Louisiana State University Professor Booted: Course Too Hard

http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=2415 ^ | William M. Briggs

[mattstat]

I have long predicted that as the proportion of high school graduates attending college increases, the classes offered at colleges would have to become easier. If they did not, then the proportion of students failing courses would increase to intolerable levels.

This prediction was correct. As proof, I offer you the story of Dominique Homberger, who tried teaching Biology 1001, “a large introductory course for nonscience majors at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge.” A lot of kids flunked her first exam. And then a lot failed her second exam. In the end, about one out five students dropped out of her course.

Get it? Students were receiving bad grades! Grades that would decide their very future and control their fate. Horror!

The Dean, Kevin Carman, flew (well, walked vigorously) to the rescue. He booted Homberger from the classroom and had Homberger’s replacement artificially boost every kid’s grade.

“Don’t worry, poor children,” Dean Carman told the sobbing students, “Here are the As you deserve. You are not stupid. You are smart. Bad grades aren’t your fault. Remind your parents to send in your tuition checks.”

But, really—what excuse did LSU offer for this extraordinary act?...

[oldvike]

Why were these in the Civil Engineering department? They should be in Mechanical Engineering.

Back when I was in engineering school we had the option of taking engineering electives outside our major area of study. When we did, we were in the classroom with folks in that major. For example, I took an intro level EE elective my junior year and was in the classroom with a bunch of EE majors.

[devere]

“I think the LSU dean acted correctly, and admire his courage in overruling the professor.”

“I think you are part of the problem and not part of the solution!”

A large part of the problem is non-scientists who are never properly educated in the methods of science. Punishing people like that with ridiculously difficult exams and low grades will not resolve the problem. Al Gore reportedly got a “D” in such a course at Harvard, and look what happened to him!

Kudos to LSU’s Dean Kevin Carman for restoring some sanity to the classroom. It takes courage, and it happens so rarely.

[KosmicKitty]

I have been very fortunate in my teaching career in having the backing of my supervisors, even when I failed 12 out of 28 graduate students for plagiarism.

I teach on both the community college and the University level. At the community college, when I teach an Intro to Computers course, I don’t even bother giving tests because at least two-thirds of the class would fail. I developed a system where all grades were based on the number of assignments completed. Each assignment was designed to teach a particular skill, such as evaluating the reliability of information at a web site, and each had a point value, do all the assignments and the student got 100 points. Students were graded by the number of points they had earned. The students were actually doing a lot more work then they would have if I just went the more traditional lecture/testing route, but I had much better luck actually getting them to learn something.

[tacticalogic]

Physics final, one essay question:

Describe the Universe, and give two examples."

[thecabal]

It will be like Idiocracy.

"Stick this one in your ear, this one in your mouth, and this one in your butt. Wait...this one goes in your mouth..."

[Richard Kimball]

Use both sides of the page, if necessary.

[Spudx7]

My dad is a retired High School Chemistry & Physics teacher who worked very hard to make sure his classes would prepare kids for college. At one parent-teacher conference he had a mother pull out her college Physics book to point out that he was making his high school classes too hard...why, they were even more advanced than her college Physics class! As he said later, “How do you point out to someone that the class she is taking is called ‘bonehead’ Physics?”

[KosmicKitty]

I had a National Security graduate course in Research Methods where the professor would give us all the questions in advance. We were allowed to make hand written notes, and we could bring in a computer file with our URL’s as each question we chose to answer (had to pick 4 from 8) was required to have a minimum of 2 web sources. All of the actual writing of the answers had to be done in class and we had exactly 3 hours and 10 minutes to finish.

Our answers had to be done using Word and had to have 1” margins and be done in a size 12 font. We could not use our names, but had to have our student # on each page as well as the number of the question we were answering and page # of #. Each question had to be answered in exactly 2 pages. You could go a sentence or two over, but any less and you lost 10 points and with each question being worth 25 points, that was a major loss.

And, the instructor would fiddle with the temperature in the room, so it would either be up to eighty or down to sixty.

He wanted us to be able to handle stress!

[CivilWarguy]

I don’t know about LSU, but where I teach, a lot of teachers make their first exams extras hard so that students are induced to drop out.
The benefit to the teacher is obvious: a smaller class size; fewer papers to grade; you’ve winnowed out the troublemakers and are left with serious students.

[NEMDF]

From the perspective of the university, if barely anyone can pass the class for whatever reason, it will not “sell”.

[devere]

“I don’t know about LSU, but where I teach, a lot of teachers make their first exams extras hard so that students are induced to drop out.”

As Lord Acton once noted, “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

No power in our society is less controlled than the power of teachers to grade students. Teachers should be accountable for their actions just like everyone else.

[dimk]

Easy way to discourage guessing is penalty for wrogn answers. My professor in first compuer graphics course used this as a part of final. 5 answers you get a right one you get 20 pts you pick a wrong one you get -15, if you pick nothing you get 0 adjustment

[jnsun]

I too have been fortunate to have good backup from my Dept chairs when faced with the sad high school products allowed into college.

One solution in intermediate courses (e.g. pre-calculus, non-calculus physics) was to offer the opportunity to those hardly able to hack it, to do extra work, a lot of extra work, to pass with a D. But I would never never compromise on an exam.

For those who are unfamiliar with the college academic environment these days, it is routine to get battered on testing from reading material, as opposed to just spoon-fed lecturing in class. This is corroborated by many instructors.

My view has always been the instructor/professor has a whole lot more experience than an eighteen year old mother pampered college juvenile, and should be trusted with the teaching responsibility.

In management/human relations the Dean here was absolutely wrong in overruling the professor publicly. You do not do that in the arena of juveniles. If there was a true issue then you ease that instructor out of that duty, absorbing the student hit for that period.

This reeks of the very atmosphere of pandering to the student.

[KosmicKitty]

The problem I have, at the community college, not the University I teach at, is the school has open enrollment. At least 1/3 of the kids there are not college material. I have had students who were functionally illiterate, actually could not read or write. Most of them figured out pretty early in the semester that they would not be able to get through the class.

One semester, I had 3 kids, out of an initial 20, show up for the final. And it wasn’t just me. For some reason, many instructors had the same problem.

When I teach anything other than the Intro class, I do give tests and they usually are pretty challenging.

Just finished teaching a SQL and DB design class. The students wanted part of the final to be a take-home. I warned them that a take-home test has to be tough. It was. I made them use the skills they had been taught in ways we hadn’t covered in class. And one question had an intentional error that they had to find a work-around for. Basically, welcome to the real world.

One kid complained about the exam, but at least 5 others told me how much they enjoyed it because it made them think. Outside of the Intro classes, I like to challenge my students. Most of them come to appreciate that.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

The Asian History course was taught by Professor Zach Baughn who had filled three blackboards with names and events before the class began.
He underlined each blackboard item as he gave the lecture three times each week.
40 minutes into the class, professor Baughn would have underlined all the blackboard stuff, erased one of the boards and began new entries at a hustling clip.
We would stagger out of one of these “Zach's eyepoper” lectures with terminal hand cramps...

[Pecos]

I had a Materials Science course at MIT, where one test consisted of the question (paraphrasing) “discuss everything you know about steel.” Nothing broad or difficult about that, right?

The correct answer was the best answer given. All other answers were graded by comparing them to that one.

[KosmicKitty]

Note taking is a lost art. i really believe powerpoint has destroyed the current generations ability to listen and discern what is important and what isn’t. everything cannot be simplified to 4 or 5 bulleted points.

[altair]

That's really too bad. I took college classes in High School, but I was at the top of the class anyway.

My harshest two experiences were interesting. I was originally an EE major (before I bowed to the inevitable and got into programming) and the Jr. level core course that I took in 1982 was extremely difficult.

It was designed to make sure that you understood all the intricate mathematics you had to digest earlier and also included trick computations that if you mindlessly typed into a calculator you got the wrong answer due to loss of precision. It was homework only - no tests and there were two rules. You did your homework alone. You were not allowed to look at material taught in the course in previous years.

Unfortunately, there were graduate students in the course too and apparently too many of them were having problems. In the last couple weeks of the course the professor (Dr. Middlebrook, spit) announced that both rules were no longer in effect and made it retroactive to the beginning of the quarter, thus penalizing everyone who obeyed the rules all along.

The second was better. This was in the mid 1990s and I was taking core accounting courses by extension at the request of my (now late) Father who had always wanted me to get a CPA. This course had 3 tests + homework for grading. This course was the exact equivalent of the EE course I described above. On the first test the whole class got a shock. I got something like a 79 (out of 100) and that was one of the highest scores in the class. As he returned the tests he made the blunt statement - you people who got below (I forget the number, but it was 70 or 80) should not only think about dropping this class, you should also be reconsidering your choice of major.

I find it interesting that the hammer came down in a public school (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo) and cheating was retroactively forgiven at a private school (CalTech).

[Eric in the Ozarks]

If I paid attention, took good notes and then typed those notes the same day, I had it.
Hear it, write it, then rewrite. That was my method, anyway.

[Hootowl99]

I really do not have any sympathy for the students. A one in five drop out rate in a non-major path science class? Sounds normal to me. If you blow the class the first time, switch to an audit status after the first test so you can take the class without a grade then repeat the next semester for the grade.

My first chemical engineering class (sophomore level) had about a 4 in 5 drop out rate and was a real pressure cooker. Every math and science class had about a 1 in 5 or greater drop out rate. By the time I got into the core of my major classes at the junior level, they had pretty much completed the weeding out and the courses changed gears from weeding to increasingly going overboard for student retention via extra help from profs, study groups, etc. Senior level classes were a breeze by comparison to the sophomore level classes.

I am dual degreed in Microbiology and Chemical Engineering and confess to having to audit some of the math and chemistry classes. If your goal for a degree and career is strong enough, there is a way to tough it out, get stubborn and accomplish it. If you don't have these when needed then you'll drop to the wayside or switch to something else compatible with your capabilities.