"An instructor at Galveston College in Texas resigned last week after a student claimed the instructor was trying to help him cheat on upcoming tests. . . . Robert Shields, director of the electrical and electronics technology program at the community college, sent the student copies of tests and correct answers to those tests, the student said." More here.
With so much of "education" today being memorization by rote, it seems like many proffies find this practice acceptable--or at least turn a blind eye to it. Even the college's president called this merely "very troublesome" or "very troubling," but didn't explicitly state that it was wrong, unacceptable, illegal, unethical, or a violation of the college rules. Perhaps he is well aware that many other proffies are doing the same thing?
How good to see this is still considered cheating, at least somewhere! Here, students expect me to do this, and get mad at me when I don't, and I never do, so they're always mad at me, so university administrators are always mad at me, since they take every words students say at face value. This is one reason I keep saying that much of what's wrong with modern universities would not be possible without the full complicity, or rather the enthusiastic support, of the students. "Corrupt" is not too strong of a word for it.
ReplyDeleteI hate to be dense, but is this line really true: "it seems like many proffies find this practice acceptable"? I've been on committees for years and years and I've never had a case anything like this. Maybe I'm in a protected environment. Maybe it's a discipline thing. Wow. I am completely flabbergasted that this is common.
ReplyDeleteIn high school, upperclass students are still taking English spelling tests. In many college language classes, students take vocabulary tests. In those cases, the proffies essentially provide the tests and answers. For example. And beyond that, I have known proffies who have given their students exact copies of the tests they would take a week or so later in the classroom. I think the idea was that the students would have to figure out the answers and remember them when they showed up to take the tests in class. Also, I have known plenty of proffies who, during each class meeting, give a question/answer that will be on the next test--so that students have an incentive to come to class. That way, the proffie can say they don't have an attendance policy, but the reality is that a student is marginally penalized for each class that's missed.
DeleteThat's off the top of my head, but I suspect it goes well beyond that.
If this is widespread I'm giving up.
DeleteAs Zooze said, I have been know to do exactly that: announce an exam question in each lecture (that is, after I've given an example of something I pause for a moment and say "that would make a great exam question"). They wake up from their mobile phone games and ask their neighbors if they got what I just said. Of course, I do this every lecture, that is far more questions than I can squeeze in on a final. But I really don't see this as cheating. We tell them stuff in every lecture that should be on the exam. This story seems only half-baked, there's probably a love-interest-rejection lurking there somewhere.
DeleteWhere I am, it's common for proffies to give "practice tests". The real tests are often the same as the practice tests with a number or two changed in each problem. I used to give a handout of supplementary problems before the final with solutions. Students kept calling it a practice test despite my telling them it wasn't. I gave up and no longer hand it out. Now, they complain that they want more problems. I no longer wonder why I drink.
ReplyDeleteWell then we really are the problem then.
ReplyDeleteFabio Sunshine, you could never be the problem.
DeleteThe "practice test" phenomenon is wide spread. I've confessed to this in ZtH predecessors. I've given some I thought were grounds for firing - but the students still complained that the exam was "out from nowhere", and my colleagues just looked at the two side by side and said "I think that's ok".
ReplyDeleteTo prove a point once, I gave in to a request for an open-book exam. I told them "If it's open book, it'll be harder, and you don't read the book regularly, so you won't know where to find anything" and they all said "yeah yeah that's what all our other professors say too but we know how to use it and isn't that what real life is like anyway? You get to look stuff up in real life..."
I selected questions from the end-of-the-chapter section, didn't change the numbers, and used questions that had answers in the back of the book.
The average was a 53%.
If you "help them cheat", they do even worse because they turn into Vizzini "If the teacher tells me the answer is Pi, and I know the teacher is out to get me because I'm so smart I challenge her and she can't handle that, then the answer *can't* be Pi, unless she knows that I know that she hates me, in which case, she knows I *won't* circle C because I think that *can't* be the answer, in which case the answer really *is* Pi..."
Then there is simply zero point to it. I mean it. There's no reason to teach if that's where we're at, if that's what we're expected to do, what we do, and what we sign-off on for our colleagues to do.
DeleteI thought it was impossible for me to feel worse, but I'm there now. This profession isn't worth pursuing for me any more. I'm grateful I just took one class this term. And I'm not going to take any more.
Broken hearted? For years. But I don't want to kill it off entirely. Done.
Cal, I hope you don't bail out.
DeleteTruly, though, there are problems in higher education. I know a proffie who teaches more than 700 students each year (between two schools). She teaches more than 550 at one campus, and then another hundred and something at an on-line "university." It boggles the mind. I can't imagine teaching more than 700 new people each year, without any teaching assistants or assistants of any kind. But she's got a mortgage and bills and so on. I guess she just churns through these students year after year. It almost exhausts me just to think about it. Obviously, she can't learn their names or anything about them. She wouldn't recognize most of them if she saw them on the street. I'd be surprised if she wrote letters of recommendation for any of them. And how does she also handle her committee work and participate in hiring new proffies? I don't know. She certainly hasn't done any research or writing in a long time.
I know of other proffies who regularly teach more than 500 gen-ed students per year. Single-handedly.
That's just the way it is today. The classics proffie in Donna Tartt's "The Secret History" was a quaint, unrealistic freak. How many students did he have? Five? Something like that. I really enjoyed the book, but I've never met any proffie in real life anything like that.
Now, it's MOOCs and "distance learning" classes and 5-year-old Pearson scantron tests and packing as many students into a school as possible and all that stuff. Ninety-five percent of students today are getting the short end of the stick.
But, Cal, perhaps you could consider this an opportunity to reimagine education. I can already see the title of your next post: "Cal's Creative Vision for Excellence and Revolution in Higher Education." I'd eat it up. You've got the experience and the chops, you wonderful, musical, dog-loving educator.
Were I younger, you equine masterpiece. But I am not. Almost 35 years in and I've been growing more and more sick at heart. I don't have any money, but my wife has always had a decent career - we've followed her around for it. And so I've had fantastic jobs (tenured twice) and I've had AWFUL ones, full time, 10 sections a year of freshmen for $30k, and that was LAST FUCKING YEAR. Just teaching one class right now and my back aches and my eyes blur and I hate myself all day and all night when I have to go, because I have lost whatever there was in me that made me think it was worthwhile. I work hard, even at this state, because there are always a few folks who want to learn. But the diminishing returns have diminished to the point where I'm much better off spending my time with one of the volunteer things I do around my own community gratis, than for getting on my hands and knees for $2500 a semester - and then getting told by a 30 year old "retention officer" what I could do to help Ralphie get out of his soft dorm bed and into class more often.
DeleteIt's a dark day, Z, and I really don't want to waste the last part of my 50s hating what I do.
Sounds like, at the very least, it's time for a sabbatical, Cal, and since your family unit can afford that, you should take it. Volunteer work is, after all, useful work (and, for that matter, teaching for $2500 a course is at least partly volunteer work, and volunteers should choose the work that fits them best).
DeleteAfter you get a bit of a rest, I, too, would love to see you make some trouble (of the #goodtrouble) kind. Your peripatetic career has given you a unique perspective on the whole enterprise, and at this point you might do a lot more good sharing your insight and experience in some way than teaching one more class (especially at an institution where wet-behind-the-ears "retention officers" have an institutional mandate to harass experienced proffies. If you want my 2 cents on the whole thing, at least part of the solution is to abolish the "higher ed" degree that I suspect that retention officer holds, and set some strict limits on how many years someone has to spend as a full-time proffie before they can give anyone else advice. I'd say the traditional 6-7 years it takes to get to tenure would be a good start, with at least 10 years before anyone can move to a mostly-administrative position beyond the department level).
I think CAVORT might work well (Cal’s Amazing Vision On Revolutionary Teaching): but more seriously, as we approach the ends of our careers we need to see things from the perspective of a batting average, not just the scores of a recent season or two.
DeleteI'd bet my bottom dollar Cal used his tenure for good & had a positive impact everywhere he taught.
Cal, precisely this (among many other things) was complained about in "Generation X Goes to College" by Peter Sacks, published in 1996. I started teaching in 1998, and often felt compelled to grab my department chair and other university administrators seemingly drunk on hallucinogenic Kool-Aid and shake them, and scream at them, "Have you LOST your MIND?!?"
DeleteEvery bit of it and quite a bit worse continue to this day, of course. I keep doing it because I get to be an astronomer, and also because you do get some victories, although don't we wish we could have more?
Cal - the anecdotes on the topic are just anecdotes - not full pictures.
ReplyDeleteI've committed other one-off offenses to prove points. Like making the answer to everything on a MC quiz "B". That's a statement about assessments and perceptions of assessments. That's not the profession. It's not the teaching. The teaching is really in the formative assessment and I work my ass off there. And a few bad summative assessments don't characterize my work either.
I don't believe in comprehensive finals for physics - if you don't understand vectors in the abstract, you can't solve problems. If you can regurgitate the definition of a projection along an axis, but can't solve the problem anyway, you're just regurgitating and shouldn't get any credit for that. If you understand vectors, you can prove it to me by solving a problem from chapter 22. There's no need for me to include a question for chapter 1 to let you show me that you understand vectors. But if I don't include a question from chapter 1, it wasn't "comprehensive", and many departments insist on it. They insist on comprehensive exams and that something from every week be included. What if the Abrahamic religions weren't predominate in the world and we conducted business on lunar time units? Could I give a test that included something from every month instead? It's arbitrary. And if you force me to give some arbitrary final assessment, you're telling me it's a game with no meaning, so I'll play by meaningless rules. And I'll make it worth the lowest percent of the final grade allowable by law.
I climbed to my final height of middling status and have the autonomy to make my own assessments however I want now (and I make them for other people too) and I've added multiple degrees in education since I found this community. So while it is sort of just changing reference frames for me to be giving the assessments to other instructors instead of having them thrust upon me, at least they're being written by someone who's studied adult education and cognition, and there are no more need for these games.
I still sometimes adjunct, but since I finally have FT gig, I no longer feel pressure to go along with any of this asinine stuff. I just don't do anything they tell me to do if it is contrary to the goal of effective teaching.
I want to make sure that my note was not about you, WotC, in ANY way. I was reacting to the collection of things about the issue.
DeleteThis is illuminating. I don't give many tests, but I've added one to my class this year (because one created by another institution on the same subject wasn't working well for me anymore). I did, indeed, do a practice test in the same general format as the test for credit, and haven't received any complaints about the fact that they're similar in basic approach/format, and cover the same basic material, but the individual questions aren't all that similar. I did notice that some students, when given 3 chances to complete a test that contributes a small but measurable fraction to their final grade, with some feedback about correct and incorrect answers in between (the questions are multiple-answer, so that's possible without fully revealing the answers, as long as they don't cheat by communicating with each other -- which, of course, I've strictly forbidden, but heaven knows what will happen with that), complete all three in very quick succession, with no apparent pause to try to puzzle out the correct answers. It's strange behavior, at least by my lights, and I can't quite figure it out.
ReplyDeleteI've also noticed that they get very anxious even around quick, participation-credit-only check-your-understanding quizzes, of which I've created a few because the online teaching gurus tell me it's good practice, but it seems to cause a lot more angst than the workshop-style discussion board exchanges on which I mostly rely. At the very least, students seem to have some conditioned responses around anything with test-style answers and a score at the end, even if I've told them that any score that suggests effort above the guessing level will get full participation credit.
I do fear these problems are, if not of our own making, then at least attributable to some combination of those who insist on assessment (who often have good motivations) and the testing companies that have egged on the trend (of which I am much more suspicious). It's definitely not the students' fault.
One very bright spot in all of this: the student:
ReplyDeleteThe student, Josh Araujo, informed multiple people at the college that Shields had sent him test answers. “I just don’t think he was meant to be a teacher,” Araujo told Click2Houston.com. Araujo also said the instructor was disorganized and appeared unfamiliar with some of the material he was teaching.
Araujo was taking a three-semester course from Shields, which ultimately would have provided him with a necessary certification to continue in the construction industry. He said he had spent about $3,600 on the course, and neither he nor the president of the college could say whether Araujo would be refunded.
Okay, so he demonstrates just a bit of the consumer mentality, but he actually expected to get an education in exchange for his money, and he actually complained, repeatedly, when he didn't get it. He deserves a medal (or at least a responsible instructor, which is presumably what he was trying to get). And maybe we could clone him?
--Cassandra (briefly channeling Pollyanna)