The Fora: A Higher Education Community

Good morning!

Got the pangram and to a bit past genius so far.  Yesterday we needed bee buddy help with curacy, yuca.

No luck on LB.

Glad your trip went well, Langue_doc! I hope you get to get some rest in.  There's been an elusive Scott's Oriole in the tree for two days now.  We can hear him, and he sounds so close! But the foliage has started to grow in to the point that we can't find him! I guess he could be a she.  Maybe one day we will have luck.

Happy solving!

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.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

Sounds like a wonderful time!  Congratulations on all the good observations.  And on being able to visit such a good refuge.  It sounds like a lovely place, in addition to all the bird life.

No, I really haven't spoken to any of those people since I moved away decades ago (no desire to ever return to that state either!). Our school was somewhat large (>2000 students), so I didn't know most of them, anyway. I don't feel any need to see them again, I actually have trouble remembering most of their names...even those who were in my close friend circle.

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.