The Fora: A Higher Education Community

Quote from: AmLitHist on April 29, 2024, 09:06:01 AM

Quote from: Parasaurolophus on April 28, 2024, 11:21:31 PMWell, I got the call. I'm giving too many As and failing too few students.

My numbers are very skewed by the one upper-level course I taught this year, where everyone did very well because of a generous concentration of points in low-stakes assessments--definitely too generous for a group who's actually going to regularly do the work.

But even so. Guess I have to be a hardass for the next few semesters.

I'm always waiting on the opposite email:  too many D/Fs, and too few passing grades.

HA! "They" don't care how many A's and B's my students get, but if there are any C's it is a "the sky is falling" call to arms disaster for everyone. For context: this is medical/allied health professional school courses, so a "C" is considered unsatisfactory (students must remain above 3.0 GPA),and <C = F and automatic dismissal.

^ basically agree with all of this

Quote from: Aster on Today at 06:22:25 AM[. . .]

 if the professor wishes to put in the effort.

[. . .]

We have constructed a system (the curriculum and its delivery) to maintain the fiction that every individual faculty member's contribution to student learning is unique and essential. This is why there is no institutionalized process to ensure that assessed work is highly specific to each course, etc.

Haven't been since the 20th. It wasn't terrible; most of my high school bullies found Jesus and were very polite. Might try to get to the 50th in 2031 if a) there is one, and b) nothing else is happening.

Farmers here should be well into planting corn by May 1, with some of them nearly done by that date most years.  Not this year, though:  some had started plowing and disking a couple of weeks ago, but even those fields have been beaten as flat as a table since last Friday, with lots of pretty deep standing water.

You can take the girl out of the country. . . . I guess ALHS and I will always mark the passage of time by what's happening on the farms. By the way, there is a huge crop of calves this year at a farm on the road to our oldest kid's house! I love how cute they are, with just their ears poking above the pasture grass; ALHS always reminds me that they're a lot of money on the hoof.

Five inches of rain at our house, after storms off and on all weekend. More heavy weather (storms and heavy rain) predicted for Thursday night. Creeks and rivers are approaching/above flood stage all over the region; the Mississippi was full of logs, trees, and debris when I crossed this morning.

Yes, submitting a duplicated assessment from outside a university course has always been a greyer area than most of us would like it to be.

I believe that most of our concerns in this context have more to do with curriculum equity than with plagiarism. But duplicated work is just so less common than plagiarized work, that most university academic dishonesty language has not carved out specific language that explains the problems in submitting duplicated work from outside the curriculum. 

"Work" in regards to a university course would intend "work" performed within the curricular confines of the course itself. Not "work" within the university, or "work" in any other context.

There are intrinsic academic complications with submitting duplicated work from an external source. A big one is that there is no direct oversight mechanism process for one professor's class to know exactly how the assessment system worked for a student in another professor's class. Did the student have help? Did the student have more time to complete? Did the student get to redo submissions into a polished product? These are all valid equity concerns from a curriculum perspective.

Another concern with submitting external duplicated work is with evaluation of the process used to originally create that work. While some courses may not specifically score this, the process as to how a student performed his/her work is very much important to the teaching and learning process. Those formative processes are managed and controlled within a specific course. Those formative processes are often lost or highly incomplete with externally duplicated work. And it makes office hour consultations extremely awkward.

ME: "Why did you use these references? They aren't on the approved list. We did not cover those in class."
STUDENT: "I wrote this paper for another class."
ME: "That is not appropriate. Can you tell me why?"
STUDENT: "Because... um... uh... that paper was for another class...?"


I would also argue that submission of duplicated work is a curriculum assessment problem, and that there are valid ways to correct it, if the professor wishes to put in the effort.

Solutions:
* Conduct assessments within the classroom (e.g. Inverted Classroom Model). For writing classes, break up the writing assessments into smaller pieces (e.g., scaffolded models) that can be performed during class time.

* Tailor assessments to be highly specific to the course, rendering the likelihood of a duplicated assessment to be virtually nil (outside of a student retaking the same course).

* Communicating and coordinating one's course assessments with those of your peer faculty. Keep one's ears to the ground.

Quote from: RatGuy on Today at 05:50:54 AM

Quote from: marshwiggle on Today at 04:45:46 AM"Treat others as you would like to be treated" is entirely different than "Treat others as they would like to be treated."

I heartily agree with the former; the latter is a hole with no bottom.

I think you're willfully misunderstanding that quote. And I know your impulse is to respond with "here's what it literally means" and continue spinning in circles. But if you really attribute unfairness, narcissism, and/or maliciousness to the idea that people are asking to be seen as a certain way, I'm not sure anyone on these fora (or elsewhere) can help you understand.

Narcissicm would be the closest. As I said above, the resources available are finite. How everyone can be treated is limited by the total resources available. (It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem.)


Consider the issue of pronouns. Pronouns, aside from making speech more fluid, essentially reduce the cognitive load of constantly referring to everyone by name, since one pronoun can be used for many different people. However, if people are allowed to make up their own pronouns, then in principle every person could make up their own unique pronoun. In that case, rather than decreasing cognitive load, remembering the names and pronouns for each individual would increase cognitive load beyond that required to simply remember names. If everyone chooses their own pronouns, there's no point to using them instead of names.

Here's another example: Suppose the required enrollment for a course is 25 for economic reasons. Below that, it can't afford to run. Say there are 20 men and 10 women in the course. 30 people , being above the threshold, allows the course to run. However, if for some reason women in the course felt that they needed a separate section of the course, then that would require breaking in into two sections, one with 10 students and one with 20 students. Both of those would be below the threshold, so neither could run. The finite resources prevent people getting what they would like to have.

In countries with universal healthcare, the societal agreement is that it is more important that services can be available to all, than that they be limited according to individual ability to pay. This is the principle I am defending; fairness is about accommodating peoples' wishes to the extent that everyone can be similarly accommodated.

The only one I attended an event for was my 25th and only because I happened to be nearby on that weekend. My brother lives about 45 miles from where we both attended high school and I was visiting him to pick up some furniture and other things he had stored for me after our Dad passed. There was a dinner at a nice restaurant, quite a few people attended, so did some teachers, it was okayish. Everyone seemed to be talking about their kids and grandkids, and vacationing at [local area that's very popular for tourism], and I had very little to add to those conversations.

High school was not the peak of my existence, it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great either. Most of the people I want to be in touch with, I already am through social media. The few people I'd like to be in touch with but am not are the very same people that no one seems to be in touch with. If there's a 40th and the timing is convenient, perhaps I would consider attending. But perhaps not.

Quote from: apl68 on April 29, 2024, 01:19:38 PM

Quote from: spork on April 29, 2024, 10:25:50 AMClosure announcements today:

Wells College, NY

University of Saint Katherine, CA

Either St. Katherine's students and faculty had more to say, or its closure was the more abrupt of the two.  Apparently the great majority of their students played sports.

"St. Katherine's was founded in 2010 and offered more than two dozen undergraduate and three graduate programs of study. It enrolled about 300 students." The article indciated that they mainly enrolled students who could not afford to pay tuition, which leads quickly to dire financial straits unless one has a major alternate source of revenue. They also had grandiose plans for a 5000 student institution on a brand new campus in Chula Vista.

Quote from: marshwiggle on Today at 04:45:46 AM

Quote from: Wahoo Redux on April 29, 2024, 02:40:49 PM

Quote from: marshwiggle on April 29, 2024, 02:15:58 PM

Quote from: Wahoo Redux on April 29, 2024, 12:51:02 PMI don't think you quite understand what that phrase means, Marshy. 

Why do you say that? The point is that how anyone wants to be treated flies in the face of a society that strives to treat people fairly. In the latter case, if everyone is treated the same, then that effectively means doling out available resources equally. But in the former, if everyone (or every "group") gets to decide what they feel they deserve, that makes no reference to whether that is compatible with the available resources in the context of what everyone else feels they themselves deserve.

It's Kant's categorical imperative simplified.

All it says is treat other people the same way you would want to be treated.

No, that's not what it says.

Quote from: Wahoo Redux on April 28, 2024, 05:23:37 PM

QuoteAt their core, DEI efforts are aspirations toward and actualizations of the platinum rule ("Do unto others as they would like done to them").

"Treat others as you would like to be treated" is entirely different than "Treat others as they would like to be treated."

I heartily agree with the former; the latter is a hole with no bottom.

I think you're willfully misunderstanding that quote. And I know your impulse is to respond with "here's what it literally means" and continue spinning in circles. But if you really attribute unfairness, narcissism, and/or maliciousness to the idea that people are asking to be seen as a certain way, I'm not sure anyone on these fora (or elsewhere) can help you understand.