Posted on 04/16/2010 7:33:18 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Grade inflation appears to have become policy at Louisiana State University, where Professor Dominique G. Homberger was removed from teaching an introductory biology course for giving tough grades. USA Today reports that the professor
... gives brief quizzes at the beginning of every class, to assure attendance and to make sure students are doing the reading. On her tests, she doesn't use a curve, as she believes that students must achieve mastery of the subject matter, not just achieve more mastery than the worst students in the course. For multiple choice questions, she gives 10 possible answers, not the expected 4, as she doesn't want students to get very far with guessing.
"The class in question is an entry-level biology class for non-science majors, and, at mid-term, more than 90% of the students in Dr. Homberger's class were failing or had dropped the class. The extreme nature of the grading raised a concern, and we felt it was important to take some action to ensure that our students receive a rigorous, but fair, education. Professor Homberger is not being penalized in any way; her salary has not been decreased nor has any aspect of her appointment been changed."
"I believe in these students. They are capable," she said. And given that LSU boasts of being the state flagship, she said, she should hold students to high standards. Many of these students are in their first year, and are taking their first college-level science course, so there is an adjustment for them to make, Homberger said. But that doesn't mean professors should lower standards.
Homberger said she was told that some students had complained about her grades on the first test. "We are listening to the students who make excuses, and this is unfair to the other students," she said. "I think it's unfair to the students" to send a message that the way to deal with a difficult learning situation is "to complain" rather than to study harder.
This is just in time - after the passing of Obamacare, they're going to need a ton of new doctors to replace the ones that are or will soon be leaving. Lowering the standards will flood the field with fresh DINOs (Doctors in name only), many of whom should not be trusted with a scalpel.
She could the right in her standards but I had two teachers while in school that their goal was to fail a large percentage of the class to prove the were tough. It was for their ego and not the students. Once you start failing 90% of your class maybe your just a crappy teacher.
A couple of students in my business statistics class got a little upset with me for doing the same thing. I was the ONLY student in that class that had taken any calculus. I set up a couple of group-study meetings with a few other students to try to bring them up to speed. Many had simply not been exposed to any math since basic algebra in high school some 20 years earlier.
Your job as a college professor is not to prepare students for a test...your job as a college professor is to share your knowledge of the subject area. Whether the students choose to internalize that knowledge - that’s up to them.
Before I started teaching in a college, I would have agreed with you that a 90% failure rate would reflect badly on a teacher. But now after four years of dumbing down test after test for my undergrad students because they refuse to read the text or take notes but, because I’m not yet tenured, their evaluations matter, while at the same time seeing grad students I teach at another university read, take notes, ask questions, and do swimmingly, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of us are teaching at schools where over 50% of our students just shouldn’t be in college.
I had an intro biology teacher that was impossible to get a good grade in her class. And not because she was “tough” but because she couldn’t teach worth a crap and she would have doctorate level questions on an intro test.
Darkwing, we most certainly do need many more like Dr.Homberger, but we WON”T get them.
First, she was educated in Switzerland. One look at her published papers makes clear that she does good work.
Secondly, LSU, and most of the rest of American Academented institutes, are infested with the socialism impaired trough feeders.
Look to the Internet and private,market driven accreditation/testing services to produce the most hireable people in the future.
>> Your job as a college professor is not to prepare students for a test...your job as a college professor is to share your knowledge of the subject area. Whether the students choose to internalize that knowledge - that’s up to them.
If a professor’s job is just to “share [their] knowledge of the subject area”, but he or she bears no responsibility for whether that knowledge is actually transmitted successfully ... you’ve got a convenient system in which the job performance of a professor cannot be evaluated.
A teacher’s job is to teach ... not simply to “share”. The only way to determine how well a teacher teaches by measuring how well the students learn.
Certainly there is student responsbility in this. An individual student has no cause to blame the teacher ... but a teacher for whom 90% fail cannot fully blame the students.
Like an employee’s work reflects both on the employee and his supervisor — a student’s work reflects both on a student and his teacher. If 90% of employees were unsuccessful in a job, a supervisor’s head would roll ... why should a 90% failure rate not reflect poorly on a teacher?
SnakeDoc
She offered to do study sessions in her physics class - in a library conference room 2 days a week, but it was a no-go. It seems the bulk of them preferred to be in a more relaxed setting, like in a dorm room, with pizza, and beer.
Mmmmm... not so much
Sounds like my freshman calculus prof, Dr. McAllister.
I sweated blood to pass his Calculus course. . . but I can STILL differentiate and integrate, 25 years later.
OTOH, he must have been slacking: HE only was flunking half the class. . . (evil grin)
Bingo !
At the University of Washington, in Mechanical Engineering, we had a heat transfer prof (full professor) who behaved that way.
He was among the original proponents of the "students must be able to solve fourth order partial differential equations in their head" crowd. The majority of his lectures were incomprehensible mathematical blather. 5 minutes was devoted to actual problem solving methods.
He loved to terrorize students with his tests. They were purposefully much longer than the time allowed. The majority of students were failing, in part due to his crappy teaching, and in part the excessively long tests.
I met with him personally, groveled appropriately, and became disgusted with his bloviating ego.
But I learned how to beat the tests.
Instead of showing up twenty minutes early, chewing my nails, I showed up a few minutes late. I sat down, poured myself a cup of coffee, arranged my my books and test papers carefully, and outlined the solution to all the problems. Then I went back and leisurely solved those I could in the time alotted.
Not allowing him to psyche me out brought my average from D-F up to a high C. I didn't study any more than I had before - probably even less. It was a mind game, not a heat transfer course.
The guy was an egotistical clown, NOT an "educator".
I teach college, and if 90% of my class is failing, I do something differently. I have high standards and my students must work hard in my class, but if they’re missing it, then I need to change my technique.
Either way, pretty wussy.
Ugh, I don't think you should be able to have a bachelor's degree in anything without calculus.
If you aren't learning calculus, you're basically paying tuition to belong to a book club.
The difference here was that I was taking night and weekend courses along with many other employed adult students. The younger "just got out of high school" daytime students would probably not have wanted to participate.
Depends heavily on the teacher.
I loved calculus at the junior college I attended. I had two extremely talented professors who made the subject both fun and interesting. The text was excellent. While rigorous, it was extremely well presented. I got As & Bs.
Then I got to the big 4 year school. My differential equations class was taught by indifferent grad students. The text was utter crap. We spent nearly an entire quarter on first order equations with a week or two devoted to second order. (This is functionally useless to engineers.)
I took and dropped the course twice. The third time, I gutted it out and passed - with a C.
Engineers need an understanding of differential equations because they are the mathematics that describe dynamic systems. What happens to a bridge subjected to dynamic loads, or how an electrical circuit will react to certain inputs, etc., is described by differential equations. My crappy diff-eq class handicapped my visceral understanding of dynamic systems.
I actually LEARNED differential equations in a senior level automatic control systems class. In a week I learned a thousand times what was taught in diff-eq. Enough to enable me, a gear head, to design and build a fourth order active filter network used in my high dollar stereo system to eliminate the effects of record warp.
The teacher and presentation makes all the difference.
He was among the original proponents of the "students must be able to solve fourth order partial differential equations in their head" crowd. The majority of his lectures were incomprehensible mathematical blather. 5 minutes was devoted to actual problem solving methods.First, solving 4th order PDEs is low-level thinking. You can have a monkey do that. Or equivalently, a graduate student. Plus, you'd be surprised what the prof expects in that context. For example, if he expects you to do these things "in your head" it means that he isn't fussed about the whole solution. He knows how the solution goes and what it ought to be. When it gets down to the nitty gritty, the particular solutions, etc., that's monkeys-at-keyboards stuff. He's not doing it in his head, it's just details that get in the way. Second, math isn't about formulas and crank turning. It's about proof. I know he's a heat transfer MechE prof, but I love hearing students say "He spent all his time proving theorems, he didn't teach any math."
Ah, engineers, so much knowledge, so little wisdom.
Computers can do what you're suggesting. The purpose of the class is to tell you why. I'm not saying they weren't bad teachers, but first order ODEs are the only way you can understand issues like the existence and uniqueness of solutions without bogging yourself down in the details.
Second order ODEs are nothing once you understand the theory, it's just computation -- monkey work. And the specific applications happen later. You don't learn to build a house by learning how to build a cape cod and then start from scratch learning to build a rancher.
I submit that you probably learned a lot more in your ODE class than you realized. It's like the difference between learning how to be a computer programmer and how to use MSWord. You just wanted to learn MSWord. It doesn't make the basic C++ course a bad one.
Yeah, here's the other thing. It is very unlikely that you would have passed a calc test at the 4 year school. Calc classes at junior college go much more slowly and present much less material.
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