Save Higher Education: Toss the Cheaters

(sorry about the slowdown, I've had the flu)

By Professor Doom

 

Faculty: “Of the thirty students in the course, only 4 actually submitted their own work. The rest...didn’t even realize I can tell where they got their code from.”

Administrator: “If you do not pass at least 15 students in this course, we’ll have to shut the program down, and we won’t need your position anymore.”

--Computer science faculty explaining to me why he was polishing his resume…not that he could afford to leave that very semester.

     Last time around I touched on the possibility that accredited institutions distinguish themselves by removing cheaters from college courses. Administrators encourage cheating, at least indirectly by letting cheaters evaluate professors (and in turn using those evaluations to influence a professor’s job), but keeping cheaters isn’t merely enhancing retention—the only thing an administrator cares about—it’s hurting all the other students who are legitimately trying to get an education. Encouraging cheating in higher education is as insane as a merchant going out of his way to have shoplifters in his store…it’s just bad business.

 

“The Dean’s office and my chair ‘expressed their appreciation’ for me chasing such cases (in December), but six months later, when I received my annual evaluation, my yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, and significantly lower than inflation, as my ‘teaching evaluations took a hit this year.’”

--NYU Professor explaining how catching cheaters lowered his evaluations, hurting himself in the process. Poor guy thought that once he acquired tenure, he’d able to catch cheaters without penalty. Over the course of the rest of his career, catching cheaters just for one semester might cost him $50,000 or more. That he waited until after tenure to try such a boneheaded move shows that he had gotten the memo from administration earlier: do not catch cheaters.

 

      Seriously, “This institution expels cheaters” needs to be fundamental to accreditation. Expulsion, from a class, for a semester, or from the institution, used to be a real risk of being caught cheating, but now there are no risks. Administrative encouragement of cheating is a huge factor in the atmosphere on campus today, where the majority—the majority!—of students admit to cheating at some point in their career, and where most every attempt to catch cheaters in a course does so in abundance. Not banishing cheaters means they stay in the class, able to exert power over the faculty with the student evaluation.  The cheater’s “honest” evaluation of the teacher would be suspect in any thinking person’s eyes, albeit not those of an administrator, who bases so much of a faculty member’s career on evaluations.

     Administrators don’t want cheaters caught or penalized, much less expelled, because it cuts into retention rates, but this typically narrow and shortsighted view needs to be discouraged, above and beyond the stomach-churning fact that administrators penalize faculty for catching cheaters, for trying to have integrity in the institution. An institution that graduates cheaters doesn’t just do the cheater a favor, it detracts from the value of the degrees granted to the honest students. Over time, the institution becomes something of a joke, although in that time the administrator has moved up and on as a result of his great success at “leadership” of an institution with many dishonest graduates.

 

     This is what has happened to a large extent with online degrees, where any non-administrator can see the potential for cheating, a potential that has been realized to a great extent. Online degrees, even from accredited online institutions that have been around for a decade or more, are still basically worthless pieces of paper, useful only to those that already have a position along with accommodating managers (or administrators) who know not to look too closely at the source of the degree (often because they have such degrees themselves). This near worthlessness is what all college degrees, not just online degrees, are turning into, and shutting down the cheating window would go a long way to preserving some prestigious value to a degree.

In 2007, half of the second-year class at the Indiana University School of Dentistry allegedly used information that other students obtained through hacking to pass an exam,

--Yes, half the class. It’s that ridiculous. If half the people going for medical degrees, a profession with some reputation for integrity, are cheating, how many psych majors do you think are cheating?

     A student caught cheating should be removed from the course, and probably expelled. It’s that simple. There are few places in this country that are more than an hour’s drive from multiple institutions of higher learning, being expelled from one institution is not a life-destroying event, the cheater can just go elsewhere. For those few students that do only have one choice and can’t afford to be expelled, they still have the option of, well, not cheating in the first place.

Student: “This is for Skippy!”  *pow*

--a student with psychological problems got excited at a charity event and punched me full in the face. I saw no reason for disciplinary action, and after well over six years of full time enrollment the student did manage to get his worthless 2 year degree.

 

     While this might give too much power to faculty to get rid of students they just don’t like, in all honesty I’ve never seen a professor accuse a student of cheating out of malice. This just isn’t a concern, although perhaps it’s possible a professor could be wrong. There are already procedures in place for students that feel they’ve been wrongly accused of cheating. These procedures are not much used now since faculty are penalized for finding cheaters, but this relic from a bygone era can easily return, to protect that rare possibility of harming an innocent. This is a risk higher education should be willing to take, for the sake of the millions of people that are definitely being harmed by the “open cheating” atmosphere of today, if not for the sake of the reputation of higher education, which is in real danger of being destroyed by administrative policies.

Tutors for the basketball team at the University of Minnesota admitted they had written hundreds of papers for players.

--I really should talk about the corruption of college sports…but it’s just too easy a target. Do you really think the professors of these basketball players really believed the papers were legit?

 

     Now, I’ll grant you, at first, these policies could flush half the students out of higher education (and cause real problems for athletic programs, but the athletes there should just have special programs, or just be enrolled for Education degrees). That dental school above was no aberration, it’s quite common, when faculty check, to find half of the students in a course are cheating in some fashion. Faculty are strongly discouraged from checking.

 

     If an institution can quickly and easily lose accreditation by allowing cheaters to graduate, administrators might rethink their position on cheating. This idea might sound draconian, but higher education, in its current form, is in great danger of vanishing. The tolerance and encouragement of cheating, far more than the student loan scam, can lead to the annihilation of the higher education system that’s been core to Western Civilization for centuries.

    Allow me to reinforce this point.

     The “drastic action” of having some integrity is required because the world is changing. Free universities and the content of high quality courses are available to anyone with an internet connection. It’s only a matter of time until the knowledge of most all degree programs, identical in every way to what is offered at a “traditional institution,” is available online for free. 

     Free.

     I grant that this knowledge has been in books, and thus relatively free, for many decades now, but now we have a corrupted accreditation system providing cover for a corrupted higher education system…it’s impossible to tell if a degree-holder actually has this knowledge.

     Which of the following sounds like a more likely candidate for a degree-requiring position: someone that paid $50,000 for a degree at an institution where he could easily have cheated his way through the entire program, or someone who shows up with a flash drive, containing examples of all the work he did and skills he learned pursuing the same degree at a free university? Both candidates could be lying and know nothing, but the second at least wasn’t stupid enough to waste $50,000 for a slip of paper that means nothing. Employers are already smart enough to think that through for online degrees, and students will figure it out eventually.

    If “traditional” institutions don’t do something, soon, to establish that they’re offering something more than a piece of paper, that they’re willing to honestly certify some legitimacy to what they’re doing, they’ll be history. It’s simply a matter of time before employers realize that traditional schools no more legitimately train students than online schools, accredited or not.

 

The suit claims a Zicklin administrator made professors allegedly pad grades for about 15 students in order to keep $45,000 to $75,000 tuition checks coming into the school.

--I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: retention is everything to administrators. There is no other concern.

      It’s a sign of how far institutions have fallen, how minimal the integrity, that I feel the need to present pages of arguments for “get rid of cheaters.” A generation or two ago, it was understood that penalties for cheating were severe and now, students literally complain when they’re caught cheating, since they know administrators will rush to help them.

     So that’s the next fix: “This institution does not tolerate cheating” needs to be core to accreditation, and even if it isn’t there, it needs to be core to any institution of higher education. Otherwise, higher education in its current form is doomed. Granted, I’m a bit biased in thinking the system of higher education of the 14^th century to about 1990 is worth having again…but it still seems far superior to the primarily corrupt and fraudulent system of today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Students, Not Admin, Complain About Cheating

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:

MUSC students livid over handling of cheating inquiry

     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.

     

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

 

Online Student College Papers are Bogus.

By Professor Doom

“Half a dozen students turned in the same paper, word for word, in my course. One student changed the font, but otherwise, the same paper. There’s even a line in the paper where I think a cat walked across the keyboard, so the text reads ‘the elDLKSNLKNLKNSGectron…”, and no student chose to even edit that out.”

-- Any wonder at all how students got used to the idea that if they all turned in the same paper everything would be ok? This type of thing doesn’t happen out of the blue. None of the students were removed from the course, incidentally, so they’ll get to evaluate the professor and influence his performance evaluation.

 

     Last time, I presented documentation showing that online courses are disastrous for high school students in a controlled setting. Should the results for high school students be applicable for college? Considering how much of college work is material offered in high school, and how students are very close to the same age, the results should be similar, and yet according to many studies, they are not. Online work is disastrous for high school students, but studies show online courses are vastly more successful for higher education, as long as success is defined as “retention.”

      Because retention, keeping people enrolled as much as possible, is a primary goal of administration, there’s a huge push to offer more and more online work, and there’s also a side push to make more and more coursework as written papers—easier to submit online, I admit.

     The reason for the better success of the online student is obvious: the college student has much greater capacity to cheat in online courses, which have no supervision. He can do so in many ways.

 

“Mary, what did he give you on that last test? I used the answers you gave me, and he failed me.”

---E-mail from a student in my online course, accidentally sent to me. Students in the class formed a “study group”, something strongly recommended by Educationists. Such groups facilitate the trading of answers to test questions. More than half of the class used the answers referenced, which were correct for the test I gave the semester before…I had changed the test, but the cheating students, all of them, had neglected to see if the questions on the current test even came close to matching the answers they gave me for the old test (it wasn’t even a multiple choice test!). Admin stopped offering my course after that, though other online courses, with much higher passing rates, continued. Note carefully: catching students cheating is cause for punishment by administration, and a faculty member can never advance his career by doing so.

 

     Cheating is rampant in online courses, overwhelming, extreme, massive even. A student with a few dollars to spare will find it’s extremely easy to have a ringer to log in to his account and perform much of the work, or hire a “tutor” to sit next to him as he sits at home and takes an online test…or just share answers with friends, like in my example above. An entire industry has arisen filled with writers that will happily write custom papers (even Ph.D. theses) on demand, with frighteningly brief turnaround time.

     An exasperated—but making far more a year than I do—employee of the paper-writing industry, who claims that Education majors make up the bulk of his clients, wonders how professors can have no questions about a student that can barely speak English but write papers like his¹. He’s never worked under a college administrator, obviously, hence his wonderment. I’m also on a website of writers for hire, though not specifically a paper-writing site, and while I agree Education majors are the majority of the “do my homework for me” assignments on offer, other fields are not without representation (I’ve only seen one physics thesis in ten years however, and none in mathematics). I emphasize: these are not students asking for editing help, or research assistance. They want whole papers, on demand, and are willing to pay well for them. I don’t take these offers, I get enough legitimate work…but it’s easy enough for anyone to do so.

Project Name: Weekely SIOP Lesson plan

Project Description:

Hello can you help with this assignment? if so what is your fee?Your final

assignment for EDU 6123…will be to develop a complete set of five lesson plans

for a unit of study (approx. 1 week in length) including all elements learned in

this course for effective instruction for English Language Learners.  Select the

specific area and grade level for your unit of study…The completed project should be 6-8 pages in length…should incorporate at least three scholarly sources

(including the textbook),…

--Another Educationist hard at work on an advanced degree, paid for with tax dollars, and buying some coursework with tax dollars. When the Educationist graduates, he’ll likely get a job paid for with tax dollars, too. At least there’s balance in this.

 

      There are many web sites that will literally write an entire paper for a student willing to pay for it. A top tier term paper site gets over 8000 hits a day, over the course of a year almost single-handedly accounting for all online students²! That is just one site, and there are plenty of others. Because there are so many sites, the cost of writing a paper isn’t much, a few hundred bucks for even an extensive paper—after plunking down $2,000 or more for a course, a student would be stupid not to pay just a bit more for guaranteed success. With these kinds of numbers, it’s impossible not to consider the reality of widespread cheating in online courses.  Think about that: it’s very possible that almost all online students are submitting work that is not their own.

 

  “The Dean’s office and my chair ‘expressed their appreciation’ for me chasing such cases (in December), but six months later, when I received my annual evaluation, my yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, and significantly lower than inflation, as my ‘teaching evaluations took a hit this year.’”

--NYU Professor Panagiotis Ipeirotis explaining how catching cheaters lowered his evaluations, hurting himself in the process. Poor guy thought that once he acquired tenure, he’d able to catch cheaters without penalty. The penalty for catching cheaters just for one semester might cost him $50,000 or more over the course of his career. That he waited until after tenure to try such a boneheaded move shows he had gotten the memo from administration earlier: do not catch cheaters. Either faculty get this memo their first day on campus, or after catching a cheater…but all get this memo.

 

     From the taxpayer’s point of view, insult is added to injury as college papers are almost certainly often paid for via student loans, as is the tuition of the student, and indirectly the salary of the faculty reading the paper, and the salary of the administrator that discourages the faculty from stopping cheating. The reader is encouraged to consider which could be taken out of the relationship to improve integrity.

     There is software that can detect plagiarism, but as the professor above shows, there’s a serious problem with it: it works. It reveals that much of college coursework is bogus. Administration was quick to solve the problem: they set things up so students check their papers with the software first, THEN turn it in only if it passes the software. Imagine if I could make all the counterfeit money I want, with no penalty if it detects as counterfeit (in which case I’m given advice on how to evade detection on the next attempt)…and I’m free to use it if it doesn’t detect as counterfeit. Administration then crows about how they’re stopping cheating. I can’t make this stuff up. Again.

     This is my 18^th essay for Rense. I’ve shown the mythology of college is bogus, none of what people believe about going to college is true. I’ve shown accreditation is bogus, and does nothing to validate an educational institution. I’ve shown remedial education is simply plundering of the weakest students, leaving a documented 90% of them with nothing but lost money and wasted years of their lives. I’ve shown the field of Education to be primarily a justified laughingstock amongst scholars. And now I’m showing that even if a student has a degree, there’s no reason whatsoever to believe he did any legitimate work for it, at least in a field where much writing is involved. I’m not even halfway done showing how corrupted much of higher education is today…at the end, I’ll show how much of it could be fixed, I promise (no guarantees the people at the top would allow it, of course).

      Back to today’s discussion, having a college degree is still widely advertised as a way to get a good job. Now pretend you’re an employer. Knowing how rampant cheating is supported in higher education, why would you hire someone just because they have a general college degree? Now pretend you’re a parent. Why would you let your child get into endless debt (or pay his way) for such a degree?

Think about it.

    

  

 

1)      Dante, Ed.  (pseudonym) “The Shadow Scholar.” Chronicle of Higher Education. November 12, 2010. All college faculty should read this article carefully, to get a true vision of how pervasive cheating is at the college level. http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329

2)      Online Education Database. “8 Astonishing Stats on Academic Cheating.”

 

 

The Worse the Teacher, The More Likely The Promotion

By Professor Doom

     I’ve spent decades in higher education, and there have been a few times I’ve been in danger of promotion. Part of the reason I’m in such little danger of being promoted is integrity: I have it, and it’s not wanted in higher education. 

     Thus, when admin says they’re going to improve education by doubling the class size, I point out that this isn’t true, obviously isn’t true, that nobody thinks “the larger the class, the more effective the teaching.” I bother to point out studies, but it does no good. Administration has their own way of looking at education, and when class sizes get large enough, retention does, arguably, improve.

     What’s retention? That’s the students not dropping the course. Of course, the reason why retention improves in large classes is easy: the teacher has no choice but to simplify the course and remove course content, to go at a slower pace. It’s why “Powerpoint lectures and multiple choice tests” are the primary course type now, because that’s the only way you can even do a little bit in a class with 100 or more students. Larger class size also means it’s much easier for a cheater to slip through the cracks, and it’s more economically viable to steal and sell the answers; it’s why there are websites now that sell the answers to the entire course curriculum of some campuses (you’ll forgive me if I don’t include links here…stupid low prices, though).

     Another way admin “improves” education is by opening up the rules for dropping college courses. It used to be a student only had a few weeks to drop a course, and could only drop a few courses in his whole college career. While these rules might seem harsh, it made students take college seriously. By making dropping a course as casual as changing a shirt, and making retention a measure by which faculty get promoted, students can take the same course with half a dozen different professors, keeping the course when they find a professor who is particularly easy, or doesn’t do his job.

      See how that works? Don’t do your job as a teacher, and you’re more likely to get a promotion in higher education. Around twenty years ago, I explained to admin the obvious here, pointing out that letting students drop all they want would mean that far less students would graduate on time, but admins didn’t care then and don’t care now: graduating students on time is irrelevant, admin is paid based on butts-in-seats, and thus don’t care about hurting education…and admins sure didn’t like me using arguments based on integrity and common sense.

      One of the most popular measures for determining promotion as a teacher is student evaluations. Naturally, the better the evaluations, the better the teacher, right? The extreme emphasis on evaluations is why faculty don’t try to catch cheaters nowadays—admin won’t get rid of cheaters (cuts into butts-in-seats, after all), and cheaters give very bad evaluations to professors who catch them; one professor’s lower pay for catching cheaters solidly demonstrates how this works (the fool actually caught over 20% of his class cheating—the gentle reader needs to understand cheaters are this common because most professors aren’t so stupid as to look for cheaters, and the students know it).

Admin: “You’re still not dividing your class into groups for assignments? Your peers are.”

Me: “I respect that my peers can do what they wish in their class, but, as you might recall, I provided studies that showed group work hurts students, they learn less, and I want to help my students learn. Now, reasonable people can disagree. Can you produce a study that shows the opposite, so that we can discuss this like academics?”

Admin: “Our consultant has plenty of evidence that group work improves retention.”

Me: “Yes, retention. I’m talking about learning here, education, students improving in a measureable way…”

Admin: “I’m not going to argue with you, but I will be docking you points on your annual evaluation. You are dismissed.”

--Yeah, citing studies and trying to have a respectful conversation…no wonder I’m a troublemaker.

     Another way administration is hurting higher education is “group work.” Again, studies have shown what common sense already knows: group work is a very limited tool for getting a real education. Group work does increase butts-in-seats, mind you, since group work means one good student (maybe) does the work while the rest of the group sits there. Again, I produced studies showing that asking faculty to add group work was hurting education…and, again, my reward for acting with integrity to my students for not putting group work in my mathematics classes was a kick in the teeth.  

Admin addressing all the faculty in a meeting: “Half of this department’s student evaluations were below the median. You people need to improve!”

--Yes, the deanling had a Ph.D. in Administration, and no, we didn’t laugh in his face.

     Now, unlike the other ways of hurting education, admin does at least have a point with student evaluations—there really needs to be some means of determining if a teacher is terrible, and, yes, looking at what students have to say certainly counts for something. It doesn’t count for everything, however, and because the relationship isn’t so clear, admin has gotten away with making getting good student evaluations a major part of a professor’s job.

     While worth something, I’ve argued (of course) that evaluations are more about populatiry than education. While the mouths of administrators say education is all about “leadership” and their actions say education is all about butts-in-seats, the simple fact is education is about improving human beings. To get human beings to move ahead, sometimes the professor will indeed need to give them a push. Some human beings, when pushed, will push back, and yes, these are often the people that give less-than-stellar evaluations.

      And so, I’ve tried to argue that high evaluations, much like high retention, shouldn’t be the main means by which a professor can gain the favor of administration, but it’s done no good. Education isn’t so easy to measure as retention. On the chance there are any administrators left who even care, I point out the following study:

Teacher effectiveness is negatively correlated with students’ evaluations.

     At the risk of patronizing my readers, and the hope of educating any administrators deigning to read this blog, allow me to explain what the highlighted result of the study says: the better the teacher at educating students, the lower the evaluations. “Negative correlation” between two things means as one thing gets better, the other gets worse. 

     When it comes time for promotion, there are many factors, such as committee work, developing courses, student club work, and so on. But the largest, most important determination of promotion on many campuses, especially the many (alleged) teaching campuses that litter our nation, is student evaluations.

     Keep that in mind, higher education is so backwards today, that a student who learns he’s taking a class with a teacher recently promoted due to “good teaching” is probably going to learn less than if he took a class from a faculty that administration insists is a bad teacher.

      Seriously, a student wanting to get a good education nowadays should first go to administration and ask “who are the worst teachers on this campus?” Administration won’t honestly answer that (of course), but if they did, those are the teachers a student looking to get an education should take.

       Of all the many signs that higher education is mostly broken right now, this might not be the largest…but it’s another sign all the same.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com