Get your Master's Thesis für just 2k$!

[Khaldun]

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.

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.

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.

[Khaldun]

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?

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.

[Nebu]

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

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.

[Morat20]

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

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.

[Khaldun]

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

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.

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.

[MahrinSkel]

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

[Morat20]

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'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!"

[Selby]

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

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.

[Chimpy]

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.

[Lantyssa]

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.

[Paelos]

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

[Sheepherder]

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

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.

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.

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.

[Merusk]

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. 

[Selby]

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.

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.

[01101010]

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.

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.

[Chimpy]

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

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).

[Selby]

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.

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. 

[Lantyssa]

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

[01101010]

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. 

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...

[Nebu]

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. 

[Sheepherder]

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."

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.

[MahrinSkel]

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

[Khaldun]

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[Selby]

I would have taken that to the dean.  You had a given scale and you did extra credit.

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

[Lantyssa]

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

[Nebu]

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. 

[Selby]

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[Sir T]

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

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.

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.

[Paelos]

So you became a priest?

[Sir T]

No. Left after 2 years of training.

[Paelos]

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

[Furiously]

Oh really? 

[Goumindong]

I would have taken that to the dean.  You had a given scale and you did extra credit.

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

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.