Party Schools Exposed

Professor refuses order to fix grades for crackhead hoopster

One of my new heroes is Sally Dear, an adjunct at Binghamton University in New York, who took a stand against corrupt college administrators who ordered her to fix the grades of a college basketball player with a spotty attendance record who was later arrested for selling and using crack cocaine.

With 11 years of experience teaching human development, Sally didn't set out to be a whistle blower, but when the New York Times asked her the question, she decided to answer it honestly.  Yes, she said, she had been ordered to give the athletes higher grades than they deserved. As a result of telling the truth, she was fired.

"I'm being fired for being ethical," she told the New York Times. "I have no doubt about that whatsoever."

While Binghamton claimed her dismissal was due to "budget cuts," absolutely no one is falling for that whopper. Now that the door is open, Sally is spilling the beans that many of Binghamton's athletically gifted but academically challenged hoopsters were funneled into the human development program because it was known to favor the basketball program. According to Sally, the department has not been holding the hoopsters to the same standard as other students. Hoopsters who were not passing were given "independent studies" to carry them through, she said.

As a former college teacher, I can tell you that "independent studies" are a well-known dodge to keep students in school who are too dumb to pass the regular courses or who have serious attendance problems caused by failure to get up before noon.

Now the SUNY chancellor has ordered Sally to be reinstated and ordered an outside investigation to focus on issues of "academic integrity" in addition to an ongoing investigation of the collapse of the team after six players were dismissed. The athletic director also resigned.

"It's no secret to anyone that the president's desire to get to the NCAA championship trumped everything else," Sally told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I got caught right in the middle of it."

So one lowly adjunct tells the truth and the whole corrupt system falls apart. College presidents like Binghamton's Lois B. DeFleur who care more about NCAA championships than they do about academic standards are exposed for the unethical creeps that they really are. Binghamton administrators are no doubt staying up late these days feeding the paper shredders to cover up the truth.

Sally thinks there are hundreds of professors like her around the country who are fed up with the dumbed down classes and inflated grades that administrators are forcing on them in order to improve their retention rates and keep the millions in tuition money flowing from student loans into the college coffers.

"They're not willing to talk to anyone," she said. "They're scared of their jobs."

When an industry that brags about its academic freedom intimidates its employees by punishing those who speak out about abuses, its time for a full scale housecleaning.   We could start by kicking out corrupt, overpaid college administrators like Lois B. DeFleur.

'Tis the season to celebrate fraudulent grade reports

It's that time of year again. All the young scholars have flown away from my little college city and there is a strange stillness, especially at night. Not a single terrified scream or cackle of laughter and no more incessant booming of Hip Hop from car windows with a rapper bragging about all the ho's he's beat up so far that evening.

You can walk down the sidewalk for block after block without having to step over a passed out scholar or worry about an adolescent urinator aiming at your shoes. Beer cans, red Dixie cups, the odd bit of cast off clothing, all gone.

But, for parents, it's also the time of year when they get a chance to examine that creative work of fiction called the student grade report.  Wait, don't tell me. Your kid got an A or maybe a B, right? In every class? And that means little Johnny and little Sally are doing great in school, right?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, believe me, dear parents, every party school student gets an A or a B on just about every assignment in every class these days. A well-publicized study that came out last year found that students thought they deserved a B just for showing up! Although there are 26 letters in the alphabet, only two are used for student grades in our era of student entitlement, dumbed-down classes and inflated grades. Try to give a student a C these days and you will create a tempest of resentment and you can expect a series of meetings with angry administrators yelling at you about "retention." Give out a few C grades and your job could be at risk.

In colleges run like businesses, giving anything other than an A or a B is like serving a bowl of soup with a big ugly fly right in the middle. The customers get upset and complain and threaten to take their business elsewhere. Keeping students happy is now rule number one at party schools. Everyone seems to know that except you, dear parents.  Foolishly you think that a B means "good," when it has come to mean second rate. Colleges and students count on keeping you in the dark about all of this.

Professors have learned the hard way that the letters C, D and F are no longer in the academic alphabet. Only those out-of-touch parents aren't aware of that.

The losers here are the students themselves, who think they have gamed the system when they wasted five or six years to purchase a very expensive diploma that's not worth the paper it's printed on. They may have a degree and their grade report may be peppered with grades of A or B, but they can't hide their functional illiteracy for long, nor their inability to balance a checkbook. Their lack of knowledge of civics, history, geography, science and economics means they must spend their lives in a haze of ignorance, entirely unaware of how the world works. But hey, they had a good time in college and that's what they paid for. 

Grade Inflation Goes Wild at America's Colleges

Stuart Rojstaczer has been a hero of mine for a long time now. A former professor of geophysics at Duke, he has gone full time into exposing how inflated grades have damaged higher education in America.  He is a muckraker and true heretic of the first order, forcing colleges to look closely at the awful problem they have created for themselves. He was one of the people who passed on his heresy to me.

So it was with great anticipation that I read his op-ed piece from the March 24 Christian Science Monitor, and I was not disappointed. Many college administrators, of course, deny that grade inflation really exists at all. How could they accept something that reminds them that their entire industry has been cheapened by professors unwilling or unable to flunk anyone because the new academic buzz word is"retention"?

I urge you to read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts from his latest update on the "everyone gets an A" school of college grading.

"When students walk into a classroom knowing they can go through the motions and get a B+ or better, that's what they tend to do, give minimal effort. Our college classrooms are filled with students who do not prepare for class. Many study less than 10 hours a week."

Or how about this:

"Paradoxically, students are spending more and more money for an education that seems to deliver less and less content. With so few hours filled with learning, boredom sets in and students have to find something to pass the time. Instead of learning, they drink."

Right on, professor Rojstaczer!

Grade inflation: Why not just give everyone an A?

To understand what’s wrong with grade inflation at American colleges, imagine that the International Olympic Committee made the following announcement:

 

“Because we have received so many complaints from losing athletes that their self-esteem has been damaged by not winning a medal and because so many of them have tried really, really hard to win one, we have decided that our former practice discriminated against too many athletes. There has been too much agony of defeat and not enough thrill of victory. So, from now on, every athlete will receive a gold medal, even the ones who come in last.”

Pretty silly, eh? What would be the point of holding the Olympics at all? What fun would it be to watch? Why would an athlete spend time training and practicing? Why would athletes bother doing their best when they could take home a suitcase full of gold medals just like Michael Phelps?

 

That is, however, exactly what has happened on American college campuses from the Ivy Leagues on down to the lowest state university. Give a student anything less than an A and students will bitterly complain, hound you for weeks, take their case to the administration and libel you on class evaluations and Rate my Professor. That’s why many professors simply toss in the towel and list A’s from the top right down to the bottom of the grading sheets.

 

While I never heard an administrator endorse grade inflation, they make it clear that they hate taking the time to deal with “grade change requests” from students. Since no students ever complain that their grade was too high, giving universal grades of A solves this problem.

 

What this does, of course, is send a loud and clear message to students: “Only fools spend time studying. I can get the same grade you do simply by harassing the professor during exam week.” And, believe me, students understand that. Grade inflation is directly connected to dumbing down the curriculum to the lowest common denominator and discouraging the kids who really want to be in college and really want to learn.

 

Grade inflation is one of the dirty little secrets colleges deliberately keep from the public. It would be a simple calculation to add up all the grades awarded during the academic year and compare them to previous years. Few colleges, of course, want to make an issue of this and keep the information to themselves. Sometimes, however, it leaks out, as it did at Brown University this fall. The report showed that over half of the grades awarded at this Ivy League school were A. There have also been a number of national studies that have confirmed that this is happening and why, but the public still hasn’t caught on.

Parents are thrilled when their children bring home grade reports with all those As on them. They still think an A means something and that their children are exceptional. The truth, however, is that there is no longer any way to differentiate the exceptional from the merely competent. That misunderstanding on the part of the parents is where all of this begins to look a lot like fraud.

 

Should students get B's for just showing up?

One out of every three college student say that if they attend most of the classes in a college course they should receive at least a B, according to a new study by Ellen Greenberger, a professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California at Irvine.

These "entitled students," as Greenberger calls them, think that enrolling in college is similar to going shopping in a mall where the customer is always right. They think they deserve the highest grades for mediocre work and achievement and are ready to scream bloody murder if their grades are too low.

These students are also more likely to engage in cheating, more likely to exploit others, run away from anything that resembles work and display a "narcissistic attitude" toward the college experience.

The study was published in the November issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. There seems to be no link to this article and I could not find a single American newspaper article on it. In Canada, however, the article has set off a fire storm of coverage. Take a look here and here and here.  That brings up some interesting questions. Why is an American study showing anti-intellectual attitudes among American college students ignored here while it is big news in Canada? Again, I suspect this is the media's reluctance to expose the heresy that students aren't really learning very much in college, but I have no evidence of that.

Greenberger and other educators quoted in the Canadian newspapers lay the blame squarely at the feet of the self-esteem movement, which is a very sacred cow in teacher training programs in America, even though there is increasing evidence that it turns out students that feel really good about themselves but are too high on narcissism to take the time to learn anything.

Certainly I had many students like this at Keene State College and it's a major cause of grade inflation. Try giving one of these narcissistic snowflakes a grade less than an A and you are accused to not being a good teacher, not liking them or being unfair, even if they got 40 on the final exam. If you stick to your guns you can expect meetings with the department chair, the dean and even the vice president. Is it any wonder that most teachers simply throw in the towel and give everyone an A? There is absolutely no repercussions if you do that. A completely separate study this week found that half of all the grades given at Brown University last year were A. Clearly A is no longer "excellent" but more like "average."

Grade Inflation: Where every student is above average

Today's colleges and universities have much in common with Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegone. Everyone is above average. Professors have learned that the price of giving a student a C is endless harassment, poor evaluations and long meetings with administrators. It's just not worth the hassle.

Yesterday's Boston Globe Magazine contained a brief commentary by Philip Primak, a journalism professor at Tufts University, who explained that for Millennial students, even receiving a B can result in complaints. The sudents are so entitled that they think everything they do should receive a A, even if they don't read the textbook, fail the tests and come to class infrequently.

As Primak noted, grade inflation is one of those dirty little secrets that college teachers and administrators talk about only in private. They all know it exists and that it denigrates their work, but since there seems to be no solution they just ignore it. And they deny it in public.

There are some problems with this system that Primak ignores. Consider, for example, the impact that grade inflation has on the minority of students who study hard to get good grades. When the kid next to them, who did no work at all, receives the same grade it reinforces the message that college is basically a joke and only suckers do any real work.

Also, consider the impact this has on parents. They still think a grade of B means "good," as it used to, instead of its current meaning, which is "below average."  This keeps parents taking out the loans without realizing how little work junior is actually doing in college.

College administrators cited by Primak, argue that grades are higher because the students coming in to college are better prepared. However, that flies in the face of the facts. IQ has stayed the same over recent decades, but high school graduates need billions of dollars of remedial help to bring them up to college entrance standards.

The real reason for grade inflation is that as colleges have become more like businesses and students more like customers, good grades are the product that colleges exchange for the ever-increasing billions in tuition money that they charge. It's callled keeping the customer satisfied so he comes back for more next year.

Student Evaluations of Faculty Lead to Grade Inflation

Each semester, usually during the last class of the year, faculty members are asked to leave the room while students fill out evaluation forms about the class and the professor. After passing through the administration the forms are returned to the professor to puzzle over.

Many of the comments are so inarticulate as to be totally worthless. What does "too hard" mean? Or how about "grammer is bad." The comments are often abusive, especially towards women who are told how to dress "hotter." On my own evaluations I was advised to go on a diet or spend more time at the gym. I was often told that my grading was preventing them from graduating. "I spend a lot of money to come here and he is making me mad!" I was told I was a bully and most interestingly that I was "too opinionated." When I tracked down through his handwriting the student who wrote this, he explained to me what I was too opinionated about. "You are so interested in teaching us your way of writing you don't let us do it our way?" When I asked for an example the student mentioned grammar. He thought I should give equal time to students who wanted to ignore the rules for making subjects and verbs agree. Good lord!

Meanwhile, the whole process has been widely discredited. You can look at this piece by the Chronicle of Higher Education and professors' reactions to it. Not only is it a poor evaluation tool but it can lead directly to grade inflation as professors seeking tenure give everyone the grade of A to make the young scholars happy.

That's why it came to me as such a surprise when my boss, the dean of arts and humanities, read my latest batch of evaluations in the summer of 2007 and pointed out that students did not seem to be happy. I mentioned the above article and asked her if she was serious about using these evaluations as a review of my performance as a teacher. Isn't this letting the inmates run the asylum?

In fact she threatened to put me on probation unless my evaluations improved. Of course it would be easy to get good evaluations. You simply dumb down your classes, make them more entertaining and shorter. I was more interested in teaching than making the binge drinking minions happy. It was, after all, journalism boot camp and I had to make up for a dozen years of grammar problems.

Now, she suggested that if I wanted better evaluations I should stop teaching grammar, show more movies and invite more guest speakers to my classes to liven them up. This was the first time in my 12 years there that an administrator actually asked me to dumb down my classes. So I did the ethical thing and resigned.

However, I was curious about whether she really believed in the ridiculous evaluation process or if she was just trying to get a notorious gadfly off the payroll. Since she taught one class a semester, her classes were also subject to evaluations. Since the college's official evaluation forms aren't public, I turned to a reasonable alternative: Rate my Professors. This is a website where students can rant about professors anonymously and more publicly than on the college's forms. You just type in the teacher's last name and select from a list.

There I found the dean's dirty little secret: the students didn't like her either! Here are some examples of what students said on her page. I am simply cutting and pasting the comments from her students in here complete with grammar and spelling errors. You can try it yourself on Rate My Professors. Just put in her last name, which is Fienberg. You can look at mine too! My last name is Brandon.

Student One: "This teacher is a space cadet. Totally high up on herself, **** towards men, assignments were overwhelming, lectures were boring as hell, threated to fail me if i didn't withdraw..paper assignments were vauge and confusing. This teacher should resign."

Student Two: "Very hard to understand. Very unclear with her expectations of students. She will pick on students who don't appear to be paying attention and then make her best attempt to embarass them for not being prepared. Last time I checked, we were paying her to teach us, not embarass us. If we choose not to pay attention, that's our choice."

Student Three: "Uninteresting, redundant and expects way too much for a 200 level course. I received a grade much lower than I feel I truly deserved."

Hmmmm. So let's see. The dean thinks students are excellent evaluators of professors' teaching expertise and the professors students don't like should be put on probation. The students say she is such a space cadet that she should resign...therefore...?

Actually I'm pretty sure she's not a space cadet but I think this experience leads to some questions about her credibility and motives. What do you think?