If It's Tuesday, Hiram Must Be Baffled By Something That Happened to Frankie.

A former colleague of mine, call him Frankie, called me up the other day to complain about his college. Frankie lives in the northeast and teaches at a decent, mid-sized community college. He doesn't complain much, so when he does I usually take it seriously:

[+]

So, Hiram, I've got this kid in my summer section of writing. First year class. He writes the diagnostic and it's barely in English. Every kind of error imaginable, but the overall feel is he's just not familiar with writing in English. In fact as the writing diagnostic was winding down, I said to him, "We need to be out of the classroom by 3 pm," to which he just sort of shrugged and shook his head as if he didn't know what I was saying.

So, I call up the pre-requisite person because I know this kid doesn't belong in the class. Turns out he's taken and passed the two developmental classes we have here. Not only that, he got Bs in both.

Making the best of Clinton's new higher-ed plan from Frankie.

So Clinton just released what sounds like a truly horrible set of proposals for higher ed: 

• Opening up federal financial aid to "alternative providers"
• Providing (unspecified) incentives for actual colleges and universities to accept credits from those "alternative providers"
• Automatically awarding green cards to international students who graduate with advanced STEM degrees. 

Now, we Miserians are a can-do, optimistic bunch. Surely we can think of ways to make this nasty little potion of perverse incentives more palatable. For ourselves, anyway, if not for higher ed.

Here's my plan, should this come to pass: 

Aunty Frankie's Surf-n-STEM Academy.

As a Disruptopreneur Alternative Provider, I don't need to bother with unfashionable, buzzkill-y things like ABET accreditation, dorms, classrooms, faculty, or learning objectives. 

No GRE? No problem! My advanced STEM degrees will be available to anyone who has the foresight and out-of-the-box thinking required to pony up a hundred and fifty grand. (Sure, it's about twice the industry average, but can your snakehead get you a guaranteed green card? Didn't think so!) Because my Surf-n-STEM Academy will have a MOOC option, there's no uncomfortable transoceanic travel required, Residency requirements and ID verification are so last-century.

And best of all, it'll qualify for federal financial aid!

Anyone interested in investing? 

Frankie

(P.S. I did consider one other disruptovative option, setting up a mostly-online school with a 68:1 adjunct-to-full-timer ratio, but that just seemed too evil.)

More writing misery, plus a little spot of cheer from Frankie.

Unlike Cassandra, I'm not teaching a summer class, so for the time being I'm not obliged to read papers that start with "In today's modern world, ethics is a big problem" or "Dictionary.com defines 'ethics' as 'moral principles that govern a person's or group's behavior.'" or "Throughout history, mankind has considered ethics to be a big problem."

I am, however, the administrator of our online resume book. Students upload their resumes, and it is my duty (and pleasure! Really! At least most of the time!) to provide feedback and suggestions for revision, in order to maximize our students' chances of getting a seat in the brutal and bloody game of musical chairs that is the current job market. 

Well, yesterday I got a resume that was...amazing to behold. 

Five pages. Comic Sans MS font (yes, really) in two colors. An objectives statement that was 100% word salad. Clip art of flowers. 

I did not post the resume as written, but instead (because I care!) spent half my morning crafting a series of gently-worded suggestions for improvement, including a short list of recommended fonts and a customized objectives statement derived from a painstaking exegesis of the coherent portions of the resume.

Why? I don't know. Because I'm a sucker? 

The student immediately submitted a revised resume and already has two job interviews set up. 

HAHA JUST KIDDING

She wrote back, "Thank you for your feed back however I honestly believe there isn't an exact structure to formulate a resume."

Okay, then. Best of luck with that. 

========================================================

Now here's the tiny bit of cheer I promised in the title. My murder mystery, The Case of the Defunct Adjunct, will be free on Kindle worldwide July 27-29, along with over 40 other mystery, thriller, and suspense novels. And to the best of my knowledge, not one of them contains the phrase, "In today's modern world..."

Frankie

This week's Big Thirsty from Frankie. The good news: You're getting a 40% raise! The bad news: This brings you up to just over minimum wage.

More adjunct misery.

The University of Memphis has given its adjuncts their first raise in three decades, from $1,500 to $2,100 per three-credit-hour course. They probably won't be able to teach more than three because then they'd be eligible for health insurance. So they'll max out at $12,600 a year.

Why don't adjuncts just quit, as a commenter (predictably) asks?

I wonder. Even if everyone who would prefer a T-T position walked away, we'd still have a good supply of people who have real jobs elsewhere and enjoy picking up a class or two on the side (like the adjunct history professor who is employed full time at an investment company). Add to that the retired professors who are so eager to stay active that they are willing to teach for free, and we don't have a lot of bargaining power for underemployed Ph.D.s.

Rio Salado College in Tempe, Arizona has no campus. All its courses are online, and the overwhelming majority of instructors are adjuncts (22 full-time faculty and over 1,300 adjunct faculty). Not only have they not been shunned and shamed, their deliberate mass adjunctification has been lauded as a strategic success, saving 27% on per-student expenditures.

It seems to me that the most effective action would come from the accreditors, but what's their motivation? Accrediting teams are made up of administrators, who may not be in a position to throw stones. And why should they? (See Rio Salado, above)

Q: Is there a way out, or are we headed toward postsecondary teaching as a hobby for people who don't need the money?

- Frankie

Today's Big Thirsty. "Do you sometimes wish ... "

... they'd just be honest about cheating?

A Thirsty based upon today's exchange with Feigning Frankie:

FF: Omigawd, Dr. Scared, I don't know how TurnYouOut could have said most of my paper was copied. I SWEAR it is all my own work. I take my education seriously. I would NEVER (ever, in infinity years) cheat! I think the similarity might be because of how common the topic was.

Me (not even looking up): It is early in the quarter, so the questions are, yes, somewhat simpler. However, over 98% of the class was able to submit assignments with < 10% marked unoriginal.

FF: Ummmm....

Me (holding last page): Not to change the subject, but just wondering, did you really think eNotes and StudentPapers.com qualify as scholarly sources?

FF: Well ...

Me: And, Frankie, seriously, your opening is a word-for-word cut-and-paste of the list in the last paragraph of the StudentPaper.com page you cited. Then there are several other sentence long lifts from web sources, amounting to about 50% unoriginal content in a 3 page paper.

FF: [crickets]

FIN

Q1: Are you more/less likely to provide any latitude for a student who just admits to plagiarizing, instead of trying to explain it away?  (complexity of explanation notwithstanding) 

Q2: Would your inclination change if you knew you had full support and backing of your administration to crush the little ... darlings?

We can be replaced, quatre cinq

No, I'm not reporting the the lack of buoyancy of a certain feline. I'm just unsure of how many posts we've had recently on the subject. Let's see: there was
Making the best of Clinton's new higher-ed plan from Frankie,
and
Our robo-proffie replacements: What could possibly go wrong?
also from Frankie (perhaps I sense a pattern), so that's un et deux, and there was possibly a third or fourth in there somewhere but I'm too lazy to find it (them), so mine is, well, you know, but it's not even a link to an article, it's to another blog (!) that's how fucking lazy I am right now (and pressed for time, but l prefer to think of myself as lazy than having the busiest summer of my life, because that would just be depressing).

The article: Meat Widgets and the End of College

Flava: This, in short, is a lousy idea.

Commentary: I agree. Good post!

---from OPH (almost too lazy to sign, but not quite)

Out of Touch Olivia Reports from the Sock Hop.

At my hopelessly inadequate community college yesterday, I was traipsing back from my last (fourth) class of the day with a box full of final projects, and the remnant notes of four 90 minute final exam preps.

It had been about the hardest day of the semester for me, and the worst grading slog was still to come. The final exam prep is something I take seriously, not something designed to make the precious dears feel good about themselves going into the final, but a no-holds-barred barrage of all the stuff I've taught for 15 weeks. I want students to fear the final. I want them to get scared and spend this last weekend reviewing all of the stuff I told them they SHOULD have learned.

As I headed to my office with a briefcase in one hand, and a large box I pushed with my feet along the hallway, I started hearing Frankie Avalon - no, really - music coming from an open classroom door. It got louder as I went, and when I got there and looked in, I saw my colleague, a pleasant and lovely woman of 50, dancing in the middle of her classroom with about 15 students.

The lights were off. Some industrial looking lights with colored plastic paper over the bulbs sat in the corners of the room. The music played out of some kind of boombox. The desks were all pushed to the sides of the room, and two folding tables were filled with Domino's pizza, silver trays of meatballs, crackers, cheese plates, a slow cooker filled with cheese, bowls of cut up vegetables.

Strung above the classroom was a long strip of paper with the words, "Dr. Xxxxxxx's Final Exam / Sock-Hop."

My colleague spotted me and waved me over to the door. She dislodged herself from the dancers and met me at the door in her stocking feet.

"Hi, Olivia," she said. "Come on in and have some food. We're celebrating the end of the semester."

I set my briefcase down, grabbed a toothpick which I speared through two meatballs and said, "Thanks. I've got  to do some work."

What am I doing wrong?

More on college readiness/success & graduation rates

This article caught my eye, in part because it appears to offer the beginnings of some actual, data-driven answers* to the questions we batted around in the comment thread of Frankie's post earlier this week.  The whole thing is worth a read, but here are some passages that struck me as especially relevant:

As more college students take on debt to finance their education, getting them to the finish line is critical. College graduates enjoy higher wages and lower unemployment rates, giving them a fighting chance of repaying student loans. And with four out of five black students borrowing for college, ensuring that they graduate could mean the difference between promoting economic mobility and exacerbating the racial wealth gap. 

Administrators at N.C. State found that students teetering on the edge of dropping out were mostly under financial, not academic, strain, so the school provided them with more institutional aid, a move that has disproportionately affected black students, according to Chancellor Randy Woodson. He said the university is also using data to track academic performance and intervene when students start falling behind.

All of this tallies with my experience (and with the experience of many of the commenters on the linked IHE article): admissions offices at institutions that are at least somewhat selective do a pretty good job, so most of our students are intellectually capable of graduating.  Some may have problems with things like study skills and time management, especially with larger projects, and some combination of faculty and academic support services can help them deal with those issues. Some may have mental health issues that become apparent or acute in the college years; those students, too, can be appropriately supported (and/or encouraged to take a brief leave to concentrate on self-care and stabilization of their condition -- not good for graduation rates, I suppose, but still the right thing to do in some cases). 

But many of the issues our students face are caused, or at least exacerbated, by the larger economic structures in which they, and we, are operating, and we just can't fix those from within the classroom, or even the university.  When a student is struggling academically because of outside pressures, no amount of academic intervention is going to help, though we can sometimes suggest strategies to minimize the damage; often, however, those strategies are going to include dropping some classes and/or taking a leave, which will run afoul of systems set up to minimize time to graduation -- which can be entirely well-intentioned, but still counterproductive if the goal is to make sure the student gets an actual education, not just a diploma.  

*Or maybe it raises some data-driven questions? This isn't my field of expertise, but it appears to me that the proposed answers are more speculative than the observed patterns, which do raise useful questions about what is going right at the institutions that are successfully graduating especially-vulnerable** students. 

**And "vulnerable" strikes me as the right word here, with the key included fact, mentioned above, that attending/trying to graduate from college can actually make people *more* vulnerable, by saddling them with loans that they can't discharge even in bankruptcy.  That's a key change from the "look to the right; look to the left" days, when the ratio of what a semester's tuition and living expenses cost to what a student could earn in a summer was lower. 

--Cassandra

Oh, hey, here's some misery...

The faculty union at Orange Coast College is squaring off against a student who shared a secret recording of a professor's in-class comments about Donald Trump on social media.

The recording starts mid-sentence; the professor was apparently responding to a student who asked her to her to "talk about how she felt" about the election.

The recording was published on Facebook, and a student group has now filed a formal complaint against the professor.

The student might be in trouble too; secretly recording the class was apparently a violation of the student code of conduct, the California Education Code, and the course syllabus.

The comment section is the usual parade of geniuses.

I'm just thankful that whatever my own misery, at least it doesn't include my unsatisfied customers students suddenly having a platform to complain about me on national news.

Frankie

I do my best scholarly work when I'm totally making stuff up

With Fab's gracious permission, I'm going to toot my own horn here.

Look over there in the sidebar

My first novel, The Musubi Murder, is finally out. It has lots of classic misery: plagiarizing students, corrupt donors, bottom-line-focused deans, and a powerful and a well-funded Office of Student Retention. Also murder.

The folks at Audible have provided some complimentary reviewer codes, and I'd like to give them away.

If you'd like a free audiobook from Audible.com, narrated by the amazing Nicole Gose, email me at frankie (at) frankiebow (dot) com so I can gift it to you. All you need is an Amazon login; no Audible subscription required.

Naturally, all characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Thanks to Fab and to the Miserians who have already downloaded the Kindle version. Now, back to your previously scheduled misery.

Today in Astonishing News That No One Could Have Predicted: Performance-based funding doesn't work.

Let's reward universities for improving their graduation rates. That'll get 'em moving. Right?

Universities in Pennsylvania did not produce more degrees even after operating under performance-based funding for nearly a decade, according to the report. Indiana schools also have failed to measurably boost degree production while at the same time becoming more selective and less diverse. And even after Tennessee ratcheted up financial incentives, universities there did not improve their graduation or retention rates, according to the paper.

In fact, 

States that tie higher education funding to performance have it all wrong, report says A new paper argues that performance-based funding models are reinforcing disparities within higher education and doing little to move the needle on completion. Thirty-two states have funding systems that allocate money to institutions based on performance measures. (Washington Post, May 26)

"Tying funding to performance favors state flagships and other well-heeled schools to the detriment of institutions that could use the most help, the report said."

What a surprise.  Institutions serving students who are not wealthy or well-prepared are at a disadvantage? It's almost as if "graduation from college can be predicted based on student characteristics known before they begin their studies."
But by all means, keep punishing institutions for things that are out of their control.  Because Accountability or something.
--Frankie

Thirsty: Peak CS?

I'm admittedly observing from a biased viewpoint, since most of my teaching load consists of  sections of Writing for Scientists, but it seems to me that more and more of my students are majoring in Computer Science (and, as I noted in a comment on Frankie's post below, they all seem to be obsessed with Big Data, though always with good intentions; whatever majors college students choose, a good many of them seem to have hopes of saving the world, as well as making some money, via the profession of their choice, which is both touching and encouraging.  They also remind each other regularly of the ethical issues involved in collecting data -- also encouraging).  In some ways, this makes sense; computers are, after all, essential to all kinds of activities these days, and my university has a growing engineering school (I suspect a lot of universities have growing engineering schools). 

But it still seems a bit unbalanced, even within the science realm, especially when I consider that 10-15 years ago everybody seemed to be going into nursing and other health professions (partly because of forecasts of a coming shortage of nurses,  which sounded ominously familiar to this possessor of a Ph.D. funded by people who projected a shortage of humanities Ph.D.s, and, from what I've heard, the nursing projections had similar outcomes -- the work was there, all right, but a lot of it got outsourced and/or rearranged so that lower-paid people could do more of it).  It's not as if the baby boomers got younger, or less in need of help/replacement, in the last decade+ (though the CS folks have solutions for that, too: those that aren't obsessed with Big Data are obsessed with self-driving cars -- which of course would be useful to seniors, though students always seem rather surprised when I point that out -- or robots, including care/assistance robots). 

And of course as a humanities proffie (albeit one who teaches almost exclusively gen ed classes), I'm aware of the declining number of humanities majors, even as I see occasional calls for people with the flexible skills built by pursuing such majors, and wonder if the pendulum might just swing our way one of these days (probably long after my retirement). 

But for the moment, I'm wondering whether others are seeing a rise in CS (or similar) majors, and/or see other cyclical patterns in choice of major?  If so, what do you think drives those cycles?  And do they serve students well, or just contribute to the number of un/underemployed, and so dissatisfied, investors in a college education (formerly known as college grads)? 

--Cassandra

Heroes and villains

Let's play "guess the other side of the story!" 

Recently, IHE's Confessions of a Community College Dean column presented a question from an anguished administrator who was worried that the math faculty were poised to "do tremendous and potentially irreversible harm to both students and the institution."

Irreversible harm? That sounds pretty dire, doesn't it? Almost unbelievable, in fact. 

Let's break this down:

Students at our community college struggle with math, a phenomenon common to many students, community college and otherwise.

Fair enough.

 Recently, our math faculty completely revamped the curriculum and implemented a new placement test (the latter with disastrous results and the exam was pulled). 

The placement test straighforwardly and accurately indicated that many students were not ready for college-level math. Administrators realized that the effect on their throughput and completion benchmarks would be "disastrous" and unilaterally put the kibosh on the math faculty's placement test.

Some of the parameters within the new curriculum are antithetical to student success.

Despite the setback of having their placement test yanked, the math department still refuses to hand out a passing grade and a trophy to every student.

 For example, in order to move from one 7-week class to the next, a student must pass an exit exam with a score of 70%. If she does not, she will earn a D or F in the course, regardless of her status prior to that test.

Competency-based assessment is all very well as long as students are not required to demonstrate actual competency.

Faculty own the curriculum; that point is never questioned. 

This AAUP-appeasing boilerplate must be repeated out loud every so often. It is about as meaningful as the corporate annual reports that proclaim, "our people are our greatest asset" right before trumpeting the cost savings realized by laying off thousands of workers.

However, what if the faculty decisions stand to do tremendous and potentially irreversible harm to both students and the institution? If other faculty approve the curricular changes in the shared governance process, what are the reasonable options that can also avoid irreparable damage to the relationship between faculty and administration?

"Shared governance" is all very well as long as faculty don't act like they own the curriculum.

Anyone have a more charitable interpretation? 

Frankie

Red Raiders Sweep Grand View. Women's Tennis.

Northwestern College picked up its second win of the season, sweeping Grand View 9-0 in a non-conference tennis match played today in Des Moines, Iowa. The Red Raiders improve to 2-4 on the year.

Singles:
1.Frankie Eszes (1-4) def. Kylar McCann, 6-0, 6-1
2.Terry Odera (1-4) def. Erica Sherman, 6-4, 3-6, 10-8
3.Daniela Lozano (3-2) def. Angela Sims, 6-1, 7-5
4.Valerie Robinson (3-3) def. Lauren Lightner, 6-3, 6-0
5.McKayla Johnson (3-3) def. Megan Hummel, 7-5, 6-0
6.Anna Haler (3-2) won by forfeit

Doubles:
1.Eszes/Odera (3-3) def. McCann/Lightner, 8-1
2.Lozano/Robinson (3-3) def. Hummel/Sherman, 8-3
3.Johnson/Haler (3-3) won by forfeit

Our robo-proffie replacements: What could possibly go wrong?

A robo-security guard in Palo Alto has run over a toddler, surprising everyone who thought it was a good idea to have an armed, 300-pound robot rolling around a suburban shopping mall. Happily, 16-month-old Harwin Cheng escaped serious injury. This is not the first recent robot malfunction:

Last month, a robot known as Promobot IR77 escaped from a lab in Perm, Russia where it stopped in the middle of a local street, causing a traffic jam. Then, even after being reprogrammed twice, continued to try to get away.

Now it's no secret that the Disruptariat is itching to replace us with robots.  Which brings me to today's writing prompt: How will the introduction of robo-proffies go hilariously, tragically, amiss?  ("Maybe the StaplerHands 3000 wasn't the best choice for our intro astronomy class...")

Frankie

Here, have a free audiobook. While supplies last.

The Case of the Defunct Adjunct audiobook is up now. You can hear a sample on the Audible page. 

If you'd like to listen to the rest of it, email me and I'll send you a code. (You can listen with free Audible software; you don't need a subscription.) 

Forced to attend the Student Retention Office's summer retreat, Professor Molly brings her game of buzzword bingo to fend off boredom. When a serial harasser collapses face-first into his haupia cheesecake, the event goes from dull to disastrous.

Now Molly has to fight to keep her best friend out of the worst kind of trouble — and herself off the unemployment line.

Frankie

So are those trips to the MAC counter tax-deductible now?

Once again, it pays to be pretty [1].

​Not only do more-attractive teachers get better evals, it seems their students pay closer attention and learn more:

Participants listened to an audio lecture while viewing a photograph of instructor. The photograph depicted either a physically attractive instructor or a less attractive instructor. Following the lecture, participants completed a forced choice recognition task covering material from the lecture. Consistent with the predictions; attractive instructors were associated with more learning.

Can't wait to see what this is this going to do to our professional-development curriculum. 

Frankie

[1] and male; an "unexpected" finding of the study was that the male instructors received better ratings than the female instructors, although the students' performance on the recall test did not differ by instructor gender. 

We all have secret stashes of Magic Teaching Dust and if we just agree to use it, everyone will graduate and get the top jobs and everything will be fine

So I just stumbled across yet another well-meaning (let's assume) article full of suggestions for "improving" college education in order to magically increase graduation rates.  Here's what the fresh thinkers at third way tell us we need:

Better Teaching & Supports: Every school with a graduation rate of less than 67% should develop and implement a plan to increase student completion, including improving classroom teaching by professors and adjuncts .

That's right, "improve" classroom teaching. Never mind how, exactly. Do we have to tell you everything? What's that, up to 87% of the variance in graduation rates is explained by the student, not the institution? Pfft. Show your fancy numbers to someone who cares.

Pell Floor: High-performing schools should be encouraged and incentivized to accept and educate far more low-income students.

Because accepting more low-income students will do wonders for graduation rates. That explains why top-tier universities insist on enrolling so many of them!

Open Data: We must end the opacity of college-specific outcomes data to help students, parents, and policymakers discern whether schools are succeeding or failing.

But not the kind of data that show that graduation rates can be reliably predicted by student characteristics.  Or the kind that show that where someone went to school explains only around 5 percent of the variation in their earnings  (p. 49). 

This article is from 2016. As is this one, damning nonselective public universities as "dropout factories" and demanding to know why, say, Alabama State University (average ACT 18) doesn't have the same graduation rate as UCSC (average ACT 27).  (Hey, guess what: No school with Alabama State's student academic profile has a 6 year graduation rate higher than 48%.)

I don't have some jar of Magical Teaching Dust hidden away, to be deployed only after I have been sufficiently hectored by fresh-thinking disruptopreneurs. I am already, believe it or not, doing my best. 

Here's an idea: How about disrupting poverty? 

- Frankie

In online classes, professors can't tell who's really doing the assignments.

Surprised? Yeah, me neither. 

"Joey" emailed that he needed someone to take a 10-week accelerated course in introductory psychology, and inquired if the company was prepared to handle all aspects of the class. The company would not only take the whole course for Joey, its representative said, but promised to earn him an A.

...

Hi. I'm Joey.
I'm putting my college degree
to good use.

Throughout the course, the professors used Turnitin and Googled students' work to check for plagiarism. They also monitored the time that students spent completing their tests to see if groups of students were taking exams at the same time.

In the end, the professors caught several students plagiarizing material. But they did not detect that Joey Sanchez was a fraud. Both instructors gave him an A in the class.

"I certainly did not feel that 'Joey' was being 'run' by a cheating company," Mr. Malesky wrote in the paper. "If anything, Joey struck me as a conscientious and motivated student who wanted to get as much out of the course as possible."

...

"Instructors such as myself," Crow wrote, "may be ignorant to the fact that it is possible for an entire course to be completed covertly by a paid impostor."  

The article is paywalled, but this link should work for a few hours. 

Frankie

It's now officially "scholarship that counts"

Thinking about attending MSUM? Tell us why you'd like to #BeADragon and you can win up to a $2,500 scholarship! That's in ADDITION to any other MSUM scholarships that you qualify for. Enter by tweeting why you want to #BeADragon and follow@AdmissionsMSUM. Entries will be judged on how creatively you include Dragon Pride as you explain why you wish to #BeADragon. The tweet can include pictures and links to video and other media.

https://www.mnstate.edu/beadragon/

I think this isn't so much a sign of the End Times as it is a clever way to get a lot of social media buzz in return for a small investment. 

Although I am warming up my thumbs just in case grant applications start going this way. 

Frankie