311–320 of 506 posts
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By whom?
By the administration, which separates the credits for the courses into "recitations" and "lectures". The TA's get paid for the recitations/activities-based hours, the professors for the lectures.
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I don't think being pissed at 28/108 students is a valid excuse for acting pissed at everyone. That is a major professional flaw and a post on how you plan to control your emotion may be appreciated by future students. I have had professors that had me write huge essays and then proceeded to just put a huge ass check and never really read past the first paragraph. If I plagiarized and cited my frustration with all th…
I see your point. But consider the following: these numbers are for the students that admitted cheating. There was a significant number of other assignments for which I suspected cheating but I did not have enough evidence. So, I erred on the side of having false negatives in the accusations, rather than false positives. Now, if you are teaching a class where you have some suspicion that half of the students have che…
From reading your blog post and your comments here, I got the impression that you cared more about your pay raise than about the students learning.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I could have misinterpreted whats been said and that you were probably a victim of circumstance, but you blame the guy for demonstrating a grade-seeking attitude while you yourself demonstrate a they're all cheaters, who are not worth my time and I don't want them to rate me lower in my evaluation money-over-doing your job attitude - I think he deserves the same benefit of a doubt as you do.
Your comments here seem very whiney and bitter and you show no sign of sympathy to the students who didn't cheat.
FWIW, the guy didn't sound very grade-seeking to me.
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First off, many of the details you cited are inaccurate. However, its pointless to argue over such things. I was not aware of your health condition, but given the pattern of treatment given to me and a handful of others, I was left to assume you were acting as usual. Anyway, my post was to make you aware of a few other reasons as to why you received a low evaluation score. Blaming the students wholly is unjust and th…
Again: read the article until the end. I do not blame the students. Students respond to incentives. If I give them opportunities to cheat and remain undetected, they will cheat. I do the same as a human. If I were getting a 50% increase in my salary for detecting cheating so aggressively, next year I would have tried to detect cheating even when there is none. What I truly blame in the article is the structure of the…
However -- So I understand that when the system encourages certain behavior, that certain behavior is very likely to arise regardless of how logical, ethical, or correct the behavior seems. For example, many students have a very unhealthy focus on grades and living up to expectations, teachers on evaluations, and administrators on high enrollment numbers, etc.
However, this doesn't mean that the incentives can't and shouldn't be circumvented. For example, if one is put in a place where performance-goals are encouraged (a focus on grades), I sincerely believe part of the teacher's role is to do their best to encourage a learning-focus and discourage performance-goals.
So this applies equally to a teacher's behaviors -- when a teacher is encouraged one way or another based on evaluations, it is the job of the administrators to either destroy whatever causes that encouragement, or in some way encourage a learning-outcome focus instead. I wonder, do you feel anything is in place to do that? And what could be?
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I don't think being pissed at 28/108 students is a valid excuse for acting pissed at everyone. That is a major professional flaw and a post on how you plan to control your emotion may be appreciated by future students. I have had professors that had me write huge essays and then proceeded to just put a huge ass check and never really read past the first paragraph. If I plagiarized and cited my frustration with all th…
I don't think being pissed at 28/108 students is a valid excuse for acting pissed at everyone. That is a major professional flaw and a post on how you plan to control your emotion may be appreciated by future students. FYI professionals are humans first and professionals second. If think that professionals can easily turn off how they are feeling and always act properly, then I conclude that you have little understan…
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First off, many of the details you cited are inaccurate. However, its pointless to argue over such things. I was not aware of your health condition, but given the pattern of treatment given to me and a handful of others, I was left to assume you were acting as usual. Anyway, my post was to make you aware of a few other reasons as to why you received a low evaluation score. Blaming the students wholly is unjust and th…
Again: read the article until the end. I do not blame the students. Students respond to incentives. If I give them opportunities to cheat and remain undetected, they will cheat. I do the same as a human. If I were getting a 50% increase in my salary for detecting cheating so aggressively, next year I would have tried to detect cheating even when there is none. What I truly blame in the article is the structure of the…
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You commit a fallacy here because your comment (as well as the one it's in reply to) assumes that work is rewarded proportionally to its value. It isn't. If you have the bargaining power to get paid more, you get paid more regardless of your contributions. The assumption you're referring to I think has to do with the question of whether it's moral to reward people for working hard (even if inefficiently). I think the…
How to you propose to measure the value of work? I'm certainly not limiting it to financial remuneration. Whatever the value is measured by, it certainly doesn't correlate to effort. Sometimes something of great value takes much effort, sometimes little, but the value cannot be predicted by the effort. Teaching people that it can is a disservice. In what situations is it a moral necessity to reward people for hard in…
In my biased opinion, it is morally necessary to reward people for how hard they work at least partially when I consider what most work (jobs) consist of, which is economically disenfranchising hard manual labor. If I am younger and/or healthier and/or genetically stronger I'll be able to have higher throughput at those jobs, creating more value. However, I'm not sure that it's moral for people who are older, sicker, or not as genetically gifted to be rewarded less than me for doing essentially the same job. I'm not talking exclusively about monetary renumeration, just general "rewards".
I'm sure not everyone buys into this, but it's what I meant with my earlier comment.
Thinking a bit more about it, I think that plagiarism is in big parts a symptom of another, bigger problem: making education a competition.
Think about it: would stundents cheat so much if it wasn't for the pressure of getting good grades?
The pressure comes from parents, peers, from the students themselves and from the fear that they won't get a job with bad grades.
Grades serve multiple purposes as well: they give the students a feedback how well they performed, they determine pass/fail, and they tell a possible employer how well the student performed.
Maybe detangling these purposes in some way (though I don't have a good idea how) might be a good way at reducing some of the pressure, and alleviate the pressure for good grades and thus cheating somehow?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think being pissed at 28/108 students is a valid excuse for acting pissed at everyone. That is a major professional flaw and a post on how you plan to control your emotion may be appreciated by future students. I have had professors that had me write huge essays and then proceeded to just put a huge ass check and never really read past the first paragraph. If I plagiarized and cited my frustration with all th…
>> That is a major professional flaw and a post on how you plan to control your emotion may be appreciated by future students. I think he is readily admitting this is a major flaw, and he plans on controlling his emotions in the future by not obsessing about cheating. This is probably not the ideal response, but it is very human, and you have to give him props for admitting his weaknesses.
Um, no. No props for simply admitting his weaknesses.
Props are for succeeding in controlling them, and for having shown that one actually does more than just going "look at these weaknesses in me these students are triggering in me with their terrible behaviours".
Props for just admitting weaknesses has a good chance of making people go complacent and "look, I'm just not good at XYZ and therefore I have to be an asshole", instead of working to improve.
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All of those are ethnic origins.
Compared to the others listed, it's out of place - all Greeks originate from Greece - where do all Jewish people originate from? (and as much as that sounds like the start of a joke, it's not)
With that disclaimer in mind, the vast majority of Jews - due to traditional prohibitions against intermarriage and low numbers of converts - originate from the general area where the State of Israel is today. Here, both the founding myths in the Torah and modern genetic testing are in agreement.
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First off, many of the details you cited are inaccurate. However, its pointless to argue over such things. I was not aware of your health condition, but given the pattern of treatment given to me and a handful of others, I was left to assume you were acting as usual. Anyway, my post was to make you aware of a few other reasons as to why you received a low evaluation score. Blaming the students wholly is unjust and th…
Again: read the article until the end. I do not blame the students. Students respond to incentives. If I give them opportunities to cheat and remain undetected, they will cheat. I do the same as a human. If I were getting a 50% increase in my salary for detecting cheating so aggressively, next year I would have tried to detect cheating even when there is none. What I truly blame in the article is the structure of the…
Wow. While a 50% salary increase is quite substantial, admitting that you'd hypothetically frame your students in order to get it is ... well it's definitely below cheating in my book.