Category Archives: Academia

Passing thoughts on online courses and the temptations they present.

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It is interesting to me that there are certain denizens of the university community who are anxious for faculty to increase the number of online courses that we offer, and that this desire for us to pursue this aim is not generally driven primarily by a desire for us to better serve students with inflexible work schedules or scary-long commutes, or even to free up scarce classroom space. Rather, some of the most vocal proponents (at least at my university) of expanding online course offerings seem to believe online classes can accommodate much larger enrollments than can traditional classroom-bound classes.

Technically speaking, that’s true — you can set things up so that your online class will allow hundreds of students to enroll in it, and the fire marshall won’t bat an eyelash. However, making enrollments really, really big also makes the workload to assess student work (including discussion board-based discussions, which now read like papers without the benefit of spellcheck) really, really big. Plus, you also get to deal with all the technical glitches the students find with accessing materials and submitting materials and joining groups for discussions and not blowing deadlines. (It doesn’t take a really, really big online enrollment for your students to discover every technical glitch there is to find.)

Of course, increasing support for graders might help, but this doesn’t come up so much, since the point is to save buckets of money. (I should note that my better half, who has been taking some online courses through organizations that hope at some point to turn a profit, was invited to be a “community TA” for one of the courses so taken —for free! Obviously, the best way to become profitable is to recruit skilled labor that is also free.)

Well, say the hopeful advocates, there are rumors of automated programs for grading student papers. Maybe you can run all the work through those?

Even if I trusted those programs to prioritize the things I’m looking for in student papers (and, you know, to provide useful feedback to my students on their work), the boom in online classes has given rise to a boom in “services” for students “taking” online classes. Inside Higher Education describes the scene:

These sites make an appeal to the busy online student, struggling through a class they’re not good at or not interested in. The description of one site, wetakeyourclass.com*, reads: “I’m sure you are here because you are wondering ‘how will I have time to take my online class?’ It may be that one class such as statistics or accounting. We know some people have trouble with numbers. We get that. We are here to help.”

Prices for a “tutor” vary. Boostmygrades.com advertises a $695 rate for graduate classes, $495 for an algebra class, or $95 for an essay. When Inside Higher Ed, posing as a potential customer, asked for a quote for an introductory microeconomics class offered by Penn State World Campus, noneedtostudy.com offered to complete the entire course for $900, with payment upon completion, and onlineclasshelpers.com asked for $775, paid up front. Most sites promise at least a B in the course. …

“If we just had a course that was just a multiple-choice final at the end there’d be a high chance of cheating,” [Eric] Zematis [director of Enterprise Systems at Charter Oak State College, a fully online institution] said. “When we design courses we try to look at having more interaction to try to discourage cheating.”

In the case of a site like We Take Your Class, Zematis surmised, the amount a student would have to pay would probably increase based on the number of assignments. If there were enough assignments, tests, or required discussions, then, using an online class-taking service could become prohibitively expensive.

A couple things worth noting here: First, the pedagogical steps that make it harder for students to cheat in an online course also tend to make student work in those online courses harder to grade. Second, the kids who have enough money to pay someone else to do that work for them seem like they’re going to have a better shot at gaming the system and getting credit for taking online courses for which they’ve done essentially bupkis.

Does this leave me oddly comforted that students in my online classes probably don’t have the means to hire someone to do their school work for them? Maybe …

But wait! Can the Invisible Hand (and the excess of Ph.D.-holders) make sophisticated and hard-to-detect cheating affordable even for lower income students? Perhaps:

The website unemployedprofessors.com has teachers writing papers for students.**

“So you can play while we make your papers go away” is its tag line.

Organizers say education has already become a commodity and with tenure harder to get, teachers need work. …

“I’d say this service represents a new solution to an age-old problem,” said one [person working for unemployedprofessors.com], adding the justification is supply and demand and a void in the marketplace.

Noting that turnitin.com has effectively barred students from buying recycled essays on the cheap, the professor said potential clients include international students whose English is poor, students too lazy to complete the work, students too busy with jobs paying for their education to do the work and science students who resent being asked to write papers in the humanities.

The service says the work should not be used to fulfill an academic requirement — but offers to supply dissertation chapters and personal statements used for admissions — and should be used as a guideline.

“This removes the ethical dimension on our side as we have no control over what a client does upon paying for and receiving the project,” said the professor.

“In fact, it places the ethical burden squarely on the shoulders of the student.”

The service started last fall and has recruited about 30 professors. While it doesn’t guarantee an A, it does guarantee high-quality work and turns away about 15 applicants for every one it hires.

I guess when people who have trained for academic careers cannot sell their expertise to a college or university, eventually selling their integrity might become a live option.

Here, if the professorial cheating-enablers are delivering what they seem to be promising, it’s likely to be fairly labor intensive for them. At least part of the labor would involve writing a paper that actually sounds like a student paper. (Believe it or not, we can usually tell.) So either they’re charging clients through the nose, or they’re being financially exploited at least as much as they would be as adjuncts.

There seems to be a possibility, though, that a willing employee of a service like this might not have qualms about cutting some ethical corners herself — perhaps providing the same basic paper for more than one client (upping the chances that those clients are caught using a paper that has been run through a service like TurnItIn already), or even plagiarizing in the production of a paper.

Also, given the understanding of how ethics works reflected in the claims from the website, I suspect buying an ethics paper from them might be a really bad call.

The selectiveness of hiring of these professorial cheating-enablers — 15 applicants turned away for every one hired! — may drive the prices from unemployedprofessors.com higher, but it’s surely only a matter of time before those applicants who were turned away find each other and set up their own cheating-enabling service, maybe cutting out some layers of management so they can enable cheating among lower income students!

Yeah, there’s a reason I skip higher education news coverage for weeks at a time.

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* Since the original Inside Higher Education article, “We Take Your Class” has gone offline.

** As far as I can tell, this service is not marketed specifically for students taking online courses, but it seems like it could be used for that purpose.

On the request for numerical scoring of honesty and integrity.

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On the Twitters, becca pointed me to this post which raises an interesting evaluative question:

I was recently completing a recommendation form for a former student and was asked to “rate the candidate on a scale of 1 to 10 for his Honesty & Integrity”. What meaningful answer can I hope to give? What level of honesty earns a 8? How much do you have to steal to earn 3?

I am sympathetic as far as the challenge of evaluating this.

I’m guessing some people would reject the notion that a ten-point scale is appropriate here, since (they might argue) honesty is one of those binary properties that is either “on” or “off”. Being a little bit honest, on this view, would be as nonsensical as being a little bit pregnant.

And, maybe that’s an appropriate way to conceive of individual acts of honesty or dishonesty, where you are making a representation that is truthful or you are making a representation that is not truthful. Maybe it’s not, though, since you might view offering a totally made-up lie as a more serious departure from the Platonic form of honesty than leaving out a particular true piece of information. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from playing “Two Truths and a Lie” with other philosophers, it’s that there are lots of interesting ways to make a claim that departs from the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

However you want to keep score on magnitudes of individual claims, though, I think we also have to recognize that evaluating the honesty of an individual is a more complicated project. Individuals, after all, tend to make lots of different representations, in lots of different kinds of contexts. There may be some contexts in which they play faster and looser with the truth, and others where they are extremely careful and rigorous. Presumably, these contexts matter. A graduate program might have no worries at all about the applicant who cheats on sit-ups, or counting strokes in miniature golf, but have huge worries about the applicant who made up every single bit of data in her lab notebook. One of these contexts seems more immediately relevant to the milieu in that the graduate program cares about than the other.

Not that I don’t have worries about a habit of lying in one milieu creeping into one’s behavior in others — I do. However, holding out for people who are 100% honest about everything is a good way to whittle your applicant pool to zero.

Besides which, what kind of actual data would an evaluator have to go on here? Honesty and integrity seem to be qualities that we assume someone has until we are faced with evidence to the contrary — for example, we tend to assume a student is honest until we catch her cheating. So, ranking someone highly on the scale might just amount to saying, “I’ve never caught him in a lie.” You’re flagging a lack of evidence of dishonesty, but that’s not quite the same as positive evidence of honesty.

Finally, I think what would be more meaningful to know about an applicant is whether he or she has been honest in circumstances where being honest is difficult — where a lie or an omission might make life significantly easier. If the applicant has stepped up to be honest in a situation where being honest created extra work, that’s someone whose commitment to honesty is serious. Especially if it’s robust, and he or she is honest in the next situation where being honest brings additional responsibilities. However, I’m not sure that this is information one is likely to get about a student in the typical college course, or even about an advisee in a typical supervised research environment. Maybe you could build such tests-of-character into those situations (as Willy Wonka did in his chocolate factors), but it would be hard to do so ethically.

Ultimately, then, can we expect that your typical college professor can provide such a seemingly-objective numerical ranking of a student’s honesty and integrity without being a little bit … dishonest?

The new must-have accessory for the Ph.D. who has been on the job market for more than three years.

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Even if you have not seen the infamous ad in the Chronicle of Higher Education for an assistant professorship at Colorado State University in pre-1900 American Literature, you have likely seen the serious discussions of it, and how ill it bodes for academic job-seekers whose Ph.D.s are not the newest and shiniest. Here are “required qualifications” for the job:

1. Ph.D. in English or American Studies or closely related area awarded between 2010 and time of appointment.
2. A promising record of scholarship/research in pre-1900 American literature and culture.
3. Ability to teach a range of subjects in American literature and culture between 1600 and 1900.

It’s item #1 on the list that seems to exclude throngs of potential candidates who had the misfortune of earning their Ph.D.s right at the U.S. economy was tanking and as the academic job market was getting even worse.

For these folks, some of whom may have quite excellent track records of scholarship and research, the only way to fulfill the first requirement would be if appointment to this post started before 2010 … which would be totally do-able with a time machine.

Job one would be going back in time to arrange conditions so Colorado State University (1) created the position prior to 2010, and (2) appointed the candidate to the position prior to 2010. Indeed, as the requirement is worded, the candidate would have to be appointed before conferral of his or her Ph.D. (since earning of the Ph.D. has to be *between* 2010 and the time of appointment — try drawing it on a number-line to see how this satisfies the requirement). But I suspect search committees are more likely to hire an ABD who has a time machine. And is from the future.

The standard warnings apply about being careful only to make the necessary changes in the past (and to avoid killing stuff). This may be a place where your attention to detail in your history coursework and research pays off. If you can manage to change what needs changing to get the job and prevent the great recession, that might be OK, too.

Once hired, hold onto that time machine, as it could help a lot in meeting requirement #3. Teaching between 1600 and 1900 sounds like a pretty grueling work schedule, but maybe less so if you can just dial up the year on the time machine. (Careful materializing in Salem Village, Massachusetts on the early end of this range, though. They might get the wrong idea, and that won’t help your tenure dossier one bit.)

UPDATE: According to Inside Higher Education, the ad has been rewritten. Can you guess which requirement has been dropped?

Still, I reckon a time machine might increase the desirability of a candidate — or at least, the search committee’s hesitance to jerk that candidate around.

Things that don’t bode well for college students in this economy.

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From the Classified section of the student paper at my fair university late last week, the full extent of the listings under “Employment”:

In case you can’t read the text in the image:

$ $ Sperm Donors Wanted $ $
Earn up to $1,200/month and help create families. Convenient Palo Alto location. Apply online: [URL redacted]

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Female Masseuse Wanted
For a private gentlemen [sic], no experience necessary.
Minimum age 18 Cash. [sic]
[phone number redacted]

I don’t even know what to say about this. Except that I hope the Career Center has more options.

Marc Hauser makes an excuse for cheating. What he could have done instead.

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DrugMonkey notes that Marc Hauser has offered an explanation for faking data (as reported on the Chronicle of Higher Education Percolator blog). His explanation amounts to:

  • being busy with teaching and directing the Mind, Brain & Behavior Program at Harvard
  • being busy serving on lots of fancy editorial boards
  • being busy writing stuff explaining science to an audience of non-scientists
  • being busy working with lots of scientific collaborators
  • being busy running a large research lab with lots of students

DrugMonkey responds that busy is part of the job description, especially if you’re rolling in the prestige of a faculty post at Harvard, and of being a recognized leader in your field. I would add that “I was really busy and I made a bad decision (but just this one time)” is an excuse we professors frequently hear from students we catch cheating. It’s also one that doesn’t work — we expect our students to do honest work and figure out their time management issues. And, we’re expected to work out our own time management issues — even if it means saying “No” to invitations that are sometimes tempting.

By the way, Marc Hauser didn’t actually admit that he faked data, or committed research misconduct of any kind, so much as he “accepts the findings” of the Office of Research Integrity. Moreover, his comments seem to be leaning on that last bullet point (the rigors of supervising a big lab) to deflect what responsibility he does take. From the CHE Percolator:

He also implies that some of the blame may actually belong to others in his lab. Writes Hauser: “I let important details get away from my control, and as head of the lab, I take responsibility for all errors made within the lab, whether or not I was directly involved.”

But that take—the idea that the problems were caused mainly by Hauser’s inattention—doesn’t square with the story told by those in his laboratory. A former research assistant, who was among those who blew the whistle on Hauser, writes in an e-mail that while the report “does a pretty good job of summing up what is known,” it nevertheless “leaves off how hard his co-authors, who were his at-will employees and graduate students, had to fight to get him to agree not to publish the tainted data.”

The former research assistant points out that the report takes into account only the research that was flagged by whistle-blowers. “He betrayed the trust of everyone that worked with him, and especially those of us who were under him and who should have been able to trust him,” the research assistant writes.

So, Hauser is kind of claiming that there were too many students, postdocs, and technicians to supervise properly, and some of them got away from him and falsified methodology and coding and fabricated data. The underlings challenge this account.

In the comments at DrugMonkey’s, hypotheses are being floated as to what might have spurred Hauser’s bad actions. (A perception that he needed to come up with sexy findings to stay a star in his field is one of the frontrunners.) I’m more inclined to come up with a list of options Hauser might have fruitfully pursued instead of faking or allowing fakery to happen on his watch:

  1. He could have agreed not to send out manuscripts with questionable data when his underlings asked him.
  2. He could have asked to be released from some of his teaching and/or administrative duties at Harvard so he could spend the needed time on his research and on properly mentoring the members of his lab.
  3. He could have taken on fewer students in order to better supervise and mentor the students in his charge.
  4. He could have sought the advice of a colleague or a collaborator on ways he might deal with his workload (or with the temptations that workload might be awakening in him).
  5. He could have communicated to his department, his professional societies, and the funding agencies his considered view that the demands on researchers, and operative definitions of productivity, make it unreasonable hard to do the careful research needed to come up with reliable answers to scientific questions.

And those are just off the top of my head.

I’m guessing that the pressure Marc Hauser felt to get results was real enough. What I’m not buying is the same thing that I don’t buy when I get this excuse from student plagiarists: that there was no other choice. Absent a gun to Hauser’s head, there surely were other things he could have done.

Feel free to add to the list of other options someone facing Hauser-like temptations could productively pursue instead of cheating.

Question for the hivemind: What’s the fairest way to distribute add codes?

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At my fair university, we are in the brief window of time between “drop day” (the date by which students need to drop a course if they don’t want it to be listed on their transcript with a W, for “withdraw,” next to it) and the “late add” deadline (after which, for all intents and purposes, you can’t add a class). This means that I have only a few more days to savor being popular — or at least, popular with the students still desperately trying to lock in their schedules for the semester and hoping to secure the units and/or general education credit my courses could provide.

Sadly, this popularity mostly manifests itself in messages in my inbox asking that I please give the sender an add code for my class ASAP. Worse, in the small fraction of cases where I have been able to to comply with these requests, I don’t always hear back from the student to whom I’ve given an add code … and he or she doesn’t always use the add code to add my class.

I find that this presents me with a practical problem that is also an ethical problem. Students will frequently email, saying, “In the listing online, it shows that your class still has open seats.” From the point of view of official enrollment, the online listing is correct, but in this portion of the term it is also the case that I have usually given out one add code for each theoretically empty seat. If all the add codes I’ve given out are used, there really aren’t any open seats.

But a handful of the people to whom I’ve given out add codes end up not using them, and not letting me know that they’re not going to use them.

I have colleagues who deal with the open-seats problem by giving out excess add codes (i.e., more than could all be used before the class is full). The computerized registration system is set up to close registration once the enrollment cap (which for us is usually the seating capacity of the room) is reached, so there’s no chance of having more students than seats and violating fire codes. But, essentially this makes adding the course a matter of being fastest on the draw to use your add code — which makes things hard for students who need first to get various holds on their registration lifted, a process that requires standing in lines and getting signatures on forms. Also, it may leave a student feeling like she has found a space in a class she needed only to be disappointed that she doesn’t really have that space because the other add code recipients got there first.

My goal is to fill all the open seats in my courses with students who need them. I don’t want to do this by setting up a bloody battle to use one’s add code first. On the other hand, I don’t want people who have gotten add codes from me to waste an open seat that someone else could use by not using their add codes.

Is there a good way to make this happen?

Super Happy Fun Semester: It Begins!

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The Fall semester is now upon us, in much the same way you might imagine a ton of bricks or a locomotive would be upon us.

And honestly, it’s much worse for the students than it is for me.

We are still in the land of The State Budget That Just Can’t Give Higher Education A Break. Millions of dollars are being cut from our campus budget and millions more will need to be cut if a ballot measure to raise sales taxes and income taxes on the highest earners goes down in November.

One response has been to cut lots of classes from the Fall schedule, since classes eat up money for faculty salaries, as well as classrooms (excepting the online classes). In particular, this response was made manifest in the elimination of nearly every class that did not have an enrollment of at least 15 students by some arbitrary date (a couple of weeks ago, I think) before the start of the semester.

This was not great news for the up to 14 students enrolled in these course offerings that were vaporized. Some of these may have been crucial courses for their majors, while others may have filled general education requirements that students need to satisfy to graduate. In any event, these students whose classes up and vanished have joined the already crowded throngs of students trying like mad to find spaces in the courses that still exist, where often it is the case that there are five or more students trying to get an add code for every available seat.

Those are not odds that would make me cheerful. Despite this, the students asking me for add codes have shown a remarkable amount of forbearance.

Meanwhile, as I’ve mentioned before, despite the elimination of many (perhaps hundreds of) classes, officially we are supposed to maintain the same level of full time enrolled students … because student fees now amount to more than the chunk of money the state puts up for each student. Logically, this means class sizes need to get bigger, but the seating capacity of the classrooms seems not to have magically increased over the summer.

Of course, the administration has put out feelers to gauge the willingness of our department, and others, to increase class size for one of our courses to 700. (Our willingness: non-existent.)

Buckle up, folks. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

“Respect my authority! (And put down the beach ball.)”

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My fellow university faculty, have you ever felt that your official commencement faculty marshal badge is just too pedestrian to command the respect it deserves?

Me too.

Luckily, it’s the kind of thing you can remedy. Observe:

For those of you muttering “Free-Ride has finally gone round the bend,” let me put a few more facts into evidence:

1. All the graduating students at commencement who commented on my badge embellishments were also quick to comply with the lining-up, filling-out-photo-cards, and marching instructions I issued. (And, since they didn’t look scared while so complying, I assume it’s because they respected my marshaling authority, not because they thought I was about to snap.)

2. Two full professors in my college (both male, if that matters to you) borrowed similarly embellished badges from me so they could step into the faculty marshaling fray. (Bringing extra credentials to commencement is always a good idea so you can deputize other faculty members on the spot.)

3. Neither of them have yet returned these embellished badges. I’m betting I’ll see them again next May.

(My better half, of course, insisted on referring to my spiffed-up faculty marshal badge as my “flair”. We’ll be meeting at Flingers for lunch to settle the matter.)

Solving California’s higher education budget — with word problems!

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Are you in the mood for some word problems? Let’s go, and please remember to show your work for full credit!

1. Read this passage from Inside Higher Ed:

University of California administrators announced Thursday that the system will centralize payroll and human resources for its 10 campuses and five medical centers at a new site in Riverside. The new center is part of a system-wide initiative designed to save $500 million in administrative costs and direct them back toward the university’s academic mission. UC officials said the new center would save “as much as $100 million annually” and create up to 600 jobs when fully deployed, which they hope to be within three years. Part of the savings will come from eliminated positions on the individual campuses, but officials would not say how many people would be losing their jobs.

(a) Assume the scenario where the net change in jobs is zero (that is, where each of the HR jobs lost at another UC campus is completely offset by a job created at the new site at Riverside). Also, neglect non-salary costs (on the assumption that salaries are a much larger total cost). Calculate the average salary of the 600 HR employees required to save $100 million annually.

(Hint: Let the average pre-consolidation HR salary equal x.)

(b) Now assume the best-case scenario where the new site at Riverside results in net creation of 600 jobs in the UC system. Again, neglect non-salary costs (on the assumption that salaries are a much larger total cost). Calculate the average salary of the 600 new HR employees required to save $100 million annually.

(c) Propose a strategy for recruiting HR specialists willing to work for the salary you found in (b). For bonus points, propose a strategy that does not require the use of Schedule I drugs.

Extra-credit: Explain why it makes sense to describe this cost-cutting plan as “creating jobs”.

2. Read this passage from California Watch:

In the first test of the California State University system’s recently approved executive compensation policy, the presidents appointed to lead CSU East Bay and CSU Fullerton are slated to each receive the maximum salaries allowable under the new rules.

After CSU trustees approved a large pay increase for the new San Diego State University president last summer on the same day that they raised student tuition, the university system faced a chorus of criticism from legislators, the media and the public. Trustees approved a base salary for SDSU President Elliot Hirshman of $400,000, including $50,000 from the university foundation. That’s $100,000 more than his predecessor’s salary.

In response, the CSU trustees in January approved a new executive compensation policy [PDF] that limits new presidents’ base pay to no more than 10 percent above their predecessors.

In a pay package [PDF] slated for review at this week’s Board of Trustees meeting, newly appointed CSU Fullerton President Mildred Garcia will get $324,500 in base pay, plus housing and a $12,000-per-year car allowance. That’s exactly 10 percent more than her predecessor, Milton Gordon, who in 2011 had a base salary of $295,000. 

It’s also 10 percent more than Garcia earned in base pay at her previous post as president of CSU Dominguez Hills, according to CSU’s executive compensation summary [PDF].

Leroy Morishita, the new president at CSU East Bay, will get $303,660 plus $60,000 per year for housing and a $12,000 annual car allowance. That’s 10 percent above predecessor Mohammad Qayoumi’s base pay in 2010, as well as a 10 percent raise for Morishita, who had been serving as interim president in Qayoumi’s stead since July.

(a) For a CSU campus whose outgoing president has a base salary of $300,000 per year, what is the minimum number of new presidents that must be hired before the base salary reaches $1 million?

(b) Given 23 campuses in the CSU system, and assuming an average presidential base salary of $150,000 per year, how many years of hiring a new president at each campus annually would it take to double annual presidential salaries?

(c) How many lecturers could you hire per year with the amount of money required for each of the 23 CSU campuses to hire a new president at the maximum 10% increase of base pay? (Assume an annual lecturer salary of $36,000.)

(d) If a new CSU campus president gets a 10% increase in base salary and faculty on that campus cannot get a 1% increase in base salary, what percentage of the faculty’s grading should the campus president take on?

Extra credit: Not all compensation for campus presidents comes in the form of salary. If housing renovations are included in campus executive compensation packages, and if such renovations can be paid for out of campus Foundation funds, explain why Foundation funds cannot be used for faculty salaries or for non-salary compensation for faculty (e.g., to pay for house or car repairs).

The perils of embodiment.

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I have long maintained that bodies are suboptimal vehicles with which to schlep minds around.

Most recent data point in support of this position: On Tuesday, I managed to hurt my knee in the course of grading papers. Grading papers! Come on now!

I guess it’s also a data point in support of the hypothesis that if there exists an improbable way to injure oneself, I will manage to injure myself that way. (Ask me about the time I sprained my ankle stepping onto a bed.) However, if I weren’t embodied, that wouldn’t be the case.

* * * * *

Undoubtedly someone’s going to want to know how grading papers resulted in a hurt knee, so here’s what I think happened: I was sitting on a bed with a laptop and a clipboard on my lap, grading a bunch of online assignments. To create enough surface at the right height on which to balance both laptop and clipboard, I was sitting cross-legged. Apparently one of the knees was getting more than its share of the stress thusly distributed.

I anticipate I will be advised to sit at a table or desk like a sensible human being to get through long stretches of grading. The problem with doing that is that the available chairs in my Cave of Grading are hard enough that I can only count on about an hour and a half of grading before the pain in my butt from my “sits-bones” (as my Pilates instructor calls ’em) becomes unbearably distracting.

In short: bodies seem not to support grading as well as they might.