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Texas college professor tries to flunk his whole class

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Texas college professor tries to flunk his whole class

#61

Post by JadeNB »

wahsd wrote: post #60
JadeNB wrote: post #55

Horwitz acknowledged that “a few” of the best performers might not deserve an F. But the school wouldn’t let him teach just those students, so he had no choice but to flunk everyone and leave the course, he said. Wow—as a teacher myself, I went to this story all prepared to root for this guy, but can't. "[T]he school wouldn't let him teach just those students, so he had no choice but to flunk everyone"? Who knows wha…

I am not sure that it really is a teacher, let alone professor's professional responsibility to have to deal with the student's lack of basic human decency. I don't know what happened in that class and I also don't know if his statement about "a few" not deserving being flunked is accurate, but it does not change the fact of the matter that a teacher / professor / lecturer's only job is to teach and educate. Their jo…

> I am not sure that it really is a teacher, let alone professor's professional responsibility to have to deal with the student's lack of basic human decency.

It is every professional's responsibility to deal professionally even with unprofessional behaviour. That doesn't mean tolerating or excusing the behaviour.

For example, as a teacher, if I am repeatedly provoked and harrassed by students (which has never happened!), then I am within my rights to ask them to stop, to call security, and even to refuse to return to the classroom until some assurance is made that it is a safe environment. That is a professional response to unprofessional behaviour.

What I am not entitled to do is to say that there are some good apples, but, because of the few (or many) bad apples, I am going to fail everyone. That is an unprofessional response.

Re: Texas college professor tries to flunk his whole class

#62

Post by cbd1984 »

virmundi wrote: post #51
cbd1984 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing but Sun Glass Huts and McDonalds coast to coast. This is so amazingly wrong I don't know where to begin.

The point is that we have, at a macro level, a common, homogenous culture. We have a common language, shared history, and shared cultural context.

> The point is that we have, at a macro level, a common, homogenous culture.

Only if you focus on the mass-marketed commercial culture, which reduces your argument to a basic tautology: "We have a shared mass-market commercial culture, therefore we have a shared mass-market commercial culture." Guess what: Europe has a shared mass-market commercial culture, too, and it's partially the same one America has.

If you can go from Maine to New Mexico without noticing any change in the local culture, I posit that you must be not only blind but deaf and lacking an olfactory sense as well.

> We have a common language, shared history, and shared cultural context.

We have a language with multiple dialects, a history which is only shared by those who are not recent immigrants (otherwise the concept of "shared history" loses all meaning), and to the extent a shared cultural context makes sense, that changes based on generation and, yes, region.

There is a certain American cultural context which is shared by most Americans. Sure. However, it isn't as homogeneous as you make it out to be, and it certainly isn't focused entirely on mass-market commercial culture, as you seemed to imply.

Re: Texas college professor tries to flunk his whole class

#63

Post by heapcity »

skywhopper wrote: post #39

Breaking News: sometimes teachers have depressive flameouts just like every other kind of person. There's not really anything to take from this article. When this sort of thing happens, the department hands the class off to someone else, the instructor is disciplined in some way, and life goes on. The students won't receive an ideal semester's worth of instruction, but that happens sometimes. The university probably…

I flamed out on cheaters once by telling students they could decide for themselves what their grade was. "Go ahead live the rest of your life with the false assumption you understand statistics."

Re: Texas college professor tries to flunk his whole class

#64

Post by virmundi »

cbd1984 wrote: post #62
virmundi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that we have, at a macro level, a common, homogenous culture. We have a common language, shared history, and shared cultural context.

> The point is that we have, at a macro level, a common, homogenous culture. Only if you focus on the mass-marketed commercial culture, which reduces your argument to a basic tautology: "We have a shared mass-market commercial culture, therefore we have a shared mass-market commercial culture." Guess what: Europe has a shared mass-market commercial culture, too, and it's partially the same one America has. If you can…

I've lived across the various parts of the country. I've never been confused if I'm still in America. I've been through New York. They'll say things like, "Going way up there, eh?" But I still know I'm in the US and not Canada. Drive in New Mexico, there are points that just looking at the landscape, you might think you wandered into Old Mexico. As soon as you hit town there is an American feel; even along border cities.

Never have I been unsure that I'm in Canada. Crossing from Detroit to Canada feels like I'm in Canada. The country has a feel. I bet that there are few Europeans that are unsure they are in a different country. Again to reference the Brits, moving within the UK still can feel like being a different country ('cause you are).

That's what makes the argument that Europeans are so cultured humorous to me. They are cultured in the sense that they have to be. An Italian in a major city HAS TO BE aware of the German ethos. They don't have to like it, they don't have to speak the language, but the feeling is there regardless. America is "uncultured" because Europeans don't realize that we are cultured, it's just that we're versed in a gigantic culture that they will not match for at least 100 years while the EU (if it does) solidifies.

Re: Texas college professor tries to flunk his whole class

#65

Post by jklein11 »

nailer wrote: post #23
probably_wrong wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are confusing "universities" with "USA universities", specially when it comes to debt and GPA.

Most USA-people do this, and they're aware of it: when they talk about 'universities', or '[some class of] people', or 'VC' or whatever else. I think the reasons they do it are a combination of efficiency and a feeling that the rest of the world isn't always necessary to the discussion. Those of us outside the US may feel it's naive, but it's unlikely they'll change. The simplest thing for us to do is to assume they…

Are you implying that there is anywhere other than the USA?

Re: Texas college professor tries to flunk his whole class

#66

Post by StillBored »

iridium wrote: post #7

Even though this incident sounds more personal than idealistic, it keeps bringing back up the question of the purpose of universities. I am okay with universities being a medium of education, where one can take any courses they want, and passing and failing is irrelevant (MOOCs?) I am okay with universities being a place to enjoy four years of camaraderie and self exploration before committing to life or career goals…

The idea that a student can be educated in 4 years is a factory mentality. It completely ignores people who want the education but are unable to commit the required time in a given semester (aka people with jobs instead of loans). It also ignores the fact that a pretty high percentage (based on people I knew in college) didn't really know what they should major in immediately. Changing majors three years in, is a good way to extend 4 years into 5. Or for that matter, four years of taking classes in one major provides a similar level of competence to four years of another major. It also assumes that everyone learns at the same rate, maybe some people take a little longer in $SUBJECT does that make them inferior?

This whole graduate in 4 years idea, is primarily driven by the college rankings. The lack of a good metric for post college "success" or information learned, means the rankings rely on feel good metrics like the average number of years to graduation.

Re: Texas college professor tries to flunk his whole class

#67

Post by aggieben »

I've taught a graduate-level class in which I caught every single student cheating at least once (18 students), including 6 of them on the final paper (for which I set an absurdly low bar). I failed those 6, and I gave zeros for all the other individual instances. I should have failed them all.

Re: Texas college professor tries to flunk his whole class

#68

Post by dragonwriter »

edw519 wrote: post #45

Horwitz, who has taught management for two decades... What exactly did he teach? It doesn't appear he learned very much about "management". Imagine a manager firing all 30 of his direct reports. What would you suspect was the problem, the manager or the workers? Same thing here. Perhaps Professor Horwitz should get a real management job. Then he'd learn how easy he'd had it for the past two decades.

> Imagine a manager firing all 30 of his direct reports. What would you suspect was the problem, the manager or the workers?

Failing isn't like firing, its more like giving an maximally unsatisfactory performance review (and, really, more like being doing so as one of a panel of reviewers .) Professors, generally, neither admit nor dismiss students from the university (which is the nearest parallel to hiring and firing), and don't generally act as "supervisors" in other respects (except in the case when a faculty member has an "advisor" relationship to a student, particular a graduate student, but that's different than the relationship of an instructor to students enrolled in a course.)

Re: Texas college professor tries to flunk his whole class

#69

Post by ggchappell »

Professor here, with a viewpoint that seems to be underrepresented.

The kind of thing discussed in this article would absolutely not fly at my university. We are expected to formulate standards for grading, inform the students of these standards, and follow them when assigning grades.

A relatively standard term for grading in ways that does not follow announced standards is "capricious grading". And many -- perhaps most, perhaps all -- U.S. universities now have official policies against it. Egregious violations of such policies would be grounds for various kinds of penalities/punishment.

That is not to say that cheating is irrelevant. For example, every syllabus I write contains the line, "Academic dishonesty will not be tolerated, and will be dealt with according to [my school's] procedures."

In another comment, user hn_ says, "A syllabus is not a contract." This is correct. That means that a syllabus is not enforceable in a court of law. However, university policy may still dictate that a syllabus is an ironclad statement of how the course will be conducted.

So, for example, I have seen a student make a complaint against a professor and take it up the chain of command. The first question asked by each of the administrators the complaint came to was, "What does the syllabus say?" If the professor is found to be acting in accordance with the course syllabus, then the student has a much harder time making a case -- at the very least.

A related issue, which seems to be an important one in the case mentioned in the article, is that grading standards are generally to be applied individually. There is such a thing as group work, of course; in such cases we make it clear that each person in the group is judged by the performance of the group as a whole.

Now, I don't know how accurately this article is representing the actual events that occurred. But if Horwitz really is assigning individual grades based on a nebulous judgement about the class as a whole, then I would say he is clearly guilty of a violation of professional ethics. What "the class deserves" is simply irrelevant to an individual's grade.

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