By Professor
Doom
I’ve written many times how extraordinary
the cheating is in higher education today. While certainly we can point at the
students as responsible, a big reason for why it’s so out of control is
administration actually encourages cheating.
I’ve seen professors lose their jobs over
catching cheaters, and certainly losing pay is quite possible for professors so boneheaded as to
catch cheaters. Random checks for cheating usually show 20% to 50% of the class
is cheating, in many classes…but faculty (usually) don’t dare do anything about
it: catching cheaters leads to the cheaters complaining to admin, and admin
comes down on faculty students complain about. Throw in that cheaters are seldom
removed from class, and get to “evaluate” the professor (and thus influence
whether the professor will be allowed to continue doing his job), and students
get the message pretty clearly: cheating is a perfectly acceptable way to get
through college.
The whole system is set up to make it all
but impossible to do anything about cheaters, simply because getting rid of
cheaters cuts into the only thing admin cares about: growth of the institution.
Rather than risk the ire of the irresponsible administration that runs our
institutions, most professors just look the other way now.
Now, much of what goes on in higher
education today is pretty irrelevant. Standards have been reduced to the point
that many courses no longer require any reading or writing, much less have
tests that require any effort to pass, as is well documented. Even if the course requires effort,
nobody really cares if the student cheats his way through Gender Studies,
Communication, African Studies, or quite a few other fields, because it just
doesn’t matter.
But the culture of cheating created by
admin is spreading now to the “real” majors, the ones where people can actually
die if the practitioner has no clue what he’s doing. A recent scandal at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) really highlights the
situation:
The warnings and directives came
after the newspaper learned last month of allegations that two students with
ties to high-ranking public officials were brought before the Honor Council.
The Honor Council recommended that
the students be expelled,…
On many campuses, professors no longer
make the decisions about cheating accusations. Instead, admin has set up “Honor
Councils” which use a high, high, standard of proof before actually calling a
student a cheater. I’ve dealt with these, and while I totally respect
reluctance to convict someone innocent, you basically need a signed confession
of cheating by the student before the Honors Council will actually determine
the student is actually cheating.
I exaggerate, perhaps, but the bottom line
is, if the Honors Council is agreeing the students should be punted from the
school, you better believe the evidence is perfectly convincing.
Great, the Honors Council does the job
that the course professor used to do. We’re done, right? Not so fast:
“…but a dean overruled its
decision, sources told the newspaper. “
Administration is out of control on campus because they literally
can do whatever they want. Yes, there are hundreds of pages of rules and
regulations but, bottom line, there’s no way to stop an administrator from
doing as he pleases (except possibly another administrator, but good luck with
that).
As always, the Seal of Silence comes down,
to protect the obvious skullduggery going on here:
“In a follow-up letter Sept. 8 to
Sausser and the newspaper’s publisher, Drachman warned Sausser not to contact
Honor Council members, who are “not permitted to disclose information about
those proceedings.” Drachman also is the Honor Council’s attorney.”
As a public institution, many of the
records involving the case are, at least technically, public information. Admin
responds the only way it can, with lies:
In a letter Sept. 1, MUSC
attorney Annette Drachman said the university would not turn over any documents
related to the Honor Council or any reports and emails related to test-cheating
allegations. She cited state and federal privacy laws.
She also said an email search
would “be unduly burdensome and may cost in excess of $275,000. In addition, a
search of this nature would take several months to accomplish.” Drachman then
said the university would do the search “upon receipt of payment.”
Wait, what? Now you have to pay a huge
sum of money just to see the public records? It’s going to take months? This
lie is so obvious on the face of it. This wasn’t the OJ Simpson trial here,
we’re talking a few dozen pages at absolute most. Maybe the university is using
a Fred Flinstone bird to peck out the words on a block of stone? Many printers take
less than 2 seconds a page, if we offer to pay for the printer, can that speed
up the process?
It would if they were telling the truth.
Anyway, administrators undermining the
integrity of the school, lying, and threatening people not to talk are hardly
news, that’s just everyday business in higher education today. Here’s the real
news:
I really want to point out, while students are protesting the acts of this one administrator...there are no administrators saying "yeah, this is corrupt, we should stop this." Perhaps what we're seeing in our presidential election, where the "rank and file" have had enough of a thoroughly corrupt establishment, is being reflected at this school?
MUSC is a medical school, you see, and so
the other students realize if the school has a crap reputation, it’ll hurt
them. Admin doesn’t care in the least about hurting students, of course:
Fielding a barrage of angry questions
from medical students Monday night after an alleged cheating scandal, the dean
of the Medical University of South Carolina College of Medicine said that the
case in question is closed
The whole point of having an Honors
Council was so that one biased faculty member couldn’t unfairly hurt a student
with a false cheating charge. And now we have a single administrator stepping
in and unfairly hurting the entire student body by covering up true cheating
charges. How is this any better?
One medical school student who
attended the meeting but asked not to be named said his classmates were
agitated and “couldn’t wait to ask questions.” Most of them “walked out angry,”
he said. More than 100 students attended the meeting, but nearly half had
walked out by the time it was finished.
Of
course they walked out, once they realized they were just going be stonewalled,
that the integrity of their degrees was being annihilated and there was nothing they could do about it, they
walked away.
You better believe students planning to go
to MUSC are likewise walking away, in search of an institution with integrity.
I wish them luck in finding one.
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