore or converted to part-time, the pool of good opportunities drops. So, many college graduates are forced to take blue-collar work, driving trucks and waiting tables.

Then there’s the question of whether college students get what they pay for. It’s a big question, since many university graduates start their working lives with five- and six-figure student loan debt. Graduates surveyed in recent studies are understandably dissatisfied with the quality of instruction in environments where an average of 28 percent of their courses are taught in classes of thirty or fewer.

But did they learn anything?

Apparently not much. A 2006 study underwritten by the Pew Charitable Trust showed that 50 percent of tested college seniors could not follow the argument in a newspaper editorial or compare credit-card offers. Folks. That’s half of them! Twenty percent had such weak math skills that they could not estimate whether their car had enough fuel to get to the gas station.

Think it can’t get worse? Think again, says Nemko:

Unbelievably, according to the Spellings Report, which was released in 2006 by a federal commission that examined the future of American higher education, things are getting even worse: “Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined. . . . According to the most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy, for instance, the percentage of college graduates deemed proficient in prose literacy has actually declined from 40 to 31 percent in the past decade. . . . Employers report repeatedly that many new graduates they hire are not prepared to work, lacking the critical thinking, writing and problem-solving skills needed in today’s workplaces.”

What to do?

Nemko suggests that colleges should be held to the same standards as, say, tire manufacturers: at the least, they should be required to provide applicants full data on their performance in areas such as graduation rates; average costs for every year, broken out by race and gender; and employment data for graduates. He also suggests that a high-school graduate in the bottom half of his or her class consider more profitable alternatives, such as associate-degree programs at community colleges, apprenticeships, the military, and on-the-job training with a successful small-business owner.

The national campaign to enroll every body that’s still breathing in four-year bachelor’s degree programs is a rip-off. It rips off the young men and women who are unprepared to succeed in universities, and it rips off the ones who are prepared, by siphoning resources away from them. Not everyone needs a four-year degree. In fact, some people are likely to find more success by using those four years in vocational training and on-the-job learning.

3 Comments left on iWeb site

BeThisWay

I think that a degree isn’t necessary, per se, and you can certainly have success, even great success, without one.

That said, I don’t think Nemko is right if he says that many of the jobs could have been landed without the degree.Degrees are actually required for more jobs above a certain pay grade than not, especially in corporateland, and having one certainly gives you the edge when all other things are equal.That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of other industries where great success can come without that degree.

To me the issue isn’t how many people are going for degrees, the issue is the commitment of each individual student to learning and getting what they’re there for in a university setting. Many kids go for the social aspects instead of the educational aspects, and view it as a way to delay having to take responsibility for their own lives.

That’s why I agree with Nemko’s suggestions.College isn’t for everyone, and parents IMO should look at who their child really is and what they are really capable of and committed to.Otherwise it’s just a waste of time and money, and it dilutes the quality of education for those that are really committed.

And the lackluster way these uncommitted grads approach their jobs has far-reaching effects and dilutes the quality of life for us all.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008 – 10:47 AM

Strid

I’m not an American, or going to university in America, but I’ve seen the relative worthlessness of bachelor’s degrees all around me. I’m not sure if it’s so much more of a scam than a high school education was back in the past, though. You know, when only the rich or the scholarship kids went to uni?

Nemko’s right, class does matter, and I’m pretty sure that it’s really one of the few constants in this whole education-employment system. If you’ve got parents that went to uni, you’ll get a decently paying job. If not…be prepared to struggle. And as for the upper class, it’s unthinkable that you could NOT have at least a bachelor’s degree from somewhere (the quality of the degree…well…it only really matters that you can say you went to university).

Here (in the Caribbean) if you don’t have some kind of degree, you’re simply not going to get an ‘acceptable’ middle-class job. Sure, you can be a tailor, or a carpenter, or a maid or whatever without a degree, but you’ll never be higher up than a bank teller, really. Many more people go to university now than ever before.

However…since everyone has one…bachelor’s degrees aren’t worth much any more. University graduates are jobless because lower-end degrees won’t get you the pay you want…but you’re not going to go into a trade or some such ‘menial’ labour because you went to uni, darn it!

It’s definitely true that many people are getting ripped off by the system and preconceived notions of status in relation to a certain type of education. Really, there SHOULD be some attempt to expose high school graduates to the various options open to them, and to emphasize that an excellent mechanic will be more successful than a pass-degree BA Literature grad will be. However, people in general aren’t stupid. They figure things out sooner or later. Many people drop out, work for a few years, and when they settle down, do their degrees successfully. And I know many people that only started to shine in uni…moving from simply passing in high school to really maturing and buckling down (and being really successful) in uni. There ARE positives to the huge increase in enrollment in the university/college system; more people have more opportunities, and a greater chance of realising their full potential.

Friday, May 16, 2008 – 01:35 AM

vh

It’s true that for certain kinds of jobs, a bachelor’s degree is key. It’s also true that an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts enriches your life immeasurably, in ways that far surpass the financial cost of obtaining the degree. And a bachelor’s degree in an academic subject prepares you for graduate study in professional programs such as the law, business, journalism, and education; in that sense, the bachelor’s degree does eventually pay for itself monetarily.

However, when you’re actually in the trenches, you come to appreciate Nemko’s estimate that 40 percent of students who are sucked into the university system are not prepared for university-level work.

Persuading those kids that they need a bachelor’s degree to have a decent life is probably a scam. When they finish the four-year degree, too many of them end up in low-skill, low-wage jobs that DO NOT REQUIRE A COLLEGE DEGREE. I have a nephew, for example, who got a bachelor’s degree in construction (don’t ask!) some years ago and to this day drives a delivery truck for a paint company. He could have driven the delivery truck with his high-school diploma and got a four-year leg up in experience and wage increases.

Advertise for a $28,000/year secretarial position and you’ll get a slew of applications from people with bachelor’s and even master’s degrees. You don’t need a college degree to push papers and answer the telephone. Give me a break! Why have these people wasted their time and gone into debt up to their schnozzes if jobs like this are what they have to look forward to?

I argue that for many young people, there are alternatives that may serve them better than marking time for four years in a bachelor’s degree program. For example, a two-year program at a community college could very well land you in a job that will earn lots better than the $28,000 secretarial position—or at least no less. Many trades are well paid, and you can’t off-shore a plumbing or an electrical job. A paid apprenticeship could prepare a young man or woman for a decently paying job—and possibly prepare the person to own a business—without leaving him or her in five-figure debt.

I also argue that filling up our universities with students who are academically unprepared dilutes the quality of the degree for every student. When faculty have to deal with gigantic classes, 40% of whose members cannot keep up with the work, attention that should be given to those students who belong there is diverted and wasted. We would not be sending college graduates into the workplace with subminimal skills if we were not having to grant degrees to people who come to us with subminimal skills.

Should we flunk out every freshman who arrives in our classes with subminimal skills? What? Send away 40% of our little cash cows? Not and keep our teaching jobs!

By and large, as a college instructor you are ill-advised, indeed, to fail students whose skills and performance do not come up to par. Promotion and tenure depend largely on semester-end student evaluations—if you give these students an honest assessment of their performance, they blow you out of the water. If you fail them, they and their parents show up at the dean’s office. If they are members of minority groups and you are not, you’re likely to be accused of discriminatory practices. If their politics are conservative and yours are liberal—or vice-versa—you may be accused of vindictive behavior.

The system as it is currently set up is designed to churn huge numbers of students through to the bachelor’s degree. Because some 40% those students are unprepared and stay unprepared throughout their four-year experience, a large proportion of those degrees are fraudulent. It is a system that cheats the students and cheats employers. And because it defrauds strong students as well as weak ones by diverting resources away from the truly qualified, over time it weakens our country’s economy.

Monday, May 19, 2008 – 09:59 AM

Bombs Away: Academic trench warfare revisited

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A query from one of my honored students:

I am wondering why the rough draft for the proposals are being graded on grammar content. I was always under the impression rough drafts do not worry about grammar content and areforgathering your thoughts together for the final draft.

Nowhere in the course materials does the slightest suggestion appear that any of the six writing assignments are “rough drafts.” Could there be a reason that I wrote and posted not one, not two, not three, but four reviews of basic grammar and style matters, and that I gave not one, not two, but three exams on that material? Might there be some reason that I posted rubrics explaining how papers would be graded on basic grammar and style, among several standards? Could there be a reason that I posted an example of copy graded in that way and told students to look at it so they would know what was expected? And might I have had some motive for putting this passage into the syllabus?

For writing assignments, writers start with 100 points; points are subtracted for various crimes and misdemeanors. For example, each Basics Review error, redundancy, or verbosity costs 2 points; logical lapses and organizational flaws, 4 points; citation errors, 6 points; and so forth. See the document titled “Essay Scoring List,” posted in Course Documents on our BlackBoard site, for a full description of deductible errors.

Or this, in the assignments handout?

Writing projects start at 100 points and challenge writers to maintain the highest possible score by creating papers that are well written, logically argued, and free of basic grammar, punctuation, and style errors. Points are deducted for specific kinds of errors, described in the Essay Scoring List, posted in “Course Information.”

Naaaahhhh. I must’ve done that just to hear my brains rattle.
“. . . the rough draft are being graded . . .”
“grammar content”
“. . . drafts do not worry about . . .”

What? Me, worry?

Stand by, all you entrepreneurs! This young fellow will soon graduate and show up at your door asking for a job. Awe-inspiring, isn’t it?

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

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Mrs. Micah

Dear student: Why are you turning in rough drafts?

Micah sometimes runs into that when he assigns a paper and then an expanded version of the same paper. He does it so they will have a better chance of learning from their mistakes…but yeah.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 – 09:15 AM

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.

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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