By Professor Doom
Years ago, in my book, I wrote
how a state university had an unwritten policy for faculty to pass 85% of their
students. To clarify, any faculty who did not meet this “standard” would find
his career cut short. I’ll double down on this by noting the university also
allowed students to register for the same course but two different faculty, in
the same semester—this led to faculty being in direct competition with each
other to offer the most minimal of coursework, with whoever dared to assign
even a single page of reading at risk of losing his job—a student which dropped
such a “monster” of a professor in favor of an easier professor would count
against the monster’s failure rate.
“I can
serve coffee and donuts and still not make 85%”
--another
faculty at the school complaining how unfair the policy was, as you generally
had 20% of the names on the roster never show up and/or drop the course. Less
honorable faculty quickly found a way, as my next anecdote will show.
I said this years
ago, and I can understand why a reader would discount such ravings on the
internet…but, hey, look, now we see faculty opening complaining about this
“unwritten” policy:
“DFW” refers to
the three ways a professor can lose a student in the course. “D” is for the D
grade, it’s not failing, but generally not good enough for course credit (i.e.,
it can easily delay graduation). “F” is for “Fail”—usually the students are
given so long to drop a course that only comatose or otherwise clueless
students actually fail. “W” is for “Withdraw,” where a student leaves campus;
this can happen for many reasons which have nothing to do with the teacher of
the course (for example, the student may die, or may be put on military deployment,
or may get terminal cancer, among other “remote” possibilities which are
regular enough occurrences with today’s class sizes).
“The
overall rate is absurd, the lumping of the W with the D and F is absurd, and it
captures how integrity is being sacrificed on the ‘don't let enrollment drop’
altar by bureaucrats.”
Even though a
withdrawing student might have nothing to with the faculty, the faculty can
still be penalized. The gentle reader should keep this is mind if he considers
my best rule for fixing higher ed, namely eliminating all administrative
positions where the title of the position is longer than twice the title
holder’s name, too draconian…many rules admin uses are so unfair that I feel no
need to treat them any better.
Registrar, at a policy change meeting: “Due to a glitch, a number of students in various courses were enrolled in courses accidentally. They didn’t know they were in the course, so never showed up for class or did assignments, and didn’t know what was going on until they received their report card. We need to change the policy to allow students to drop late, for this reason.”
Me: “Of these
students that did absolutely nothing, about how many failed?”
Registrar:
“2/3rds failed. The rest got A’s, but complained because it cut into their loan
disbursements.”
Me: “To be clear,
1/3 of the students that literally did absolutely nothing still got an A for
their coursework?”
Registrar: “Yes.”
--I repeat this
story, as it’s eyewitness testimony of clear evidence that around 1/3 of the
coursework on that campus was utterly and completely bogus. Yes, I know, I
could just as easily cite a book saying as much. In any event,
this sort of fraud happens for a reason.
Now, that’s my
own anecdote, above. Let’s see what faculty are saying in the article I linked:
But professors there didn’t know until recently that the rate
at which they give D and F grades and see students withdraw from their courses
was impacting the tenure and promotion process.
Now, I’m no jerk, I sure want every one of my students to
pass the course. I also have integrity, however, and realize that most of
education is self-directed. No matter what I do in class, the student must
study to be able to demonstrate that he knows the material. I like having
integrity, but now faculty positions are often just to rubber stamp that the
student passed the course.
The average cost of a college degree is well over $100,000. Shouldn’t it
mean more than just a bunch of rubber stamps?
I really think integrity should be an issue
here, but higher education is so debased that, strangely, this isn’t the
problem:
However one feels about the validity of DFW rates in the
tenure and promotion process, what’s clear at Savannah State is that this was
never approved through shared governance channels or articulated in the Faculty
Handbook. So some professors are apparently being judged on a criterion of
which they were previously unaware.
“Wait. I didn’t
know I was being paid to support fraud.” strikes me as a weird objection, but that's what faculty are reduced to today. One
usually gets the memo about being at a fake school early on, and certainly over
the course of the years it takes to get even a minor promotion as faculty, it
should have come up.
The quotes above
are for Savannah State University in Georgia, but I assure the gentle reader it’s
a popular unwritten policy at many schools. Another school in the same state said
it officially doesn’t happen, but faculty claim otherwise:
Georgia
Southern University’s Faculty Senate successfully fought
against the inclusion of DFW rates in annual evaluations, in 2012. Gregory
Brock, a professor of economics at Georgia Southern who campaigned against the
DFW criteria at the time, said this week via email that he was once advised by
his chair to “get below 20 percent.”
I’m sure, in writing, it doesn’t happen,
but faculty are verbally told things much like the above many times. So, I
claimed to have worked at the past in a state university where the DFW rate
needed to be below 15%...and here we see someone else saying it needed to be
below 20%.
Please understand, many faculty get this
memo and sell out immediately (I left the place before my eventual firing). I
so hated watching praise and promotions heaped on faculty who did nothing for
education, even as admin praised their “good teaching” and getting 100% passing
rate for the course.
As I saw in my community college
anecdote above, all you have to do to be considered an effective teacher is
give everyone in the class an A, even if they never even showed up for class a
single time. And yet this is the very definition of “award winning” teaching on
many campuses today.
A faculty member who
did not want to be identified by name said in an interview that faculty
concern “has to do with expectations when it comes to what they need to do for
tenure or promotion. They’re now being judged on this new metric, having
already submitted their portfolios, with no prior knowledge of it.”
--emphasis added.
I end by
demonstrating the culture of fear on campus is still dominating, as faculty
know better than complain in a way admin might know who to fire. Many of our
campuses are ruled by thugs who know nothing of education, who occupy our
universities for the sole purpose of plundering the student loan money at every
opportunity.
And, clearly,
campuses in Georgia fit that description. What’s missing in the article is
administration’s role in this, beyond encouraging academic fraud. One comment
summarizes this issue nicely:
Well, darn.
Looks like D and F students should now result in automatic dismissal of
admissions officers. Admit a D or F student, lose your job. Professors don't
decide who is admitted and often don't decide who can take their courses.
That's admin's responsibility.
Administration has
reduced entrance standards precipitously, and so we have many basically
illiterate students flooding our campuses now, paid for by the student loan
scam. Faculty could mitigate the damage these students do to themselves by
failing them but…faculty who do this get fired.
Meanwhile, the
admin who lowered standards are the same admin who are telling faculty to pass
the students are the same admin who are firing faculty who don’t keep that 80%
(or whatever) pass rate in the courses.
And the poor kids who are burying themselves in debt for this “rubber
stamp degree” won’t find out until years later how they’ve been defrauded by
this system.
Oh well, at least
the leaders who run our higher education system will get to retire on some nice
lakefront property.
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