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| Oh, deer. |
Professors also have their own private lives to deal with besides their responsibilities at Baylor. Professors could be every bit as busy as students, but ultimately, professors should respect the student enough to return graded work in a timely manner. If the professors set deadlines for returning graded papers, then their students can know when to expect papers – just like professors expecting students to turn in assignments.
THE REST.
Student from Baylor that doesn't want to put his or her name on this stunning demonstration of your whiny, entitled attitude, I've upped my standards, so up yours.
ReplyDeleteIf I was to supposed to be at least as busy as some of my students, I would have been bone idle.
DeleteThis is the most reasonable critiques of professor behavior I've seen in a college newspaper. The author takes into account that faculty can be busy with lots of classwork and their own lives outside of work. The author lacks perspective, as shown by the statement that faculty and students can be equally busy, but that sort of error is expected. Even then, the author isn't snarky or hyperbolic about it.
ReplyDeleteI agree - this was balanced, reasonably well structured and had only minor typos which did not interfere with the communication of the message. Much better than most student articles - and the point does stand. We don't accept tardy work from students so if we do give them a definitive date (which is not always smart) we should stick to it.
DeleteI prefer to give them an outer limit - "Your grades will be returned by date X at the latest" - and plan to return work a few days earlier. That's how I always treated essay deadlines as a student - get the work done a little before so there's room to accomodate the unexpected - so I like to think I model it. Probably not, but hey... these little delusions keep me going at this time of year.
I have not read the full article. But I do try to return work in a timely manner, with things turned in late ignored for a longer period of time. I know there are prof's around here that may not return anything until the end of the semester! That is wrong in my opinion. How can students correct their mistakes if they get no feedback? (I know, I know they don't actually use the feedback, but one or two might) In my field material builds and it makes my life easier to fix minor issues ASAP!
ReplyDeleteI never PROMISE when things will be returned. I tell them it's usually a week for short things, 2 weeks for longer. Sometimes I get ahead.
ReplyDeleteThe timeliness of returning work is quite important when assignments are set up on a ladder (or whatever the fuck they call that thing now), but I don't know anybody in my group of colleagues who simply don't return things.
When I was an undergrad, I almost always got my work back within a week of handing it in. I followed that while I was teaching, rarely missing a deadline.
ReplyDeleteHmmm, hold myself to the same standards as the students. I'll have to buy a "smart" phone and start texting when they ask me a question. :-)
ReplyDeleteMy only promise to students since I started teaching in the dark ages before constant internet access and LMSs: I will not collect a major assignment until graded feedback has been returned for the previous major assignment. This way, students get feedback they can act on/use (or not, usually) on that subsequent assignment. It was also a good way to keep things from getting Piled (too) High and Deep...I teach mostly writing courses, so the crap that comes in can be hard to face--but holding myself to this standard also gets me tagged as "Fair but tough" on the dreaded surveys.
ReplyDeleteThese days, I require electronic submission of work. It cuts down on the amount of germs I am exposed to, and I have an app for my LMS that allows me to mark and put sticky-note comments on the draft, then upload it along with the rubric feedback. Much neater. The added bonus of this is that I can organize them by submission date--the students who turn their work in first are the first to get feedback, so some of them get feedback in as little as 6 days. For the ones turning things in just before the deadline...theirs comes later but before two weeks have passed. Cuts down exponentially on the super-keener emails asking about grades.
As for the writer's other remarks, I will acknowledge that some of my students are holding down a full-time job and have kids to take care of--but strangely enough, those are the students who are more likely to do well in my class. The ones who spend their time playing video games in the common areas? Surprisingly, not so much.
I use electronic submissions too. I will never go back to paper. I can keep track of everything, easily compare drafts, check for plagiarism almost automatically, grade papers in the exact order they come in, and get them back one or two days earlier than I normally would. I also notice that I don't get colds as often.
ReplyDeleteWhat I can also do is see when students access my comments for their revisions. That, in itself, is wonderfully revealing, if a bit demoralizing. (The answer? Almost always the day, or sometimes hours, before the revision is due.)
I can see that too--and I usually go in and check the previous assignment to see if they've read feedback before I start grading the latest essay. Saves me having to mark the same things over and over again--plus I can say "You didn't pick up feedback on the last essay--feedback that would have helped you avoid making the same mistakes." A quick scan of the dropbox for the last essay shows that 22% haven't picked up the feedback--and most of those folks are in the low C/D category, strangely enough.
DeleteI, too, thought it was pretty well and reasonably argued. Of course, the student bases hir argument on some incorrect assumptions: professors don't have full control of how much they assign or when, nor do we only have to deal with the work from the class the student is taking (a very common mistaken perception among students, who don't see the rest of the professor's course load). Many professors know, from long experience, pretty precisely what we can reasonably accomplish in the average semester, with the average number of unpredictable events (which can range from minor personal illness to family emergencies to an unusually needy/demanding student or two); however, the combination of university/department/program requirements and teaching load we face may well not allow us to design assignment schedules that produce that amount of work. We know at the beginning of the semester that we're designing an ideal/impossible grading schedule, because that's all that we can do given the conditions under which we're working. And we know that grading is going to turn into a train wreck by the end of the semester; the only question is whether it will be a minor derailment or a full-dress deadly pile of twisted metal. But we're not in a situation to learn from experience, and design a schedule that would actually work better, for us and for the students.
ReplyDeleteApropos of today's what's-wrong-with-higher-ed Thirsty, I really think that much of what's wrong with higher ed today has to do with the fact that both professors and students are seriously overworked (and hence underslept), and, as a result, end up demanding less and less form each other, out of simple exhaustion (or, alternatively, end up demanding more than the other can reasonably expect, and treating it as a personal rather than a structural problem when (s)he fails).