f13.net

The saddest thing is, he just refers to the US Educational System, when really it's the same in all of the western hermisphere:

http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/

Well, I for one laughed at the fact that the article started with a faked paper on business ethics. :awesome_for_real:

Oh dear.

Folks have pointed out that the dude is:

a) pitching a book

and

b) claims to have written so many pages as a ghost, he would have had to write something like 10-12 hours a day every day of the week for years.

So I would take everything he says with a huge grain of salt. On the other hand, there are unquestionably people like him out there doing this kind of work, and it's not so much to their discredit as an indication of how utterly broken and corrupt a lot of professional graduate programs in universities actually are.

Having suffered through a never-ending thesis which lead to a never-ending publication in an academic journal, I can fully understand why this guy does what he claims to do... I can't even imagine trying to do what I did as an ESL student. It's easy to look up essays online to see if a student pulled it off a site, much more difficult with "custom" written papers uniquely and privately written. Growing industry? I can see it. Hell if I enjoyed writing, I would flirt with the idea myself.

It flirts with a lot of my problems about education.  We focus on the wrong things, we treat it as a production line instead of an important life skill, and we don't take enough interest in our students to be able to tell their work from that of another, nor do we have enough educators to allow for anything better.  All in a system where it becomes increasingly important to have higher education, yet we routinely underfund and belittle it.

I find the job itself interesting.  It's something I could easily see myself doing if the thought of helping people cheat didn't infuriate me.  That there is a need for it saddens me, and that students go to such lengths depresses me.

This projects up the ladder as well. As I got closer in my PhD program I saw that to succeed (i.e., attain the golden ticket of tenure), one had to basically crank out top tiered research journal articles as fast as possible. The production of academic knowledge so to speak moved from think tanks to production lines. Add to that the fact of getting your research even considered or looked at in a top tier journal was completely political and about who's knob to polish and when. In our monthly graduate committee meetings, this topic was brought up and the debate and banter went on for a full hour before it became apparent that the research and actual progression of knowledge was secondary to who was in your proverbial corner to get something published. I am not sure if it works quite the same in the physical sciences, but in the social sciences, it's all about name dropping and fellatio. And I say all this with utter disappointment btw.

The claim of 5000 pages in a year seems to work out if you do some math. Assume he's working 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, and you need to average under 3 pages per hour to reach that level. It's not unbelievable on the face of it, although that is a rather intense amount of writing - and he does claim to average 4-5 pages per hour, which would provide the administrative time necessary to handle clients.

If true, it's an interesting insight into the lengths to which we've industrialized the educational model. It mirrors, somewhat, my own experiences in university in my larger courses - they were largely there to ensure you were exposed to the material and validate that you could regurgitate it. Actual learning took place on your own or in independent study/research groups and small focused classes. I was lucky enough to have the latter two available at my institution.

Considering all of the MS and PhD committees I've served on, none of this surprises me.  Graduate education from schools below the top 10 (or even 25) in the US is generally a joke in many fields.  It's more about slave labor for faculty attempting to bring indirects into universities than about education.  

Postsecondary education, much like health care, has become a service industry.  


Edit: I apologize if I just got this sent to Politics.

For my pchem lab I had to write a ten page paper every week, for two semesters.  Then again for advanced analytical.  Once you know how to take a simple sentence and add fluff to make it a paragraph, writing several pages an hour is not hard.  It also obfuscates the tiny amount of real information, and a TA grading papers isn't going to care as long as you're not blatantly wrong.

Since the guy knows how to research and organize before he starts writing, and then cranks it out, that kind of production schedule does not surprise me at all.  And if it's topics he's written for before, which is highly likely for some subjects, it becomes that much easier.

This guy, by the way, is also a big reminder to me of a very similar racket: it's becoming increasingly clear that quite a few faculty at universities, including tenured faculty, "double-dip" by working for online for-profit universities like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University. Most of which offer courses of lower quality than community colleges at vastly higher rates, which very rarely have any meaningful value in the job market. There's a pretty fine line between making money writing papers for students and making money supervising valueless online courses. In fact, a really smart operator could probably make money at both ends of that deal: supervise the course and have a second identity where you charge the students for papers you write to be turned into yourself. None of the for-profits would know or care if someone was doing that, honestly. Just as many of the less selective brick-and-mortar universities don't really want to do anything that would get in the way of funnelling the largest number of cattle through the slaughter pens, and hence, don't do some of the simple things you could do to make cheating more difficult. (Customize exams, use other assessment instruments besides exams, smaller classes, don't use a standardized textbook, etc.)

There is a great Frontline episode about the for-profit college system.

And in other news, the "capstone" course in the faculty of Management at the University of Central Florida, which is a 4th year undergrad course on business strategy, had 3/4 of its class admit to cheating.  


Let me bake this in: this course (I took 2 similar for an MBA) is about *competition*.  Strategy, planning and how to measure success.  So you know, statistics, dealing with ambiguity and the like.  

The students in that course got a hold of the answers to the question bank and took the competitive decision to cheat, while knowing that untold dozens of other people in their class would do the same.  The result is in the video, where the prof made the decision (I think it was a bluff) that if the cheaters acknowledged themselves no futher action would be taken against them.  In the meanwhile, everyone in the 400 (?) strong class has to re-sit the midterm.  So 100 odd people who didn't cheat have to re-sit the exam.  

It's utterly mind boggling -- a course about competition, about the problems of risk, about the problems of how difficult it is to measure risk, along with EVERYTHING going on the world economy today, this still happens.  It's not quite as bad as cheating on a business ethics course, but becuase it's about strategic competition it's still mindblowingly ironic.

The ridiculously lazy professor used the test provided by the textbook publisher (after saying he designed his own tests). The test which was available quite easily online. At some point, you can't blame a kid who eats a cookie that's placed on the plate in front of him, no matter how he knows he's not supposed to eat a cookie.

Plus, look at the whole thing with fraudulent paperwork around mortgages and much else in our current economy. Learning to cheat is an important part of mad bizness skills these days!

1) I agree that the professor was lazy in using a canned exam.  I blame his institution.  Professors are encouraged to spend less and less time on teaching as it interferes with your time to beg for money and write papers.  As a professor at a state university, there is ZERO incentive to be a good educator beyond your own personal ethics. 

2) You can (and should) always blame people for following the wrong path.  I don't care how easy it is to follow the wrong path.  That doesn't make it any more right.  Cheating will always be the coward's way out.  

I think I would feel less bad cheating on a general that is just "required" and has nothing to do with my degree then a class that is relevent and teaching me thigns I will need to know in my industry...but maybe I just have weak ethics.  :oh_i_see:

Precisely why I opted out of the PhD program. I absolutely loved teaching my class at the "U" and would have loved teaching a full course load had it not come with the added baggage of having to crank out the research at an ungodly rate. My class gave me first rate reviews even though I had the lowest GPA of any of the graduate student taught classes because, as a few told me, it was the only class they actually learned something in. Of course it didn't hurt that all my exams were custom made by me, every semester - though that had a lot to do with my teaching style tending to the discussion side relating real world stuff that mattered to the students to the theoretical part of the book stuff. It's very disheartening to know that is the way college should be, but isn't and will not be for quite awhile. It also wraps back into the OP... if profs don't give a shit what the students work is about (and many have no clue about their students) then the kids most likely won't give a shit about learning from an absent teacher. I was a TA and did the majority of the grading for the prof I was "assisting" and even had one prof ask me about a student, who she was, her grade, her topic of interests, who had scheduled to meet with said prof about the class materials presented. Needless to say, he deferred the student to me to "take care of it" while he made some excuse he had a conflict. :oh_i_see:

Shit, I still haven't broken my thesis apart to publicize. (Then again, my general view is "I've satisified my curiousity on this particular subject. Hmm. Now let's do it again, with what I've learned." Rewriting it to publish is just work, dammit. I did the fun bit already).

I cannot imagine my thesis advisor falling for that sort of scam, simply because the man was relentless about weekly meetings, constant circulations of drafts, discussions on concepts and results, and generally being heavily invested in every stage of the process. To actually hire someone to write it for me, I'd have to have had him write it dozens of times, as a cycle of drafts.

Not to mention the domain knowledge so he'd know what to write about, or how I'd handle presenting it to an audience (full of other grad students, all asking pointed questions -- on everything from process to results) if I didn't actually write it.

And UHCL isn't exactly a top-10 school for graduate degrees. :)

There is one universal truth about graduate degrees: You get out of them what you put into them.  

Where did you get that 3/4 number from? From what I've read it's ~1/3 that cheated.

Any time you have considerable contact with a student, it is usually screamingly obvious when they're turning in written work that they could not possibly have done themselves. Where plagiarism and ghosting are prevalent modes of completing assignments, it's almost always a sign that faculty do not have close connection to or knowledge of the students for which they're allegedly responsible.

Occasionally it's a sign that the faculty member is also a plagiarist or cheat. In certain fields (medical research that involves pharmaceuticals) it's becoming increasingly clear that substantial numbers of researchers and professors routinely submit work that has been done for them by pharma-paid ghostwriters.

That's what I've seen (and what the professor says in the video that's circulating): about 200 out of 600.

In today's world, you should get credit for just trying math, not for getting it right!  Or so a classmate of mine who anonymously asked that our math homework be credited for completeness and not correctness thinks! 

I think in my haste I conflated 4th year with 3/4 -- I haven't had a chance to watch the last 3-4mins of that video.  

I'm thinking I should have charged my classmates more for the papers I wrote for them.  I could have a whole different career today!



Actually, I wouldn't.  I'd only do papers I knew they could write themselves, but were too legitimately swamped to deal with.

And I'm still offended at that one prof that gave me a "B" :P

Over the range of academic institution:

• So, on the low end paper mills and plagiarism result in just another meaningless degree that is exploitive to the owner and uninteresting to everyone else (not really a surprise given that we're starting with a low end institution).
• In the mid-range the specific results and conclusions are provided by personally self-interested parties.  This isn't actually that unlike the “publish to eat model” of most research staff the world over (e.g. so long as volume is a viable substitute for original or useful content). 
• And on the high end labs sit on each other's results in peer review until they can get their own version of the paper published. 

We aren't interested in original work at all; the closest is an interest in the credit for it at the highest level.  Yes, wildly overgeneralized caricature.  But if Vannevar Bush’s problem of the future was relevance, our problem of the future is veracity.

We have too many colleges, professors and students with no good reason to produce most of them.  Is it any surprise that we’re not really all that interested in how they are produced?  The real test of a thesis isn’t the cost of writing it, but the opportunity cost of enduring the entire educational process.  $2,000 is a pittance compared to years of deferred income.

My thought would be that if we concentrated more on what & how faculty teach and less on research productivity, we might get a lot closer to universities being genuinely value-added.

If you want some insight to the damage that the incentive to overproduce research findings is doing quite beyond plagiarism, this piece in the Atlantic Monthly on John Ioannidis' research on the trustworthiness of medical research is fairly interesting: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/

Won't happen as long as the research brings in the money hats for the university. Tuition just can't compare with it. But hey, if you figure out the magic key to unlock a school where professors get paid to teach and not write for each other then give me a call. I'd be happy as a clam just to teach and get paid enough to break.

Hah.

That story is funny because I had his class my senior year of college in 2007.  The funny thing was that he was on the news here talking about how disappointed he was that students would do this.

That's funny for two reasons.  First is because Capstone is the last class you take at UCF in the school of Business (you can't get into it without filling out an intent to graduate form that says you are graduating that semester).  It's also funny because everyone tries to get him for Capstone class, because he is universally known as being the easiest professor for it.  In Capstone, you have to write an 11 page industry analysis, he's the only teacher that let's you use bullet points (because business managers don't give a shit about an 11 page fluff paper, they want bullet points that get them the facts quickly).   Also he gave students take home quizzes, while other teachers had them take them as pop-quizzes

So last semester seniors, who signed up for him specifically because he's known to be easy, cheated and they are shocked.

Though to be honest, the tests in that class were ridiculous anyways, and the idea that anyone needed to cheat on them is laughable.  I don't remember anyone in my class getting a bad grade on them because it was that stupid of a test.

A close friend was a dual major with business as one of them.  He constantly lamented about the people in those classes.  It doesn't surprise me they needed to cheat to get a passing grade.

I hate writing...sometimes I wish I could buy my papers and be done, or at least do the research, throw out my ideas and let someone else do the stupid spit and polish of it.

I am the type that doesn't give a shit about how much fluff you cram into it, give me small amount of facts and show me how I can make my patients better quicker, and for God's sake don't drone on because I will fall asleep on your ass.

Is there any colleges that don't use a research paper as the way to measure how much you can learn from a class?

My master's program allowed you to do a project or paper.  I chose the project.

I sometimes wish I had studied something other than science just to see how they do things.  Chemistry is such a grueling graduate experience. 

Well I had to defend my thesis at LSU which turned out to be 10% about my paper and 90% about how much shit I learned in the last two years there. I was told it was a mini-oral exam. For the doctorate, its an 8 hour oral exam for each of two areas, theory and methods, or at least was when I was there 99-02. At the U of Miami, it was four comprehensive exams, 8 hours each covering methods/stats, theory, your major focus, and your minor focus, which they allowed for a four hour keyboard banging session. They used to do just the major focus exam and the other two but decided after my first year there to go with 4 to make their dept more legit in the eyes of national academia. It did not sit well with us servants. I left after some huge controversy about the exams and am glad I did. Took my buddy who started with me another 3 years to get outta there.

Yeah, it is.  I know I made the right choice, but I do sometimes wish I had managed to finish.

Well, actually, at small-liberal arts colleges, the money from research is not that big a deal, even when faculty are relatively active researchers. it just offsets the cost of maintaining labs. This is not to say that money isn't an issue, but the biggest source of revenue now at most selective private colleges is endowment income, then tuition, then donations to the annual fund. "Overhead" revenue from research funding is a distant fourth.

But at most research 1 universities? Yeah, the revenue from research is huge. Two things should really happen: spin off the R&D operations of universities into a separate entity that is allowed (with constraints) to have overt partnerships with private industry, and send the folks who  simply don't want to teach over to that neck of the woods--without tenure. E.g., they produce or they get canned. Then spin off the Division I football and basketball operations into minor league teams owned by existing franchises, with their home university still being the "brand image" and getting a big cut of the revenue (bigger than the liabilities) in return for hosting the team at the stadium.

Then refocus on the teaching core, supported by those two revenue centers which are no longer pissing in and corrupting the work of teaching.

There are plenty of disciplines which don't use papers, sure: performing or studio arts, for example. And certainly I have colleagues who use something other than essays or research papers to assess student work--say, a community-based learning project or something like that. But writing is pretty hard to get away from entirely in most higher ed, and I think there's pretty good reasons why that should be.

As someone that has been a professor at both a liberal arts university and a research I institution, I'll say this: I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the American public to start investing in education.  No one is interested in education.  They're interested in making money.  Why do you think we see so much online education being created and a huge push for research from even the smallest universities?

I'm not even going to mention that most students have no interest in getting an education.  They just want a degree.

We had a choice between a project or a thesis. The project was pretty much for anyone who had no desire for a doctorate. I did the thesis because I haven't ruled out a doctorate, but mostly because no one was doing a project I was interested in. (The project was basically "You get with one of the professors, who is doing research, and you basically do a lot of the design and work, and they do the bulk of the writing.".It gives you a feel for publication level work, the work itself is complex and suffices as a measure of your understanding of the field in question.).

Of course, in practice, I ended up sorta doing both. The coding side of my thesis wasn't quite up to the size and scope of what the 'capstone' folks did, but it was damn close. I simply had an edge -- my thesis was an extension of work I'd done in an independent study class, which itself was an extension of work I'd done in a data mining class. I effectively had an extra year of coding, and my thesis was simply taking all that and extending it and analyzing it.

I guess I'm not sure which was the cart and which was the horse in this situation, but at any rate, whoever is pulling, we're all falling down the same slope.

It doesn't matter what you learn, only what degree you get, and from what school, that determines what jobs will be available when you finish.  Unless it's a handful of professional fields (medicine, law, etc.) it doesn't even matter what grades you got.  That being the rules, of course the students are powergaming for the result, not the process.

--Dave

It's all field dependent. I'd say the bulk of folks go there to get the necessary 'minimum credentials' for some general field they're interested in. Businesses prefer it, because as long as the place is accredited, they've got a minimum baseline to work with.

However, for some fields -- and especially the upper echelons of business, politics, law and journalism -- college isn't for an education. It's for networking. Business has gotten especially bad about it, as far as I can tell.

Or perhaps nothing's really changed at all. We've moved from obvious nepotism and 'old boy's clubs' to "Oh, you went to Harvard? Member of blahy-blahy-balh? You know my son Steve? Awesome, we need a new vice president in charge of bullshit! Just a starter salary, a mere 250k with another 200k in options. But hey, got to start at the bottom!"

I had to do both.  I wrote the thesis over the project.  My professor made me build two chargers to demonstrate that I had learned something and could actually be a productive member of society as an engineer and then grilled me in my defense over all the minutiae he told me he didn't care about for 2 years when I was designing and testing.  It was... fun?  I feel like I'm in some elite club at my job though... people hear you have X level of degree and automatically they treat you better even if they don't know you.

I dropped out of grad school. Partially because I realized that I was learning almost nothing above what I had learned at undergrad (the graduate program at Illinois in my field is in the top 5 in the nation and I took most of the same classes the grad students did while I was an undergrad) and partially because I could not afford to continue with no tuition waiver (which the department would only give to "design" majors, not technology ones after the first year).

Part of me laments not finishing the MFA and having a terminal degree. But I burned out on that field after 5 years anyway so w/e.

Burn out was a large part of my decision.  Getting my second Bachelor's turned out to be the right move, although I probably could have skipped it.  I'm much happier with the direction I took despite not getting the Masters or Ph.D.

Got my Masters because it was required for my field. It was actually 50/50 on classes that were worth it.

The quality of teaching in social sciences and related fields is absurdly variable, it gets really fucking hateful having to appease some cocksucking asshole who, realizing that it's really fucking hard to fuck up a social sciences course by not understanding the material, takes it upon themselves to weed out as many freshmen as possible in ways completely unrelated to the material.


Don't knock online education, most of the courses I've seen offered by something approaching legit universities that aren't buying advertising spots are actually decent courses.  It sucks not being able to stroke your neckbeard in a room of a few dozen of your peers, but that 's the price you pay.

People just want the degree because they want the fuck out, because far too many teachers and profs are self-important cocks.

The self important prof thing was a good part of the reason I just wanted my degree and out.   The other part was school taught me virtually nothing of use in the real world of my field.  It made me long for the days of the apprenticeship system just to learn something worthwhile and not be spending $9k a year listening to someone tell me my design sucked because it was too practical while giving an A to the chick crawling on the floor during her presentation without a bra.  :oh_i_see:

I loved it when the way a professor chose to "weed out" students was by attendance.  Because it was so simple NOT to fuck it up yet people bitched and moaned incessantly about it.  "Wah, I know the material I shouldn't have to spend time in class!" always amused me, especially when the professor covered things not in the literature and specifically said "this will be on the test."  The weed out classes I had to take were mostly things like E&M physics, Electronics theory and fields theory classes, of which the professors varied SO much in their presentation of the material and grading that knowing the material was no guarantee that you would be able to understand the problems they were asking you to do on the test.  I really do not miss undergraduate at all (graduate school was completely different).

I really disliked the assholes and their bell curve grading scheme and how allowing too many As and Bs was uncouth.

I taught similarly but I never took attendance. I told the kids straight up, you don't come to my class, you are not going to know 50% of the exam. After 3 semesters, it proved true. Never graded on a curve either - what you got in my class was it. It was more work on my part tailoring exams to class discussions that were different from year to year, but well worth it when you have an avg student come up to you after the final and tell you your class is the only one that actually taught him/her something worth learning.

The worst thing about the Bell curve is not as much the "too many high grades" but the "you have to have X number of failures" part. I had a physics test freshman year where I scored a 91 and got a C, knew a guy who got an 80 and failed. I much prefer shifted scales where the range for A/B/C/D/Fail are smaller at the top end and known before hand. But penalizing people because the test you wrote was easier than you planned is not in any way sensible to me. But that is what happens when you are in a freshman physics class for engineers at one of the most competitive engineering schools in the world (and part of why I changed majors).

I had a fiber optics theory class in grad school and the professor gave us all the scale for everything.  Then gave us extra credit opportunities.  So my friends and I took advantage and overloaded him with extra credit.  At the end of the semester, he still gave 1 A, us B's, and everyone else C's.  We asked why he didn't follow his scale and his response was "you guys did too much extra credit and cause too many A's, I had to adjust everything to a bell curve."  Needless to say us following his scale resulted in screwing over half the students in the class with C's who legitimately had B's according to the scale he gave out. 

I would have taken that to the dean.  You had a given scale and you did extra credit.  That should not be penalized.

This is a good example of another fucked up thing that happens in college. Professors seem to arbitrarily assign the golden distribution in order to make it seem like they are some ideal teacher in the eyes of the university. This kinda shit pissed me off to no end when a fellow graduate student instructor would do the same shit. You grade on the basis of what the student does, not the class...unless it's a class about the team. Now I am pissed...

I tell my students exactly what they need to achieve an A grade.  If 100% of them learned what I asked them to, then they'd all get A's.  Interestingly enough, I still get a Gaussian distribution at the end of the semester. 

Many profs know how to teach.  Few know how to properly assess.  Assessment is the part of my job that I'm always working on, but never feel like I really have a handle on. 

I like learning new material in class.  Literally grading people on attendance?  Stopping the class to lecture a student about interruptions who had the temerity to enter the class a minute late because the bus schedule was off?  Yeah, talk to your pshrink, psycho.

When I taught a class on introductory game design at Austin Community College, the only time I made attendance an issue was one student that consistently came in 30-45 minutes late.  Since I open the class with an hour of presentation/lecture, then had them do an hour of workshop activity, he was missing most of the lecture that set up the second half of the class, and whoever he grouped with wound up spending half the time explaining what he missed.

Other than that, I had no attendance problems either of the semesters I taught the class.  If someone showed up for the second class, I had them there nearly every class (there were hardship exceptions, I didn't ding anyone for them).  I guess they either enjoyed it, or felt they were learning something useful.

--Dave

I also tell everybody what the standard is, and if the class meets and exceeds it, I have no problem handing out As all around. I find the idea of grading on curve really distasteful, particularly in classes where the point is to teach a fairly fixed, concrete body of knowledge. The notion that someone always has to do poorly at that even if they do well is just fucked up. I often have Nebu's experience, though: there are students who fail on purpose no matter what you do. There is no pedagogy that can prevent that, because it's not about the classroom, it's something else going on.

Most of the good professors I had would tell you straight up that you couldn't handle this shit outside of class. Trying to comprehend advanced taxation principle and laws without knowing what realm they expected you to focus on would have been ridiculous. The same was true of Financial Reporting, or Advanced Audit when the test was written by a former FASB member.

"A professor's grading scale is up to their discretion and we do not get involved in such matters"

Except the only reason to force a curve is to please their masters with a pretty looking curve.

:uhrr:

The biggest issue that I see is more one of grade inflation.  Average students now expect a B in class for an average level of understanding. 

The students sure did in engineering school, but oh wow did those professors slap that down.  Lots of reality dosing my 2nd and 3rd year there.  None of my professors had any qualms with failing people, and some of them even D'd people several times in a row forcing them to drop the major and change to another department (yes, their grades actually were very poor and they probably deserved to fail).  The unwritten rule in our department was fail (or drop) a class 3 times and you don't get to take it again and are encouraged to seek another degree out.

My history classes on the other hands, the professors would placate the masses just to stop the whining.  Seriously, what a bunch of spoiled babies complaining about how it "was hard!" and it "was unfair" for bad grades to be handed out for incomplete essays\projects and missing half of the test questions.

Business school was full of grade inflation in the early goings. If you tried hard and made a good effort of getting to know the prof, you would have to fall over dead in a test or get caught cheating to fail.

Then, you got to the accounting major curriculum... If you didn't cut it, the professors would just tell you straight up after a test that this wasn't the major for you.

When I went to college, I was a total aspergers style science nut. But I went there to become a priest, and while I wasn't told to do an arts degree, it was strongly encouraged. So I got my degree in Sociology, Philosophy and Classics, and I have to admit it was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I had to force myself to think in a totally different way than I had before to get through it, and when I left my mind was totally confused and took a few years to settle into its totally new way of thinking. Its stood to me later though, as I'm usually thinking on 2 different levels in a discussion and I can multitask doing techy stuff while talking with someone.

And it taught me the value of Education and stretching yourself beyond your borders.

So you became a priest?

No. Left after 2 years of training.

That makes sense. Somehow the idea of a priest on F13 didn't gel.

Oh really? 

A professor changing his syllabus after the fact and without consent is a big deal actually. As the written document defining a course it is essentially a contract between the students and institution.

If you bring that to the internal auditing/ethics committees you will probably get a result.

For my master's, one of the course admins I talked to said that they probably wouldn't be able to punish students for handing in work late because the guidelines for late work had not been outlined beforehand in any documentation.

I know on my degree a lot of grading was done by postgrads, with the course convenor generally having to moderate the grades after marking (post-grads tend to mark papers according to the standards they are held too, which tends to be a bit harsh on first years). Overall I felt my grading was pretty fair; I came out with a good 2:1, I could have made it a first, but I probably would have had to sacrifice most or all of my extracurricular activities, and I feel they added sufficient value in their own right.

They did come down hard on late submissions though, that was something they were very clear about.

I have no idea if anyone was using any external essay-writing services. I'd guess it is possible, although it seems unlikely. I know that as a post grad I have done quite a bit of proof-reading for current undergrads, although I don't charge (I can read an essay in ~20 minutes usually, and I only really do it for people I like), I'm not sure that's quite the same thing. I'd suspect that science papers are a bit harder to blag, but I could be way off.

As an UG the main papers we had to write were lab reports, which were set experiments on a rotation. If you were ever stuck you could just find a friend who'd done it, or even a student from previous years. No need to pay someone to write it for you...

Well, in Biology we had to write a few more essays than y'all  :grin:

Labs were much as you described, but I was lucky to have a good lab partner and we'd just knock everything out together.

My thesis advisor also taught advanced database design and data mining. I barely passed his advanced database class, but didn't speak to him about my thesis until after I'd finished his data mining class.

His first words to me, as my thesis advisor, were "On the basis of your DB class performance, you did not seem to be a good candidate for a thesis. Thankfully, that seemed to have been an aberration, judging by your performance in my other classes."

I always rather appreciated that comment, strange as it was to be told "Good lord, you seemed to damn bad at this at first", simply because I found it refreshing to have an advisor that was serious about what was and was not acceptable. Of course, I still feel kinda weird at getting the degree based on my thesis "In Which I Try Some Approaches, Only One of Which Has Any Real Effect. And Not One I'd Anticipated". (My thesis was basically: Data mining problem, 3 varient approaches that have not been used for this class of problem, did it do much good?")

I get that failure is often as important as success, but damn did it suck writing pages of "And in summation, this had little effect on test outcomes. A more focused attempt might generate more useful data".

It's not a failure if you think of it as discovering a given method will not function for a data set.  Rather invaluable, really.

Negative results are important, but inherently less interesting to the wider audience.

Good to know.  I'm in the midst of trying to think of a topic for my thesis in CompLing, and I keep worrying that my ideas won't have much effect once I start testing!

The one that did work was rather valuable in a way I almost missed, until I started running statistical analysis. I had really wide distribution of results. Except for that one method. While the overall results were WORSE, the results were clustered, with the median and mean values being very close.

Enough so that should I take another whack at the problem, that'd be required. I really should publish that, but I was really burnt out on writing after I was done.

Although part of me still wants to go fiddle with it a lot more, using what I learned. And another part of me keeps reminding me that I have a great neural network modification I want to try, and that I should find an appropriate dataset and try it out.....

And THAT sort of thing is why I keep looking at doctoral programs before remembering I have to earn a living. :)

You're dreaming. Grades are not what the internal auditing of a university gives two shits about. They are looking for financial issues. Also, the ethics committee isn't concerned about changing grading policies. They are concerned about things like "The professor failed me because I'm a minority" "The professor is trading sex for grades" and "The professor told me he would pass me if I paid him off"

You'll get a different hearing depending on whether a professor is adjunct, tenure-track or already tenured. Already tenured? Unless he or she is someone already in trouble for something else, you'll be told to eat a bag of dicks. Tenure-track? Well, they're not going to change your grade, but the professor might get some feedback that will discourage that kind of changing-the-terms-of-the-deal for future students. Adjunct? You might actually get your grade changed if you act fast, and if the person is already at least a bit unpopular, that might be their last contract.

Is that fair? Not especially.

Also, though, it depends on the institution. For-profit online bullshit places actually often change grades, because they really don't care about anything as long as you're paying up (or more pertinently, as long as the federal government is via loans). Some lower-tier publics will also often override faculty grades to keep the proles happy.

If your professor breaks the contract between you and the school you have standing to sue(and will probably win). If they have a grading policy and you can show that they modified it to your detriment at the end of the term they will care. You may not be doing yourself any favors with that prof, but they will care.

IANAL, but I think it's ambivalent about whether what's said on a syllabus is formally contractual. If there's an overall grading policy that's formally described in official college publications (say, a course catalog) then that is different, and I think that commonly has been regarded as a contractual obligation. The wiggle room comes from the fact that in many circumstances universities can disavow aspects of what happens in an individual classroom--a professor cannot invariably obligate the institution to deliver on promises made by that professor, and institutions typically reserve the right to overrule or override serious errors of judgment by a professor as well. Whether an administration is willing to do that tends to vary a lot not just by the seniority or tenure status of the person involved but also by the quality or selectivity of the university and the degree of influence or power that faculty have. At lower-tier institutions with major athletic programs, it's not unknown for administrations to tinker with the grades of star athletes and just expect the faculty involved to keep their traps shut, for example.

At Miami, a syllabus was a contract. When my grad class went through our crash course on teaching requirements, the syllabus was first and foremost and the most stressed thing in the orientation. Granted, you could slip in a few clauses on how extra credit was at your discretion or the addition of pop quizzes may occur, but you lived and died by that 2-4 page "contract." I know for a fact students did challenge things that were not on the syllabus and won...not in my dept, but it happened enough for that to be a warning in the orientation as well. Not sure if this is universal at all schools, but at the "U" it was srs bizness.

edit: no spelling class offered in grad school  :oh_i_see:

Most syllabus contain all the formal requirements for a contract. There is offer, acceptance, and consideration.  Offer come in that the course is offered to students and the professor enacting the course at their discretion. Acceptance comes in that students register AND have the ability to withdraw. So long as they can withdraw after a syllabus has been presented (whether or not they receive their money back) there is acceptance of the syllabus. In short, registration ensures they have a spot in the course, not dropping the course accepts the terms of the course. This works precisely the same way as a "right to purchase" or "first right of refusal" contract works.

Consideration is the grades and course material (for the student) and the payment for the school/professor.

So long as people can withdraw at any time after the syllabus has been presented, its a contract.

It wasn't emphasized as much at the time when I taught, however it's become rather important to list out the specifics for us as well.  Our undergrad chair is serious about student advocacy.  Changes in policy during the semester might fly with a good reason, however arbitrary ones won't.

I'll also note I registered my complaint when my lab grades got knocked down almost a full letter.  It didn't affect much, however my students appreciated the effort.  I also went to bat for one accused of cheating on a sample where she had a bad product and was later flagged for some silly reason.  I worked hard to give them good quizzes with 'real' situations and strongly emphasized that understanding was more important than yield.  They responded well to that.  My drop rate was low, I had their respect, and they seemed to enjoy the class for as much as possible given it was a six hour Saturday organic lab.

While that's a good story, the end result was that the University didn't care about a grade issue. They responded to a cheating issue. That was my point.

EDIT: Also, a syllabus is not a legal document or a binding contract. Any lawyer will tell you that.

Not in a court of law, but cases at Miami were brought to the dean and school administration after the student got the undergrad senate involved. I guess it all depends on how serious the college or university is about it.

Exactly. Everything depends. It depends on the university, the class, the professor tenure, the time of year, the financial pressure, the race of the student involved, etc, etc. Grades are entirely subjective, and typically you'll find that most Universities (especially the larger ones) will try to avoid getting into grading policy wars because they are difficult to judge. Cheating is black and white. Finances are black and white. Grading isn't. A change in grading could be necessary or it might not be. There are constantly going to be mitigating factors that may/may not give the case merit.

The short answer is that while it always depends on the situation, you are dreaming if you believe that the University will automatically care if a prof changed his grading policy from the original syllabus simply because it consistutes some sort of binding agreement between the prof and the students. That is simply not the case at many institutions, and certainly has no bearing in any legal issues.

EDIT: I had originally written a diatribe about the changes that I have observed with regard to professor control over the classroom and grading and opted it best to omit.  Rather, I'll leave you with the following observation:

Bringing a lawyer to any negotiation has a profound effect on the outcome.  Logic and ethics are rapidly replaced by fears of financial loss. 

Miami takes it seriously because it will hold up in a court of law and they don't want to have to test it, contracts don't have to be signed, sealed, and delivered, just offered (presented with course outline) and accepted (class not withdrawn from) whereby consideration is given to each party(evaluation of performance in exchange for cash). If the terms of the evaluation have been changed after the fact(in detriment of the student) then the contract has been materially altered in breech of the agreement.

You would have to show that you completed the material to the required grade based on the syllabus, but if you did, you would likely win.

I guarantee you in most subjects you would lose simply because there's a subjective judgment escape clause built intrinsically in the grading, before we get into any other consideration. The only classes where you'd have a chance would be course with nothing but multiple choice tests where the policy on curves/no curves was state unambiguously in advance in writing on the syllabus, where attendance, participation and other fuzzy issues weren't a part of the grade, again by explicit commitment on the syllabus. Anything else and there's plenty of escape room: a contract where one party has the right to redefine terms at will.

You're wrong. Do any sort of research on the subject and you'll see that a syllabus is in no terms a legal document. It's up to University policy how they enforce them.

I'll just crack out this smiley since I never used it before.  :google:

Google answered my question in the affirmative. Though there are a lot of people who don't think that way, the lawyers seem to think that it will hold up so long as its possible to withdraw after the syllabus is presented.

Great, now go ahead and link one legal precedent. Pick a case. Hell pick any case. Let me go ahead and clue you in on that because there isn't one. The fact you found one idiot on google to agree with you is not shocking. You should have noticed you had to sift through pages of  "No, it's not. Dumbass," to get there.

I'll go on further. While you seem to understand that a contract has to include offer, acceptance, and consideration, you are misinterpreting what the contract is actually about in the case of the teacher/student. The contract between the student and the university is that the student pays them for the right to receive an education at their institution, and access to all the resources. At no point are you paying for a grade. You are not an employee and you are not providing any exchange with your professor. Consideration requires that something of real value actually be exchanged in order for a legal contract to exist. A grade is an evaluation of performance, not a conditional good to be granted upon said peformance, and it has no real value since it cannot be freely traded.

Actually there isn't legal precedence because no one has sued over it(very likely because most situations are not "the professor changed the syllabus and therefore my grade is lower than it ought to be, and I can show it". They don't make it to court because they're rectified before they get to court). And the materials I found said "no its not unless" and then spelled out the requirements that do actually exist all over the nation. I.E. They said "a syllabus is not a contract because you cannot withdraw from courses". Well, you can withdraw from courses. And as such the situation changes.

I'll go further. You seem to understand what contracts are about, but not what value is about. Grades have value because they can be tracked specifically to post graduate income attainment. I.E. if you have higher grades you will get a better job. No one after the first employer cares, but the first employer cares and that starts. (Note: there are plenty of cases where standing is granted over a poor grade, standing implies consideration in this instance)

The ability to trade it after the fact has nothing to do with whether or not it is consideration. Case in point. Ratings on bonds. They're just evaluations(of the underlying bond characteristics), they cannot be traded. But they sure has hell have value. And if you get screwed on one you can sue.

I mean, do i have to explain non-pecuniary consideration, or how grades are valuable to you? I mean, you may go to school for an education, but I go to school for a certificate and one that says "A" on it is materially different than one that says "C". And if i meet the requirements to get certified at an A then damnit I better get the higher value certification.

Are you trying to convince him or make yourself feel good? Insulting people does not make an argument, and it's just going to get this thread sent to the shitter.

I will just point out that you are comparing a rating of your education to the rating of a level 1 fair value asset. The law and accounting do not look at these as the same. If they did, every idiot would be suing over bad grades devaluing their employment potential.

No, they are pretty similar. The rating on an asset is a risk of default rating. It is intended to inform the purchasers of the quality of the asset. It has value only as it conveys information relating to the quality of the asset. Or, to be more explicit, it is the sale of due diligence. Such that the purchaser of the asset does not have to perform that task himself

Grades inform employers(or schools) of quality in much the same way. Consider yourself someone who works and grades as an information source to verify the quality of your human capital. Such that the purchaser of the labor does not have to perform the task of evaluating performance himself.

Both items are informing purchasers (of labor or assets) as to the quality of the product. If you can show that the rating you received was incorrect as per the guidelines for said rating then you very much have standing. And since the rating is received in compensation and it has value it is consideration.

A simple way show that it is both standing and consideration is this. Who pays for schools that don't give out grades? And the answer is that only a very small amount of people do, practically no one. Clearly, if grades were not part of the compensation, we would see many institutions ignore the actual grading aspect. And, beyond that, they would be very popular.

Why? Well, teaching is hard enough, but assessing is even more difficult. If grades did not matter and only education did, then schools which did not grade, but rather spent the entire time educating would be in high demand. In short, we are paying for assessment, and per the terms of the contract, the school has to give a fair assessment.

Now, as i said earlier, this does not mean that you're going to win, showing that you've been screwed is not easy as many classes have significant subjective aspects. But if you can, if you have the syllabus and the work that unambiguously shows that according to the syllabus you should have received an "A" then you're going to win.

But those cases don't make it to court, and they don't make it to court because schools know that they're going to lose and so the administrative remedies never get exhausted, they end up solving the problem.

So your point is that it's possible, but it's never been tested. Great. All that tells me is that it's not a legal document because it's NEVER been established anywhere as a legal document. The syllabus wouldn't even be the thing you'd have to prove in the case of grade discrimination. You would have to prove that the professor comparatively gave you less than someone else, and it would have to be concrete. It couldn't be a subjective element.

Here's a case: "He did X and passed, I did X and failed, and the reason is that I was black/female/latino."

We can go round and round on this all you want, but you're speculating at best. It's best to deal in facts first and random speculation about "maybe if this certain situation happened somewhere at this time beyond all viable appeals" second.

 If anything, liberal arts portion of my education taught me to produce canned bullshit devoted of intelligent thought.  I wrote all of it myself, being ESL student and all, but noticed early on that least inspired, thoughtless papers produced best grades. I quickly discovered that papers where you regurgitate class notes without providing any meaningful input will produce best marks. Woe if you happen to disagree with professor and/or foolish enough to state it in the paper.

With this in mid, no wonder liberal education degrees are seen as a waste of time by the majority of employers.

Multiple choice exams are far from perfect. There is large body of evidence suggesting that MC exams do not measure learning, rather measure one's ability to study for MC exams.

No, you would have to show that you received less than the syllabus provided. For instance, if you did the extra credit and then the professor modified the grading scale such that you no longer received an A.

You can show that you should have gotten an A because you have the grading scale that you signed up for. You can show that you did the required work because you have the work.

If you take the issue to your schools administrative board they will rectify the issue. And that they do is why you don't see court cases like this. I.E. it is possible for an issue to be so clear cut that it never needs to go to court. The cases where things go to court are the ones where there is a question to be answered.

It is literally impossible for goumindong not to have the last word on something.

You realize how specious that reasoning is, right? I honestly hope you do. No evidence somehow means you are correct? Of course that's never going to go to court because the law doesn't want to waste it's time with deciding whether or not you deserved an A. The University will tell you to go fuck yourself and see if you can find a lawyer who would take such a stupid case. They won't because you can't claim a valid injury.

What I was saying is the only time you could talk about grades was in the case of discrimination, which has nothing to do with the syllabus. The injury is clear, and the damages are monetary, not just a grade fix.

Depends on the professor. The problem with college professors is that very few are trained as teachers. This isn't the problem it'd be in, say, K-12 -- because college students are, more or less, fully functioning adults with mostly working brains and are at least theoretically capable of adjusting to crap teaching.

It would help an AWFUL FUCKING LOT, however, if colleges required professors to undertake some serious professional development on things like learning styles, assesment, grading methods, classroom management, that sort of thing. The best college professors seem to work out these basics (or self-study them, or at least know teachers) but too many of them seem to teach via the Severus Snape method of showing up, writing some shit on the board, and expecting the class to fill in the details. Details they don't know, because they're there to learn them.

Fuck, the worst professor I ever had was, undoubtably, a really good programmer. He couldn't fucking teach to save his life, and his constaint refrain on assignments was "I wanted it done the standard way" or "I graded you down because that's not how it's done in the industry.". Well, fuck-wit, I'm wasn't IN the goddamn industry, you never TAUGHT the standard way, and you assigned the worst fucking book in existence. (That wasn't really his fault. Turns out every book on the subject was written by the same moron. I luckily found a previous edition, written by someone else). The man didn't teach the subject. He laid out assignments like a really bad project manager -- the one who expects you to read his mind, rather than telling you what he wants.

1. The courts have granted standing for grade issues which have not been related to racism.

2. Racism would not matter. Standing is based on injury not on whether or not someone else got more than you. If you can have standing on an issue of grades due to racism you can have standing on an issue due to anything else, including a breach of the grading method as outlined in the course.

Yep, and they end with the in favor of protecting the professors right to teach how they see fit within the guidelines of University discretion. Most of the US cases involving grading are professors suing the Universities about their grading policies, not students suing over grades. Also, under no circumstances anywhere are syllabi referenced as legal documents.

Here's some cases involving the principles:

And if the syllabus contains the rubric for said grading then that is their scale.

What is so hard about this?

In fact, in the case you just cited, the issue is literally that the professor was saying "I am sticking to my already established grading scale which was given to the students" and the court says "yes, you get to do that".

At no time was there a question where the right of the professor to give a grade not on his scale was questioned.

 :uhrr:

And by that standard, they are at liberty to change their grades at will within the confines of the Unversity Code of Conduct (not any syllabus). Get this through your skull, the syllabus is a GUIDELINE. No court has ever backed it as a legal contract in any grade dispute. They will always back the right of the professor to change grades, policies, and standards as long as they don't discriminate unfairly against students.

At this point I can only assume you are still arguing despite lack of evidence, cases, or any general logic because you literally refuse to back off a losing position. Just type "I love the last word!" in your next post, and I'll let it stand at that.

Good god.  I mean I was mildly annoyed when it happened and we discussed doing something, but we were over it pretty quickly.  I love how the discussion continues on longer than we were annoyed back when it happened all those years ago.

He was just training you for life in the industry!

But yes, there are a lot of professors in higher education who can't teach and don't bother to learn. Because in many universities there are zero incentives to do so at best, at worst you're actively discouraged from becoming a competent teacher. Smaller colleges (and community colleges, actually) this is not so much the case: teaching matters.

Nothing will really change at research universities until the paying customers become way more discriminating about teaching, and punish universities that refuse to raise their standard expectations. The problem is that undergraduates often don't realize how bad the teaching is until they're well into their time at a given university, at which point the opportunity costs to switching are too high and the risks from making a stink about particular teachers are also considerable. So you endure, get out and eventually the whole experience is memorable mostly for the few really good teachers you had plus the sex and drugs you indulged in. Graduate students, unless they're naive, don't expect to be taught at all, and so anyone who actually does teach is a pleasant surprise.