When Chemists Attack

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.