What will the fall students be like?

[downer]

Most students won't have had any face to face classes for 18 months.

Entering students who just graduated from high school have by many accounts been held to (even) lower standards than regular graduating students.

My guess is that high-performing students will still be good, but that struggling students who really be struggling with their first year in college.

Are you planning to do anything different from usual in fall classes?

I've had messages from a dean or two mentioning this issue, and all the resources available to students. But it didn't seem that they had much clue about what to expect.

[Caracal]

Most students won't have had any face to face classes for 18 months.

Entering students who just graduated from high school have by many accounts been held to (even) lower standards than regular graduating students.

My guess is that high-performing students will still be good, but that struggling students who really be struggling with their first year in college.

Are you planning to do anything different from usual in fall classes?

I've had messages from a dean or two mentioning this issue, and all the resources available to students. But it didn't seem that they had much clue about what to expect.

I doubt any effect will be enough to notice in classes. Or, I should say, the actual effect will be too little to notice, but lots of people will think they are noticing it, but actually will not be seeing anything out of the normal.

[kiana]

Anecdotally, from local high school teachers, there's been an absolutely massive amount of cheating for online math tests. Since our college recently started placing students by their high school math courses/GPA, I'm concerned.

How am I dealing with it? Links to tutorials on "if you forgot the order of operations, click here" and so on, and otherwise pretty much ignoring it. I don't have time to teach the prerequisites at the same time.

[the_geneticist]

I am curious to see what they will be like as well.  I know that our students HATED their entirely online classes and say really want to be back in the classrooms.  But they really like having videos of the lectures to watch.  A big part of "welcome to/welcome back to campus" is going to be letting students know that if a class is in person, that it's only in person and there won't be a video.  And that each class will have its own policies on attendance, missing work, etc.  I think the first few weeks will be rough as students ride out the learning curve.

[Ruralguy]

Yes, the shifting policy, and lack of consistent policy between/among professors (a constant problem at my school...we like the "wild west" attitude towards profs being the local "law") will, I agree, be the biggest problem, especially if illness continues to be a problem (obviously the illness itself can be the worst problem for the few that get bad cases).

[mamselle]

Just brainstorming here, but would it be possible to record the classes anyway, since there may indeed be health issues still abounding in the fall?

Better to be on top of the options (ask IT if there's a camera in the back of the room that you can just turn on from the front desk, etc.) and decide for yourself beforehand; filming your own lectures isn't that hard and setting up links to them only takes a minute or two once they're saved; you could just insert them as you do the online CMS classwork assignments, or email them to the class or something.

M.

[the_geneticist]

Just brainstorming here, but would it be possible to record the classes anyway, since there may indeed be health issues still abounding in the fall?

Better to be on top of the options (ask IT if there's a camera in the back of the room that you can just turn on from the front desk, etc.) and decide for yourself beforehand; filming your own lectures isn't that hard and setting up links to them only takes a minute or two once they're saved; you could just insert them as you do the online CMS classwork assignments, or email them to the class or something.

M.

You would need permission from each and every student in the room to record their voice and/or face.  I personally wouldn't want to deal with the hassle.  Plus, I don't know how you'd equitably use any in-class assessments for students who were not there (e.g. quizzes, clickers, case studies, etc.).

[Caracal]

Just brainstorming here, but would it be possible to record the classes anyway, since there may indeed be health issues still abounding in the fall?

Better to be on top of the options (ask IT if there's a camera in the back of the room that you can just turn on from the front desk, etc.) and decide for yourself beforehand; filming your own lectures isn't that hard and setting up links to them only takes a minute or two once they're saved; you could just insert them as you do the online CMS classwork assignments, or email them to the class or something.

M.

This would be tough for a few reasons.

One set of problems is technical. Recording the instructor is easy enough, but it might be very difficult to be able to record what students are saying, for example. That could make it really hard to follow a class that is partly discussion.

I think the bigger problem, however, would be that if you upload all the classes, it would be very hard to persuade many students that they actually need to come to class, assuming they aren't sick. You'd be sending the message that watching the video is a reasonable substitute for coming.

[Ruralguy]

Yes, I am just going to treat COVID absences like any other. So long as they have proof that they saw a medical professional, then I let them make up any work from class.
I don't generally copy my notes or film lectures, but some for some courses have power points, and I distribute those a few days before the relevant exam. If they miss a quz or problem set, they can make that up.

[apl68]

Anecdotally, from local high school teachers, there's been an absolutely massive amount of cheating for online math tests. Since our college recently started placing students by their high school math courses/GPA, I'm concerned.

How am I dealing with it? Links to tutorials on "if you forgot the order of operations, click here" and so on, and otherwise pretty much ignoring it. I don't have time to teach the prerequisites at the same time.

That's very disturbing to hear.  Apart from what it suggests about widespread slippage in ethics among students, this preference for cheating over actually doing the work to learn could end up being one of the worst damages that COVID does to many students' future educational prospects.  It may be a long time, if ever, before many of them catch up.

[the_geneticist]

Anecdotally, from local high school teachers, there's been an absolutely massive amount of cheating for online math tests. Since our college recently started placing students by their high school math courses/GPA, I'm concerned.

How am I dealing with it? Links to tutorials on "if you forgot the order of operations, click here" and so on, and otherwise pretty much ignoring it. I don't have time to teach the prerequisites at the same time.

That's very disturbing to hear.  Apart from what it suggests about widespread slippage in ethics among students, this preference for cheating over actually doing the work to learn could end up being one of the worst damages that COVID does to many students' future educational prospects.  It may be a long time, if ever, before many of them catch up.

Anecdotally, the number of academic dishonesty incidents was order of magnitude higher for our online college courses as well.  We are having a LOT of folks repeating classes.  We even have students taking classes out of sequence due to rampant cheating & not being found responsible until after they had starting taking the next course in a series. 
The real proof will come when they are turning in work in the classroom.  It's going to be a real wake-up call.

[fishbrains]

Anecdotally, from local high school teachers, there's been an absolutely massive amount of cheating for online math tests. Since our college recently started placing students by their high school math courses/GPA, I'm concerned.

How am I dealing with it? Links to tutorials on "if you forgot the order of operations, click here" and so on, and otherwise pretty much ignoring it. I don't have time to teach the prerequisites at the same time.

That's very disturbing to hear.  Apart from what it suggests about widespread slippage in ethics among students, this preference for cheating over actually doing the work to learn could end up being one of the worst damages that COVID does to many students' future educational prospects.  It may be a long time, if ever, before many of them catch up.

I don't know. From the writing side, high school students have always been copying and pasting to slide by (or, before the internet, copying stuff from an encyclopedia). They just need the proverbial kick in the head to understand that kind of silliness won't fly anymore. Most figure it out, and a couple will still fail the course due to plagiarism.

I think Fall 2021 will be, to quote the words of Ice Cube, "Same corner, same 'hood."

[spork]

Same cheating and plagiarism, just more of it. The students truly deserving of special consideration because of actual health problems, family dynamics, poverty, etc., won't ask for it, while the ones that aren't will.

[kiana]

That's very disturbing to hear.  Apart from what it suggests about widespread slippage in ethics among students, this preference for cheating over actually doing the work to learn could end up being one of the worst damages that COVID does to many students' future educational prospects.  It may be a long time, if ever, before many of them catch up.

Anecdotally, the number of academic dishonesty incidents was order of magnitude higher for our online college courses as well.  We are having a LOT of folks repeating classes.  We even have students taking classes out of sequence due to rampant cheating & not being found responsible until after they had starting taking the next course in a series. 
The real proof will come when they are turning in work in the classroom.  It's going to be a real wake-up call.

I can say that I had provable dishonesty -- not merely in the sense of "cheat sheets" but in the sense of wholesale use of algebraic computation software -- from 1/3 of the active students last spring. It was utterly dismal -- one of the most depressing and demoralizing semesters I've ever had. I had more in this past year than I did in the previous EIGHT YEARS of full-time teaching.

The part that I find most concerning is that someone who's enrolled in a college algebra class and legitimately doesn't understand beginning algebra -- to the point of not being able to graph a linear function or multiply two binomials -- is going to fail. There is literally nothing that we can do to teach them three semesters of math in one semester. And because they have no idea what's going on, they're going to run everything they can through Photomath and skip everything they can't and feel like they're accomplishing something because they're stacking up homework points, even though they're going to fail every f2f exam with adequate proctoring.

[Parasaurolophus]

I anticipate no real changes. Cheating was endemic here long before the pandemic, and it will remain so.

They'll like IRL me better than recorded me, however.