Our Under Achieving Colleges
Bok's Dark View of the Sad State of Learning in Higher Education

What are the big faculty cat fights all about?

Online Distance Education Is Rapidly Gaining Acceptance

A Guide on How to Be an Online Student and Survive in the Attempt

"The Overworked College Administrator," by Barbara Mainwaring, Inside Higher Ed, August 10, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/08/10/mainwaring
How can teachers/researchers gain collegiate administrative skills?
Many professors worry that colleges these days prefer a professional class of administrators to promoting faculty members. In turn, many administrators complain that faculty members — however good at their teaching and research — may lack key skills for more responsibility. A new program at Simmons College — one of six master’s institutions receiving grants Tuesday to promote “faculty career flexibility” — aims to provide professors with a path to pick up administrative skills, without just adding on to their workloads. The grants are being awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which last year awarded similar grants to research universities.
Scott Jaschik, "Promoting Career Flexibility," Inside Higher Ed, January 30, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/30/sloan

Foreign Students Pour Back Into the U.S.

Dating Students May Be Roommates in Dorms

Student Engagement

Student Partying Controversies
How should administrators handle student-sponsored events that feature alcohol?
Or, for that matter, half-naked partygoers dressed in caution tape?

Unacceptable Dropout Rates

Sex and the Modern Language Association Academic Conferences

Teaching Excellence Secondary to Research for Promotion, Tenure, and Pay

Teaching Evaluations and RateMyProfessor

Smile Professor, You're on Candid Camera

Does faculty research improve student learning in the classrooms where researchers teach?
Put another way, is research more important than scholarship that does not contribute to new knowledge?

Do we want the Shotgun Game to be so dominant in academic research?

How much tenure credit should be given to micro-level research?

How should credit to co-authors (joint authors) be granted in tenure and performance evaluations?

Privatization Issues 

Endowment Funds and Accounting Controversies

Issues in Computing a College's Cost of Degrees Awarded

Supplemental fees for excellence
A rose by any other name is , ... , ah er , ... a required supplemental enhancement charge

Financial and Academic Lack of Accountability and Conflicts of Interest

Study Abroad Conflict of Interest Fraud
What students and their parents should, but probably don't, know about study abroad programS
Questions about globalization of business schools

Professors and Colleges Skating on the Edge of Questionable Ethics

Colleges throw rocks at students who cheat
Colleges throw powder puffs at professors who cheat
Professors Who Cheat --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize

Liberal Bias in the Media and in Academe

Are we Overworking Our Graduate Teaching Assistants?

Admissions and Financial Aid Controversies: Grades are Even Worse Than Tests as Predictors of Success 
Bound to Fail
We need to get serious about creating universities that are actually designed to educate undergraduates successfully

Too Much Need for Remedial Learning in College, Too Little Success

Pre-collegiate Remedial Studies

Paying for Improved SAT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, TOEFL and Other Qualifying Test Scores

Note to College Presidents:  We've got kickback ethics problems right here in River City!

Full Disclosure to Consumers of Higher Education?

Academic Calendar Issues (it's more than just quarters versus semesters)

Professors Who Cheat --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize

Students Who Cheat --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

In terms of earnings expectations, should a black student graduate from a historically black college or another college?

Some Doctoral Programs Are in Need of Big Change  

The New European Three Year Plan for Undergraduate Degrees

Nontraditional and Online Doctoral Degree Programs: Some With No Courses

Students may take the easiest way out in customizable curricula

Are Elite Universities Losing Their Competitive Edge? 

Was Earning That Harvard M.B.A. Worth It?

What's it really like to be the president of a university?

How can you ruin a student's career and maybe her/his life on a discussion board?

Debates Over the Limits of Academic Freedom

When Professors Can't Get Along

A Call for Professional Attire on Campus

U.S. Supreme Court Speaks Out About Religion on Campus

Controversies in Doctoral and Other Graduate Programs (more clinical studies possible?)

Are American Scientists an Endangered Species?

An Internet Casualty:  The Losing Research Edge of Elite Universities

Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education 

Authoring and Faculty Ethics or Lack Thereof

Issues in Information Technology on Campus

Teaching Without Textbooks

Accreditation: Why We Must Change --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Colleges On the Far, Far Left Are Having a Difficult Time With Finances and Accreditation

Peer Review in Which Reviewer Comments are Shared With the World

Flawed Peer Review Process

Elite Researchers No Longer Need Peer Reviewed Elite Journals

Rethinking Tenure, Dissertations, and Scholarship
Academic Publishing in the Digital Age

Obsolete and Dysfunctional System of Tenure
Over 62% of Full-Time Faculty Are Off the Tenure Track

Inexorable March to a Part-Time Faculty

Political Correctness and Other Academic Freedom Issues
Intellectuals, Free speech, and Capitalism
Political Correctness, Free Speech and Academic Freedom:
How Unsafe Are Horowitz's 101 Most Dangerous Professors?

Does a professor have more freedom of speech than any employee?

Liberals Debate Political Islam

The Politically Correct Fracture of Academe (including sponsored boycotts of some professors)

Ethics Centers in Universities Devote Scant Attention to Ethics Breaches in Their Own Houses

What type of alumni gifts to colleges are just not politically correct?

The Politically Correct Fracture of Harvard University (including the gender gap in science)

Salary Compression, Inversion, and Controversies
How you can compare living costs between any two college towns in the U.S.?

Gender Differences versus Discipline Differences in Salaries

Non-salary Controversies

Rethinking the Roles of Spouses of College Executives

Debates on Size:  Pomona College, Amherst, and Some Other Small Colleges Plan to Grow in Size

Debates on Unionization of Faculty and Graduate Assistants

New Critique of Teacher Ed

Do we need revolutionary changes in Economics 101? 

Do we need revolutionary changes in Government 101?

Do we need huge changes in J-Schools and B-Schools?

Some Business Schools No Longer Have Silo Core Courses

New, Albeit Shaky, Partnership Forming Between Professors and the FBI

Elite colleges are for the rich and the poor and selected minorities,
but less and less for middle income families

Fraternity and Sorority Controversies

College Dating/Marrying Ain't What It Used to Be Many Long Years Ago

Athletics Controversies in Colleges 

On the Dark Side of the Higher Education Academy:
Generation Gaps, Collegial Apathy or Hostility, and Loneliness

How much would you charge to help restore the tarnished image of a CEO you never knew?

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of distance learning and education technology are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

Incredible shrinking men in higher education: 
The problem is not just a shortage of black male applicants

Declining Rate of Growth

The Eroding Faculty Paycheck

Universities may not provide commissions or other success-based rewards to student admissions officials

Controversial Issues in Affirmative Action Hiring and Pay Raises

Controversial Issues in Affirmative Action and Academic Standards

Pre-collegiate Remedial Studies

Too Much Need for Remedial Learning in College

Graduation Trends

Why are blacks and latinos avoiding teacher education majors?

The Controversial Top Ten Percent (10 Percent) Law

Controversial Issues in Silver Spoon Admissions and Academic Standards

Controversial Issues in Affirmative Action Preferences for Gay Students

Controversial Issues of the Study Abroad (International Studies) Curriculum

Dealing With Disturbed and Possibly Dangerous Students

Engineering Programs Facing Up to Possible Requirements for Masters Degrees
Accounting Programs Were Forced to Do This Via Newly-Enacted State Laws for CPA Licensure

Many Professors Oppose Free Open Sharing of Research

Some Disciplines, Especially in Business Research, Do Not Encourage Replication

Appearance Versus Reality of Trustee/School Kickbacks

Appearance Versus the Reality of Research Independence and Freedom

Appearance Versus Reality in Church Dogma and Education Integrity

College Ranking Issues in the Media 

Journal and School Ranking Controversies and Eigenfactor Scores

Paying More for a Lower-Ranked University: Where What You Pay is Supposed to Mean Prestige

Commission on the Future of Higher Education Final Report: 
The National Education Database and College Assessment Controversy

Earmarked research funding

The Decline of the Secular University

Too Many Law Schools

Residence Hall and Fraternity/Sorority House Fires a Growing Threat

Executives' accountability and responsibility?

Prestige Competition from U.K. Universities:  "Who Needs Harvard or Yale?"

Since the Virginia Tech massacre are college instructors more at risk?

Are college students good surrogates for real life studies?

How can you protect your work in progress and finished works on your computer?
Why are some of these alternatives problematic for your college and/or your employer?

Long Deferred Campus Maintenance:  Crumbling Buildings and Stadiums

What is the best method of peer review?
Is it truly a value-adding process?
What are the ethical concerns?
And how can new technology be used to improve traditional models?

Differences between "popular teacher"
versus "master teacher"
versus "mastery learning"
versus "master educator"

Bob Jensen's threads on Cognitive Processes and Artificial Intelligence are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#CognitiveProcesses

In an educational system strapped for money and increasingly ruled by standardized tests, arts courses can seem almost a needless extravagance, and the arts are being cut back at schools across the country

Miscellaneous Tidbits

Social Networking for Education:  The Beautiful and the Ugly
(including Google's Wave and Orcut for Social Networking and some education uses of Twitter)
Updates will be at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm

Education Tutorials

Free Images from the U.S. Government --- http://rastervector.com/resources/free/free.html

Free Federal Resources in Various Disciplines --- http://www.free.ed.gov/

Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch

"U. of Manitoba Researchers Publish Open-Source Handbook on Educational Technology," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 19, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3671&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Technology is changing the way students learn. Is it changing the way colleges teach?

Not enough, says George Siemens, associate director of research and development at the University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre.

While colleges and universities have been “fairly aggressive” in adapting their curricula to the changing world, Mr. Siemens told The Chronicle, “What we haven’t done very well in the last few decades is altering our pedagogy.”

To help get colleges thinking about how they might adapt their teaching styles to the new ways students absorb and process information, Mr. Siemens and Peter Tittenberger, director of the center, have created a Web-based guide, called the Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning.

Taking their own advice, they have outfitted the handbook with a wiki function that will allow readers to contribute their own additions.

In the its introduction, the handbook declares the old pedagogical model—where the students draw their information primarily from textbooks, newspapers, and their professors—dead. “Our learning and information acquisition is a mash-up,” the authors write. “We take pieces, add pieces, dialogue, reframe, rethink, connect, and ultimately, we end up with some type of pattern that symbolizes what’s happening ‘out there’ and what it means to us.” Students are forced to develop new ways of making sense of this flood of information fragments.

But Mr. Siemens said that colleges had been slow to appreciate this fact. “I don’t see a lot of research coming out on what universities might look like in the future,” he said. “If how we interact with information and with each other fundamentally changes, it would suggest that the institution also needs to change.”

Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning ---
http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wikis/etl/index.php/Handbook_of_Emerging_Technologies_for_Learning

Preface

This Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning (HETL) has been designed as a resource for educators planning to incorporate technologies in their teaching and learning activities.

Introduction

How is education to fulfill its societal role of clarifying confusion when tools of control over information creation and dissemination rest in the hands of learners[3], contributing to the growing complexity and confusion of information abundance?

Change Pressures and Trends

Global, political, social, technological, and educational change pressures are disrupting the traditional role (and possibly design) of universities. Higher education faces a "re-balancing" in response to growing points of tension along the following fault lines...

What we know about learning

Over the last century, educator’s understanding of the process and act of learning has advanced considerably.

Technology, Teaching, and Learning

Technology is concerned with "designing aids and tools to perfect the mind". As a means of extending the sometimes limited reach of humanity, technology has been prominent in communication and learning. Technology has also played a role in classrooms through the use of movies, recorded video lectures, and overhead projectors. Emerging technology use is growing in communication and in creating, sharing, and interacting around content.

Media and technology

A transition from epistemology (knowledge) to ontology (being) suggests media and technology need to be employed to serve in the development of learners capable of participating in complex environments.

Change cycles and future patterns

It is not uncommon for theorists and thinkers to declare some variation of the theme "change is the only constant". Surprisingly, in an era where change is prominent, change itself has not been developed as a field of study. Why do systems change? Why do entire societies move from one governing philosophy to another? How does change occur within universities?

New Learners? New Educators? New Skills?

New literacies (based on abundance of information and the significant changes brought about technology) are needed. Rather than conceiving literacy as a singular concept, a multi-literacy view is warranted.

Tools

Each tool possesses multiple affordances. Blogs, for example, can be used for personal reflection and interaction. Wikis are well suited for collaborative work and brainstorming. Social networks tools are effective for the formation of learning and social networks. Matching affordances of a particular tool with learning activities is an important design and teaching activity

Research

Evaluating the effectiveness of technology use in teaching and learning brings to mind Albert Einstein’s statement: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted". When we begin to consider the impact and effectiveness of technology in the teaching and learning process, obvious questions arise: "How do we measure effectiveness? Is it time spent in a classroom? Is it a function of test scores? Is it about learning? Or understanding?"

Conclusion

Through a process of active experimentation, the academy’s role in society will emerge as a prominent sensemaking and knowledge expansion institution, reflecting of the needs of learners and society while maintaining its role as a transformative agent in pursuit of humanity’s highest ideals.

 

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

From the University of Michigan
National Clearinghouse on Academic Worklife --- http://www.academicworklife.org/

Today, college and university faculty members face many challenges, including an increasingly diverse workforce and new models for career flexibility. The National Clearinghouse on Academic Worklife (NCAW) provides resources to help faculty, graduate students, administrators and higher education researchers understand more about all aspects of modern academic work and related career issues, including tenure track and non tenure track appointments, benefits, climate and satisfaction, work/life balance, and policy development.

Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The Master List of Free Online College Courses --- http://universitiesandcolleges.org/

Colleges, Accreditors Seek Better Ways to Measure Learning
Assessment/Learning Issues: Measurement and the No-Significant Differences --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#AssessmentIssues

Education at a Glance 2007 (Comparisons Across Nations) --- http://www.oecd.org/document/30/0,3343,en_2649_39263294_39251550_1_1_1_1,00.html

Bob Jensen's threads on oligopoly textbook publisher frauds are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ScholarlyJournals

Academic Conferences that Rip Off Colleges --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#AcademicConferences

Effort Reporting Technology for Higher Education ---
http://www.huronconsultinggroup.com/uploadedFiles/ECRT_email.pdf

Assessment of Learning Achievements of College Graduates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#AdmissionTesting

Work Experience Substitutes for College Credits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#WorkExperience

Has positivism had a negativism impact on research in the social sciences, business, accounting, and finance? --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on teaching evaluation controversies and grade inflation --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

Study says B-schoolers (at the graduate level) are more likely to cheat than other students.
Now administrators are fighting back --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#MBAs

Bob Jensen's threads on course evaluations and grade inflation are at
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/07/28/caesar

Bob Jensen's threads on teaching evaluations and learning styles are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#LearningStyles

Bob Jensen's threads on controversies in assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating and plagiarism ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on technology controversies in education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on classroom, building, and campus design are in a module at  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of distance learning and education technology are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on Hypocrisy in Academia and the Media ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Hypocrisy.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on Cognitive Processes and Artificial Intelligence are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#CognitiveProcesses

Bob Jensen's advice to new faculty --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on fraud --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm

Ten Largest Universities in the United States

Rank	Institution	Location	Founded	Affiliation	Enrollment
1	Allama Iqbal Open University	Islamabad, Pakistan	1974	Public	1.9 million
2	Indira Gandhi National Open University	New Delhi, India	1985	Public	1.8 million
3	Islamic Azad University	Tehran, Iran	1982	Private	1.3 million
4	Anadolu University	Eskişehir, Turkey	1982	Public	884,081
5	Bangladesh National University	Gazipur, Bangladesh	1992	Public	800,000
6	Bangladesh Open University	Gazipur, Bangladesh	1992	Public	600,000
7	Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Open University	Andhra Pradesh, India	1982	Public	450,000
8	State University of New York	New York, United States	1948	Public	418,000
9	California State University	California, United States	1857	Public	417,000
10	University System of Ohio	Ohio, United States	2007	Public	400,000+
11	University of Delhi	New Delhi, India	1922	Public	400,000
12	Universitas Terbuka	Jakarta, Indonesia	1984	Public	350,000
13	Universidad de Buenos Aires	Buenos Aires, Argentina	1821	Public	316,050
14	State University System of Florida	Florida, United States	1905	Public	301,570 (2008)
15	Osmania University	Hyderabad, India	1918	Public	300,000 [
16	Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University	Nashik, India	1989	Public	300,000
17	National Autonomous University of Mexico	Mexico City, Mexico	1551	Public	290,000 (Aug 14th, 2006)
18	Tribhuvan University	Kirtipur, Nepal	1959	Public	272,746
19	University of South Africa	Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa	1873	Public	250,000
20	Instituto Politecnico Nacional	Mexico City, Mexico	1936	Public	229,070

Data are provided for 51 universities  --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_largest_universities

Size Matters (Video) --- http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=FqfunyCeU5g
Otherwise entitled "Shift Happens"

Even the Top Ranked Business Schools are in a Crisis in 2008 (including a slide show) --- http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/08_47/B4109best_business_schools.htm
Applications for MBA programs are up, but job opportunities for second-year students in finance or consulting have turned wretched.
The scary part is that it will be a long, long time before finance and economics students will have rising opportunities.

But accounting students fair well in rain or shine --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/accountingstudents.xml

Bob Jensen's threads on careers --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers

Bob Jensen’s threads on the financial markets meltdown --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm

Definition of Millenials (Generation Y or Net Generation) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials

"The Millennials Invade the B-Schools:  They're pursuing MBAs to change the world, but first they're forcing business schools to make changes in order to accommodate them," Business Week, November 13, 2008 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_47/b4109046025427.htm?link_position=link2

Top Global Business Schools According to Business Week --- http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_43/b4006014.htm

Slide Show --- Click Here
The 15 business schools included here are strong contenders among the world's top MBA programs, but lower marks keep them just shy of the top tier

Top European Business Schools According the Business Week --- http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/europe/special_reports/03/31/2008europeanb-s.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings

Controversies in College Rankings --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings

Grade Inflation and Dysfunctional Teaching Evaluations (the biggest scandal in higher education)

College is about having a career after high school, after college, so you want students to understand the material and not just get good grades in class. I feel like it’d be better for the students to actually understand the material and for the teachers to change their teaching so that the students get a real understanding.
Student, Los Medanos College

"Dumbest Generation Getting Dumber," by Walter E. Williams, Townhall, June 3, 2009 --- http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/06/03/dumbest_generation_getting_dumber 

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international comparison of 15-year-olds conducted by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that measures applied learning and problem-solving ability. In 2006, U.S. students ranked 25th of 30 advanced nations in math and 24th in science. McKinsey & Company, in releasing its report "The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools" (April 2009) said, "Several other facts paint a worrisome picture.

First, the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers. In recent cross-country comparisons of fourth grade reading, math, and science, US students scored in the top quarter or top half of advanced nations. By age 15 these rankings drop to the bottom half. In other words, American students are farthest behind just as they are about to enter higher education or the workforce." That's a sobering thought. The longer kids are in school and the more money we spend on them, the further behind they get.

While the academic performance of white students is grossly inferior, that of black and Latino students is a national disgrace. The McKinsey report says, "On average, black and Latino students are roughly two to three years of learning behind white students of the same age. This racial gap exists regardless of how it is measured, including both achievement (e.g., test score) and attainment (e.g., graduation rate) measures. Taking the average National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores for math and reading across the fourth and eighth grades, for example, 48 percent of blacks and 43 percent of Latinos are 'below basic,' while only 17 percent of whites are, and this gap exists in every state. A more pronounced racial achievement gap exists in most large urban school districts." Below basic is the category the NAEP uses for students unable to display even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at their grade level.

The teaching establishment and politicians have hoodwinked taxpayers into believing that more money is needed to improve education. The Washington, D.C., school budget is about the nation's costliest, spending about $15,000 per pupil. Its student/teacher ratio, at 15.2 to 1, is lower than the nation's average. Yet student achievement is just about the lowest in the nation. What's so callous about the Washington situation is about 1,700 children in kindergarten through 12th grade receive the $7,500 annual scholarships in order to escape rotten D.C. public schools, and four times as many apply for the scholarships, yet Congress, beholden to the education establishment, will end funding the school voucher program.

Any long-term solution to our education problems requires the decentralization that can come from competition. Centralization has been massive. In 1930, there were 119,000 school districts across the U.S; today, there are less than 15,000. Control has moved from local communities to the school district, to the state, and to the federal government. Public education has become a highly centralized government-backed monopoly and we shouldn't be surprised by the results. It's a no-brainer that the areas of our lives with the greatest innovation, tailoring of services to individual wants and falling prices are the areas where there is ruthless competition such as computers, food, telephone and clothing industries, and delivery companies such as UPS, Federal Express and electronic bill payments that have begun to undermine the postal monopoly in first-class mail.

At a Washington press conference launching the McKinsey report, Al Sharpton called school reform the civil rights challenge of our time. He said that the enemy of opportunity for blacks in the U.S. was once Jim Crow; today, in a slap at the educational establishment, he said it was "Professor James Crow." Sharpton is only partly correct. School reform is not solely a racial issue; it's a vital issue for the entire nation.

"Listening to Students About Learning," by Andrea Conklin Bueschel, The Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching of Community Colleges, 2008 ---  http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/dynamic/publications/elibrary_pdf_737.pdf

Students get it. By the time they get to college, they know a good deal about education. They know that grades do not always reflect “real understanding.” They know that not every class is the same and that not all teachers teach the same way. They know that students learn in different ways, and they understand that how teachers teach has very real consequences for their future. They understand that they have a role in their own success.

Students who come to college underprepared are especially attuned to these realities. Recent reports from education researchers and in the mainstream media point to how few of the growing numbers of students entering college underprepared move successfully through the system. But students do not need reports and headlines to understand how much learning matters and how elusive success can be. For them the challenge is personal and immediate: if they can’t get the education they need, then they can’t get a job that pays the rent, read the rental lease, or calculate the monthly budget. If they don’t succeed, there are real consequences—for them as individuals and for all of us as a society. This problem is not just one of depressing statistics, but of people whose life chances rise or fall depending on their performance in our community colleges.

Too often, community college students taking basic skills classes have been exposed throughout their earlier schooling to the same material taught in the same way multiple times with unsuccessful results (see, for example, Grubb and Associates, 1999). Their knowledge tends to be precarious, and often they haven’t mastered the art of being a good student, let alone content knowledge.

The chances of failure are high indeed. There are many approaches to this challenge. Often discussions of community colleges—and the many underprepared students who attend them—focus on financial aid policies, student background, and support services of various kinds. Real gains have been made by focusing on these non-instructional or extracurricular aspects of students’ lives.

In addition to addressing these factors, however, there is much to be gained from a focus on the classroom itself, especially in the pre-collegiate (developmental or basic skills) courses that are supposed to prepare students for college-level work.1 In particular, this essay focuses on how listening to students talk about learning can help them become more active partners in their own education, more engaged in the classroom, and better positioned to succeed. A large literature on adult learning supports the value of student engagement and partnership, insights that were brought home in a recent project undertaken with 11 California community colleges sponsored by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Faculty who participated in the Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC) project, used technology, different class structures, learning communities, lab components, and supplemental instruction to help developmental students master material they had struggled with in the past. At the same time, these teachers of precollegiate English and mathematics used a variety of strategies to become better observers of student learning and help students themselves become more aware of their needs as learners.

Perhaps the most common message from our interviews with SPECC students (like the young woman quoted at the beginning of this essay) is that students care about their educational experiences.2 In many cases, students didn’t think about how their classes were taught until they saw a teacher do something different from traditional instruction (especially lecture format). Once they were exposed to different practices and styles—whether group work, different technology, or new types of assessment—they felt more confident about articulating what helped them learn best. Not only can innovations in teaching improve students’ mastery of content, they can also make students better learners. Perhaps the most important message is that teachers can accomplish a great deal when they treat students as valuable partners in improving teaching and learning.

Continued in article

When all the grades are above average

"Grade Inflation Seen Rising," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, March 12, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/12/grades

A professor who has crusaded against grade inflation by gathering and publicizing data has released his largest analysis to date -- suggesting that grade inflation continues to be a broad problem across much of higher education. The figures may embarrass some colleges and renew a debate over whether students experience enough rigor.

The new analysis found that the average grade-point average at private colleges rose from 3.09 in 1991 to 3.30 in 2006. At public colleges and universities, the increase was from 2.85 to 3.01 over the same time period. The study also examines -- and seek to refute -- the idea that students are earning better grades simply because they are better prepared. The greatest increases in grades appear to be coming at flagship public universities in the South and at selective liberal arts colleges.

The study was done by Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who created GradeInflation.com to document these trends. For this study, he significantly expanded the numbers of institutions examined, and the time frame.

In addition, Rojstaczer says that his new study shows that it is possible to tame grade inflation. He finds that Princeton University has largely done so -- by making an issue of grades and encouraging professors to give a broader distribution of grades. Further, he finds that there is one sector that has held the line against inflated grades: community colleges.

Rojstaczer's findings will likely resonate with professors, many of whom regularly bemoan grade inflation and say that students are conditioned to expect good grades just for showing up, and that professors who refuse to go along get punished with harsh course evaluations. Many professors who are off the tenure track or who are pre-tenure report great fear of being punished by students (and then not rehired) if they gain a reputation for tough grading, and studies have found correlations between being an easy grader and earning good ratings at RateMyProfessors.com. But other researchers question this study and conventional wisdom and say that reports of grade inflation are themselves inflated.

Various professors start campaigns against grade inflation, but Rojstaczer has stuck with the issue. He gained national attention in 2003 with an op-ed in The Washington Post called "Where All Grades Are Above Average," an article in which he confessed to having let two years pass without awarding a C. The Web site followed, but the new data represent more colleges than ever before and come after several years in which he didn't update the statistics.

In an interview, he said that he releases this information because he believes that not much more is really needed to tackle grade inflation. "People say this issue is complicated and difficult. It really isn't. It's incredibly simple," he said. "You get so fat that it effects your health. You lose weight. I really don't see all the problems in reducing GPAs that everyone else seems to see."

He noted that once Princeton deans said that the issue mattered and encouraged tougher grading, there was a significant change. "How difficult is this?" Rojstaczer asked. Other colleges and universities have seen the opposite trend. At Brown University last year was the first time, for example, a majority of undergraduate grades were A's, up from 42.5 percent a decade earlier.

The issue matters, Rojstaczer said, because "the alternative is a student body that frequently misses class, never prepares in advance, studies about 11 hours a week if they are 'full time' students, and drinks itself into a constant stupor out of boredom. That's not an acceptable alternative anywhere."

Clifford Adelman, a senior analyst at the Institute for Higher Education Policy and a leading education researcher, has conducted extensive studies of grades and degrees, using national data sets, and he believes that grade inflation is marginal -- and that the issue receives far too much attention. (Adelman has criticized the quality of Rojstaczer's past work, and Rojstaczer has in turn been critical of the critique.)

"If grade inflation is so rampant, how come at least a third of kids who start in four-year colleges don't graduate?" Adelman asked.

"My point is not that there is no grade inflation, rather that inflation in the judgment of human performance is something that cannot be proved," he said. In many cases, he said, there is a far more significant shift going on that gets missed in the discussion of grade inflation. "A significant proportion of grades that are not really grades" are being given, Adelman said, as students and professor embrace "alternative signs of student academic behavior" in a way that "devalues grading."

Added Adelman: "I see grade devaluation as a more serious problem for a variety of reasons that Stuart would never consider, but that academic administrators and enrollment managers everywhere instantly understand when the trend is pointed out." Adelman said that he stands by his earlier work, based on national data, that there is not a national surge in grades.

Community College Standards

Rojstaczer's work focuses on four-year institutions, and most of his criticisms relate to traditional college age students. But he notes in his new report that data from community colleges suggest that professors in that sector have been getting tougher in recent years, and have never abandoned the C. Rojstaczer had data from the entire California Community College system (the largest in the United States) and selected other community colleges -- and he found none of the patterns that bothered him in the four-year sector.

Michael R. Chipps, president of Mid-Plains Community College in Nebraska, said his institution and other community colleges take grades seriously for a number of reasons. One is that community colleges use grades to track how their students do when they transfer to four-year institutions (and he noted that many community college graduates perform better than students who started at four-year institutions). In addition, he noted that because community colleges admit students with a range of academic backgrounds, accurate assessment is seen as important to help students enter the best possible programs and to track their progress.

"Community colleges want the rigor to be sufficient, so that our students can not only prosper in the world of work, but seriously compete with students at the senior level institutions," Chipps said.

At a reception for college composition instructors Wednesday night in San Francisco, professors from community colleges were not surprised that grade inflation seemed less present at their institutions than at four-year institutions -- and they were proud of their standards too.

Sandie McGill Barnhouse, chair of the Two-Year College English Association, who teaches at Rowan Cabarrus Community College, said that community college professors see it as part of their missions to teach students of a "diversity of entering skills," so there is no assumption that everyone in the class will do well. She said that many community college students haven't had great high school experiences and so aren't those demanding an A on everything.

Sharon Mitchler, associate professor of English and humanities at Centralia College, a community college in Washington State, said that she thinks grading at community colleges may be more honest because that's the way students want it. Her students, she said, are focused on how improving their writing will help them professionally, and they want to see that the course will give them new skills they can use, not a letter grade.

"If I gave out all A's, my classes would think I'd lost my mind," she said.

Most Students in Remedial Classes in College Had Solid Grades in High School
Nearly four out of five students who undergo remediation in college graduated from high school with grade-point averages of 3.0 or higher, according to a report issued today by Strong American Schools, a group that advocates making public-school education more rigorous.
Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/5145/most-students-in-remedial-classes-in-college-had-solid-grades-in-high-school-survey-finds

The investigation revealed that 91 percent of Harvard's students graduated cum laude.
Thomas Bartlett and Paula Wasley, "Just Say 'A': Grade Inflation Undergoes Reality Check:  The notion of a decline in standards draws crusaders and skeptics," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i02/02a00104.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

Question
If median grades for each course are made publically available on the Internet, will students seek out the high grade average or low grade average courses?
Examples of such postings at Cornell University are at http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/Student/mediangradesA.html

Hypothesis 1
Students will seek out the lower grade average courses/sections thinking that they have a better chance to compete for high grades.

Hypothesis 2
Students will seek out the higher grade average courses/sections thinking that particular instructors are easier graders.

However, when Cornell researchers studied about 800,000 course grades issued at Cornell from 1990 to 2004, they found that most students visited the site to shop for classes where the median grade was higher. Plus, professors who tended to give out higher grades were more popular. Students with lower SAT scores were the most likely to seek out courses with higher median grades.
"Easy A's on the Internet:  A surprising Cornell experiment in posting grades; plus a look at recent research into ethical behavior, service charges, and volunteer habits," by Francesca Di Meglio, Business Week, December 11, 2007 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/dec2007/bs20071211_885308.htm?link_position=link2 

In a striking example of unintended consequences, a move by Cornell University to give context to student grades by publicly posting median grades for courses has resulted in exactly the opposite student behavior than anticipated.

Cornell's College of Arts & Sciences originally set up a Web site in 1997 where median grades were posted, with the intention of also printing median class grades alongside the grade the student actually received in the course on his or her permanent transcript. Administrators thought students would use the information on the Web site to seek out classes with lower median grades—because, they reasoned, an A in a class that has a median grade of B-minus would be more meaningful than say, an A in a course where the median was A-plus.

Course Shopping Leads to Grade Inflation

However, when Cornell researchers studied about 800,000 course grades issued at Cornell from 1990 to 2004, they found that most students visited the site to shop for classes where the median grade was higher. Plus, professors who tended to give out higher grades were more popular. Students with lower SAT scores were the most likely to seek out courses with higher median grades.

This "shopping" in turn led to grade inflation, Vrinda Kadiyali, associate professor of marketing and economics at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management, one of the authors, explained in an interview. The study, which is undergoing peer review, has not yet been published.

So far, however, the university has posted the median course grades only on the Internet and has not yet put those grades on transcripts. According to an article in the Cornell Daily Sun, the school will start posting the grades on transcripts in the spring. School officials were not immediately available for comment.

The research team hopes the school follows through on its plans. "That will allow Cornell to hold itself to a higher standard because it lets potential employers know where students stand relevant to other students," says Kadiyali.

The presence of the median grade data is well-known to students but less well-known to faculty. The researchers themselves were prompted to do the study when one of them learned of the Web site from a student questioning grades in her course.

Kadiyali says the formula the researchers used to come to these conclusions could easily be applied to Internet teacher rating sites, such as ratemyprofessors.com. It's something educators should consider, she adds, to find out how these posts affect the decision-making of students and, thus, professors and their courses.

Jensen Comment
The problem is that, in modern times, grades are the keys to the kingdom (i.e., keys unlocking the gates of graduate studies and professional careers) such that higher grades rather than education tend to become the main student goals. A hundred years ago, just getting a degree could open postgraduate gates in life because such a small proportion of the population got college diplomas. With higher percentages of the population getting college diplomas, high grades became keys to the kingdom. In many colleges a C grade is viewed as very nearly a failing grade.

At the same time, formal teaching evaluations and teacher rating sites like ratemyprofessors.com have led to marked grade inflation in virtually all colleges. The median grades are often A, A-, B+, or B. The poor student's C grade is way below average. Just take a look at these course medians from Cornell University --- http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/Grades/MedianGradeSP07.pdf

Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation and dysfunctional teaching evaluations are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation

The investigation revealed that 91 percent of Harvard's students graduated cum laude.
Thomas Bartlett and Paula Wasley, "Just Say 'A': Grade Inflation Undergoes Reality Check:  The notion of a decline in standards draws crusaders and skeptics," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i02/02a00104.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

"Just Say 'A': Grade Inflation Undergoes Reality Check:  The notion of a decline in standards draws crusaders and skeptics," by Thomas Bartlett and Paula Wasley, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i02/02a00104.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

Does Florida State University have a grade-inflation problem?

The numbers are certainly suspicious. A decade ago, only 19 percent of the students who took an oceanography class earned A's. Last fall it was 57 percent.

Or take mathematics. Ten years ago, 27 percent of math students at Florida State failed. Last fall it was 10 percent. With a few exceptions, the same trend holds in other departments.

But what does that mean? At the provost's request, a committee of deans is trying to figure out why grades have gone up and what, if anything, should be done about it.

Grade inflation is among the oldest and thorniest problems in higher education. In 1894 a committee at Harvard University reported that A's and B's were awarded "too readily." But after more than a century of fulmination, there is little agreement on the cause or how to fix it.

There is even contentious debate about whether the phenomenon of grade inflation exists at all. It is the question at the center of a new collection of essays, Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education (State University of New York Press).

Those who believe that grade inflation exists say that when colleges do try to hold grades in check or make professors accountable, they usually fail.

Among the contributors to the new volume is Mary Biggs, an English professor at the College of New Jersey, who sees little hope for those trying to stem the tide.

"Once grade inflation has taken hold," she says, "it develops its own constituencies and acquires a heavy weight and powerful momentum of its own."

No Consensus

Those who see grade inflation as a serious concern often have a hard time getting taken seriously. In part that is because not everyone is convinced that grade inflation actually exists — or that it's necessarily such a bad thing.

Among the agnostics is Maureen A. McCarthy, a professor of psychology at Kennesaw State University, who recently participated in a debate on the topic at a conference sponsored by the American Psychological Association. While it may be true that college grades have generally trended northward in the past 20 years, she points out, so have scores on more "objective" forms of assessment, like the SAT and IQ tests.

Today's students may legitimately be achieving more than their parents' generation, she argues. "So in that sense, do we even have grade inflation? I'm not certain."

Still, many find the numbers on grade inflation, like those at Florida State, hard to ignore. And evidence such as the exposé published by The Boston Globe in 2001 on Harvard University's grading practices add more ballast to the argument that grade inflation is a serious problem. The investigation revealed that 91 percent of Harvard's students graduated cum laude. (The university has since placed a limit on the number of seniors eligible for Latin honors.)

While complaints about grade inflation date back more than a century, according to Ms. Biggs, lax grading and slipping standards were much-discussed in the 1960s, when grades began to rise noticeably. That's when critics coined the term "grade inflation."

Scholars of the phenomenon also point to other reasons that it not only exists, but is so powerful. A reputation for giving low grades creates problems in recruitment and retention. In addition, because grading is considered part of a professor's academic freedom, regulating the distribution of A's and B's can be tricky.

For faculty members, the pressure to grade generously comes not only from anxious students and "helicopter" parents, but also from promotion-and-tenure committees that look carefully at end-of-term student evaluations.

"It's easier to be a high grader," says Ms. Biggs. "You can write that A or B, and you don't have to defend it. You don't have students complaining or crying in your office. You don't get many low student evaluations. The amount of time that is eaten up by very rigorous grading and dealing with student complaints is time you could be spending on your own research."

Leaders Needed

Could those reasons account for Florida State's rising grades? Sally McRorie, dean of the College of Visual Artists there, leads the committee that is looking into the issue. The group plans to quiz grade-inflation experts and talk to professors and department chairmen. "There are a lot of factors at play," she says.

Among them are the Bright Futures scholarships. Most Florida State students receive some money from the lottery-supported program, which requires them to maintain a certain grade-point average, though it varies depending on the amount of the scholarship. It's no secret that students often beg professors for better grades, citing the possible loss of their scholarships.

If Florida State is serious about tackling grade inflation, observers say, the university will need strong leadership in doing so. And sometimes even that isn't enough.

In 2006, Hank Brown, then president of the University of Colorado, waged a public campaign against grade inflation. Calling it a high priority of his administration, he proposed adding class rank to transcripts to give employers a better sense of students' achievements.

The top-down policy proposal was unpopular with faculty members, however, and in the end the regulation of grades was left up to individual colleges and departments.

The flagship campus's College of Arts & Sciences, for example, chose to promote "academic rigor" through other measures, such as disseminating data on grade distribution and working to standardize teaching practices among sections of large lecture classes, says the provost, Philip P. DiStefano.

These efforts have had modest success in reining in grades, he says: The college has brought down its grades five-hundredths of a percentage point, from an average of 2.99, in 2004, to 2.94, in 2007.

Move to the Median

Cornell University has tried something similar. In 1996 officials there decided to make median grades for each class available on the university's Web site. The aim was to make grades more meaningful by putting them in context and thus preventing grade inflation.

But the plan seems to have backfired, according to a recent paper by three Cornell professors. Students, not surprisingly, tended to choose classes with higher median grades. The scholars also found that overall grades at Cornell have risen since the information was made public.

"The hope was that this would encourage students to go into tougher classes because they would be recognized for taking them," says Talia Bar, an assistant professor of economics and one of the paper's authors. "We're not seeing that effect."

Some faculty members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill think the cure for grade inflation may be a mathematical formula.

Spurred by a report in 2000 that showed a steady rise in grades at Chapel Hill, a faculty committee proposed a GPA alternative called the Achievement Index, a weighted class-ranking system that measures a student's academic performance relative to those of classmates.

Andrew J. Perrin, a professor of sociology who is one of the system's backers, likens the index to the "strength of schedule" system used in basketball to compare teams from different leagues on the basis of wins and losses against common opponents. Similarly, he says, the Achievement Index formula takes into account not only how a student performs vis-à-vis others in the course section, but also how those classmates fare in all of their courses.

The index is a resurrected version of a 1997 proposal by a Duke University statistician, Valen E. Johnson, who found that positive student evaluations correlated with lenient grading. The algorithm he devised was intended to neutralize differences in professors' grading practices and remove incentives for students to choose easier courses to inflate their GPA's.

Duke's faculty rejected a proposal to use Mr. Johnson's formula in lieu of the GPA a decade ago. Proponents of the weighted class-ranking system at Chapel Hill have been only marginally more successful. In 2007 a plan to put Achievement Index information on students' transcripts alongside GPA's, and to use the formula to determine student honors, was narrowly voted down by the faculty council.

Some students objected that the index would stoke competition. But the main problem, faculty members felt, was that the solution was just too complicated. Grade-point averages are intuitive and easy to calculate. The Achievement Index requires advanced math and can be computed only with full access to the registrar's data. "The biggest concern was that this was a black box," says Mr. Perrin, "and that we didn't really understand what it would do."

Still, the sociologist is hopeful that he and his colleagues will get the go-ahead from Chapel Hill administrators to run a pilot version of the Achievement Index. Under the revised plan, index information won't appear on transcripts, but students who log onto the registrar's site to check their end-of-term grades will also be able to see their index-based rankings. Mr. Perrin hopes that distributing the Achievement Index results will help both faculty members and administrators understand how it works and convince students that it's a fairer assessment measurement than the straightforward grade-point average ranking.

Formula for Success?

Perhaps the most successful attempt to combat grade inflation has been at Princeton University, which was singled out as one of the worst Ivy League offenders in this regard. In the fall of 2004, Princeton approved a policy of grading expectations.

It's simple enough: All departments are expected to keep the number of A's down to 35 percent. In any one class, of course, that number might be considerably higher (or lower), but the idea is that the expectation will create consistency across departments.

The idea seems to be working. From 2004 to 2007, the percentage of A's in undergraduate courses was 41 percent, down from 47 percent during the previous three years. Princeton isn't hitting its target yet, but it's getting closer.

All of which pleases Nancy W. Malkiel, dean of the college at Princeton. "We think it's really important to use grades to signal to students the difference between their very best work and their good work," she says. "Otherwise how do they know how to stretch themselves if they don't have clear signals?"

Whether such guidelines would work at a university like Florida State is uncertain. Deans there are still trying to determine whether they have a problem and, if so, what's causing it.

According to Joseph A. Travis, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, officials are determined to do something — they're just not sure what. "Things like this creep up on you," he says. "No one's sanguine about it. No one is saying 'Oh, yeah, this is fine.'"

September 2, 2008 reply from Richard C. Sansing [Richard.C.Sansing@TUCK.DARTMOUTH.EDU]

--- David Albrecht wrote:

Where, oh where, has accepting personal responsibility gone?

--- end of quote ---
This reminds me of one of my favorite Doonesbury cartoons. A professor is talking to the university president, whose last name is King.

Professor: King, the world you and I grew up in his crumbling. Students were once asked to take responsibility for their own performance. But today, if a student fails a course, it's OUR fault. That moment of accountability-- bringing home a report card--is not as we knew it, old friend.

Last panel is of a child showing his report card to his father.

Dad: Son, I'm very, VERY disappointed in your teacher.

Son: Me too, Dad.

*********************
Richard C. Sansing
Professor of Accounting
Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth 100 Tuck Hall Hanover, NH 03755

 

Questions
How well do student evaluations of instructors predict performance in subsequent advanced courses?
Are popular teachers necessarily the best teachers?
Are students misled by grade inflation?

One of the major points of the study was its look at the effectiveness of student evaluations. Although the evaluations can accurately predict the performance of the student in the “contemporaneous” course — the course in which the professor teaches the student — they are “very poor” predictors of the performance of a professor’s students in later, follow-up courses. Because many universities use student evaluations as a factor in decisions of promotion and tenure, this “draws into question how one should measure professor quality,” according to the report.
See below

"Evaluating Faculty Quality, Randomly," by James Heggen, Inside Higher Ed, July 11, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/11/evaluation

The question of how to measure the quality of college teaching continues to vex campus administrators. Teaching evaluations, on which many institutions depend for at least part of their analysis, may be overly influenced by factors such as whether students like the professors or get good grades. And objective analyses of how well students learn from certain professors are difficult because, for one, if based on a standardized test or grades, one could run into problems because professors “teach to the test.”

A new paper tries to inject some rigorous analysis into the discussion of how well students learn from their professors and how effectively student evaluations track how well students learn from individual instructors.

James West and Scott Carrell co-wrote the study, which was released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. “Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors” examines students and professors at the U.S. Air Force Academy from fall 1997 to spring 2007 to try to measure the quality of instruction.

The Air Force Academy was selected because its curricular structure avoids many of the pitfalls of traditional evaluation methods, according to the report. Because students at the Air Force Academy are randomly assigned to sections of core courses, there is no threat of the sort of “self-selection” in which students might choose to study with easier or tougher professors. “Self-selection,” the report notes, makes it difficult to measure the impact professors have on student achievement because “if better students tend to select better professors, then it is difficult to statistically separate the teacher effects from the selection effects.”

Also, professors at the academy use the same syllabus and give similar exams at about the same time. In the math department, grading is done collectively by professors, where each professor grades certain questions for all students in the course, which cuts down on the subjectivity of grading, according to the report. The students are required to take a common set of “follow-on” courses as well, in which they are also randomly assigned to professors.

The authors acknowledge that situating the study at the Air Force Academy may also raise questions of the “generalizability” of the study, given the institution’s unusual student body. “Despite the military setting, much about USAFA is comparable to broader academia,” the report asserts. It offers degrees in fields roughly similar to those of a liberal arts college, and because students are drawn from every Congressional district, they are geographically representative, the report says.

Carrell, an assistant professor economics at the University of California at Davis, attended the academy as an undergraduate and the University of Florida as a grad student, and has taught at Dartmouth as well as the Air Force Academy and Davis. “All students learn the same,” he said.

For math and science courses, students taking courses from professors with a higher “academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status” tended to perform worse in the “contemporaneous” course but better in the “follow-on” courses, according to the report. This is consistent, the report asserts, with recent findings that students taught by “less academically qualified instructors” may become interested in pursuing further study in particular academic areas because they earn good grades in the initial courses, but then go on to perform poorly in later courses that depend on the knowledge gained from the initial courses.

In humanities, the report found no such link.

Carrell had a few possible explanations for why no such link existed in humanities courses. One is because professors have more “latitude” in how they grade, especially with essays. Another reason could be that later courses in humanities don’t build on earlier classes like science and math do.

One of the major points of the study was its look at the effectiveness of student evaluations. Although the evaluations can accurately predict the performance of the student in the “contemporaneous” course — the course in which the professor teaches the student — they are “very poor” predictors of the performance of a professor’s students in later, follow-up courses. Because many universities use student evaluations as a factor in decisions of promotion and tenure, this “draws into question how one should measure professor quality,” according to the report.

“It appears students reward getting higher grades,” Carrell said

Bob Jensen's threads on teaching evaluations and assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation

"Great, My Professor," by JJ Hermes, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 22, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3027/great-my-professor?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Partly because he was fed up with childish comments on Web sites where students rate their professors, a business-school professor at Temple University has created an online forum for students who want to sound off. So as not to mislead students, the site’s title suggests its intent: “Thank You Professor.”

“There are so many vehicles for students to express their opinion,” says the site’s creator, Samuel D. Hodge Jr., chairman of the business school’s legal-studies department. “But there’s nothing really at the school where the professor can get a letter directly from the student.”

When the site went live on May 1, Mr. Hodge says, he expected about a dozen comments in the first week. Instead, more than 200 flooded in. He converts each note into a letter to the faculty member being praised, then makes sure the business school’s dean gets a copy.

Mr. Hodge moderates the comments, but so far there haven’t been any negative posts on the site, he says.

For example, the four “thank you notes” left on the site so far for Rob B. Drennan Jr., an associate professor of risk, insurance, and health-care management, have been uniformly laudatory (three were signed, and one was anonymous). “I truly enjoyed his class,” wrote one student, Tom Coia. “Difficult and challenging, but isn’t that what we want from school?” Contrast that to an anonymous comment concerning Mr. Drennan that a student left last spring on RateMyProfessors.com: “BOOOOO!!!!!”

Mr. Hodge, incidentally, has appeared on an MTV Web site of faculty members who “strike back” against comments on RateMyProfessors.com. He says Ohio State University is the only other institution he knows of that gives students a way to thank their professors on the Web.

Temple may extend the site to the whole university, he says: “It’s such positive reinforcement."

Upward Trend in Grades and Downward Trend in Homework

Business ranks at the bottom in terms of having 23% of the responding students having only 1-5 hours of homework per week!
This in part might explain why varsity athletes choose business as a major in college.

Minimum Grade School Policies

Question
Should a student who gets a zero (for not doing anything) or 23% (for doing something badly) on an assignment, exam, or term paper be automatically (as a matter of school policy) upgraded to a 60% no matter what proportion the grade is toward a course's final grade?
Should a student get 60% even if he or she fails to show up for an examination?

"Time to Add Basket Weaving as a Course," by Ben Baker, The Irascible Professor, June 22, 2008 --- http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-06-22-08.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Every Student Suddenly Gets an A+
Canada's main faculty association has set up an independent committee to investigate a series of clashes between the University of Ottawa and a senior tenured professor who was suspended last month and barred from the campus, apparently because of a grading dispute in which he gave all students in a class an A+ last spring after being refused permission to make the course pass/fail.The professor, Denis Rancourt, is a noted physicist who has worked at the university for 22 years. He is also an activist blogger, particularly on issues of pedagogical reform and university governance. His advocacy of "greater democracy in the institution," he says, could be the real reason why the university is trying to push him out.
Karen Birchhard, "Canadian University Apparently Tries to Oust Professor Over Grading Policy," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/01/9310n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
I wonder if he gave examinations and if he gave full credit for any answer to a question or problem on each and every examination? I know of one instance where students strongly suspected that a professor was giving A grades without even reading the blue books. Some brave souls even gambled by writing nonsense after the first few pages of their blue books. They, like the other students, received their A grades. The professor was forced to resign from the faculty (there were also other incidents that forced his resignation).

A university has to be concerned about extremes in generous grading. At some point the university would lose its integrity if there is no differentiation in performance. Also to the extent that grades motivate students to learn the material, that motivation factor is destroyed. Diploma mills often give all A grades, but who has any respect for a diploma mill?

At RateMyProfessor.com, it surprises me how many times students report that an instructor gives an A grade to all students who regularly attend class --- http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/

Our Compassless Colleges

The problem is that our students choose very bland, low nourishment diets in our modern day smorgasbord curricula. Their concern is with their grade averages rather than their education. And why not? Grades for students and turf for faculty have become the keys to the kingdom!
Bob Jensen

So much learning now takes place online, including faculty office hours, study groups, and lectures.
What extra value are you going to need to offer to bring the students of the future to your college?
Read the new report, "The College of 2020: Students," from Chronicle Research Services.

"THE COLLEGE OF 2020: STUDENTS," The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2009 ---
http://research.chronicle.com/asset/TheCollegeof2020ExecutiveSummary.pdf?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

This is the first Chronicle Research Services report in a three-part series on what higher education will look like in the year 2020. It is based on reviews of research and data on trends in higher education, interviews with experts who are shaping the future of colleges, and the results of a poll of members of a Chronicle Research Services panel of admissions officials.

To buy the full, data-rich 50-page report, see the links at the end of this Executive Summary. Later reports in this series will look at college technology and facilities in 2020, and the faculty of the future

"The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age," by  Jane Park, Creative Commons, June 26th, 2009 --- http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15522

HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) announced a new report called, “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age,” now available at MIT Press. The report is in response to our changing times, and addresses what traditional educational institutions must know to keep up. From the announcement,

“Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg in an abridged version of their book-in-progress, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, argue that traditional institutions must adapt or risk a growing mismatch between how they teach and how this new generation learns. Forms and models of learning have evolved quickly and in fundamentally new directions. Yet how we teach, where we teach, who teaches, and who administers and serves have changed only around the edges. This report was made possible by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in connection with its grant making initiative on Digital Media and Learning.”

A central finding was that “Universities must recognize this new way of learning and adapt or risk becoming obsolete. The university model of teaching and learning relies on a hierarchy of expertise, disciplinary divides, restricted admission to those considered worthy, and a focused, solitary area of expertise. However, with participatory learning and digital media, these conventional modes of authority break down.”

Not coincidentally, one of the ten principles for redesigning learning institutions was open source education: “Traditional learning environments convey knowledge via overwhelmingly copyright-protected publications. Networked learning, contrastingly, is an “open source” culture that seeks to share openly and freely in both creating and distributing knowledge and products.”

The report is available in PDF via CC BY-NC-ND.

Also see http://www.convergemag.com/workforce/47240132.html

This suggests that education and research must consider evolution in brains when reaching out to the Y Generation and beyond

We are indeed getting smarter. Further, it has been suggested that the data deluge now available via the Internet makes the scientific method obsolete and reduces enormously our dependence on models versus the real, measurable world.
"Yes, the Web Is Changing Your Brain," by Kim Solez, Internet Evolution, March 12, 2009 ---
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=567&doc_id=173469&

More than a year ago on ThinkerNet, I described a new kind of human intelligence particularly suited for the digital age.  It involves strong multitasking ability, rapid switching between tasks, logical statements, and an ability to identify and take advantage of potential connections, to separate information into transformable chunks, and to reassemble these chunks for new purposes. 

Today, my question is whether digital intelligence, and intelligence in general, is something innate and determined by our genes -- or whether, as some suggest, Internet stimuli and other aspects of our  environment actually change the wiring in our brains to increase or decrease intelligence.

Put another way, will there be more geniuses, more Renaissance men and women, more big conceptual breakthroughs, because of easier access to information and knowledge via the Internet? Or is mankind limited by the number of people with high IQs, which will not change until our biology changes via genetic evolution?

To begin with, the idea of measuring IQ may be misleading.  New forms of intelligence require new types of intelligence tests.  The original assertion by Nicholas Carr in last summer's Atlantic that the Internet is making us stupid just reflects the fact we may be testing the wrong thing, thinking the wrong way about brain functioning.

As new intelligences suited for this new age we live in evolve, performance on old-fashioned IQ tests may decrease exactly because of distraction and task switching, which are disadvantageous for the old IQ test but advantageous in everyday life in 2009 and beyond.

We also tend to view the Internet's effects negatively. The Internet is changing us, but the changes are positive: Use of the Internet makes our brains more active, with more neurons firing. It stimulates parts of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. It is hard to imagine that that is a bad thing!

In a study in which people's brains were observed reading a book vs. searching the Web, language and visual centers were stimulated in both, but decision making and complex reasoning centers were stimulated only in the Web group and not in the reading group.

At the same time, thinking deeply, while still of value, is needed less in day-to-day living.

When a common situation was a lack of information and no possibility of getting more, then deep contemplation of the limited knowledge we had seemed reasonable. Now we are more likely to find an answer and move on.

It is not that we have lost the ability to read War and Peace, it is just that in the modern world we would seldom opt to spend a long period reading one book. It is more practical to carry out other, shorter tasks, to divide things up, and that is what we mostly choose to do.

There have always been attempts to resist the inevitable pace of progress and human evolution.  Recent books like Enough and In Praise of Slowness are two examples.  But we cannot really slow the pace of evolution of our species -- nor should we want to!

As I observed in an earlier blog, it was probably always man's destiny to have the kinds of communication devices we have now and the even better ones we will have in the future as extensions of ourselves.  It is not predominantly a shifting of cognitive responsibility from our biological brains to the silicon extension of those brains, but rather an augmentation of overall cognitive capacity. 

We are indeed getting smarter. Further, it has been suggested that the data deluge now available via the Internet makes the scientific method obsolete and reduces enormously our dependence on models versus the real, measurable world.

So yes, the Internet does make us smarter.  We just need to pause every now and then to contemplate and enjoy it!

— Kim Solez, MD, Director of NKF cyberNephrology at the University of Alberta

The Mystery of Research Having Higher Priority Than Teaching in Performance Evaluations
But research expectations have grown at many institutions where the missions -- at least until recently -- have been primarily focused on teaching. And as Dahlia K. Remler and Elda Pema note in a provocative new paper, the emphasis extends beyond research that pays for itself . . . Remler, associate professor of public affairs at Baruch College of the City University of New York, and Pema, an assistant professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School, decided to review the literature and economic theories that might explain the reasons more colleges and departments are encouraging their faculty members to focus on research, at the expense of teaching time. And they found an abundance of theories, some of which may overlap and some of which may conflict with one another. The authors suggest that higher education would benefit from figuring out just why this phenomenon has taken place, given its expense in money and faculty time.
Scott Jaschik, "The Mystery of Faculty Priorities ," Inside Higher Ed, May 28, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/28/nber

The NBER Report is at http://papers.nber.org/papers/w14974

"The Relevance of the Humanities," by Gabriel Paquette, Inside Higher Ed, January 22, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/01/22/paquette

The deepening economic crisis has triggered a new wave of budget cuts and hiring freezes at America’s universities. Retrenchment is today’s watchword. For scholars in the humanities, arts and social sciences, the economic downturn will only exacerbate existing funding shortages. Even in more prosperous times, funding for such research has been scaled back and scholars besieged by questions concerning the relevance of their enterprise, whether measured by social impact, economic value or other sometimes misapplied benchmarks of utility.

Public funding gravitates towards scientific and medical research, with its more readily appreciated and easily discerned social benefits. In Britain, the fiscal plight of the arts and humanities is so dire that the Institute of Ideas recently sponsored a debate at King’s College London that directly addressed the question, “Do the arts have to re-brand themselves as useful to justify public money?”

In addition to decrying the rising tide of philistinism, some scholars might also be tempted to agree with Stanley Fish, who infamously asserted that humanities “cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.” Fish rejected the notion that the humanities can be validated by some standard external to them. He dismissed as wrong-headed “measures like increased economic productivity, or the fashioning of an informed citizenry, or the sharpening of moral perception, or the lessening of prejudice and discrimination.”

Continued in article

"Our Compassless Colleges," by Peter Berkowitz, The Wall Street Journal, September 5, 2007; Page A17 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118895528818217660.html

At universities and colleges throughout the land, undergraduates and their parents pay large sums of money for -- and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support -- "liberal" education. This despite administrators and faculty lacking, or failing to honor, a coherent concept of what constitutes an educated human being.

To be sure, American higher education, or rather a part of it, is today the envy of the world, producing and maintaining research scientists of the highest caliber. But liberal education is another matter. Indeed, many professors in the humanities and social sciences proudly promulgate doctrines that mock the very idea of a standard or measure defining an educated person, and so legitimate the compassless curriculum over which they preside. In these circumstances, why should we not conclude that universities are betraying their mission? Many American colleges do adopt general distribution requirements. Usually this means that students must take a course or two of their choosing in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, decorated perhaps with a dollop of fine arts, rudimentary foreign-language exposure, and the acquisition of basic writing and quantitative skills. And all students must choose a major. But this veneer of structure provides students only superficial guidance. Or, rather, it reinforces the lesson that our universities have little of substance to say about the essential knowledge possessed by an educated person. Certainly this was true of the core curriculum at Harvard, where I taught in the faculty of arts and sciences during the 1990s. And it remains true even after Harvard's recent reforms. Harvard's aims and aspirations are in many ways admirable. According to this year's Report of the Task Force on General Education, Harvard understands liberal education as "an education conducted in a spirit of free inquiry undertaken without concern for topical relevance or vocational utility." It prepares for the rest of life by improving students' ability "to assess empirical claims, interpret cultural expression, and confront ethical dilemmas in their personal and professional lives." But instead of concentrating on teaching substantive knowledge, the general education at Harvard will focus on why what students learn is important. To accomplish this, Harvard would require students to take single-semester courses in eight categories: Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding, Culture and Belief, Empirical Reasoning, Ethical Reasoning, Science of Living Systems, Science of the Physical Universe, Societies of the World, and The United States in the World. Unfortunately, the new requirements add up to little more than an attractively packaged evasion of the university's responsibility to provide a coherent core for undergraduate education. For starters, though apparently not part of the general education curriculum, Harvard requires only a year of foreign language study or the equivalent. Yet since it usually takes more than a year of college study to achieve competence in a foreign language -- the ability to hold a conversation and read a newspaper -- doesn't Harvard, by requiring only a single year, denigrate foreign-language study, and with it the serious study of other cultures and societies? Furthermore, in the search for the immediate relevance it disavows, Harvard's curriculum repeatedly puts the cart before the horse. For example, instead of first requiring students to concentrate on the study of novels, poetry, and plays, Harvard will ask them to choose from a variety of courses on "literary or religious texts, paintings, sculpture, architecture, music, film, dance, decorative arts" that involve "exploring theoretical and philosophical issues concerning the production and reception of meanings and the formation of aesthetic judgment." Instead of first requiring students to gain acquaintance with the history of opinions about law, justice, government, duty and virtue, Harvard will ask them to choose from a variety of courses on how to bring ethical theories to bear on contemporary moral and political dilemmas. Instead of first requiring students to survey U.S. history or European history or classical history, Harvard will ask them to choose from a variety of courses that examine the U.S and its relation to the rest of the world. Instead of first teaching students about the essential features of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Harvard will ask them to choose from a variety of courses on almost any aspect of foreign societies. Harvard's general education reform will allow students to graduate without ever having read the same book or studied the same material. Students may take away much of interest, but it is the little in common they learn that will be of lasting significance. For they will absorb the implicit teaching of the new college curriculum -- same as the old one -- that there is nothing in particular that an educated person need know. Of course, if parents, students, alumni donors, trustees, professors and administrators are happy, why worry? A college degree remains a hot commodity, a ticket of entry to valuable social networks, a signal to employers that graduates have achieved a certain proficiency in manipulating concepts, performing computations, and getting along with peers. The reason to worry is that university education can cause lasting harm. The mental habits that students form and the ideas they absorb in college consolidate the framework through which as adults they interpret experience, and judge matters to be true or false, fair or inequitable, honorable or dishonorable. A university that fails to teach students sound mental habits and to acquaint them with enduring ideas handicaps its graduates for public and private life. Moreover, properly conceived, a liberal education provides invaluable benefits for students and the nation. For most students, it offers the last chance, perhaps until retirement, to read widely and deeply, to acquire knowledge of the opinions and events that formed them and the nation in which they live, and to study other peoples and cultures. A proper liberal education liberalizes in the old-fashioned and still most relevant sense: It forms individuals fit for freedom. The nation benefits as well, because a liberal democracy presupposes an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing the public interest from private interest, evaluating consequences, and discerning the claims of justice and the opportunities for -- and limits to -- realizing it in politics. Indeed, a sprawling liberal democracy whose citizens practice different religions and no religion at all, in which individuals have family heritages that can be traced to every continent, and in which the nation's foreign affairs are increasingly bound up with local politics in countries around the world is particularly dependent on citizens acquiring a liberal education. Crafting a core consistent with the imperatives of a liberal education will involve both a substantial break with today's university curriculum and a long overdue alignment of higher education with common sense. Such a core would, for example, require all students to take semester courses surveying Greek and Roman history, European history, and American history. It would require all students to take a semester course in classic works of European literature, and one in classic works of American literature. It would require all students to take a semester course in biology and one in physics. It would require all students to take a semester course in the principles of American government; one in economics; and one in the history of political philosophy. It would require all students to take a semester course comparing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It would require all students to take a semester course of their choice in the history, literature or religion of a non-Western civilization. And it would require all students to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language of their choice by carrying on a casual conversation and accurately reading a newspaper in the language, a level of proficiency usually obtainable after two years of college study, or four semester courses. Such a core is at best an introduction to liberal education. Still, students who meet its requirements will acquire a common intellectual foundation that enables them to debate morals and politics responsibly, enhances their understanding of whatever specialization they choose, and enriches their appreciation of the multiple dimensions of the delightful and dangerous world in which we live. It is a mark of the politicization and clutter of our current curriculum that these elementary requirements will strike many faculty and administrators as benighted and onerous. Yet the core I've outlined reflects what all successful individuals outside of academia know: Progress depends on mastering the basics. Assuming four courses a semester and 32 to graduate, such a core could be completed in the first two years of undergraduate study. Students who met the foreign-language requirement through high school study would have the opportunity as freshman and sophomores to choose four elective courses. During their junior and senior year, students could devote 10 courses to their major while taking six additional elective courses. And students majoring in the natural sciences, where it is necessary to take a substantial sequence of courses, would enroll in introductory and lower-level courses in their major during freshman and sophomore years and complete the core during junior and senior years. Admittedly, reform confronts formidable obstacles. The major one is professors. Many will fight such a common core, because it requires them to teach general interest classes outside their area of expertise; it reduces opportunities to teach small boutique classes on highly specialized topics; and it presupposes that knowledge is cumulative and that some books and ideas are more essential than others. Meanwhile, students and parents are poorly positioned to affect change. Students come and go, and, in any event, the understanding they need to formulate the arguments for reform is acquired through the very liberal education of which universities are currently depriving them. Meanwhile, parents are too distant and dispersed, and often they have too much money on the line to rock the boat. But there are opportunities. Change could be led by an intrepid president, provost or dean of a major university who knows the value of a liberal education, possesses the eloquence and courage to defend it to his or her faculty, and has the skill to refashion institutional incentives and hold faculty and administrators accountable. Reform could also be led by trustees at private universities -- the election in recent years of T.J. Rodgers, Todd Zywicki, Peter Robinson and Stephen Smith to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees on platforms supporting freedom of speech and high academic standards is a start -- or by alumni determined to connect their donations, on which universities depend, to reliable promises that their gifts will be used in furtherance of liberal education, well understood. And some enterprising smaller colleges or public universities, taking advantage of the nation's love of diversity and openness to innovation, might discover a market niche for parents and students eager for an education that serves students' best interests by introducing them in a systematic manner to their own civilization, to the moral and political principles on which their nation is based, and to languages and civilizations that differ from their own. Citizens today are called on to analyze a formidable array of hard questions concerning war and peace, liberty and security, markets and morals, marriage and family, science and technology, poverty and public responsibility, and much more. No citizen can be expected to master all the issues. But liberal democracies count on more than a small minority acquiring the ability to reason responsibly about the many sides of these many-sided questions. For this reason, we must teach our universities to appreciate the aims of a liberal education. And we must impress upon our universities their obligation to pursue them responsibly. Mr. Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, teaches at George Mason University School of Law. This commentary draws from an essay that previously appeared in Policy Review.

"Failure in Urban Universities," by Kevin Carey, Inside Higher Ed, October 14, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/10/14/carey 

"How Business Schools Have Failed Business: Why not more education on the responsibility of boards?" by Michael Jacobs, The Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124052874488350333.html

As we try to understand why our economy is so troubled, fingers are increasingly being pointed at the academic institutions that educated those who got us into this mess. What have business schools failed to teach our business leaders and policy makers? There are three profound failures of sound business practices at the root of the economic crisis, and none of them have been adequately addressed by our business schools.

Just about everyone agrees that misaligned incentive programs are at the core of what brought our financial system to its knees. Countless individuals became multimillionaires by gambling away shareholders' money. Incentive systems that rewarded short-term gain took precedence over those designed for long-term value creation.

We could chalk this all up to greed, as many pundits have. But first we should ask how many of the business schools attended by America's CEOs and directors educate their students about the best way to design management compensation systems. Amazingly, this subject is not systematically addressed at most business schools, and not even discussed at others.

Secondly, as Washington scrambles to restructure the financial regulatory system, those who still believe in the private sector are asking why corporate boards were AWOL as institution after institution crumbled. Why did it take rumors of nationalization and a drop in Citicorp stock to below $2 a share to inspire Citigroup to nominate directors with experience in financial markets?

American icon General Electric was stripped of its coveted AAA-rating because of problems emanating from its financial services unit. Yet its board has only one director with experience in a financial institution. If it is the board's job to oversee a corporation, it seems logical that there would be a segment in the core curriculum of every business school devoted to board structure, composition and processes. But most programs don't cover the topic.

The third breakdown came in the investment community. Nearly 20 years ago I wrote a book titled "Short-Term America" that warned about the growing chasm between those who provide capital and the companies who use it. The concept is simple: When money provided to homeowners or businesses comes from an anonymous source, possibly half way around the world, there are serious challenges to operating a functioning system of accountability.

Nationally, finance departments at business schools offer hundreds of courses in asset securitization and portfolio diversification. They have taught a generation of financial leaders that risk can be diversified away. But in their B-school days, few investment bankers examined the notion of "agency costs." That concept explains that as the gulf between the provider and the user of capital widens, the risks involved with selecting and monitoring the participants in the portfolio increase. It should come as no surprise that financial institutions amassed securities that consist of a diversified portfolio of deadbeats.

About 70% of the shares of American corporations are held by institutional investors such as pension and mutual funds. These organizations are brimming with MBAs. But how many of these MBAs took a class devoted to how shareholders should exercise their rights and obligations as the owners of America's corporations? Few, if any. When shareholders are uneducated about their obligations, how can a corporate accountability system function properly?

Recently, when I delivered a guest lecture at another school, a distraught-looking student pulled me aside after class. She explained that my talk was very disturbing to her. After investing two years and $100,000, she was only weeks away from receiving her MBA. But prior to our class, she had never heard a discussion about board responsibilities or the rights of shareholders. She said she felt cheated.

By failing to teach the principles of corporate governance, our business schools have failed our students. And by not internalizing sound principles of governance and accountability, B-school graduates have matured into executives and investment bankers who have failed American workers and retirees who have witnessed their jobs and savings vanish.

Most B-schools paper over the topic by requiring first-year students to take a compulsory ethics class, which is necessary, but not sufficient. Would Bernie Madoff have acted differently if he had aced his ethics final?

Could we have avoided most of the economic problems we now face if we had a generation of business leaders who were trained in designing compensation systems that promote long-term value? And who were educated in the proper make-up and responsibilities of boards? And who were enlightened as to how shareholders can use their proxies to affect accountability? I think we could have.

America's business schools need to rethink what we are teaching -- and not teaching -- the next generation of leaders.

Mr. Jacobs, a professor at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flager Business School, was director of corporate finance policy at the U.S. Treasury from 1989 to 1991.

Jensen Comment
I don't think Bernie Madoff would've behaved differently if he aced five courses in ethics. Ethics failures are largely situational and relative based upon motive, opportunity, and a follow-the-herd mentality. Students should learn more about ethics and corporate governance, but there's a great danger in relying too much on college courses in the area of ethics and responsibility. More important are such things as the tone at the top and strengthening whistleblower laws and rewards --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#WhistleBlowing

"Executives Took, but the Directors Gave," by Heather Landy, The New York Times, April 4, 2009 ---
http://nytimes.com/2009/04/05/business/05board.html?8dpc 

Little of the ire against outsize C.E.O. paychecks has been aimed at the people who signed off on them: corporate directors.

Instead, the anger has been concentrated on the executives themselves, particularly those running companies at the heart of the financial crisis. And boards — thrust into the limelight only rarely, as when the directors of the New York Stock Exchange were in a legal battle over the pay collected by Richard A. Grasso — have managed to stay in the background.

The exchange’s board “really took a lot of heat for that controversy,” says Sarah Anderson, an analyst on executive pay at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. “But so far, with this crisis, I don’t feel like boards have been getting as much attention as they should be.”

Last spring, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform examined pay practices at Countrywide Financial, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup, but those issues eventually took a back seat to broader concerns about the viability of the country’s financial system. As investors frustrated by the continuing crisis start seeking ways to avoid the next one, advocates of change in corporate governance expect boards to come under renewed scrutiny that could yield big changes.

Emboldened shareholder activists are pressing more companies to hold annual nonbinding votes on executive pay packages. They’re also pursuing, and appear increasingly likely to win, rules to make it easier for investors to nominate or replace board members.

And as more people start connecting the dots between pay incentives that boards laid out for executives and the risk-taking at the heart of the financial crisis, some lawmakers have been eager to step in, and many directors themselves are re-examining their approach to compensation.

“When you look at cases where compensation of senior management was out of line, or where people arguably were overpaid, it’s definitely the fault of the compensation committee of the board,” says Thomas Cooley, dean of the Stern School of Business at New York University and a director of Thornburg Mortgage. “Congress has gotten into the business of dictating executive pay now, and they shouldn’t be in that business. What they should be doing is turning the light on the committees.”

Activist shareholders have been criticizing executive pay practices for well over a decade, accusing directors of being too cozy with C.E.O.’s, too eager to lavish pay on them and too ambiguous about the formulas they use for setting compensation.

Improved standards for determining director independence and disclosing the procedures of board compensation committees were supposed to help solve those problems. And activist shareholders played a major role in spreading the notion of pay-for-performance, by which executives would be compensated based on their ability to meet board-devised financial targets.

But amid all the changes, a crucial piece of the equation — the unintended risks that could arise from these pay-for-performance incentives — went unnoticed, said James P. Hawley, co-director of the Elfenworks Center for the Study of Fiduciary Capitalism at St. Mary’s College of California.

“The problem isn’t just when people in a particular firm are getting rewarded in ways that take away from the shareholder. That’s been well recognized,” Mr. Hawley says. “What’s not been recognized is that the misalignment of incentives has resulted in firm, sector and systemic risks. None of the corporate governance activists ever made the connection.”

It took the disastrous results of 2008 to expose such links, and to make compensation a central issue for politicians and corporate America.

TWO factors contributed to the pay scales that now have C.E.O.’s earning more than 300 times the pay of the average American worker.

First was the advent of giant stock option grants, a form of compensation made all the more attractive by a 1993 change to the tax law that maintained corporate tax deductions for executive pay over $1 million, but only if the pay was tied to performance.

Second was the widespread practice of linking pay to the levels at companies of similar size or scope. Every time a board tries to keep an executive happy by offering above-average pay, the net effect is to raise the average that everyone else will use as a baseline.

In the absence of fraud or self-dealing, it’s hard for shareholders to make a legal argument that boards have failed at their job. State law in Delaware, where most big public entities are incorporated, simply requires companies to have boards that direct or manage their affairs, and it affords broad legal protection to board members so long as they act in good faith and in a manner “believed to be in or not opposed to the best interests of the corporation.”

That was the basis for the recent ruling of a Delaware judge who threw out most of the claims in a shareholder lawsuit seeking to hold Citigroup directors and officers liable for big losses tied to subprime mortgages. But the judge did allow the plaintiffs to pursue one of their claims, which alleged corporate waste stemming from a multimillion-dollar parting pay package that Citigroup’s board awarded Charles O. Prince III, the former C.E.O., in 2007.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on corporate governance are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#Governance

Does It Matter That Your Professor Is Part Time?

November 10, 2008 message from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

This is an interesting article from U.S.News.

At my school, the most recent past president seriously curtailed the the use of adjuncts and hired a couple of hundred non-tenure track faculty. A majority of the student credits at BGSU are taught by non-tenuretrack faculty, either full time or part-time adjuncts.

Now that faculty are attempting to organize into a union, squabbling is going on as to whether the non-tenure track should be in the tenure-track bargaining unit or in their own unit. The organizers want them in the tenure-track union to get their votes.

Dave Albrecht

http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/2008/11/07/does-it-matter-that-your-professor-is-part-time.html 

Does It Matter That Your Professor Is Part Time? By Kim Clark Posted November 7, 2008

As colleges face increasing costs, the traditional tweed-coated, pipe-smoking, comfortable-job-for-life full-time professor appears to be going the way of the dodo bird. Nowadays, the typical college professor is a part-timer, moonlighting for extra cash or prestige, or "freeway flying"­cobbling together a teaching career with several classes at different colleges.

Some students are benefiting from adjuncts' lower costs and, often, more practical, up-to-date instruction, of course. But there's also considerable evidence that the proliferation of adjunct professors­many of whom don't have Ph.D.'s­is dumbing down many classrooms and contributing to grade inflation.

Despite 20 years of booming enrollment and skyrocketing tuition, colleges have been quietly filling the majority of new openings with part-time or short-contract adjunct professors (also often called "visiting professors," "instructors," or "lecturers") instead of the traditional assistant professors who have a chance to work up to a full tenured job. In fact, the nation's graduate schools are now pumping out hundreds more Ph.D.'s each year in some disciplines than there are tenure-track openings available. The trend has become so pervasive that about two thirds of America's college instructors are now adjuncts.

That's generated tremendous savings for colleges. On average, traditional professors, who have tenure (or lifetime job guarantees), benefits, and campus offices, cost colleges the equivalent of about $8,000 per three-credit class, one recent study found. Adjuncts, the vast majority of whom teach only one or two courses at any particular college, cost their employers an average of about $1,800 per course. Schools not only pay adjuncts less per classroom hour but often don't offer benefits or support such as offices or secretaries.

Acceleration. A few schools, such as Arizona State University, are responding to current budget shortfalls by laying off adjunct faculty. But looming financial problems are likely, over the long term, to cause many colleges to "accelerate the hiring of adjuncts," says Jane Wellman, director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability.

Indeed, many of the fastest-growing schools have eliminated tenure altogether. Western Governors University, a new online community college, has found that non-Ph.D.'s, on average, do a better job of motivating and counseling students through the school's computerized lessons. And the freedom to release employees whose students fail improves the quality of the education, says Robert Mendenhall, WGU's president.

Many traditional colleges claim adjunct-taught classes are better for students than, for example, classes taught by graduate students.

Texas Woman's University Provost Kay Clayton says raising the share of part-time faculty about 4 percentage points to 44 percent in the past five years might be helping her students. For instance, by hiring moonlighting nurses for about $3,000 per course to teach some nursing classes, the school helped keep this year's tuition at $6,500 a year and, Clayton says, provided better teachers. "That is a real benefit to the students, because they are practitioners and bring in a wealth of experience," she says.

In fact, one study found that in some fields­especially technical and career-related programs such as psychology, architecture, and finance­students who are taught by professionals serving as part-time instructors appear to perform better academically. Such students also take more courses in the subject.

But that study (and others) found, in addition, that the students of adjuncts who are teaching the basic academic disciplines, such as English, history, and pure sciences, are more likely to drop out.

Despite that troubling research, more than half of all English professors are now not on the tenure track. And many adjuncts say most colleges provide them with so little support, job security, and money that it is inevitable that their students will underperform.

Since schools usually look at student evaluations to determine whether or not to invite adjuncts back, Lila Harper, who has a Ph.D. in English literature and teaches writing and literature at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Wash., finds herself grading a little easier than she likes and avoiding controversial subjects. "We are gradually undermining the value of a college degree," she fears.

Harper, who is a full-time adjunct, says that because she has no chance at tenure, she stopped teaching a course that included Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice after a student objected on religious grounds. (The main character, a middle-aged writer, struggles with an unexpected passion for a young boy as he also confronts his mortality and his moral duty to warn the youngster to flee a coming plague.) "I am disposable," Harper says. "If they can save face by firing me, they will fire me, so I try to pick topics that are not controversial."

Multiple choice. Another adjunct, who teaches speech and communications part time at private Midwestern colleges and asked not to be named, says that only by teaching six to nine courses a semester (at about $2,000 a course) can he make the $25,000 to $30,000 a year he needs to cover his basic living costs. So he spends 12 to 13 hours a day driving to part-time jobs at different colleges, teaching, and grading. "I give multiple-choice tests because I don't have time to grade essays," he says. And when one private college, eager to increase enrollment, recently asked him to pass a flunk-ing student who would otherwise have dropped out, he says he had little choice but to agree, since he wants to be invited back to teach again next semester.

Sometimes, he thinks of how each of the 20 or 30 students in his classes is paying about $2,000 in tuition and fees for each course. The classes generate at least $40,000, which means the colleges pass on to him only about 5 percent of the students' tuition. Although the adjunct, who has a master's degree, gets top ratings from his students, he doesn't get raises. The colleges "always say, 'We know that you are worth more than this, but we don't have the money.' "

Meanwhile, to get to his classrooms, he drives past cranes erecting "million-dollar dorms and athletic facilities," he notes. He is often tempted to find steadier, more lucrative work. But "I love teaching, being exposed to the students, their ideas and energy." If he did quit, he knows there are dozens of professionals eager to take his place. "If the university can get something cheaper," he says, "it will."

"The Bachelor’s Degree Is Obsolete?" by  Peter Agoos, Inside Higher Ed, May 13, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/05/13/sloane

"America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree," by Marty Nemko, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i34/34b01701.htm

Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this: "I wasn't a good student in high school, but I wanted to prove that I can get a college diploma. I'd be the first one in my family to do it. But it's been five years and $80,000, and I still have 45 credits to go."

I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!

Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.

Such students are not aberrations. Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

Perhaps more surprising, even those high-school students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly unlikely to derive enough benefit to justify the often six-figure cost and four to six years (or more) it takes to graduate. Research suggests that more than 40 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions do not graduate in six years. Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that's terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they'd still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they're brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

Also, the past advantage of college graduates in the job market is eroding. Ever more students attend college at the same time as ever more employers are automating and sending offshore ever more professional jobs, and hiring part-time workers. Many college graduates are forced to take some very nonprofessional positions, such as driving a truck or tending bar.

How much do students at four-year institutions actually learn?

Colleges are quick to argue that a college education is more about enlightenment than employment. That may be the biggest deception of all. Often there is a Grand Canyon of difference between the reality and what higher-education institutions, especially research ones, tout in their viewbooks and on their Web sites. Colleges and universities are businesses, and students are a cost item, while research is a profit center. As a result, many institutions tend to educate students in the cheapest way possible: large lecture classes, with necessary small classes staffed by rock-bottom-cost graduate students. At many colleges, only a small percentage of the typical student's classroom hours will have been spent with fewer than 30 students taught by a professor, according to student-questionnaire data I used for my book How to Get an Ivy League Education at a State University. When students at 115 institutions were asked what percentage of their class time had been spent in classes of fewer than 30 students, the average response was 28 percent.

That's not to say that professor-taught classes are so worthwhile. The more prestigious the institution, the more likely that faculty members are hired and promoted much more for their research than for their teaching. Professors who bring in big research dollars are almost always rewarded more highly than a fine teacher who doesn't bring in the research bucks. Ernest L. Boyer, the late president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, used to say that winning the campus teaching award was the kiss of death when it came to tenure. So, no surprise, in the latest annual national survey of freshmen conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, 44.6 percent said they were not satisfied with the quality of instruction they received. Imagine if that many people were dissatisfied with a brand of car: It would quickly go off the market. Colleges should be held to a much higher standard, as a higher education costs so much more, requires years of time, and has so much potential impact on your life. Meanwhile, 43.5 percent of freshmen also reported "frequently" feeling bored in class, the survey found.

College students may be dissatisfied with instruction, but, despite that, do they learn? A 2006 study supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 50 percent of college seniors scored below "proficient" levels on a test that required them to do such basic tasks as understand the arguments of newspaper editorials or compare credit-card offers. Almost 20 percent of seniors had only basic quantitative skills. The students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station.

Continued in article

April 28, 2008 reply from Flowers, Carol [cflowers@OCC.CCCD.EDU]

April 29, 2008 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Abacus, 

Glad you joined us. My compliments to your parents if Abacus is the name on your birth certificate.

My parents weren’t as imaginative but then again they might've chosen “Sue” (as in the Johnny Cash classic."

Message to America's Higher Education Faculty
You are the reason the colleges are proud of what they do and your accomplishments represent the performance that colleges and universities point to in developing and justifying their reputation. Reputations are not developed in a vacuum. You, your parents, your children, your colleagues and your peers are the living remnants of the college experience. Your success justifies the massive resources poured by private Americans into supporting colleges and universities. And your success validates the vocation that characterizes the role of so many faculty members. There is something special about American higher education, which continues to produce some of the world’s greatest scientists and engineers, thinkers and scholars. There is something unique in the education we offer, which provides a breadth, an intellectual depth to accompany the skills and aptitudes of the specialist. And there are the human successes in sectors whose mission is to produce an involved, thinking efficiency... Not everyone agrees that American higher education is characterized by success. Numbers are quoted indicating that the quality of graduates is not what it used to be. But they forget that sometimes the numbers go down as the numbers go up. As American higher education welcomes people less prepared, less gifted and often less motivated, as the atmosphere at some colleges becomes less rarified by the proliferation of remedial education, the average accomplishment will go down.
Bernard Fryshman, "Grasping the Reins of Reality," Inside Higher Ed, August 16, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/08/16/fryshman

Modeling Hispanic Serving Institutions
A new report released Wednesday, “Modeling Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs): Campus Practices that Work for Latino Students,” explores strategies used by institutions with significant Latino enrollments. The report was released by Excelencia in Education and examined six community colleges and six public universities — in California, New York and Texas.
Inside Higher Ed, June 19, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/19/report
Jensen Comment
In particular note the "Lessons Learned" section on Page 19.

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

Western Governors University, which was founded in 1997 as a collaboration of colleges in 19 states offering online programs, was for many years known for not meeting the ambitious goals of its founders. Projected to attract thousands of students within a few years, it initially attracted but scores of students. But the university has been growing lately, and on Wednesday announced that enrollment has hit 10,000, including students from all 50 states.
Inside Higher Ed, June 5, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/05/qt

Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education alternatives are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

May 8, 2008 message from The Carnegie Foundation

A New Agenda for Higher Education

To prepare students to respond to the world with informed and responsible judgments about the role they will play within it, a new model of undergraduate teaching is needed. A New Agenda for Higher Education (Jossey-Bass, 2008), by Carnegie Senior Scholar William M. Sullivan and Consulting Scholar Matthew S. Rosin, offers a conception of educational purpose focused on the interdependence of liberal education and professional training. More than just positing a theory of a better integrated undergraduate education, the book highlights practices to educate students for lives of significance and responsibility.

What would your college do with an added $200 million?
First I want to congratulate Claremont McKenna College for receiving such a huge gift.
Second I want to congratulate them on how they intend to spend it in this era where so many students opt for professional program majors rather than liberal arts.
Claremont McKenna College on Thursday announced a $200 million gift, from a trustee and alumnus, Robert Day. One purpose of the funds will be to create new academic programs in which students can combine liberal arts education with an education in business and finance — either during their undergraduate program or through a one-year master of finance program immediately after an undergraduate program is completed. The new options are meant to be an alternative to a traditional M.B.A.
Inside Higher Ed, September 28, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/28/qt

Bob Jensen's threads on free mathematics and statistics tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics

Where the Highest Ranked Colleges Don't Excel --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DoNotExcel

Carnegie Foundation's case for integrating statistics into "a manifold" of undergraduate courses

Adult Learners Find Some College Web Sites Wanting
Before they choose to enroll in continuing-education courses, adult learners spend plenty of time perusing college Web sites, looking for the right fit. But those prospective students don’t always like what they see, says a report from Eduventures. The college consulting firm surveyed more than 500 adults who were considering taking classes. Most said the sites they visited were at least somewhat helpful, but many said the college sites were difficult to search or skimpy on useful content. For example, more than nine out of 10 prospective students visited continuing-education Web sites to figure out how much courses will cost, the study found. But only 59 percent said the sites spelled out pricing plans clearly and comprehensively. Colleges that do make that information easily accessible, it would seem, are getting a leg up on their competition.
Brock Read, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 14, 2007 --- Click Here

Does It Matter That Your Professor Is Part Time?

November 10, 2008 message from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

This is an interesting article from U.S.News.

At my school, the most recent past president seriously curtailed the the use of adjuncts and hired a couple of hundred non-tenure track faculty. A majority of the student credits at BGSU are taught by non-tenuretrack faculty, either full time or part-time adjuncts.

Now that faculty are attempting to organize into a union, squabbling is going on as to whether the non-tenure track should be in the tenure-track bargaining unit or in their own unit. The organizers want them in the tenure-track union to get their votes.

Dave Albrecht

http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/2008/11/07/does-it-matter-that-your-professor-is-part-time.html 

Does It Matter That Your Professor Is Part Time? By Kim Clark Posted November 7, 2008

As colleges face increasing costs, the traditional tweed-coated, pipe-smoking, comfortable-job-for-life full-time professor appears to be going the way of the dodo bird. Nowadays, the typical college professor is a part-timer, moonlighting for extra cash or prestige, or "freeway flying"­cobbling together a teaching career with several classes at different colleges.

Some students are benefiting from adjuncts' lower costs and, often, more practical, up-to-date instruction, of course. But there's also considerable evidence that the proliferation of adjunct professors­many of whom don't have Ph.D.'s­is dumbing down many classrooms and contributing to grade inflation.

Despite 20 years of booming enrollment and skyrocketing tuition, colleges have been quietly filling the majority of new openings with part-time or short-contract adjunct professors (also often called "visiting professors," "instructors," or "lecturers") instead of the traditional assistant professors who have a chance to work up to a full tenured job. In fact, the nation's graduate schools are now pumping out hundreds more Ph.D.'s each year in some disciplines than there are tenure-track openings available. The trend has become so pervasive that about two thirds of America's college instructors are now adjuncts.

That's generated tremendous savings for colleges. On average, traditional professors, who have tenure (or lifetime job guarantees), benefits, and campus offices, cost colleges the equivalent of about $8,000 per three-credit class, one recent study found. Adjuncts, the vast majority of whom teach only one or two courses at any particular college, cost their employers an average of about $1,800 per course. Schools not only pay adjuncts less per classroom hour but often don't offer benefits or support such as offices or secretaries.

Acceleration. A few schools, such as Arizona State University, are responding to current budget shortfalls by laying off adjunct faculty. But looming financial problems are likely, over the long term, to cause many colleges to "accelerate the hiring of adjuncts," says Jane Wellman, director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability.

Indeed, many of the fastest-growing schools have eliminated tenure altogether. Western Governors University, a new online community college, has found that non-Ph.D.'s, on average, do a better job of motivating and counseling students through the school's computerized lessons. And the freedom to release employees whose students fail improves the quality of the education, says Robert Mendenhall, WGU's president.

Many traditional colleges claim adjunct-taught classes are better for students than, for example, classes taught by graduate students.

Texas Woman's University Provost Kay Clayton says raising the share of part-time faculty about 4 percentage points to 44 percent in the past five years might be helping her students. For instance, by hiring moonlighting nurses for about $3,000 per course to teach some nursing classes, the school helped keep this year's tuition at $6,500 a year and, Clayton says, provided better teachers. "That is a real benefit to the students, because they are practitioners and bring in a wealth of experience," she says.

In fact, one study found that in some fields­especially technical and career-related programs such as psychology, architecture, and finance­students who are taught by professionals serving as part-time instructors appear to perform better academically. Such students also take more courses in the subject.

But that study (and others) found, in addition, that the students of adjuncts who are teaching the basic academic disciplines, such as English, history, and pure sciences, are more likely to drop out.

Despite that troubling research, more than half of all English professors are now not on the tenure track. And many adjuncts say most colleges provide them with so little support, job security, and money that it is inevitable that their students will underperform.

Since schools usually look at student evaluations to determine whether or not to invite adjuncts back, Lila Harper, who has a Ph.D. in English literature and teaches writing and literature at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Wash., finds herself grading a little easier than she likes and avoiding controversial subjects. "We are gradually undermining the value of a college degree," she fears.

Harper, who is a full-time adjunct, says that because she has no chance at tenure, she stopped teaching a course that included Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice after a student objected on religious grounds. (The main character, a middle-aged writer, struggles with an unexpected passion for a young boy as he also confronts his mortality and his moral duty to warn the youngster to flee a coming plague.) "I am disposable," Harper says. "If they can save face by firing me, they will fire me, so I try to pick topics that are not controversial."

Multiple choice. Another adjunct, who teaches speech and communications part time at private Midwestern colleges and asked not to be named, says that only by teaching six to nine courses a semester (at about $2,000 a course) can he make the $25,000 to $30,000 a year he needs to cover his basic living costs. So he spends 12 to 13 hours a day driving to part-time jobs at different colleges, teaching, and grading. "I give multiple-choice tests because I don't have time to grade essays," he says. And when one private college, eager to increase enrollment, recently asked him to pass a flunk-ing student who would otherwise have dropped out, he says he had little choice but to agree, since he wants to be invited back to teach again next semester.

Sometimes, he thinks of how each of the 20 or 30 students in his classes is paying about $2,000 in tuition and fees for each course. The classes generate at least $40,000, which means the colleges pass on to him only about 5 percent of the students' tuition. Although the adjunct, who has a master's degree, gets top ratings from his students, he doesn't get raises. The colleges "always say, 'We know that you are worth more than this, but we don't have the money.' "

Meanwhile, to get to his classrooms, he drives past cranes erecting "million-dollar dorms and athletic facilities," he notes. He is often tempted to find steadier, more lucrative work. But "I love teaching, being exposed to the students, their ideas and energy." If he did quit, he knows there are dozens of professionals eager to take his place. "If the university can get something cheaper," he says, "it will."

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

"Twenty-Five Years Later, A Nation Still at Risk," by chester E. Finn Jr., The Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2008; Page A7 ---

Today marks the 25th anniversary of "A Nation at Risk," the influential Reagan-era report by a blue-ribbon panel that alerted Americans to the weak performance of our education system. The report warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people." That dire forecast set off a quarter century of education reform that's yielded worthy changes – yet still not the achievement gains we need to turn back the tide of mediocrity.

After decades of furthering educational "equality," the 1983 commission admonished the country, it was time to attend to academic excellence and school results. Educators didn't want to hear this and a generation later many still don't. Our ponderous public-school system resists change. Teachers don't like criticism and are loath to be judged by pupil performance. In educator circles, one still encounters grumbling that "A Nation at Risk" lodged a bum rap.

Others heeded the alarm, though, and that report launched an era of forceful innovation and accountability guided by noneducators – elected officials, business leaders and philanthropists.

Such "civilian" leadership has brought about two profound shifts that the professionals, left to their own devices, would never have allowed. Today, instead of judging schools by their services, resources or fairness, we track their progress against preset academic standards – and hold them to account for those results.

We're also far more open to charter schools, vouchers, virtual schools, home schooling. And we no longer suppose kids must attend the campus nearest home. A majority of U.S. students now study either in bona fide "schools of choice," or in neighborhood schools their parents chose with a realtor's help.

Those are historic changes indeed – most of today's education debates deal with the complexities of carrying them out. Yet our school results haven't appreciably improved, whether one looks at test scores or graduation rates. Sure, there are up and down blips in the data, but no big and lasting changes in performance, even though we're also spending tons more money. (In constant dollars, per-pupil spending in 1983 was 56% of today's.)

And just as "A Nation at Risk" warned, other countries are beginning to eat our education lunch. While our outcomes remain flat, theirs rise. Half a dozen nations now surpass our high-school and college graduation rates. International tests find young Americans scoring in the middle of the pack.

What to do now? It's no time to ease the push for a major K-12 education make-over – or to settle (as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton apparently would) for reviving yesterday's faith in still more spending and greater trust in educators. But we can distill four key lessons:

First, don't expect Uncle Sam to manage the reform process. Not only does Washington lack the capacity to revamp thousands of schools and create alternatives for millions of kids, but viewing education reform as a federal obligation lets others off the hook. Yet some things are best done nationally – notably creating uniform standards and tests in place of today's patchwork of uneven expectations and noncomparable assessments. These we have foolishly resisted.

Second, retain civilian control but push for more continuity. Governors and mayors remain indispensable leaders on the ground – but the instant they leave office, the system tries to revert. The adult interests that rule it – teacher unions, yes, but also colleges of education, textbook publishers and more – look after themselves and fend off change. If three consecutive governors or mayors hew to the same agenda, those reforms are more apt to endure.

Third, don't bother seeking one grand innovation. Education reform is not about silver bullets. But huge gains can be made by schools that are free to run (and staff) themselves, attended by choice, expected to meet high standards, and accountable for their results.

Consider the more than 50 schools in the acclaimed Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) network. We don't have nearly enough today, but we're likelier to grow more of them outside the traditional system than by trying to alter the system itself.

Finally, content matters. Getting the structures, rules and incentives right is only half the battle. The other half is sound curriculum and effective instruction. If we can't place enough expert educators in our classrooms, we can use technology to amplify the best of them across the state or nation. Kids no longer need to sit in school to be well educated.

Far from delivering an undeserved insult to a well-functioning system, the authors of "A Nation at Risk" were clear-eyed about that system's failings, and prescient about the challenges these posed to America's future. Now that we're well into that future, we owe them a vote of thanks. But our most solemn responsibility is to keep the reform flag flying high in the wind that they created.

Mr. Finn, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is the author of "Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik," published in February by the Princeton University Press.

Terminology for a Mission Statement:  If you have to write a mission statement for a program, department, or an entire college here's a way to think about and write about such things

"An Economist's Tools of the Trade:  How the science of economics is instrumental in helping a president run his university," by James L. Doti, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 9, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/12/2008120901c.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

I've often been asked whether my academic background in economics serves me well in carrying out my presidential duties at Chapman University. No doubt, course work in accounting while I was an undergraduate has helped me to critically read and understand income statements and balance sheets.

But what about my many years of almost total immersion in the dismal science? Does it translate to executive leadership? Can economics help a chief executive be more effective, or is it only the stuff of dry mathematical models and esoteric theories, with little practical value?

In reflecting on those questions, I've concluded that my economic brainwashing has been instrumental in how I think about things and make decisions as a university president. I may not always be conscious of it, but economics rears its head in many telling ways. And the same holds true, I believe, for other university leaders, whether they know it or not.

Comparative advantage.
In the early 1800s, the millionaire stockholder David Ricardo showed how the law of comparative advantage can be used to explain the gains of trade. That law is why most economists believe in the efficacy of free trade across international borders. I use the law of comparative advantage in a somewhat different way.

In strategic planning for a university, we are often confronted with many proposals for new academic programs. Making choices is difficult but choose we must, since resource constraints limit what we can do. About 10 years ago, we had to decide at Chapman whether to significantly expand our small department of film production or focus on alternative programs with great promise.

In the end, we concluded that Chapman had a comparative advantage in film over other universities because of our location in Southern California and because of a team of leaders in our nascent program who shared a compelling academic vision. That small department has since grown to become one of the leading film schools in the nation.

Another area of Chapman's comparative advantage goes beyond its location. I have long observed that unlike professors at most universities, our faculty engage in a good deal of interdisciplinary work. Without much prodding, various schools offer a variety of joint programs; the disciplinary silos that impede interdisciplinary work at other institutions do not seem to exist at Chapman. While I'm not certain how that happened, I do know that it represents a comparative advantage for Chapman that should not only be nurtured but exploited.

With that in mind, we decided last year to recruit a world-class team of six faculty members in computational science — an interdisciplinary area of study that integrates physics, computer science, and engineering. The new center will use tools from various disciplines to study such hot topics as adaptation to climate change, nanotechnology, wildfire prediction, and even earthquake forecasting.

I believe we're making the right choices, but more important, I am confident that by placing great emphasis on comparative advantage, we're using the right decision-making process.

Incentives.
Any discussion about the workings of a market economy ultimately falls back on the power of incentives. And any discussion about the workings of a vibrant academic community ultimately falls back on attracting and retaining the best and brightest faculty members and students. For that to happen, we must use an arsenal of incentives. The fact that people respond to rewards is understood even by noneconomists. But economists tend to be obsessed with the connection between incentives and results.

Salaries and scholarships are certainly among the carrots we offer. But the market economy has been unfairly pilloried for dealing only with monetary rewards. Incentives can and do take many other forms.

For example, realizing how much faculty members value endowed chairs and professorships, we began creating more of them. The number of endowed positions at Chapman has grown from one in 1991 to 33 chairs and 19 professorships today.

Creating those endowed positions also relies on using incentives in our fund-raising efforts. It always troubled me that donors who endow faculty positions get little recognition for their philanthropy. Naming a chair after a donor obviously lacks the panache that comes with giving money for a major construction project and seeing your name in large letters on a building.

One day, as I was jogging along the beautiful trails of the Borghese Gardens in Rome, I noticed busts of famous artists and scientists framing the paths. I'm not sure now, but probably because of my obsession with incentives, I was struck by the idea of creating a similar promenade on the Chapman campus. It would be flanked by busts of personages to represent the various disciplines of our endowed chairs and professorships, and by each bust we could name the donor whose money had made the position possible.

Our campus now has busts of Abraham Lincoln, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, Martin Luther King Jr., Adam Smith, and many others. Most recently, we had a public ceremony to celebrate the creation of a new chair in Italian studies. On the pedestal of an exquisite bronze bust of Giacomo Puccini is a plaque that also commemorates Paul and Marybelle Musco, whose donation made the chair possible.

In tough economic times, when both donors and institutions are suffering under fiscal constraints, the arsenal of monetary incentives will be limited. But market incentives can be as simple yet powerful as giving praise and public recognition to professors, staff members, students, and alumni.

Sunk costs.
Those are expenditures that, once incurred, cannot be recovered. Sounds simple enough, but those costs are oh-so-powerful in administrative decision making.

Recently, in evaluating an academic program created several years ago, we reached a point where it became clear we had a failure on our hands. Students and faculty members weren't engaged or interested. The program lurched forward but had few prospects for real success. When our discussion turned to the possibility of ending the program, someone argued, "Yes, but what about all the money we've invested in this?"

That person was referring to sunk costs. But since these costs are "sunk," they should not be considered in evaluating whether to continue a program. Only its future prospects — both pro and con — are relevant.

Because of the long planning horizon for construction, the perceived benefits of a project often change during the time it takes to complete it. For example, we once spent close to $1-million in architectural costs for a new classroom building. But by the time we were ready to break ground, we had come to the conclusion that we really needed a new student union more than a classroom building.

The $1-million was already spent and, so, not directly relevant to forward-looking decisions. Let's say, for example, that the total cost (including architectural fees) for either the classroom building or the student union was $10-million. In deciding between those projects, the relevant cost for the student union is $10-million. But the relevant cost for the classroom building is $9-million.

Clearly, an understanding of sunk costs is necessary for relevant cost-benefit analysis. In deciding what to do, presidents should not be swayed by sunk costs. The only relevant costs for decision making are the costs that would be incurred from the present to the future.

Price discrimination.
Private colleges and universities are price discriminators. That is, they use tuition rates and grants as pricing tools to achieve certain quantitative and qualitative objectives. Tuition grants in the form of financial aid, for example, can be used to make a college experience more affordable. They can also be used in the form of academic or athletic scholarships to attract better-prepared students or star athletes.

Our ability to charge different net (after-grant) tuition rates to different students is to be contrasted with businesses in which everyone pays the same price for a particular product. For example, unlike higher education, most sellers of agricultural products do not have the ability to maximize revenues and shape customer profiles by charging different prices for such commodities. Commodity customers face the same stated market price and determine whether to buy or sell on the basis of it.

Many experts in the economics of higher education, however, argue that colleges and universities are losing their ability to effectively price discriminate. I made that argument myself in a November 2004 article I wrote in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management ("Is Higher Education Becoming a Commodity?"). In my research, I found that the ability to use price discrimination is declining at different rates for different types of institutions. I found that more-selective colleges had a greater degree of price-discriminating ability. That is consistent with economic theory which suggests that price discrimination is conducted more effectively when demand for a product or service does not vary much with price, which is certainly the case at selective institutions.

Strategically, the findings suggest that more-selective institutions will be better able to price tuition and grants at relatively high levels. Less-selective colleges would be better off with a low tuition and grant strategy.

At Chapman, recognition of that relationship helped us to significantly increase student selectivity. Not only would the recruitment of better-prepared students improve the intellectual life on the campus, but it would also place us in a stronger market position. As our selectivity increased — moving steadily upward from a "student selectivity" rank in U.S. News & World Report of 92 out of 112 Western master's universities in 1991, to a rank of 2 out of 127 campuses in 2008 — so did our net tuition. We found that being more selective made it possible for us to increase tuition at a faster rate than the rate at which we increased financial aid. In contrast, less-selective institutions generally have to give most of their tuition increases back in the form of scholarships and tuition grants, resulting in no increase in net tuition revenue.

Those are but a few examples of how economics can be used to inform administrative decision making in academe. I could go on. But there is something else I know about economics, in addition to its usefulness in decision making: The human mind is capable of absorbing only so much economics at one time. So let me end here before the dismal science becomes even more dismal.

Continued in article

LearningScience --- http://www.learningscience.org/index.htm

LearningScience.org is an organization dedicated to sharing the newer and emerging "learning tools" of science education. Tools such as real-time data collection, simulations, inquiry based lessons, interactive web lessons, micro-worlds, and imaging,  among others, can help make teaching science an exciting and engaging endeavor. These tools can help connect students with science, in ways that were impossible just a few years ago. Take a look at a few different types of "learning tools" at this link, Tool Examples. At this point in our project we are highlighting some of the best web resources for science concepts. Although our main emphasis is on students, teachers, and parents, really anyone interested in science education will find the site useful and informative. 

Using the National Science Education Standards (1996, National Academy of Sciences) as our framework, we highlight only the best of these "learning tools" for students and teachers. All of the featured tools go through a  review process. Once a "learning tool" is submitted it is analyzed by an editorial panel of science educators and scientists for content and design.

LearningScience.org  is proof of concept project and a work in progress. Most of our "learning tools" are web based and free. We will remain a totally FREE online learning community that researches, reviews, and recommends the best of world wide science education interactives. This means that most of these are accessible to teachers, students, and parents who have access to the Internet.  For some of the concepts, we have only a few "learning tools".  That is why it is important that you join us in this effort. If you are a science professional, or someone who enjoys science, please consider sending us your ideas.. If you have found science resources that we should add,  please share your ideas with others, we would love to hear from you. Just email George Mehler with your suggestions.

LearningScience.org is a collaborative project of the Central Bucks School District (PA,USA), the teachers of the Central Bucks School District, The College of Education at Temple University (PA, USA), and George Mehler Ed.D.  George Mehler can be reached at gmehler@cbsd.org
or 267 893 2044.

In Defense of "Traditional" Learning and Assessment

April 27, 2009 message from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

Bob,

Here's another article from the CHE newsletter.

The conclusion from these latest two articles rings true.

Collegiate business courses in general, and collegiate accounting courses, in particular, have taken their fair share of hits in recent years, because of the lack of experiential learning built into the curriculum and so many courses. The traditional approach to collegiate instruction--lecture and (MC) testing--is too frequently assailed because students don't become active participants in the learning process. Never-the-less, accounting students across the country do pick up on the rules of financial and tax accounting, and the logic of cost accounting and auditing. I've frequently wondered where the missing piece is, how a discredited approach to conducting college courses can produce any learning results at all.

My own thinking had begun to focus on the recitation/homework aspect built into so many of our courses, and the results of these two studies seems to it up.

I have made extensive use of homework assignments over the years, to the extent that I write my own problems. A HW set for a particular topic moves from very short "drills" to comprehensive problems that set the topic into a very realistic setting. What I do isn't unique. However, I have my own idea about what is realistic.

Anyway, I find this latest news to be a validation for a part of what we do, and welcome news indeed.

Access to the article below requires a subscription. The part of the article not quoted IS important, as it pertains to real world applications.

Dave Albrecht

******quotation begins******

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i34/34a00101.htm 

From the issue dated May 1, 2009 Close the Book. Recall. Write It Down. That old study method still works, researchers say. So why don't professors preach it?

By DAVID GLENN

The scene: A rigorous intro-level survey course in biology, history, or economics. You're the instructor, and students are crowding the lectern, pleading for study advice for the midterm.

If you're like many professors, you'll tell them something like this: Read carefully. Write down unfamiliar terms and look up their meanings. Make an outline. Reread each chapter.

That's not terrible advice. But some scientists would say that you've left out the most important step: Put the book aside and hide your notes. Then recall everything you can. Write it down, or, if you're uninhibited, say it out loud.

Two psychology journals have recently published papers showing that this strategy works, the latest findings from a decades-old body of research. When students study on their own, "active recall" ¬ recitation, for instance, or flashcards and other self-quizzing ¬ is the most effective way to inscribe something in long-term memory.

Yet many college instructors are only dimly familiar with that research. And in March, when Mark A. McDaniel, a professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and one author of the new studies, gave a talk at a conference of the National Center for Academic Transformation, people fretted that the approach was oriented toward robotic memorization, not true learning.

Don't Reread

A central idea of Mr. McDaniel's work, which appears in the April issue of Psychological Science and the January issue of Contemporary Educational Psychology, is that it is generally a mistake to read and reread a textbook passage. That strategy feels intuitively right to many students ¬ but it's much less effective than active recall, and it can give rise to a false sense of confidence.

"When you've got your chemis-try book in front of you, everything's right there on the page, it's all very familiar and fluent," says Jeffrey D. Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University and lead author of a paper in the May issue of Memory about students' faulty intuitions about effective study habits.

"So you could say to yourself, 'Yeah, I know this. Sure, this is all very familiar,'" Mr. Karpicke continues. "But of course, when you go in to take a classroom test, or in real life when you need to reconstruct your knowledge, the book's not there. In our experiments, when students repeatedly read something, it falsely inflates their sense of their own learning."

These findings about active recall are not new or faddish or parochial. The research has been deepened and systematized recently by scholars at the University of California at Los Angeles and Washington University in St. Louis (where Mr. Karpicke earned his doctorate in 2007). But the basic insight goes back decades. One of the new papers tips its hat to a recitation-based method known as "SQ3R," which was popularized in Effective Study, a 1946 book by Francis P. Robinson.

So if this wisdom is so well-established ¬ at least among psychologists ¬ should colleges explicitly try to coax students to use these study techniques? And if so, how? That is the question that the authors of these papers are now pondering.

"I think it's a mistake for us to think that just publishing this work in a few journals is going to have a huge impact in the classroom," says Mr. McDaniel.

After a decade of working in this area, Mr. McDaniel feels enough confidence in his findings that he is willing to proselytize about them. He and his colleagues have also been promoting the idea of frequent low-stakes classroom quizzes (The Chronicle, June 8, 2007).

Among other things, Mr. McDaniel has recently collaborated with a network of biology instructors who would like to improve the pass rates in their introductory courses.

One of those scholars is Kirk Bartholomew, an assistant professor of biology at Sacred Heart University. He first crossed paths with Mr. McDaniel at a conference sponsored by a textbook publisher.

"He basically confirmed my ideas ¬ that after you've read something once, you've gotten what you're going to get out of it, and then you need to go out and start applying the information," Mr. Bartholomew says.

The two scholars collaborated on a Web interface that encouraged students to try different study techniques. The first round of research did not turn up any dramatic patterns, Mr. Bartholomew says ¬ other than the unsurprising fact that his students did better if they spent more time studying. But he says that he looks forward to refining the system.

Rote learning?

In March, however, when Mr. McDaniel took his message to the National Center for Academic Transformation meeting, his talk was not entirely well received.

Several days after his appearance, he got a note from Carol A. Twigg, the center's chief executive. "She said, 'We really loved having you, but you created some controversy here,'" Mr. McDaniel says. According to Ms. Twigg's note, some people worried that Mr. McDaniel's techniques might generate rote memorization at the expense of deeper kinds of learning.

Michael R. Reder, director of Connecticut College's Center for Teaching and Learning, had a similar reaction to one of Mr. McDaniel's new papers on studying.

The paper seems perfectly valid on its own terms and might offer a "useful tool," Mr. Reder says. But in his view, the paper also "suggests an old model of learning. You know, I'm going to give information to the students, and the students then memorize that information and then spit it back."

Mr. McDaniel finds such reactions frustrating. One experiment in his new paper suggests that a week after reading a complex passage, people who recited the material after reading it did much better at solving problems that involved analyzing and drawing inferences from the material than did people who simply read the passage twice.

"I don't think these techniques will necessarily result in rote memorization," Mr. McDaniel says. "If you ask people to free-recall, you can generate a better mental model of a subject area, and in turn that can lead to better problem-solving."

And in some college courses, he continues, a certain amount of memorization is impossible to escape ¬ so it might as well be done effectively.

In Biology 101, for example, "you've got a heavily fact-laden course. When I talk to biology instructors at Big Ten universities, they're working really hard to create interesting, interactive courses where they've got 500 or 600 kids in a lecture class. But no matter how engaging you make the course, the students need to have the knowledge base to do the inquiry-based problem-solving activities that you've designed."

continued in article

******quotation ends*******

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm