Ponderous pondering

I sometimes think too much (not always well, just too much). Recently, I've been thinking about my teaching philosophy. I had to sit down and think about this a month or two ago when I was prepping for a video conference job interview (didn't get the job, and, no, they didn't ask me for my teaching philosophy); however, events in the last couple of weeks at my university have had me discussing (arguing) about our programs and the university's direction.

I'd like to preface this by saying that I love the possibilities that computers and the internet have for education. I've had my own student-centered homepage for years (www.geocities.com/mbrown_ae). I've created a lot of interactive materials that I have on a department homepage. I show my students where all of this material is and I strongly encourage them to use it. HOWEVER, I don't check up on them. If they don't want to use it, that's their choice as adults.

Our new president is a business man and undoubtedly thinks like a business man, not as an educator. To be fair, some of his beliefs are not that far from some of my Korean colleagues. The thing that has struck me most is that the president seems to think that the main thing that stands in the way of us becoming a world class university is that our students don't do enough homework, so he has told our department (and presumably all departments) to assign more homework and to do it online so that the students can be tracked and given a grade based on this homework.

This will assuredly make our university a world-class one (koff, koff).

I may be remembering poorly as I sometimes do, but I don't remember my university professors gathering and marking university students' homework on a regular basis. Certainly homework was assigned and it was expected that you would read Ch.1 and come to class prepared to discuss it. We were assessed by one or two exams and by several assignments. If we didn't do the homework, we expected that we might do poorly on the exams and assignments.

Another thought is that old people who have little or no understanding of computers shouldn't be allowed to make decisions about computer use. To be sure, there is tracking software that can show if "someone" has logged in. It's possible to see what links were clicked on by "someone", but there is not necessarily a correlation between looking at something and actually studying it and learning it. (How many times have you read a couple of pages in a book to then realize that you have no idea what you read?) There is no way to be sure of what students are doing when they are out of your sight. It's hard enough to control them sometimes when they are in the same room. Even if "someone" has logged in, you can't be sure who it is. I could certainly see some enterprising young man getting a list of everyone's user names and passwords so that he could log them in for a fee. You also can't be sure that they haven't logged in and then turned on a computer game. I can just imagine some teacher looking at little Moohyun's tracking log and seeing that he spends an amazing 5 or 6 hours every night on the university website. WOW!!! Amazingly Moohyun's English isn't getting better, but he's well on his way to becoming a professional gamer.

Although I still assign homework, I've stopped grading it. I still walk around the classroom and mark who has something written on the pages I've assigned. They get one mark for doing it and nothing if it isn't done, but I'm getting increasingly uneasy about even this. I like to think that my tests and assignments reflect the students abilities. I try not to trick them. My students know what they will be assessed on and how. Homework helps, as does extra online material that I provide for them.

I don't assign much out of class writing anymore either. This bothers me a lot because I like teaching writing, and, as a student, I always wrote better outside of class than in. Now, I alternate take-home and in-class assignments. The take-home assignments are for feedback. The stuff done in class is for "big" marks.

I have disagreed on more than one occasion with colleagues about online quizzes. And, again, I feel really bad about this, but cheating is common and it is a problem. If the teachers allow it, they are disadvantaging the honest students and teaching them that only cheaters prosper.

At my university, we grade on a strict grading curve. 30% get A; 40% get B, and 30% get C or lower. Allowing a "B student" to cheat and take an A from a deserving "A student" (who gets bumped down to a B+) really bothers me.

My colleagues say that cheating isn't such a big problem and that there is no solution anyway. Sometimes I wonder if we deserve to be called a profession.

Plagiarism.org has this to say (the emphasis is mine):

A study by The Center for Academic Integrity found that almost 80% of college students admit to cheating at least once.

According to a survey by the Psychological Record 36% of undergraduates have admitted to plagiarizing written material.

A poll conducted by US News and World Reports found that 90% of students believe that cheaters are either never caught or have never been appropriately disciplined.

The State of Americans: This Generation and the Next (Free Press, July 1996) states that 58.3% of high school students let someone else copy their work in 1969, and 97.5% did so in 1989.

A national survey published in Education Week found that 54% of students admitted to plagiarizing from the internet; 74% of students admitted that at least once during the past school year they had engaged in "serious" cheating; and 47% of students believe their teachers sometimes choose to ignore students who are cheating.

Now, this article at Plagiarism.org dealt with plagiarism, but I think that people who plagiarize would not have second thoughts about cheating in other ways if they knew that they wouldn't get caught.

I found this article in The Harvard Crimson:

Problem Set Problem: Cheating

Let’s be upfront: cheating—most commonly in the insidious form of copying or other illicit collaboration—happens quite a bit at Harvard on take-home assignments...

The status quo would be acceptable, though still unattractive, if cheating were a victimless crime. But most large science classes—incidentally the places where copying on problem sets is most apt to occur—are graded on a curve. This creates a zero-sum situation, where any points people gain by cheating do not simply help them, but hurt others.