When Chemists Attack

It’s always interesting to know what your students are actually thinking. I have to admit, though, that sometimes I would really rather not know. Take this example, buried in the comments from a set of student surveys from a past semester:

[Rick] needs to come down to our level.

You might expect to hear comments like this from students in, say, sophomore level chemical engineering thermodynamics. Heck, I still have nightmares about that course. The comment above, though, was left for me by one of my introductory chemistry students. Introductory chemistry is the lowest-level chemistry course we offer – roughly on par with a high school course. It’s the lowest-level science course with a lab that we teach.

How low a level are we talking here? Here’s one of the questions from this course’s first test.

Determine the length of the line based on the ruler drawn below.

(Why ask about a ruler in an intro chemistry class? We discuss reading of measuring devices like rulers, graduated cylinders, and balances early on in the course – otherwise the students couldn’t really do much in the course’s lab. The ruler itself is mostly meant to connect a familiar measurement – what adult has never used a ruler? – to more unfamiliar devices like graduated cylinders and balances.)

I’m at a loss. Education isn’t like the limbo. It’s not about how low you can go. And, with this particular course, it’s not as if I can “come down” any more. At some point, the student has got to climb.

Occasionally, I give “pop” quizzes in my introductory classes to reinforce the idea that my students should be prepared for class and keep up with their studies. (Just to prove that I’m not completely evil, my students are told to expect a quiz each week on the material that we’ve been discussing.)

We’re now a week into the semester here, and I just gave one class it’s first quiz – a simple five-question multiple choice set on the material from the previous two classes. After class let out, a student came up to me and asked “Can I do the quiz over? I wasn’t really prepared to take it.”

This, of course, was the entire point of the quiz – to remind the students that they should keep up with the material as we’re going through it and not cram the night before each major test.

But where does the idea to ask an instructor for “do-over”s on even the simplest of assignments come from? I’ve been on the other side of the classroom for a few years, but it would have simply never occurred to me as a student to ask my instructors for “do-overs”. Preparing for class was my responsibility, and if I wasn’t prepared, then it was my own fault.

Oh well, maybe my student thought that the house limit was three do-overs.

Not Very Bright has a post up on the micro-scandal at Clemson over Ann Patchett’s book Truth & Beauty. Go forth and read it. 🙂

But I’m going to make a few hurried comments. Here’s a statement from Ken Wingate – in a letter to Clemson’s president.

As a Clemson alumnus, a Clemson parent, and a member of the Commission on Higher Education, I suggest that you pull the plug on the author’s lecture and offer an alternative book for the freshmen.

As a Clemson alumnus myself, I’m embarassed to read that letter. Clemson is a place of many viewpoints. Is Ann Patchett such a dangerous person that the freshmen (nearly all of whom are legal adults) will be damaged merely by her speech?

Or her book?

I think the perfect response to that is from Ann Patchett (emphasis mine).

The chance to receive higher education is a privilege, and Clemson students should be proud they attend a school where they are treated as adults, she said.

Amen. And … Go Tigers!

The College of Charleston is doing something interesting with their cheating students – giving them an X-tra special grade!

Students caught cheating at the College of Charleston will now be graded for their efforts – they will received a mark of “XF” – which means they failed the course because of academic dishonesty.

I’m curious about the “X”. What does it stand for – “eXtra fail”? “eXtreme failure”?

All kidding aside, this is an interesting idea that should be picked up at more schools. (It’s already implemented at some colleges and universities. For some schools, this kind of grade has been around quite a long time.) Potential employers, when getting a transcript from a school, should be able to see whether their new hires acquired their grades honestly. Plus, I think it’d act as a pretty strong deterrent to a potential cheater to know that his cheating will show up on the transcript he will have to provide to a future employer.

I do think that there’s one weak point to CofC’s method:

The XF grade will remain on a student’s transcript at least two years. After two years, if there are no additional violations, the student can petition to have the grade removed.

I think that time period of two years is too short, since it removes the “stick” of having the cheating being exposed to potential employers for too many would-be cheaters.

I am a couple of days late on this, but Kevin Drum’s site has a post up with the Washington Monthly’s take on the latest federal report on higher education.

When you look at the system as a whole, the numbers are disturbing — only 37% of students who begin at four-year colleges nationwide actually graduate in four years.

Now while I teach at a two-year college, I do not really find that number disturbing at all. To get a four year degree in four years requires that you be a full-time student the entire four years. College students are adults, and they are not compelled to be ful-time students. Some work part-time to help pay for college, and as a result may take a reduced course load. Some co-op, so that they have a better chance of landing a job after graduation. That means … longer than four years to get a degree.

While you may blame the colleges to some extent for this, there’s not a whole lot they can do about it, except to perhaps require less credit hours for graduation. (Some schools are doing exactly this – I got a newsletter from Clemson‘s chemistry department the other day detailing how the curriculum was to be “streamlined” to reduce the number of credit hours required for a degree.

Extending the timeframe to six years only brings the rate up to 63%. For black and Latino students, it’s less than 50%.

While I agree that the percentage of minority students that don’t graduate is disturbing simply because it’s lower than the rest, you can clearly see that a lot of folks are extending their stay at college.

We have a similar issue at the two-year schools. Many of our students do not graduate with a two-year degree in two years. Of course, the vast majority of these students have jobs (many have full-time jobs), and cannot take full-time loads. Those that try to juggle full-time work and full-time student status are sometimes forced to let their studies slide. Is it useful to criticize the school in this situation? What can the school do about it?

Criticizing the way financial aid is given might be a useful place to look, though. Many students tell me they “have to be full time” for financial aid reasons.

Timothy Sandefur, the resident no-comment Libertarian at Panda’s Thumb, asks us Is School Choice the answer?, and links us to a mini-debate between Neal McCluskey of CATO and Matthew Yglesias on the issue of resolving the creation/evolution debate.

The simple answer to Sandefur’s question and McCluskey’s assertion is, obviously, no – vouchers would not solve the problem of kids getting a poor science education. Vouchers would merely force me and other taxpayers to foot the bill for deluding children with demonstrably incorrect pseudoscience.

Sure, vouchers could eventually end the complaining about what kids were being taught in public schools (by eliminating the public schools), but it would do little else other than shift the complaints onto other targets.

Colleges would (rightly) penalize students with with the kind of substandard education you get from the small, fundamentalist schools that stand to benefit the most from vouchers. And then these disadvantaged students would sue the colleges, et cetera. Problem most definitely … unsolved.