Dozens of e-mails were exchanged on our university’s “discuss” list — an e-mail listserv for faculty to exchange ideas and discuss topics — trying to explain why this might be the case and what we can do about it. Among the explanations and possible solutions were:

1. This is simply a communications problem. We’re better than students think we are and we just need to tell them that.
2. We need to explain to students how harmful it is to our “image” when they say bad things about us.
3. Students at SCSU are simply more vicious than students at other schools, and this has nothing to do with our faculty or administration.
4. Writing negative comments on evaluation forms without ever speaking up during the actual class is a cultural thing, common not just to Minnesota but to Nordic cultures.
5. Good students aren’t posting on the site for some reason, so it skews the numbers. (Why this would be specific to SCSU and not apply to every other school was not explained.)
6. We try to give access to non-traditional students who may come in with less academic qualifications and who, as a result, may do worse and be more frustrated and more likely to vent on RMP.
7. It’s a Midwest thing. We take lots of rural students and expose them to a diverse, mostly non-rural faculty, and apparently that makes them dislike us.
8. Our students are biased, possibly racist and sexist. They claim that female professors hate men and that minority professors hate white people, yet never claim that white men hate women or minorities.

Not surprisingly, there was not one e-mail that said “You know what, maybe we could learn from this and try to do a better job of teaching in ways that our students will appreciate.” Not one. Apparently we’re perfect here and if any student thinks otherwise, it’s their problem. One colleague did say that they try to learn from RMP and pay special attention to comments that are specific and explain what the professor could do to improve. Kudos for that.

A colleague in my department had a different take on it. He said we should wear our 9th worst ranking with pride. The “worst 25 schools” include many good universities, schools of engineering, and institutes of technology. Maybe students simply give you bad ratings if the subject is difficult to learn. There may be some truth in that — I’m not sure how easily students can separate the level of difficulty of the material and the quality of instruction received. I know I always wanted professors who could make difficult concepts seem easy, but sometimes the concept is so difficult that it’s simply impossible to make it as simple as we would like it to be. I know I certainly felt that way during my graduate Time Series Econometrics course, but my experience teaching helped me separate the course difficulty from teacher quality. Your average undergrad may have difficulty doing that.

There may be a modicum of truth in a few of these explanations, but I have a real problem with the “blame the student” mentality that predominated these e-mails. I have a lot of respect for students — I was one once, as were all of these other professors, although they make me wonder if they may have forgotten what it was like. I have a job because of them. I not only teach them, I learn from them. It frustrates me when I hear professors discount their opinions or knowledge. In my opinion, students usually know a good teacher when they see one. If, as a professor, you are going to claim that your students are too ill-informed to appreciate how amazing you are, either a) you’re mistaken, or b) you’re not communicating well enough to your students about why you’re doing things. If I thought I were the best boyfriend in the world but my girlfriend did nothing but complain about me, either I’m horribly wrong or she’s just not understanding how awesome I am. You can imagine how well it will go over when I tell her it’s the latter. (Or, as an analogy to #2 above, I tell her that it makes me look bad when she complains about me to her friends so she really just needs to stop complaining.)

Once students know why they have to do an assignment, and what they’re supposed to get out of it, they are usually willing to do the work. Maybe in the “real world” you’ll have a boss that will tell you to do something without explaining why, and perhaps this kind of teaching is just good preparation for the workplace. But is college simply a preparation for how awful the work world can be? Not hardly. The ironic thing is that professors are often the kind of people that most want to know why they have to do something. We’re intellectuals, after all. We are always questioning and looking for an explanation or a purpose — if you can tell me why I have to fill in a “last date of attendance” for a student, then I won’t complain as much about having to spend some time on Christmas Eve doing it. If you have a method to your madness, it would be wise to let students know what it is at some point.

Maybe students write comments that are snide, but I’ve seen many of them that are actually constructive and specific. Granted, I take every bad rating I get like a dagger to the heart, but when there’s something specific I try to address it. But I know not everyone does that. I’ve seen some professors with the same kinds of specific comments year after year after year, evidence that they’re not taking any of the criticism to heart and trying to fix what students seem to think is a weakness. Aren’t we supposed to be continually striving to improve?

A colleague of mine at a previous university once told me that she didn’t pay any attention to student evaluations. Her statement was something like, “Students don’t know what they’re supposed to learn in a course, so how can they evaluate how effective you were at teaching them the material?” Actually, I think they have a pretty good idea. You have a textbook with 20 chapters. Did you get through only 10 of them or did you cover almost all 20? Did you help make the material more clear or more convoluted? Did you use interesting examples to bring the course material to life and show them how it applies to them, or bore them to death? I think students are perfectly qualified to judge the people who are teaching them and take issue with anyone who feels otherwise. At that point, you’re basically the chef that’s telling the patron that, no, that steak is not undercooked — it’s supposed to be purple, and if you can’t appreciate it that way, you’re not refined enough to be eating at my restaurant.

On a related note: I wonder how many faculty who completely discount RMP will pay attention to a product’s ratings on Amazon.com or equivalent website before purchasing a product? It doesn’t matter if it’s not a statistically perfect sample of the class — there’s still information in there you can use. We all use it. But when it’s about us, suddenly it’s flawed and should be dismissed? I disagree.

For me, the heart of this issue is this: are we to assume that students are adults capable of independent thought, or sheep to be guided to the final destination of a diploma?

I once served on a committee that heard cases of students who were suspended or expelled and wanted to be reinstated to the university. Most of us felt that in order to be admitted before you were scheduled to be readmitted, you had to show that you were taking positive steps to correct the problems that got you in trouble in the first place. But some professors were very sanctimonious about it — they insisted that students should be treated like adults and be fully responsible for their own behavior, and there was little they could do to gain early admission. I then asked everyone in the committee to raise their hands if they graded attendance and almost every hand went up, especially those that were most insistent that students are adults. If they’re adults, why should their attendance be graded? If they can learn the material without listening to your lecture, shouldn’t they have that option without it adversely affecting their grade? If they’re adults, why don’t you treat them like adults?

We cannot have it both ways. We cannot assume that students are free-thinking, autonomous individuals who have their own thoughts and ideas, and then turn around and say they’re too stupid or racist or uncultured to know whether we are teaching them effectively.

It may be true that remarks on RMP often are not the nicest form of criticism, but it’s criticism nonetheless. Simon Cowell may be a pretty mean judge, but there’s certainly a lot of truth in most of his critiques. You can either learn from criticism and try to improve, or you can bury your head in the sand.

Our employment contract states that for teaching faculty, “effective teaching shall be the principal proportion of the five criteria considered in evaluation.” (For the record, the five are: effective teaching, scholarly or creative achievement or research, evidence of continuing preparation and study, contributions to student growth and development, and service to the university and community.) Part of effective teaching is trying new things, making changes, and improving your course. Sometimes those changes don’t quite work out the way we thought they would, but if we don’t try, we’ll never know if they work or not.

I am so thankful now that years ago I put our student evaluation process online instead of the traditional paper evaluations. Students have the chance to complete it at a time that is convenient to them, and they write a TON of comments that are more specific and helpful than the ones I got when I was using paper. I’ve tried to focus on the answers I’ve received to “What are the weak parts of the course that could be improved?” and have been fortunate to receive some really great suggestions from students. A few years ago, a few students suggested using an in-class exercise as a way of breaking up a 3-hour night class. I tried it the next semester and got great comments on it, so I’ve added it to almost all of my courses. That’s just one example. There are many more.

And that’s why I’m writing this post today, as another semester comes near to an end. Students: please take your evaluation process seriously. Give your professors useful comments. If they’re not doing something well, tell them how they can improve. (As I tell my students: if you think I suck, don’t just say “you suck” — tell me exactly WHY I suck so I can try to suck less in the future.) If you want your professors to care and to really do a good job, then you have to do your part to give them information they can really use. Don’t just say “I don’t like the homework.” Explain exactly why you don’t like it and suggest how it could be changed in the future. Sure, some of your professors are so set in their ways that they’ll probably ignore your suggestions anyway, but there are enough of us out there who really want to improve that it’s worth a shot. Chances are that some of the useful things your professors are doing in class now are the result of a student giving feedback years ago. And it’s probably also the case that your less-than-effective professors aren’t even sure what they’re doing wrong — or if they know, they don’t quite know how to fix it.

So be specific, be constructive, and be creative in your comments and suggestions, and we’ll all be better off for it.

I bring this up because I just got a new rating on my Ratemyprofessors.com page. It’s for my Econ 201 class and it’s not good:

I can see why some people might like him but if you get on his bad side your done for in the class. And like others said he is pretty full of himself.

(As Ross from Friends would say: “Y-O-U-’-R-E means “you are.” Y-O-U-R means “your.”)

I’m not going to argue the personality criticism because there’s no point. If you don’t like the way I come across, I can’t help that. If you take my statement of facts and theory with assertion as arrogance, that’s your problem. The person I make fun of the most in my classes is myself, yet somehow I’m arrogant.

But what really irks me is the claim that I would give people anything other than the grade they deserve. (Quick question: does using the word “irks” make me arrogant?) That is an attack on my integrity as a professor and I thought I had to say something somewhere to defend myself. (Good thing I have this blog!) This student got a bad grade and assumes that it’s because I don’t like him/her. To be honest, I can’t think of one student in that class who was on my “bad side.” I have no idea who could have written this because I actually really enjoyed that class — the students in it asked great questions and we had good interactions. To be honest, the only students that I don’t like in any class are the ones who don’t come to class, don’t do assignments, and show me through their lack of effort that they don’t really care about the class. But even then, they don’t get on my bad side — they get on my indifferent side.

All of my grading in that class is blind. I grade all the in-class exercises without looking at names. All the exams are graded blind: I flip over the cover page and grade all the question #1’s, then I move on and grade all the #2’s, etc. I have no idea who anybody is until after I’m done and I’m adding up the scores on the individual questions. All the online work is up to the students — I have no control over that. If anyone gets a bad grade in that class, it is because they did not do the work or did not learn the material, plain and simple. Blaming it on getting on my bad side is a weak excuse.

Part of me wishes I didn’t care so much. My colleagues with more experience tell me that you can’t worry about students like this — you can’t please everyone anyway so you should just shrug off the criticism. I guess I’m not cynical enough to think that way yet. (Maybe once I get tenure — just kidding!) I hope there’s a way to become less sensitive to the criticism while still retaining the desire to do my best to reach every student, but I’m not sure there is.

Okay, it’s been a long semester and I have two weeks to get a bunch of online videos done to prepare for the next semester. Enjoy the rest of your break if you have one.

Susie Shepherd, the principal, said a parent advisory council came up with the idea, and she endorsed it. She said the council was looking for a new way to raise money.

“Last year they did chocolates, and it didn’t generate anything,” Shepherd said.

Shepherd rejected the suggestion that the school is selling grades. Extra points on two tests won’t make a difference in a student’s final grade, she said.

What Ms. Shepherd is saying is two things: a) Parents should spend $20 to buy their kids extra credit so that the school can raise money, and b) it will not have any impact on their grade. I don’t know how many tests there are every semester, but a 10% increase on two tests has to have some impact on a student’s grade, doesn’t it? And if there are so many tests that it doesn’t matter, than the PAC is basically stealing the parents’ money, selling them something that is worthless. Either Ms. Shepherd thinks the parents of the children in her school are stupid or she thinks people reading the story are stupid. I’m not sure which.

I’ve flirted with some controversial things with grades in the past, and I’ve often had to ask my colleagues what they thought of it, and have backed away from a few proposals. In my Industrial Organization class at Northern Michigan University, I ran a simulation game based on Severin Borenstein’s Competitive Strategy Game. I’ve used the game, or a variation thereof, all three times I have taught I.O. in my career and the students love it. It applies principles from throughout the course, forces them to use Excel to run simulations and calculate different scenarios, and helps them visualize what they are learning. I can’t get Dr. Borenstein’s software to work any more for some reason so I use an Excel file to run the simulations and that allows me to tweak things and create new markets. It’s more work for me but the result is better and I’m much more in tune with the decisions students are making.

The game accounts for about a quarter of each student’s final grade. It’s a semester-long project with an assignment every week or two (it varies by semester). It can be a lot of work or students can half-ass it and hope to get lucky.  The first time I taught the course, I was not sure how motivated students would be. So to encourage them to really take it seriously, I stated in the syllabus that members of the team that finished in first place would each received one grade shade bump on their final grade; if they had an A-, I would bump them up to an A. But I realized something: the good students are probably going to take the game more seriously, and they’re probably going to get an A anyway. NMU did not allow me to give out A+’s, so a grade bump for these students was worthless. So I decided to give it to them as a property right — they could give it away to a friend or even sell it to another student if they wanted. I would set up an auction for them.

I loved the idea at first, and so did they. Students often consider their grades as their property, but they do not have the right to sell or trade that right. I thought I would experiment with that. But at the end of the semester, I started hearing complaints from some of the other students. They thought it was unfair that someone who did poorly all semester could buy a grade bump from another student. I mentioned that there would be an auction for the grade bumps (two of the three students in the winning group already had an A and therefore did not need theirs) and everybody had an equal opportunity to put in a sealed bid on one of them. Naturally, some complained that this meant the wealthier students would get the grade bump — the same thing complained about in the story linked above.

I did not want to cause a controversy with this, so I did not collect any money from the students who put in the highest bids, and I did not give them the grade bump. I took the two highest bids, averaged them, and gave the two students that owned the grade bumps cash from my own pocket. I thought that was the fairest thing to do — why should they suffer a loss of income because I changed the rules on them? If I remember correctly, it was only $25 or so each. Nobody bought a grade, and the students that earned the grade bump and did not need it received the cash equivalent value.

But there have been other times when I have thought of doing something similar. As it turns out, I’m not the only one considering it. In fact, Michael Baye, the author of the book I use in Managerial Economics, gave an online web conference a few months ago where he talked about something he does in his classes that could easily be construed as grade-selling. He includes class participation in his grades. He also auctions off a few shirts at the beginning of the semester and any student wearing one of the shirts when his or her name is called is automatically immune from questioning and gets 100% that day. Some students keep the shirt in their backpack and put it on before every class. These students have essentially bought a percentage of their grade. He does it so that when he asks students how much they are willing to pay for a good at the beginning of the semester, it’s not just a thought experiment; it’s something tangible, something that has real value to them. He uses the numbers he gets from this experiment to create a demand curve. He uses the numbers to run regressions, to calculate consumer surplus, the profit-maximizing price for a monopolist, and a variety of other things. It’s a running theme throughout the whole course based on an actual tangible good. But still…is he selling grades? Does the fact that he’s selling a shirt make it not so straight-forward?

I have thought of doing something similar in my Managerial Economics class in the future. I don’t grade attendance so the magic shirt idea wouldn’t work. Instead, I thought that students would bid on one of several homework passes. Each homework assignment is usually worth between 5-7% of their final grade and there are 3-4 of them. It’s not hard to get a good grade on homework assignments and most students get at least 80% on them. But if they bought one of these passes, a student would have one freebie and receive 100%. In my mind, I justify it by saying that if a student decides to just not learn the material and use the homework pass, their grade will likely suffer on the next exam, which usually takes place the following week. And I can do the same analysis on the data that Baye does — I’ve seen the Excel sheets he has created with it and he applies the data to almost every concept students learn the entire semester.  It really is a valuable teaching tool. But is it buying a grade? And if it is, is it worth any potential controversy if it has pedagogical value? If I sold magic homework shirts instead, would it be any different?

I’m interested in comments from students and educators.

I’m in the middle of a redesign of the online principles courses in the Economics department to take advantage of new technology and a new and growing understanding of what it takes to create a good online course. There are many issues to consider and I’d bore you if I went into them here. Let’s just say that I have a very good vision for what I want the online courses to look like and am trying to make sure I can get the technology to do it in a way that is easy for students to follow. But as professors, sometimes we find that our vision of a course conflicts with what students want in a course. In that kind of a disagreement, the professor usually wins, but sometimes the class as a whole loses as a result. Our job is not an easy one: to balance our professional expectations for what goes into a course with an understanding of what our students will and will not do; to push students to do work we know will be beneficial for them, making them live up to our expectations, without pushing too hard and risking a revolt.

For example, I would love it if all my students read their textbooks before class. It would allow me to spend more time on applications and extensions of the concepts and less time going through the basics. A few years ago, I started using pre-lecture quizzes to force students to read the book before lecture. The questions weren’t too difficult, but you had to read the chapter if you wanted to pass. I eventually came to find that students just skimmed the book  or searched through the book to find the answer to the question without really paying attention to what they were reading. The pre-lecture quiz performance was never good. Students did the quiz but didn’t learn much, so I had to go over the basics anyway. My students told me, through their behavior, that they’re simply not going to read their textbook before lecture, since they felt I did a good job communicating the concept in lecture and they didn’t need to read the book. The pre-lecture quiz idea was great in theory but just didn’t work well in practice. (I got the message, loud and clear, and have dropped the idea from my courses.)

The purpose of this post is to solicit feedback from students about online courses. For those of you who have taken online courses: what made it a good or bad course? Why did you choose the online course instead of a lecture-based course: convenience or a perceived lower level of difficulty? Was it easier or harder than a lecture-based course? Was it just as educational as a traditional lecture course would have been? If you had a bad experience, what could your professor have done differently to have made it better for you?

Please share your thoughts so that I can understand why students take online courses and what makes them successful from a student perspective. Our goal is to make our department’s online courses as educational and informative as a traditional lecture course — I’m just trying to figure out what that means for students.

During the Presidential address in our university’s Convocation Week activities, I was reminded of how lucky I am to have the career I have. I haven’t been away from higher education since I was an undergrad, and sometimes you forget just how special this whole education thing is. I was reminded of my past students and professors — caught up in quite a bit of reflection, and it was very good for the soul.

In thinking of the high points, you can’t help but also recount the low points. I remembered one incident that happened at my previous job at Northern Michigan University. I watched a screening on-campus of Wal-mart: The High Cost of Low Price. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s about as negative a portrayal as one could paint of a company. None of the benefits are discussed whatsoever. Wal-mart is simply an evil corporation out to destroy the world. Last Fall, we watched it in my Economics of Film class, actually taking the film a step further and talking about more than just the one-sided portrayal. Having already seen it several times before, I knew the arguments, so when we watched it as a class, I was able to focus on the movie-making aspects of it. I earned a new appreciation for the film-making techniques that went into making Wal-mart look like so horrible. Victims of Wal-mart tell their stories to soft music. When Wal-mart managers talk, it is to violent drum beats. When people vote to keep a Wal-mart out of their town, the spokesperson used is a pastor and a gospel choir sings hallelujah in the background. It is as if Wal-mart is so evil that even God hates it. That movie gave me a better appreciation for the way that music can be used in a film to elicit feelings that advance the goal of the movie-maker.

But I digress – back to the story. A few months after the original screening at NMU, a professor from another university (can’t remember who or from where) was invited by the College of Business to come to campus and talk about the movie. There was a classroom screening of about 20 professors and 50 students in Jamrich Hall and we watched about the first 2/3 of it. After that, the professor gave her take on things, basically parroting everything the movie just showed and provided a few more horrible facts about Wal-mart. Some of the people in attendance were not as biased against Wal-mart as she was, and some worked for Wal-mart and actually liked it.  I asked a few questions of her, trying to get her to at least admit that there were some good results for consumers, since none of that was in the movie. She did not rebut any of the facts I presented (I always come armed with facts to these kinds of things). Instead, she dismissed my arguments outright, basically saying, “Well, that may be true, but the bad stuff they do dwarfs that in comparison.” That’s a normative judgment, but she was stating it as fact.

When the session was over, she was escorted from Jamrich to the College of Business office by someone who worked in their office (we’ll call her Ava), who coincidentally also happened to be a student of mine. The professor mentioned something to Ava about the student in the front row asking all the questions. Ava told her, “Yeah, that wasn’t a student — that was my economics professor.” The professor then said something to the effect of, “Oh, I’m sorry, I wish I had known he was a professor. I would have taken his arguments more seriously.”

I don’t think I have to tell you how pissed off I was when Ava told me that. It was indicative of an attitude that, frankly, too many professors have. They start looking down on their students, thinking that students couldn’t possibly be right if they don’t agree with the professor, and are simply hindrances on their quest to publish papers. I was more mad at that statement than I was at her dismissing my comments.

Students: you have a right to be heard. You have a right to have your thoughts taken seriously by your professors. Some of you abuse this and try to dominate a classroom discussion. Professors should be acknowledging your opinions, explaining their arguments and having you explain yours, and taking you seriously. But at some point, they have to move on and teach the rest of their class — further discussion can be done in office hours.

Professors: you were one of those very students once. Remember? You were smart, inquisitive, and questioned the professors who taught you. You thought you knew everything. Looking back so many years later, you now know just how little you really knew back then — but you did know something. You had some valid arguments, you made insightful observations and your professors learned from you. Had they dismissed you outright, you both would have been done a disservice. Well now that you’re a professor, give your students the benefit of the doubt — they might be smarter than you think. Their points may be just as valid as they would be if they were coming from a collegue. The best part of my job is when students come up with new ways of thinking about things, or new examples that I had never thought of before.

To me, university education is about learning how to think and how to critically analyze the world around us. It is not about learning to parrot a professor’s argument. It is about challenging the conventional wisdom, and in doing so either disproving what we take as an assumption so that our analysis is more accurate than before, or sharpening the argument in favor of the status quo. When students ask questions and are taken seriously by their professors, who are then forced to examine their claims and justify their own arguments, we all win. And if we can do it respectfully, even better.

(Aside: Congress just passed and Obama signed a Credit Card Reform Act to prevent this kind of retroactive interest rate increase. I have a feeling a lot of credit card companies sent out letters like this in advance of the new legislation, trying to wring out every last dollar before the rules change.)

The letter tells me I can “opt out” by contacting them by July 31. If I do that, I can use my account at the old terms until my card expires, and then they will close my account. I like to reward good companies with my continued service and recommendations to my friends and family, and punish bad ones by doing the opposite. In the past, the Shell MC (run by Citibank) has been good to me. They overnighted me my initial card so that I would have it for my long road trip from St. Cloud to Los Angeles a few years ago, and saved me about $35 as a result. But I just can’t deal with something like this, so I’m going to send them a nice letter and opt out.

I’m hoping that it won’t affect my credit score negatively, because normally when you close an account it hurts your FICO score. (I hope the opt out option is treated differently, but it very well might not be.) See, if you have any outstanding debt, closing down one line of credit makes your debt/credit ratio increase, which is a bad thing in FICO’s books. This link shows you what they consider when giving you your score. Take a second and look at it – I think everybody should know this information. Outstanding debt and the debt/credit ratio is 30% of your score. Of course, the website also says that these are just averages and everyone’s situation is different — an action that might make your credit score go down might not have any effect on mine, and vice versa. There’s really no way of knowing how anything will affect your specific situation, which is just another frustrating aspect of the credit card industry.

If you look at the information, you’ll see that it seems the best way to increase your credit score is to not do anything new. Open up a new line of credit and they count it against you. Close that new line of credit and they count that against you too. Close a line of credit you’ve had for a long time and it hurts even more. It’s all very messed up if you ask me. But what it means is that you should not get a bunch of credit cards in college just because they’ll give you a free t-shirt (I’m pretty sure I did that at least twice), as closing those accounts five years later when you finally get smart about your finances is just going to drag down your credit score.

I’ve decided that I’m going to send Citibank a letter telling them that I will opt out and close my account unless they will change my terms back to the old ones. One thing I have learned is that when it comes to credit card companies, if you ask for things convincingly enough, often you will get them. I have probably had a half dozen different late fees removed by just asking nicely. I have rewarded those companies by using those credit cards more. They help me out, I’ll help them out.

Back in 2003, I had one company that wouldn’t remove a late fee no matter how much I begged them. I asked to talk to an account manager and I informed him that if they would not remove it, I would transfer the entire balance to another card and then cancel my account. The account manager wouldn’t budge. I hung up and immediately arranged a balance transfer to another card — this was back in the days when you could transfer balances for free; now they’ll charge you 3-5%. When the transfer finally went through a week later and I had a zero balance on the original card, I called to cancel the account. They transferred me to an account manager and he asked why I was leaving. I told him that I promised I would cancel my account if they didn’t take off the late fee, and I was just fulfilling my promise. He said he was sorry to hear that and asked if there was anything they could do to get me to stay. I told him to make me an offer. He said if I transferred the balance back, he’d give me a 0% APR for the first year and then 4% after that until I paid off the balance, and no transfer fee. The card I had moved it to was charging me 7%. I gladly accepted his offer and transferred the debt back.

Just a few months ago, I had a balance on a card that I was paying the minimum on, enjoying a very low introductory APR that is set to increase in September. With the holiday season, I got distracted and forgot to make the minimum payment. I got hit with a $39 late fee, and the low 3% APR was immediately bumped up to the full rate of 18%. I called customer service and begged them to bring the rate back down, but the rep said there was nothing he could do. Grrrr.

I called back the next day and spoke with someone different. She asked me for my personal information to verify it was me calling, and when I told her my birthdate she said, “That’s my fiance’s birthday!” Somehow magically she was able to get my APR back down to 3% when the previous rep had said it was impossible. Something as completely irrelevant as having the same birthday made her want to pull a few strings and work for me.

The moral of the story is this: politely ask for lower interest rates and fee reversals. You can yell and get mad, but in my experience that doesn’t work. If asking nicely doesn’t work, you can say that you will pay off the balance and then cancel the card — and then do just that (or at least try to bluff them). Or you can call back the next day and get someone different who might be a little more receptive to your request, or have a different birthday. I’ve noticed that calling late at night is usually less successful, as the people who have the power to make important decisions work the day shift. All these actions might be a little less successful in today’s tighter credit environment, but there’s no harm in trying.

Or you can just not get into credit card debt in the first place. Yeah, that’s probably your best option.

One quick story to tell though.

As universities across the country and across the world settle in for final exams, people at universities are searching for a variety of things and some of them end up finding their way to different posts on my blog. I use a website that keeps track of visits to my site, including the website someone visited right before they came to mine. For example, when I add a new post, I usually put it in my Facebook status, and when someone clicks on that, I will see that they are coming from Facebook. Similarly, when people come here as a result of a Google search, I can click on the link and see what they were searching for, and the other sites that came up in their search.

New traffic in the last week or two has been a mix of both professors and students, judging by the IP addresses listed that are attributed to universities from the U.S., Turkey, South Korea, and India, to name a few countries. Some are faculty searching for what to do when they catch students cheating. Some are students searching for a few different things: 1) tips on how to cheat, 2) what will happen to them if they get caught cheating, and 3) what happens to their financial aid when they fail a class and/or don’t take a final exam. I always knew students searched the web for ways to cheat, but it’s a lot more real when you actually see it for yourself.

Some people may think that incentives don’t matter, and students are going to cheat regardless of the punishment. This provides a little anecdotal evidence showing that, at least in some cases, cheating is a calculated decision based on the perceived punishment. Similarly, whether to fail a class on purpose when a C is out of reach depends in part on the financial aid implications. University administrators and faculty would be wise to consider this when crafting their policies about punishment for academic dishonesty, replacing failing grades, and revoking financial aid when students fail courses and don’t even bother showing up to the final exam.

I took the exam from him and went back to my office, telling him I would contact him and let him know what I was going to do about this. I was a little hot at this point and I needed to cool down and think this through. I write in my syllabus that the punishment for cheating can be either a failing grade on the exam or a failing grade in the class, depending on the severity of the offense. I spoke with colleagues about the situation and everyone seemed to agree that I should throw the book at Adam. If there were ever a time to fail a student for cheating, it was for this, a clear case of premeditated cheating. It would be one thing if, during an exam, he were looking on the exam of the student next to him and continued to do so even after being warned. In that case, I might just give him a zero on the exam. But this was about as bad as it gets. At that point, I contacted the Office of Student Life and Development  (OSLD) and asked them what I should do next.

I was informed that I could mete out the punishment I deemed proper, and Adam would have the right to appeal the resulting grade if he so desired. I was told that I could also take it one step further and file a complaint against the student for violating the Student Code of Conduct (SCC).

(Note to professors: even if you decide to handle a cheating incident in-house and not pursue any violation of the SCC, you are still supposed to contact the OSLD and inform them of the situation; they will put something on the student’s record so that if it happens again, they can take this previous behavior into consideration. Despite what some may think, including myself before this incident, contacting OSLD does not automatically start an investigation or hearing; it’s entirely up to the professor.)

I wrote a detailed account of the events that occured and e-mailed it to the OSLD, along with scans of the cheat sheets. They contacted Adam and informed him that I was initiating an investigation. At that point, Adam came forwarded and admitted wrongdoing. He later sent me an e-mail apologizing for cheating. He said that given the situation, my giving him a failing grade in the course was an appropriate punishment. He felt embarrassed about everything — he hadn’t studied enough for the exam, had some family issues going on, and was afraid he would fail. I give him credit for the apology, and I appreciated it. This was an educational lesson for Adam and I wish him well in the future. No hard feelings.

Okay, now here’s the problem. I serve on the Judicial Board at SCSU, and we hear cases brought by the University against students that are accused of violating the SCC. The composition of board members changes with each proceeding, but it consists of one faculty representative, one staff representative, and three students. All the proceedings are confidential. We take notes throughout the hearing and everything is taken from us at the end and shredded. We are not to discuss anything that occurred during the hearing. We listen to the testimony, ask questions, take in evidence, and then the parties leave the room while we deliberate. We consider everything and first decide what the facts are. Then we decide if the accused party is “responsible” (the University’s word for “guilty” but since this is not a legal hearing, the language changes a bit) for violating part of the SCC. We then bring the parties back into the room. When someone is found responsible, we inform that party and any other relevant complaining party (for example, the victim in case of a sexual assault) that the person was found responsible. Then everyone else leaves the room and the Board members decide on appropriate punishment. The Board recommends a sanction, anywhere from a slap on the wrist to expulsion from the University. Ultimately it is up to the person in charge at OSLD to decide on what to do; I am told that he usually follows the Judicial Board’s recommendation.

When students are found responsible for violating the SCC at a Judicial Board hearing, they are told that they will be informed of the sanction within three business days, after the OSLD makes its decision. Everyone else involved in the process is told nothing. While the victim in a sexual assault case will learn at the hearing that the accused party was found responsible, the victim is never told what the ultimate punishment actually is. Judicial Board members are never told whether their recommended sanction is what was imposed, or whether OSLD decided to change it and substitute their judgment for the Board’s. In my case, I will never know what the punishment was for Adam. By coming forward and admitting responsibility for cheating on the exam, Adam bypassed the Judicial Board system, saving a lot of time and hassle. The OSLD decided on the punishment, with no recommendation by the Judicial Board. I have no idea how he was punished. I received an e-mail simply saying that he accepted responsibility for this violation and “was sanctioned appropriately.” I have no idea what “appropriately” means.

Some students at the university are considering changing our current SCC system, whereby the University provides an extra punishment on top of any criminal sanctions for things like sexual assault or drug use. I won’t get into whether I personally think that is appropriate or not, but if you’re going to have a system like the one we currently have (providing extra punishment for offenses which our legal system already finds worthy of punishment), shouldn’t the actual punishments meted out by the University be public information?

I am disappointed with the current system and its lack of transparency. I will never know whether the OSLD decided that Adam’s failing my class was already punishment enough, or whether they decided to suspend him or expel him. It would be nice to know where the University draws the line. How blatant does a violation of the most important part of the SCC have to be to warrant suspension or expulsion? I understand privacy issues, but without anybody knowing what the punishment for cheating is, how do we communicate to students just how wrong violations of academic integrity are?

I mentioned in a previous post that there should be a Student Cheating Report, much like there is a Sexual Assault Report every year. After writing that post, I sent an e-mail to the head of the OSLD letting him know my opinion about this and asking him why we don’t currently provide this information. He said that in the past the University has not put out a report because of the lack of a good information system, and this kind of report would require going through files by hand. (Personally, I think this should be a priority, regardless of how busy the OSLD is with other things, but at least I have an explanation.) He said they now have a simple system they can use for this, but it has a few glitches that need to be worked out. He said this is a summer project for him, and he agrees with me that faculty and students really need this kind of information. Every interaction I have had with him has confirmed to me that he is a great asset to this University and is very good at his job, so I trust that he will do what he says he will. I look forward to the results.

I’m not sure what the over/under is on the number of student violations of academic integrity in the last academic year. Feel free to state your guess for the record in a comment to this post. Closest to the actual number without going over gets $20 from me, via Paypal, when the report is released. (In the case of a tie, winners split it — I’m cheap, you know.)

Most of us in the economics department at SCSU have moved towards doing our evaluations electronically on D2L. For most questions, students give a 1-5 rating and then have the option to provide comments about that specific topic. I have found that the quality of the open-ended responses is so much better using electronic evaluations than it ever was with paper evaluations. Students can take the evaluation whenever they have five minutes at a computer, instead of right before or after a final exam when they really don’t want to spend the time. Most students can type faster than they can write, so instead of a half-sentence, they write several complete sentences. Students have provided much better information about the little things (exams, textbook, other things) than they used to. And when asked about the electronic evaluation process vs. paper evaluations, over 95% of students said they preferred the electronic evaluation, it took less time, and they were able to provide better feedback.

I write this post for students, to encourage them to take the evaluation process seriously. Most of your professors really do want to give you the best education possible. We’re supposed to try new things: new books, new websites, new ways of delivering content. Sometimes they work out well and sometimes they don’t. Some experiments fail, and we learn from that — so we need you to be honest and constructive about what works and what doesn’t. We need your feedback so that we give you a course that fits our requirements, but does it in a way that works well for students too. I recommend you visit the following site in preparation for your evaluations these last few weeks of the semester. Take the process seriously — other students will benefit from the feedback you provide, and your professor will appreciate the time you took in giving constructive feedback that helps them craft a better course. I know I’ve done several new things in courses as a result of comments and suggestions I received the semester before, and most of them worked out very well.

Last semester, after all my evaluations were in, I e-mailed a summary of them to my students so they could look at them. I specifically wanted them to see the comments. I wanted them to see how hard our job as professors can be when we have a class of 70 students. They needed to see that for every student that says “I like the fact that you write on the chalkboard” there’s a student that says “The chalkboard sucks — you should use PowerPoint.” For every student that says “The exams sucked — you should use multiple choice” there’s a student that says “I’m so glad you don’t use multiple choice.” We cannot make all of our students happy. You need to know that. If you have a professor that does something in a way you find annoying or not constructive, please understand that many other students feel the exact opposite. And if you love how a professor does something in particular, there’s probably another student that hates the same professor for that very same reason. That’s why you need to take the syllabus seriously — if your professor does something in class you don’t like (group projects, grading attendance, etc.), then don’t take that class. E-mail your professors ahead of time and ask for a syllabus so you don’t waste the first week of class. Most of us will appreciate the fact that you’re taking your education so seriously.

There are a variety of websites for students to examine when considering taking a potential class or professor. There are two pretty good websites you can go to if you want to learn more about your professors or provide feedback to other students who might benefit from your insight:RateMyProfessors and CampusBuddy.

Most people know about RMP, so I won’t go into too much detail here (but I will come back to it later in this post). CampusBuddy is relatively new. You can log in through your facebook account, so that makes it easy. The interesting thing about CampusBuddy is that while you can rate your professors (although there are very few ratings on the site), the most important feature of the site is that you can get information about grades. CampusBuddy uses actual data from the registration office, so you can see what grades have been given by department, by course, and by professor. When you have a variety of people to take a required course from, this kind of information can be useful. The only majors with GPAs lower than economics are physics, math, and engineering (if memory serves me correctly).

Here’s where things get personal. If you look at all the professors in the economics department here at SCSU, you’ll find I give out the third-highest GPA (it’s listed as fourth, but one of the people above me, Hari Luitel, has moved on to warmer temperatures). There’s a stigma involved in that, as some professors might think you’re just handing out A’s like candy. Recall the scene from an episode of Friends where Ross posts his grades. Another professor looks at them and says, “Looks like someone was generous this semester,” after which Ross starts putting minuses on all the grades.

I honestly don’t know what to make of my GPA. On one hand, perhaps my courses are really easy and it’s easy to get a good grade in my classes. Or perhaps I’m a good professor and my students learn so well from me that they just learn the material well enough to get good grades. I’d like to think it’s the latter, but how can one be sure? As my tenure clock ticks away, it makes me wonder how others at the school will determine whether I am a good professor.

One way is to look at the RMP data. RMP has three ratings: helpfulness, clarity and ease. Each is given a 1-5 score. The overall quality rating is the combined average of helpfulness and clarity (assuming that more = better here). The ease rating is kept separate. I think an easiness rating too close to 1 or too close to 5 is equally bad. There’s also a correllation between the two measures. I might actually download the data on every SCSU professor just to examine this further, but it’s low on my list of priorities. It seems that professors that get low easiness scores tend to not get good quality scores, and professors that get high quality scores also get high easiness scores. So how exactly should one combine this information to make sense of this? One way I propose is to take the quality rating and subtract the easiness rating. That way, if someone scores really well on quality just because their class is a cakewalk, they’ll get an ease-adjusted quality rating (EAQR) of 5-5=0. I did that for everyone in my department here, and for everyone in my former department at NMU. The average EAQR for the both economics departments is 0.5, with a standard deviation of about 0.6. My EAQR is 1.7 at SCSU and 1.4 at NMU — so either I’ve gotten better or my classes have become harder since I switched schools. I think my EAQR says that I’m an effective professor who is both helpful and clear, but who doesn’t just water down material to make a class so easy that everybody gets a good grade. Those EAQR ratings put me right in line with my former colleague Dave Prychitko, and his is good company to be in.

Another way is to look at end-of-semester evaluations. Obviously your professors care about the overall quality rating, but studies have shown that non-educational things can influence those ratings. So I look at a few additional questions that ask students to compare this class to similar classes (i.e. 200-level classes with other 200-level classes). The first one I look at is “How much do you think you have learned in this course, as compared to similar courses?” Possible responses are: much less than usual, less than usual, about usual, more than usual, much more than usual. The second question is ”The work load for this course, as compared to similar courses, is:” Possible responses are: much too light, a little too light, about right, a little too heavy, much too heavy.

If students learn a lot because the work is demanding, some professors would say that’s just fine, and I definitely understand that argument. But if students feel they have learned a lot and not had to work excessively hard to do so, I would argue that is a better outcome. On the first question, I usually get above 80% answering either “much more than usual” or “more than usual,” and only one or two percent giving me anything less than “about usual.” On the second question, I usually get about 80% answering “about right” and most of the rest being “a little too heavy.” Most students of mine seem to feel that the workload was about average but the knowledge gained was above average. So on that score, I feel I’m doing a good job. Ultimately, the highest compliment a student can pay me is to say they learned a lot, and it seems like the data bear that out.

I don’t think most of my former students will tell you that my classes are a cakewalk (maybe the Economics of Film class, but that was a given). And I would feel comfortable with any of my A students in principles taking the principles exams of any other economics professor anywhere. So yeah, I give out more A’s and B’s than a lot of my colleagues, but I think my students learn in my courses and I think they have earned those grades.

I’m interested in hearing what students think about the easiness of a course vs. what you learn in it, and what you think makes a professor good.

I placed my textbook order for the class last week and I requested the fifth edition thinking that was the latest one. Usually publishers know when you use their book and, when they have a new version, they send you a desk copy for free. I never got a new version of Baye, so I figured there was no sixth edition. As it turns out, there is in fact a sixth edition. I asked the textbook representative for McGraw-Hill to please send me a new copy so I could see if it is worth having students buy the latest version.

I got it in the mail yesterday and I cannot fully express how furious I am at McGraw-Hill. On the back of the sixth edition, it says the following:

Some exciting features in the Sixth Edition include:

- New learning objectives: Each chapter begins with clearly identified learning objectives, designed to enhance the learning experience and help implement AACSB assurance of learning standards.

- Enhanced Time Warner Case Study: Includes nine additional end-of-case problems (called Memos).

- New end-of-chapter material: Over 30 new problems and applications were added to enrich the learning experience.

The “new learning objectives” are things like: “Illustrate how changes in prices and income impact an individual’s opportunities” and “Explain how accounting costs differ from economic costs.” These are basic. If you read the chapter, you’ll figure out what you’re learning. Maybe there is a little value-added in this, but it’s not much.

The Time Warner case study is actually pretty cool. It goes through the merger of AOL and Time Warner from a managerial economics perspective and has you analyze different aspects of it. It was already very thorough; now it’s a little better. But to do that case well, I would need to spend three weeks in class on it and I don’t have that much time anyway. And these updates could easily be put on the textbook’s website for professors to download and give to their class. A whole new book doesn’t need to be printed to add these 3 pages.

The new end-of-chapter material consists of about 2 new homework problems per chapter, increasing it from 19 to 21. The other 19 are exactly the same as they were before.

Aside from those three things, nothing in the book has changed. All the examples are the same. All of the graphs are the same. I flipped to a random page in the new version of the book, page 520 (out of just under 600 total in the book). That page is exactly like page 518 in the previous version. In 520 pages, they only added enough material to increase the book length by 2 pages — and that was just the 2 extra questions per chapter.

I sympathize with my students when it comes to buying textbooks. I am offended for them that a company can make a few tiny changes, call it a “new version” and get people to pay $125 (and that’s on Amazon; it’s more in the bookstore) when they can get the previous version on half.com for $20-$40. I told the bookstore that there is a new version but I am not requiring it and I will tell my students to buy a used fifth edition, so the bookstore can go ahead and order the sixth edition but I doubt anybody will buy one anyway. Then I e-mailed my textbook rep and told him that I find it despicable that they published a new version when so little content was changed. I’ve already made the order so I’ll use the book this time, but in the future, I might switch to a different book just to make a point to the publisher.

When does this kind of thing stop? When enough professors stop requiring the new version, and the message finally gets through to publishers who pull this kind of thing. There is a new textbook company called Flat World Knowledge. They offer free e-texts for students, and if there’s too much eye strain reading off the computer screen, they can get a printed copy for as little as $30. There’s very little variety in their offerings right now, but they’re expanding their titles and the authors seem pretty reputable. That’s the wave of the future, and I plan to be a part of it; I e-mailed them and told them I am willing to help write a book or supplemental materials. As professors, we don’t always think about how a textbook affects students. If I save students $40 each on a textbook, that might not seem like a big deal. But when you have 30 students, that’s $1,200 the class is saving as a whole. And if every professor does that, it saves students a few hundred dollars a year.

My message to professors: find ways to save your students money. Don’t require the latest edition of a textbook. And if you like those new homework questions, type them out and put them on your course website so students can buy a previous version and still have access to the new questions.

My message to students: explore your options on used book websites, and make sure your professor provides a copy of the textbook on reserve at the library. Professors can request an extra free copy for this purpose, and publishers almost always oblige, but sometimes we forget. And even if we have an extra copy, we don’t want to bother with taking the book to the library and filling out the forms if nobody is actually going to check the book out. But if you remind us about it, we’ll think you’re going to use it and then we’ll feel like we’re actually saving our students money, and we’ll do it.

___________________

Hey Dr. Switzer,

Given your recent brush with students who cheat, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on what happened to me this week. I want to tell you about professors who cheat.

My professor gave our class a take-home midterm on Tuesday, due next week.  The midterm is 3 pages long and contains only 2 questions. I read through both of the questions and it was clear that the writing style used was not a product of my foreign professor’s vocabulary. So, I was curious where he got the question from.  I pulled a phrase out of the first question and put it in quotations and did a simple Google Search.  What shows up was the exact question from my take-home midterm, with all of the answers I need. Talk about a moral hazard.

This is a take-home midterm that we have 7 days to complete, and not an in-class midterm, where the circumstances of student access to information would be constrained. The fact that I can do a Google search and find the answers to half of my midterm, which according to the syllabus will equate to 20% of my grade for the entire course, seems ridiculous and unacceptable. It really reflects the lack of effort the professor has shown our class so far. He is 5 minutes late to class every day, clearly does not prepare his lectures, and always seems to be disconnected from our small, 10 person class. He knows nobody’s name. 

What really bothers me is that all he would have had to do to prevent any student from finding what I found, or to reduce the value of what a student might find, would be to simply change the data given in the sample. I mean, it was only 15 numerical observations. Had he changed the data, the variance related jargon we have to calculate in the question would be completely different than those given on the webpage. Even at that point, the webpage would still explain the procedure to calculate everything using about as direct of an example as one can get. If the professor really liked this question, all he would have had to do to prevent anything like this from happening would be rewrite the question in his own words (even just paraphrase it) and change the dataset just in case a student finds it. That way nobody will find it.

I’m having a hard time seeing how this is different than a student cheating, because I really feel like I have been cheated this semester. Finding the midterm question and answers online really put cap on it. When you combine the poor instruction the professor has given so far and general lack of interest he shows for the class, as a student, I’m genuinely frustrated. Also, class attendance is also mandatory. When the professor consistently shows up 5 minutes late, mandatory attendance doesn’t seem fair. 

I’d be curious to hear your opinion on the matter. Is this a case of teacher cheating? As a professor, what arguments can you make for either side of my professor’s actions?

Matt Nicklay

____________________

My response to Matt:

I think this is an interesting situation, and there are actually a few different elements to your complaint, so I’ll break this up into parts a little bit.

I understand a student feeling cheated at poor instruction in the course. You (and the taxpayers) are paying for quality instruction, and when you don’t get it, you are justified in being upset. I’d like to give the professor the benefit of the doubt and say there might be something going on in his personal or professional life that is distracting him. I know that as I approach tenure and start working more on research, some of my teaching is slipping a little bit. I don’t like it, but sometimes it’s inevitable. Now, if he just doesn’t care, that’s another problem altogether.

Grading attendance and then showing up late — that’s a bit hypocritical. I don’t grade attendance, since this is college and I think you can choose to show up or not, and your grade will reflect your decisions enough without me assigning points for attendance. I can see your frustration with that also.

But on your more central point, I think I have to disagree with you. I really do think it’s different when a professor takes a question from another source vs. when a student plagiarizes a paper (the fact that I’m not calling it plagiarism when a professor does it with test questions reflects my opinion here, and I admit that).

If I write a good question, and a colleague of mine wants to use it, I have no problem whatsoever. In fact, I would be flattered. Personally, I have e-mailed former professors and asked them for midterm questions so that I could use them, and they always oblige me. I don’t think they expect me to actually give them credit on the exam, and nobody has ever asked for it. And I would not expect a colleague to cite me on the exam if he used my question. I would like to know he is using it and at least have the option to say no, even though I can’t imagine I would ever do that. I would like my colleague to acknowledge to me personally that he is thankful for the questions. I think that’s more than just a courtesy — I think that’s the appropriate thing to do. But citing me on the midterm? I don’t feel that is necessary.

If I actually cite the source of the question on the midterm, I create a whole new problem. If I tell students that I got this question from a specific former professor or a specific website, I have given my students information that they can use against me. Then they can go online and try to find those questions, knowing where I’m getting them. They might be able to have final exam questions in advance because they looked at all the questions from that professor they found online. And I don’t think I have to tell you I would have a major problem with that. It would also limit my ability to give take-home exams, something I do occasionally, as students could easily do exactly what you have done in your situation.

Admittedly, I’ve taken questions from other professors’ midterm exams, some from professors I have had and others from professors I have never had (usually other professors at the same school as the professor I had). I invariably have to tweak them one way or another because I find them either too difficult or too easy, or covering the material in a slightly different way than I presented it that semester. I would like to think that these professors would consider this flattery, and would give me permission were I to ask them, as all the ones I do ask seem to do. Should I send them an e-mail ahead of time and say, “I found your Spring 2003 midterm online and would like to use question #2 in my Industrial Organization class this year. May I have your permission?” Perhaps that would be the courteous thing to do. And when it’s a professor I know, I do it every time and they always say yes. I guess I’m just assuming that the other professors, whom I do not know, would say yes too, so I don’t bother asking because a) they don’t know me, b) I don’t want to bother them, and c) I would personally be fine with it if the roles were reversed. In talking to some of my colleagues, they seem to agree with me, but as of now it’s been a small number of people I’ve talked to about this.

Some questions I put on exams are from other textbooks on the subject. Should I cite those too? If I do, then students can find those books and use those questions to study for their future exams, giving some of them an unfair advantage.

Finally, I’m not sure the expectation of originality is the same for teachers as it is for students. As students, you are expected to learn the information and be able to explain it in your own words, as proof that you understand the material.  As professors, it is assumed that we already know the material. Should we really have to re-create the wheel and write all of our own questions to demonstrate that to your satisfaction? Should we be allowed to use the text banks provided with 99% of textbooks? (Is your problem that we don’t write our own questions or that we get them from a source that students can look up online? I guess I’m not 100% clear on that.) We still have to choose the questions that we feel are most appropriate to the way we have taught the class. When I create my weekly online assignments for my principles classes, I go through over 100 questions and pick the 10-15 I think are most appropriate to the way I teach the class. It’s time consuming, but I do it. If I picked them at random, would that mean I was cheating my students? Also, I have to admit that when I go question hunting on former professors’ web pages, the vast majority of the questions are not usable because I teach the material differently and emphasize different parts. Usually when I do that, it’s for a class that I am teaching for the first time, and I am just trying to get ideas for my own questions. It can take four or five hours, sometimes longer, so go through everything and craft what I think is a good exam. If I tried to write all my own questions from scratch for a course I’m teaching the first time, it would take many more hours, and that exam would probably not be good.

One more thing. In this day and age, if someone wants his students to have old exams but does not want the rest of the population to have it, he can use a course management system (WebCT, Blackboard, D2L) so only his students can access them. I guess I assume that if a professor makes them public, he’s okay with other people using them. In fact, I might put some of my material up on my profswitzer.com page for precisely this reason. I want other people to see what I do and get ideas, and if they use it, so much the better.

I hope you see that having to write your own exam questions is not always optimal and not always feasible. And I hope you see that citing the source on the exam itself introduces an additional problem whereby students can find the information. I understand your frustration with the class as a whole, and I think this might just be the straw that broke the camel’s back. But I’m not sure that what your professor has done on this exam is necessarily “cheating.”

I welcome your response and those of other students and professors.

Update 4:45pm: I didn’t even address the issue of this student looking at the question/answer online and whether using it is cheating, but it is discussed in the comments to this post.

I’m making a stand here on principle. If the problem is that students cheat and professors do nothing about it because it’s a difficult process, then the solution is for professors to bite the bullet and do what’s right, not what’s convenient. So I’m doing what’s right — to protect the integrity of the university, and to protect all of my students who don’t cheat. If I were an honest student who didn’t cheat, that’s what I would want to be done.

Here’s how the drop system works at SCSU. Students have one week of class to determine if they like a class and they can drop with no penalty. That’s it. One week. At U.C. Berkeley, we had about 6 weeks — enough time to go through a few assignments or an exam and see if the class was something you could actually handle. I remember one course, Econ 101A (Intermediate Microeconomics with Calculus) where, after the first midterm exam, enough people dropped the class that the waitlist for the course was down to zero. At that point, the professor said, “Congratulations. I had to keep the course tough to get people to drop, so I’ll make it easier from here on out.” Here at SCSU, as a student you really have no opportunity to see what you’re getting into until it’s too late. If students drop after a week but before the half-way point in the semester, they get a W on their transcript. The W does not factor into the student’s GPA, but obviously it doesn’t look good either. Typically, students will re-take the course again to replace the W with an actual grade. The problem is that if students drop too many courses, they can end up having to repay financial aid to the state and federal government.

So what do a lot of students do? They don’t want to drop and get the W, especially if it is a course they need for their major — they have to take the course over anyway, and there may be financial aid implications (explained below). So they ride the course out the entire semester, barely showing up in the end because they know they’re going to fail anyway, and then they take the final exam. I fail them, they take the class over again, and they get the better grade. Everybody wins, except for the taxpayers who are partially funding their education, who end up paying twice for the class: once when the student failed it and again when they take it again to replace their grade. We have full replacement here at SCSU, so if you get an F and then retake the course and get an A, the only grade that impacts your GPA is the A. (The F still shows up on the transcript, but unless you’re applying to graduate school, nobody will ever know…)  There is basically no penalty for taking a class and failing (other than the fact that a student will take longer to graduate)…unless the student stops coming to class. See, when I give a failing grade, I actually have to assign one of three different types of grades. The standard F is for someone who went the whole semester and just did poorly. Then there is the FW, which is given to students who do not drop (probably because it’s past the drop deadline so they can’t drop) but who stop coming to class or doing online assignments. And there is the FN, for students who are enrolled but never even showed up in the beginning. It’s all very complicated, but I know that if a student is in class until the last week and then stops showing up, they get an FW and can get in financial aid trouble and may have to repay financial aid. But if they go the whole way and take the final exam, they get the F and keep their money. I used to wonder why some students who I hadn’t seen since the second midterm exam actually showed up to take the final exam and bombed it, but now I know why. If they don’t take the final exam, a professor might interpret that as a drop and give them an FW and they might take a financial aid hit. It makes perfect sense. And if I were in their shoes, I would do the same thing. We have a system that basically tells students that if a course is not required (my course is not required for majors), they should just drop the course and take the W and take something else next semester. And if it is required, so they’ll have to take the course again, they should stay in the course and just fail it. That’s why so few people ever drop my principles courses even when they’re doing horribly – they’re required courses for most of the people who take them, so they’ll have to take them again anyway.

I understand the financial aid angle — if students blow off a course and aren’t really in school, they shouldn’t get loan and grant money as if they were taking school seriously; they should have to pay that money back. I get that. But you can’t combine that policy with the full replacement of grades and not realize that it gives students in required courses an incentive to phone it in for the last month in the class and just take the F.

I have two recommendations to make the system better. First, the deadline to drop without getting a W should be extended beyond just the first week. Give students at least a month — let them actually get a feel for the course before you punish them by giving them a W. Second, the free replacement of any grade needs to be changed. Knowing that an F can be replaced completely, students that know they are struggling in a class during a semester might as well just blow off the class completely. They’ll have more time for their other classes and can salvage those grades. At some schools, including Berkeley while I was there, a student that takes a course more than once gets the average of the two grades. That gives students the incentive to learn as much as possible and actually take the class seriously, even if they know they might need to retake it later. That F might turn into a D with a little bit of effort, and the student will no doubt learn more in the process. Or the school could use some weighted average, putting more emphasis on the better grade. But there should at least be some penalty for failing a class or else students will do exactly what they do now — take advantage of the system.

I’m interested to hear what students have to say about these policies — please comment if you have any thoughts about this.

P.S. Sorry it’s been a while since my last post — it was Spring Break and I was trying to relax a little bit and catch up on some things.

I chide the WC for assuming guilt, but don’t get me wrong — I think it is vitally important for people to know this information. I applaud their efforts to get this information to the university community. If the number of reported assaults is on the rise, and it is (15 in Fall 2008 vs. 10 in Fall 2007), we need to know about it. Female students need to know that they need to take precautions, and other people need to know what to watch for. If it is on the decline, we also need to know this so that we have proof that our efforts are working and give credit where credit is due.

Similarly, I believe there needs to be an official report by the Student Affairs Office providing an overview of the number of cases of alleged cheating (notice I included the word ”alleged” — I’m old school in the fact that I presume innocence; the Women’s Center is so ahead of the times that they drop this quaint old concept). Students and faculty need to know how many students were brought up on charges of cheating, how many of them were punished, and how they were disciplined. Right now, nobody knows anything. Students know cheating occurs — and they admit it when surveyed. But nobody knows what the punishment will be. I believe that the fact that nobody knows how widespread cheating is or how cheaters are punished causes more cheating.

When I was teaching at Saint Louis University while I was a graduate student, I strongly believe I had a student cheat on an exam. He received special testing privileges allowing him a quiet room and extended time. He told me this a few days before, and showed me the documentation from Disability Services, so I told him that I would put him in one of the study rooms in the building and he could take his exam there while the rest of the class was taking the exam in the classroom. (I didn’t want him taking it early and telling people what was on it, or taking it late and learning what was on it before he took it.) That turns out to have been a mistake on my part. He knew he would be alone, isolated in a room with only a small glass window in the door, at the same time I was down the hall proctoring 44 other students in another room. After their exam finished, I would wait in the lobby of the building for him to finish the exam, since he received extra time.

On the day of the exam, he came to the room where everybody else was starting their exam, and I gave him a copy and told him to go to a specific wing of the building, choosing one study room in a particular corridor that contained about a dozen such rooms. When the rest of the class finished their exams, I looked through all the windows of all the doors in this wing and he was not in any of the rooms. I figured he stepped out to use the restroom. I went to the lobby and waited. I checked back 20 minutes later and still could not find him anywhere. I decided to just relax and go to the lobby and start grading the exams. When his actual time was up, I went and looked for him again. Still nowhere to be seen. I was starting to get angry. My parking meter was expiring and I was worried about getting a parking ticket. (I did in fact get a ticket — the little creep cost me $25.)

About 25 minutes later, he waltzed into the lobby and gave me his exam as if nothing was wrong. I asked him where the heck he had been and he said he was in one of the rooms. I told him he was NOT in one of the rooms, as I checked all of them several times in the last hour. He said he went to the bathroom a few times. Regardless, he was late and I should have wiped out his whole exam right then — he broke the rules. I took his exam anyway and left annoyed at the whole situation. When I got home, I looked at his exam and could not believe what I saw.

Before every exam I give, I give students a set of practice questions to give them a better idea of what they will need to know. I give them solutions to the questions if they show me they have made a serious attempt at answering at least half of them. And I tell them that I will use at least one of those questions on the exam, giving them an incentive to really study from them and make sure they know the answers. I think it’s a great system. Not so much this time.

His exam was about as bipolar as an exam can get. For any of the questions that were similar to the ones I had on the practice problems, he answered perfectly. Too perfectly. Verbatim from the answer key. And I mean three sentences verbatim, word for word exactly what I have on the answer key. But on the questions that were about different material than the practice questions, he was so far off that it was not even funny. Every answer was pretty much the exact opposite of the correct answer. His sentences were more much shorter, and much more vague. It seemed pretty clear to me that he took the exam somewhere, had the answers on him (or looked them up online, since I put them up on the web at that time) and copied down what he could. For the rest, he had to rely on his brain, which wasn’t working so well that day.

I informed him of this and told him that, in my opinion, it appeared that he cheated. Not once did he ever say to me, “I did not cheat.” If it were me and I were accused of cheating, the first thing out of my mouth would be, “I did not cheat.” He never said it once. I brought him up on charges with the Dean’s office and there was a hearing. I went to the Disability Services office beforehand and spoke with the person in charge there about the case, and he told me that he had had problems with this student in the past. The student was in their office taking an exam once and left to use the bathroom for about a half hour. This man finally sent a student into the bathroom to check on him and from behind one of the stalls, he hears papers crinkling. So this man brought him up on cheating charges too, and those went nowhere. I introduced him as a witness in my hearing, to testify to a pattern of behavior.

So we had our hearing and he finally gave his defense. Previously he had no explanation to offer me. Now he’s got a whopper: he has a photographic memory. He memorized all the answers verbatim but since he didn’t actually learn anything, he tanked the questions that weren’t from the practice solutions. This is the same student who, when working on homework, had to have answers explained to him about a half-dozen times and still would not understand it. Now he has a photographic memory. And at the hearing, he finally says the magic words, “I did not cheat.” I mention to the board that this is the first time he’s ever said that to me. The board, consisting of 3 undergrads, 1 grad student, and 1 faculty member, deliberates for about five minutes and finds him not guilty. Nevermind that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be at any point I was looking for him. Nevermind that he came back 25 minutes later than he should have. His photographic memory claim (which the board did absolutely nothing to substantiate) absolved him of everything. In their minds he had done nothing wrong. I walked out of the room stunned.

What are faculty supposed to do, short of videotaping all of their students taking their exams? Faculty have learned that when we bring charges of cheating, students walk most of the time because the standard of proof is apparently so high that a student can talk his way out of anything: claim you have a photographic memory and they believe you without asking you to demonstrate this phenomenal ability. That’s why many faculty simply give up trying and just look the other way. That’s why, when I see a student looking on another student’s paper, I move them to another seat. I want to take their exam and rip it up in front of them, grab them by the collar and throw them out of the room, and give them a zero, but I think it’s going to cause too much of a problem and ultimately I will be left unsatisfied with the solution. I have seen several faculty profiles on RateMyProfessors.com where the comments by students say that it’s so incredibly easy to cheat in this professor’s class because the professor just sits in the front and never even bothers looking up. Never walks the room at the start of the exam to make sure there aren’t items under the desk in one row that might help someone in the next row. Never bothers to see if there is anything on a student’s desk that they should not have. Never checks the calculator to see if, perhaps, they have a cheat sheet taped to the bottom of it. Never bothers to see if there is writing on the inside of the label of that Coke bottle. (Yes, students, some of your professors know about that trick.) Many of the students find it laughable. So they just keep on cheating. Why learn when you can cheat?

And for faculty, why try to fight it? Even when you catch a person red-handed, it’s an administrative nightmare for everyone involved, parents get upset at the whole thing, and in the end the student walks away clean. It’s just not worth it for most faculty. There is no mention of it in the student’s record, so that when it happens again and a pattern develops, that pattern remains hidden. And there is no public record that there even was a hearing, so nobody knows about it. At least in the case of sexual assaults, somebody is providing numbers so we have an idea of the size of the problem.

If students knew how many times other students tried to cheat and were brought up on charges, it might make them think twice about cheating. Then again, if students knew how many times students walked away clean from the hearing about their alleged cheating, it might just empower them to try even more. The whole process makes me sick to my stomach. That’s why I write two versions of my exams. That’s why I don’t give multiple choice exams. That’s why I don’t let students take exams late. That’s why I don’t allow calculators except for upper division classes with difficult math. I don’t want students to cheat — it’s not fair to all the other students that worked hard studying for the exam. And I know most students are good students. I have had students walk up to my desk during an exam to let me know that their pen ran out of ink and they are going to reach into their backpack to get another pen. They let me know ahead of time so I don’t see them doing it and think they’re cheating. The first time that happened, I couldn’t even believe it. I love those students.

Cheating is a huge problem on college campuses. But nothing is done about it because nobody knows how bad the problem really is. And the only way we’re going to know is for this information to be made public.