My brilliant granddaughter (yeah, I'm biased, but she is objectively exceptional) didn't even consider applying to Harvard or Yale. And I'm glad. She was accepted to her first-choice school with a full ride, 4-year scholarship. Would she have gotten that from Harvard or Yale? Who knows. I'm just glad that she didn't even consider them. They represent all that is wrong with academia today and are bastions of left-wing politics. The world would be better off if they both closed down.
My youngest is in college and also exceptionally bright (it’s not his parents, our other kids aren’t like this… it’s all him). Would never have considered an Ivy except maybe MIT (is that an ivy?). He’s exactly where God thought he needed to be and it’s been a terrific education.
My son desperately wanted to go there for undergrad. (Mom and Dad went there, and there is NO legacy consideration...although maybe with large $$$, who knows?)
We told him there were 3 things against him:
1) He's male
2) He's white
3) He lives in the Boston-area
We told him that if we loved him enough, we'd consider moving to North Dakota...but that would only solve 1 of the 3.
We KNEW he would be a serious scientist...and would need a PhD.
So we told him to go ahead and apply, but instead get a lot of experience and aim for grad school instead.
So he went to Northeastern. Had 3 different 8-month long co-ops.
He's a PhD candidate right now at MIT. {Neither he nor we have paid a dime}
I think it was different 30 years ago. Undergrad was awesome. I don't know about now. But for the price tag? Aim for the name for grad school (if you think the name is important). Finishing with undergrad? Not worth it. Instead work experience is the way to go.
That sounds like an excellent strategy. I haven't asked my granddaughter where she wants to go for grad school. But knowing her, she's already decided.
LOL. My daughter, her mom, is also very accomplished. And I don't know where she got it from either. Congratulations to your granddaughter and to your family.
There are a fairly large minority who can parrot back anything and everything. They get As. How many though are exceptional thinkers who contribute to humanity? Very very few. Let everyone have their As. Big deal. We all know they are meaningless. Have a special small extra mark for genuinely interesting thinking.
Make Blue Books Great Again! No laptops, no smartphones, just a pencil and a blue book. Good luck kids! And who cares if the TAs grading those blue books will be annoyed, that’s just a bonus!
I’ve had this same thought many times. No more papers, everything has to be done by hand in class. Don’t like it? Too bad, it’s the only way we know if you understand the material.
That’s also a travesty. We switched our youngest kid to private school after 3rd grade and had to teach him cursive because all assignments were to be done in cursive at the private school and cursive wasn’t even taught at Publix anymore. I guess they needed more class time for lectures about climate change. 🙄
@GK- that's because they've had to cram so much in because of No Child Left Behind (how's THAT working out for ya?) there is simply no time to teach it.
Every time I heard Kamala speak it sounded to me like someone trying to fill a blue book on a subject they didn't study. "The significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time.”
Capping grades is a typical liberal low intelligence answer to a problem. It’s like raising taxes to solve your deficit instead of doing hard work and cutting spending. The easy way doesn’t cause the tenured aristocracy of professors any hardships, like having to create tougher curriculum and grade honesty. At the end of the day, a Harvard Ivy League education won’t mean much, and it will be their own fault.
Not sure if it's still the case, but remember when ours were HS/College age I did do a lot of reading around the choices faced for higher ed. I read several well written articles that talked about the differences in the coursework and academic rigor around the 'elite' (not just Ivies, but in the overall universe of higher than average tuition) schools vs the State universities. Basic premise was not so much that the academic rigor was higher, but that the connections made - alumni, clubs, fellow students - were what gave grads the edge. That you were paying for the network more than the excellence of the course content.
And the elite schools tend to be taught by profs who care more about their research than teaching and/or pass off pesky teaching to grad assistants. My son's friend went to a pricy school and many of his classes were in big lecture halls where he was nothing more than a number, while my son went to community college for 2 years and then transferred to a regional state school. In nearly every case, he had small class sizes, instructors/professors who knew him by name and who, in most cases, cared that the students understood and mastered the material, and encouraged visits during office hours if he struggled. Both kids have good jobs making good money. But my son graduated debt free, and his friend graduated with a big $$ loan balance.
Their coursework remained challenging, that wasn’t this issue. The issue was DEI and making sure to give enough minorities a “boost” in grade even if they didn’t merit it. That makes the coursework appear too easy when in fact it’s probably not. And of course the coursework in humanities, political science, and sociology generated a bunch of knobheads.
As a person who went through many semesters of student evaluations, no professor takes those evaluations seriously. What they are really for is administrators to determine faculty salary increases. As far as I know, students think they are stupid and not worth doing.
Professors may not take them seriously, but the kids sure do. Every student I know checks Rate My Professor before they schedule their classes for the semester.
I was--ever so briefly--an assistant professor back when personal computers were just coming on the scene and Just Everything had to be Computed, don-t-ya-know. My "genius" dept. chair set himself the task of programming a "ranking" process for computing the averages of all student evaluations to determine "merit", numerically. I, who thought the only thing I could actually _do_ well was teach, came out poorly. I asked if he'd redd the comments for context. "No," he said, "I cut those off first thing. The numbers tell the story." And he coincidentally destroyed the evidence contradicting that opinion. One of my students had rated me "Average"--in everything!--but his comment redd "I rated Dr. Nelson 'Average' because d*mm*t THIS level of teaching SHOULD be the Average, Everywhere on This Campus!" If I'd known C*rr*l the *rseh*le chair was going to DESTROY that paper, I'd have Reserved it--and it would be on my wall now.
Another professor who became a good friend, but who was on the Asperger's scale somewhere, was truly perplexed by one of his reviewers' comments: "This professor is one of the Worst to have Ever Slimed the Face of this Planet!!" He calmed down when I explained how he had probably been confused with someone else.
KC, I don't know, that sort of feels like the Little Tailor (I think? or chiropractor? possibly) who killed 7 houseflies at one time and made and wore a sash that redd "Seven at One Blow!" People who saw it naturally thought it referred to his having killed seven men (or put their backs out of alignment) with one stroke and made way for him. Whenever anyone challenged him, he managed to outwit them by one way or another.
I'd only consider doing it IF I could remember the guy's name; THAT's the important part I should have remembered from the story. What I do remember was that he wasn't particularly a "fan" during my class, which made his evaluation that much more surprising, and welcome. OTOH, if I ever take up needlepoint, I'll be all over this.
I fail to understand how it is possible for a first semester freshman to answer honestly any of the questions on these idiotic surveys. My all time favorite is to rate your professor in comparison to other professors you have had. My favorite English professor would have been rated a Zero if he were still teaching today. He didn't ever look at us, instead he read his lecture from a bunch of yellowed index cards with his chair facing 45 degrees away from us. He was amazing. It was only when it became more difficult to fill seats with bottoms that colleges began offering students a shot at offering their opinions about people who were better educated than they were. SMH
Many years ago there was a Browning scholar at Cornell who brought his two Afghan hounds to class, had them sit against the wall, and he turned to lecture to them with his back to his students. Students hitchhiked to Cornell for the chance to sit in on one of his classes even though he told all his classes that his dogs understood him and students could not; he didn't want to waste his time on students. Students today expect to be entertained. The English professor who read from his yellowed index cards knew about his subject and we wanted to know what he knew.
"The ways of universities are inscrutable." It ~may~ be that views of first-semester students are heavily discounted in the process. OTOH, it may be too that The Only Thing looked for in the opinions of 1st-yearers are Enthusiastic Endorsements! which would make it a relatively simple thing for even an administrator to determine just who will be saddled with teaching over-stuffed freshman sections for the foreseeable.
My kids thought Rate my Prof was fabulous. When a “jury of your peers” says that Dr. Such&such truly cares abt a,b,c and rarely harps on e,f,g, and recognizes whatever is important to that kid, they were all in, or all out, as the case may be. And who among us truly would choose, Dr. ___, the hard nose, over Dr. ___, the Easy A professor?
I took geology in school, not because I have any real interest other than, I do love a well stacked stone mailbox surround or fireplace. We called it ‘Rocks for Jocks’, and it was supposed to be an easy A. What can I say? I also took ICE SKATING as a PE credit! 😝 I thought it was fun and a great strategy to offset the D+ I was likely to get in a difficult math course I had to take that quarter.
I took History of Sport (with a room full of male student athletes) and Ballroom Dance. I aced the dance class because the TA was short and always chose me for his demo partner 😁 But the chem, bio classes that graded on a curve were the stuff of nightmares. ‘Curve raisers’ in every darn one of those.
So professors don't concern themselves with evaluations which are used to determine salary increases? That is really surprising. Does that include non-tenured professors?
I reread my comment and should have been clearer. So, it's not the students doing the evaluations that bother faculty. The students don't take them seriously and the questions are really vapid. But and on the other hand, faculty are aware just how important these evaluations are to administrators since students are now seen as (and even called) "customers" in the Admissions Departments. Smart faculty know they have to find other means of convincing administrators that they're doing the work that is demanded of them: attending conferences, writing papers that actually get published, committee work, etc. Now, all of those can be and often are meaningless exercises. In the end, it's all paper-thin evidence in decisions over raises based on merit. Merit has very little to do with anything in colleges anymore. To answer your second question, it does include non-tenured professors. In fact, they are the most vulnerable.
I am a retired professor of Microbiology, Human Anatomy, and Medical Laboratory Technology. About those faculty evaluations by students: If they are so worthwhile and useful to the administration, how could they evaluate mine when sometimes I would get an evaluation that said I was the best professor ever, and IN THE SAME CLASS, another evaluation that said I was the worst professor ever? When students would complain about having to take a math competency test before the "drop date" (so they wouldn't continue in the course and probably not make the require "C" grade or better) my stock answer was "How are you going to explain the family of the deceased that your medication or lab result error resulted in the death of their loved one?"
One of my colleagues at my third-tier "university" employment refused to grade on a curve because, as he put it, he felt it important that SOMEONE stress the importance of someone, somewhere, sometime, getting a Right Answer!
(_I_ graded on a curve because my grading had never been subjected to any sort of 'calibration' to ensure that "what I thought" was excellent, or poor, was either. I figured I could tell when answers were totally right, mostly right, mostly wrong, and totally wrong and graded accordingly, with some regrettable, negotiable "slop" built-in as a result. I spent a good bit of my time in negotiations--but I learned some tricks to blunt the lances of the worst ones who thought negotiation was going to be a substitute for learning anything.)
The problem is that every child in every school system has been led to believe that the only way to make it in life is to get a degree and the colleges have made $$$$$ on this. Every Child Left Behind and Race to the Bottom with the mantra of "college and career ready" (from kindergarten!) created this mess. And what a mess it is!
...but I'd be willing to set aside my personal feelings to ask him to make personal sacrifices for the good of the Nation, and scars for life. And I should think his first act would be to arrange for a more equitable distribution of "Education" funds, before shutting down the groupthink op altogether.
SHug, when there's a dirty job to do, who ya gonna call? I saw the guy go out in a ROWBOAT in a SEWAGE POND! He's DONE this!
That sounds like the orientation presenter at Harvard who, when asked what the drop-out rate was freshman year replied, "Harvard doesn't make that kind of mistake." Yeah. Right.
I think that's what the young man who told me the story was expecting - he was pretty much appalled that Harvard was so smug about the issue. Course they were the same bunch who tried signing him up for crew as a coxswain since he was so short - not that he'd even shown interest in the position.
You are right about the 30 years ago remark; it was at least 20 years ago that the president of Mercyhurst College made his remark about grades to the faculty. The entire meritocracy began to collapse once critical theory and DEI made their appearance back in the 60s with men like Herbert Marcuse. We just didn't know or see that it would become so widespread.
I live near a town called Harvard. Shopped now and then in small town Princeton and in early marriage bought liquor at an Iowa state liquor store in Oxford junction and my hometown county courthouse was in Cambridge. I’m a genius!
Or, David, has it ever occurred to you that, in marriage, you should be scoring the "game" differently, like, for an example, "winning" is "taking one for the team." A lot. And the more you don't talk about the score (how you're "crushing it" as the poster reads)--the more you don't even think about it--the closer to All-Star status you approach.
And like any other game, having a bad performance one day, does not imprint "LOSER!" on your character. The very next day, you get another chance to show off your championship capability.
Mic drop!! Dropping truth bombs like the US is dropping bombs on Iran, but instead of deception, death, and destruction, we are served with logic, laughter, and love.
This latest move shows the true colors of all of these Ivy league schools. Ostensibly based on merit, but actually based in fraud and deception. It's just another institution that has been corrupted by the kakistocracy that we find ourselves living in today.
Come to think of it, this nonsensical idea about scarcity is coming from the same playbook by the powers that shouldn't be. There is plenty in this world for everyone but the parasites up top want you to think there isn't so that we fight over resources. It's bananas that they are using the same playbook for school grades 🤣🤣🤣
There's three things going on here. (Isn't that always the way?)
Harvard's "Excellence!" product is primarily destined for Employers of Harvard graduates. #sowhocares
Harvard's "grades cap" is not about bringing reality back into grading; it's about setting up a straw man to take the heat for individual professors too spineless to write down "not the best work I've ever seen." #ourhandsourtied (If they really cared about grade inflation, they'd be sitting the professors down for a serious time-out, but tenure being what it is, that's a D.O.A. approach.)
Harvard must be like Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, "where all the children are above-average"--on steroids--where all the children are above-above-average.
My old department head, the finest of heads of electrical engineering departments who ever drew breath, Dr. Russell H. Seacat (RIP), ordered me to, "Teach to the C students, the average students. They are the largest group and they do the lion's share of work in the world. You 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 teach them, and if you do, the As and Bs will do fine on their own." He went on to say that "An A student will never miss an opportunity to demonstrate that they deserve an A," and then, as an afterthought, he added, "The same goes for F students..." Another time he commented that, "If you have a tough problem, assign it to an engineer who was a C student because A students are prone to prove it cannot be solved while every problem every C student ever faced in his education looked impossible, but he didn't give up." I was one of those A students. Dr. Seacat loved me, but like him, I came to love the C students who just slogged away; THEIR successes were real, and hard-fought. An institution that makes clear their disdain for "average" people subconsciously exposes a disdain for hard work. (Incidentally C students were outstanding in the labs, where practical ability shone.)
When our oldest was in public school in second grade, I took her with me to meet a fellow young assistant professor, Dr. Lilly (RIP), for lunch. During lunch John asked her about school and she brightly started chirping about how much she liked reading, so John asked for details. She said she was in the Bluebirds, and on further encouragement, added that their were Rose and Buttercup groups too. John looked at me, and said, "I really like that they are putting the kids into groups with neutral-sounding names; when I was in school they had 'Regular', 'Advanced' and 'Slow' groups and I hated that." At that point, my daughter piped up to help John out, "Yes, Buttercups is the slow readers."
Second-graders have a lesson to offer the "geniuses" at Harvard--if they can but stoop to learn: "It's POSSIBLE the only people being fooled are Yourselves." (It may be that the "slow readers" these days are in the group called "Harvard Administration.")
Not really. I loved the part about teaching to the C students, since an honest bell-curve of achievement does indicate that it would represent the bulk of your students.
But given that Harvard et al have skewed enrollment to deny whites and Asians in favor of blacks, who then require remedial courses because they can’t handle actual college-level classes, I tend to dismiss any discussion of “grades at Harvard” since it’s all fake. The 60% stat bears that out.
You might want to parse that to “so_who_cares”. Although I have to say “sow ho” is an interesting parsing that is probably used by some of their irreverent male classmates.
College is a waste of money for most young people. I hope the marketplace for jobs recognizes that college makes people dumber and more ideological. Having said that, my kids are going to college, because they need to get out of my house (God's design is so perfect...making teenagers intolerable).
Hardest thing I’ve ever done. I graduated second in the class due to hard work and because I was good at multiple choice tests. If I had to take oral tests, I would have flunked out.
Those kids in my class that made Cs and Ds were darn good doctors. Just not good test takers, who probably would have aced an oral exam. Just saying.
As much as I have a hard time caring about California’s issues from yesterday, Hahvahd and the other Ivy’s can go suck an egg. If Pete Hegseth announced that campuses would be used for training pilots for bombing missions I’d be more inclined to start a Give Send Go for extra fuel and munitions than to sign a petition to stop it.
Ginny, BRILLIANT! In fact too brilliant for me, sending me to AI for the reference which I post here for the other dumb guy reading this:
[grok]
"Harrison Bergeron is the main character in Kurt Vonnegut’s famous 1961 dystopian short story "Harrison Bergeron. Harrison is a 14-year-old boy in the year 2081.
In this future America, the government has enforced absolute equality through the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution.
Anyone with above-average intelligence, strength, beauty, or talent is forced to wear handicaps (physical and mental restraints) to bring them down to the average level:
Intelligent people wear ear radios that blast loud noises every 20 seconds to disrupt their thoughts.
Strong people carry heavy weights.
Beautiful people wear masks or disfiguring items.
Harrison is extraordinarily intelligent, tall, strong, and handsome."
[/grok]
...what Harvard might call "a triple loser." After reading this, I remember that I read the story, but I'm putting this here because, having forgotten once, I'm likely to forget again.
OMG - We were required to read this in 1970s middle school! That and "The Button" and "The Lottery." Scarred for life!! And this was a Catholic school!
The hardest part of these elite colleges is getting in. Once you’re in, you can pretty much coast. It’s all about the connections you make while you are there. I live very close to Wellesley College and their graduates can go anywhere in the world and connect with a fellow graduate and get some kind of assistance whether it’s getting a job or an accommodation. I know a lot of Wellesley grads. It’s a weird system and yet not necessarily a bad thing. I’d still recommend going into the trades. We need plumbers and electricians and carpenters. They provide a good service and can make a substantial living.
My brilliant granddaughter (yeah, I'm biased, but she is objectively exceptional) didn't even consider applying to Harvard or Yale. And I'm glad. She was accepted to her first-choice school with a full ride, 4-year scholarship. Would she have gotten that from Harvard or Yale? Who knows. I'm just glad that she didn't even consider them. They represent all that is wrong with academia today and are bastions of left-wing politics. The world would be better off if they both closed down.
My youngest is in college and also exceptionally bright (it’s not his parents, our other kids aren’t like this… it’s all him). Would never have considered an Ivy except maybe MIT (is that an ivy?). He’s exactly where God thought he needed to be and it’s been a terrific education.
Not an Ivy.
My son desperately wanted to go there for undergrad. (Mom and Dad went there, and there is NO legacy consideration...although maybe with large $$$, who knows?)
We told him there were 3 things against him:
1) He's male
2) He's white
3) He lives in the Boston-area
We told him that if we loved him enough, we'd consider moving to North Dakota...but that would only solve 1 of the 3.
We KNEW he would be a serious scientist...and would need a PhD.
So we told him to go ahead and apply, but instead get a lot of experience and aim for grad school instead.
So he went to Northeastern. Had 3 different 8-month long co-ops.
He's a PhD candidate right now at MIT. {Neither he nor we have paid a dime}
I think it was different 30 years ago. Undergrad was awesome. I don't know about now. But for the price tag? Aim for the name for grad school (if you think the name is important). Finishing with undergrad? Not worth it. Instead work experience is the way to go.
That sounds like an excellent strategy. I haven't asked my granddaughter where she wants to go for grad school. But knowing her, she's already decided.
That's really something to absolutely brag about Suzanne! Congratulations to your granddaughter!
Thank you. She has worked very hard for everything she's received.
My granddaughter received a full ride also🤗
Thankfully my genetic contribution was severely diluted.
LOL. My daughter, her mom, is also very accomplished. And I don't know where she got it from either. Congratulations to your granddaughter and to your family.
Thank you Suzanne, being a proud grandparent is such a wonderful feeling.
There are a fairly large minority who can parrot back anything and everything. They get As. How many though are exceptional thinkers who contribute to humanity? Very very few. Let everyone have their As. Big deal. We all know they are meaningless. Have a special small extra mark for genuinely interesting thinking.
As an employer I would be hard pressed to hire an Ivy.
It's ok they aren't actually looking for real jobs
Ha! True. I only hire when I absolutely must. Otherwise I sub contract it out.
Make Blue Books Great Again! No laptops, no smartphones, just a pencil and a blue book. Good luck kids! And who cares if the TAs grading those blue books will be annoyed, that’s just a bonus!
I’ve had this same thought many times. No more papers, everything has to be done by hand in class. Don’t like it? Too bad, it’s the only way we know if you understand the material.
Students no longer have the ability to write long hand or cursive. I think they need to be graded entirely on their penmanship. Sorry, penpersonship.
That’s also a travesty. We switched our youngest kid to private school after 3rd grade and had to teach him cursive because all assignments were to be done in cursive at the private school and cursive wasn’t even taught at Publix anymore. I guess they needed more class time for lectures about climate change. 🙄
@GK- that's because they've had to cram so much in because of No Child Left Behind (how's THAT working out for ya?) there is simply no time to teach it.
Every time I heard Kamala speak it sounded to me like someone trying to fill a blue book on a subject they didn't study. "The significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time.”
Capping grades is a typical liberal low intelligence answer to a problem. It’s like raising taxes to solve your deficit instead of doing hard work and cutting spending. The easy way doesn’t cause the tenured aristocracy of professors any hardships, like having to create tougher curriculum and grade honesty. At the end of the day, a Harvard Ivy League education won’t mean much, and it will be their own fault.
Not sure if it's still the case, but remember when ours were HS/College age I did do a lot of reading around the choices faced for higher ed. I read several well written articles that talked about the differences in the coursework and academic rigor around the 'elite' (not just Ivies, but in the overall universe of higher than average tuition) schools vs the State universities. Basic premise was not so much that the academic rigor was higher, but that the connections made - alumni, clubs, fellow students - were what gave grads the edge. That you were paying for the network more than the excellence of the course content.
And the elite schools tend to be taught by profs who care more about their research than teaching and/or pass off pesky teaching to grad assistants. My son's friend went to a pricy school and many of his classes were in big lecture halls where he was nothing more than a number, while my son went to community college for 2 years and then transferred to a regional state school. In nearly every case, he had small class sizes, instructors/professors who knew him by name and who, in most cases, cared that the students understood and mastered the material, and encouraged visits during office hours if he struggled. Both kids have good jobs making good money. But my son graduated debt free, and his friend graduated with a big $$ loan balance.
That's a solid comment.
It's in keeping with the progressive trait of somehow not being able to predict 2nd and 3rd order effects.
Their coursework remained challenging, that wasn’t this issue. The issue was DEI and making sure to give enough minorities a “boost” in grade even if they didn’t merit it. That makes the coursework appear too easy when in fact it’s probably not. And of course the coursework in humanities, political science, and sociology generated a bunch of knobheads.
I wonder how closely the rise in A grades correlates with the rise in students evaluating professors.
As a person who went through many semesters of student evaluations, no professor takes those evaluations seriously. What they are really for is administrators to determine faculty salary increases. As far as I know, students think they are stupid and not worth doing.
Professors may not take them seriously, but the kids sure do. Every student I know checks Rate My Professor before they schedule their classes for the semester.
It's two different systems with no relationship to each other.
Rate My Professor doesn't use the same questions as the college surveys which students have told me for years they are sure don't count for anything.
I was--ever so briefly--an assistant professor back when personal computers were just coming on the scene and Just Everything had to be Computed, don-t-ya-know. My "genius" dept. chair set himself the task of programming a "ranking" process for computing the averages of all student evaluations to determine "merit", numerically. I, who thought the only thing I could actually _do_ well was teach, came out poorly. I asked if he'd redd the comments for context. "No," he said, "I cut those off first thing. The numbers tell the story." And he coincidentally destroyed the evidence contradicting that opinion. One of my students had rated me "Average"--in everything!--but his comment redd "I rated Dr. Nelson 'Average' because d*mm*t THIS level of teaching SHOULD be the Average, Everywhere on This Campus!" If I'd known C*rr*l the *rseh*le chair was going to DESTROY that paper, I'd have Reserved it--and it would be on my wall now.
Another professor who became a good friend, but who was on the Asperger's scale somewhere, was truly perplexed by one of his reviewers' comments: "This professor is one of the Worst to have Ever Slimed the Face of this Planet!!" He calmed down when I explained how he had probably been confused with someone else.
I say recreate that comment and frame it, David. It’s worth framing and the fact that it would be a replica also adds to the story.
KC, I don't know, that sort of feels like the Little Tailor (I think? or chiropractor? possibly) who killed 7 houseflies at one time and made and wore a sash that redd "Seven at One Blow!" People who saw it naturally thought it referred to his having killed seven men (or put their backs out of alignment) with one stroke and made way for him. Whenever anyone challenged him, he managed to outwit them by one way or another.
I'd only consider doing it IF I could remember the guy's name; THAT's the important part I should have remembered from the story. What I do remember was that he wasn't particularly a "fan" during my class, which made his evaluation that much more surprising, and welcome. OTOH, if I ever take up needlepoint, I'll be all over this.
😝
I fail to understand how it is possible for a first semester freshman to answer honestly any of the questions on these idiotic surveys. My all time favorite is to rate your professor in comparison to other professors you have had. My favorite English professor would have been rated a Zero if he were still teaching today. He didn't ever look at us, instead he read his lecture from a bunch of yellowed index cards with his chair facing 45 degrees away from us. He was amazing. It was only when it became more difficult to fill seats with bottoms that colleges began offering students a shot at offering their opinions about people who were better educated than they were. SMH
Wow, this prof sounds like death on stick. Glad he worked for you.
Many years ago there was a Browning scholar at Cornell who brought his two Afghan hounds to class, had them sit against the wall, and he turned to lecture to them with his back to his students. Students hitchhiked to Cornell for the chance to sit in on one of his classes even though he told all his classes that his dogs understood him and students could not; he didn't want to waste his time on students. Students today expect to be entertained. The English professor who read from his yellowed index cards knew about his subject and we wanted to know what he knew.
"The ways of universities are inscrutable." It ~may~ be that views of first-semester students are heavily discounted in the process. OTOH, it may be too that The Only Thing looked for in the opinions of 1st-yearers are Enthusiastic Endorsements! which would make it a relatively simple thing for even an administrator to determine just who will be saddled with teaching over-stuffed freshman sections for the foreseeable.
My kids thought Rate my Prof was fabulous. When a “jury of your peers” says that Dr. Such&such truly cares abt a,b,c and rarely harps on e,f,g, and recognizes whatever is important to that kid, they were all in, or all out, as the case may be. And who among us truly would choose, Dr. ___, the hard nose, over Dr. ___, the Easy A professor?
I took geology in school, not because I have any real interest other than, I do love a well stacked stone mailbox surround or fireplace. We called it ‘Rocks for Jocks’, and it was supposed to be an easy A. What can I say? I also took ICE SKATING as a PE credit! 😝 I thought it was fun and a great strategy to offset the D+ I was likely to get in a difficult math course I had to take that quarter.
I took History of Sport (with a room full of male student athletes) and Ballroom Dance. I aced the dance class because the TA was short and always chose me for his demo partner 😁 But the chem, bio classes that graded on a curve were the stuff of nightmares. ‘Curve raisers’ in every darn one of those.
I can so relate.
So professors don't concern themselves with evaluations which are used to determine salary increases? That is really surprising. Does that include non-tenured professors?
I reread my comment and should have been clearer. So, it's not the students doing the evaluations that bother faculty. The students don't take them seriously and the questions are really vapid. But and on the other hand, faculty are aware just how important these evaluations are to administrators since students are now seen as (and even called) "customers" in the Admissions Departments. Smart faculty know they have to find other means of convincing administrators that they're doing the work that is demanded of them: attending conferences, writing papers that actually get published, committee work, etc. Now, all of those can be and often are meaningless exercises. In the end, it's all paper-thin evidence in decisions over raises based on merit. Merit has very little to do with anything in colleges anymore. To answer your second question, it does include non-tenured professors. In fact, they are the most vulnerable.
I am a retired professor of Microbiology, Human Anatomy, and Medical Laboratory Technology. About those faculty evaluations by students: If they are so worthwhile and useful to the administration, how could they evaluate mine when sometimes I would get an evaluation that said I was the best professor ever, and IN THE SAME CLASS, another evaluation that said I was the worst professor ever? When students would complain about having to take a math competency test before the "drop date" (so they wouldn't continue in the course and probably not make the require "C" grade or better) my stock answer was "How are you going to explain the family of the deceased that your medication or lab result error resulted in the death of their loved one?"
One of my colleagues at my third-tier "university" employment refused to grade on a curve because, as he put it, he felt it important that SOMEONE stress the importance of someone, somewhere, sometime, getting a Right Answer!
(_I_ graded on a curve because my grading had never been subjected to any sort of 'calibration' to ensure that "what I thought" was excellent, or poor, was either. I figured I could tell when answers were totally right, mostly right, mostly wrong, and totally wrong and graded accordingly, with some regrettable, negotiable "slop" built-in as a result. I spent a good bit of my time in negotiations--but I learned some tricks to blunt the lances of the worst ones who thought negotiation was going to be a substitute for learning anything.)
My children relied on the student-driven ratings system when deciding which prof to choose. They trusted their peers to give good intel 😁
Excellent point!
The problem is that every child in every school system has been led to believe that the only way to make it in life is to get a degree and the colleges have made $$$$$ on this. Every Child Left Behind and Race to the Bottom with the mantra of "college and career ready" (from kindergarten!) created this mess. And what a mess it is!
Mike Rowe for Secretary of Education would be an interesting change-of-pace.
I wouldn't DO that to Mike Rowe - I LIKE him! But, wouldn't mind if someone just gave him buckets of money for the trades!
I LIKE him TOO.
...but I'd be willing to set aside my personal feelings to ask him to make personal sacrifices for the good of the Nation, and scars for life. And I should think his first act would be to arrange for a more equitable distribution of "Education" funds, before shutting down the groupthink op altogether.
SHug, when there's a dirty job to do, who ya gonna call? I saw the guy go out in a ROWBOAT in a SEWAGE POND! He's DONE this!
Since Harvard is now teaching remedial math, methinks something wrong in the Admissions Office. Zero colleges should be teaching remedial math.
In local news, there is a Catholic college in Erie whose president informed the faculty that "There are no C students at Mercyhurst."
That sounds like the orientation presenter at Harvard who, when asked what the drop-out rate was freshman year replied, "Harvard doesn't make that kind of mistake." Yeah. Right.
50 years ago the remark at nearly every college in the land was “Half of you will not graduate. Work hard so that you will be in the half that does.”
I think that's what the young man who told me the story was expecting - he was pretty much appalled that Harvard was so smug about the issue. Course they were the same bunch who tried signing him up for crew as a coxswain since he was so short - not that he'd even shown interest in the position.
I wonder if it's possible for these elite idiots and the colleges they have ruined to ever recover their reputations.
Hard to say, May Ann - that orientation remark happened about 30 years ago. Doesn't seem to have made much of a dent until recently . . .
You are right about the 30 years ago remark; it was at least 20 years ago that the president of Mercyhurst College made his remark about grades to the faculty. The entire meritocracy began to collapse once critical theory and DEI made their appearance back in the 60s with men like Herbert Marcuse. We just didn't know or see that it would become so widespread.
Lake Woebegone State U.
I live near a town called Harvard. Shopped now and then in small town Princeton and in early marriage bought liquor at an Iowa state liquor store in Oxford junction and my hometown county courthouse was in Cambridge. I’m a genius!
A meritocracy is so Trump. Harvard can’t have that.
Marriage is definitely one situation in which you should NOT keep score!
Or, consider: Marriage is definitely one situation where scores should be kept secret.
Or, David, has it ever occurred to you that, in marriage, you should be scoring the "game" differently, like, for an example, "winning" is "taking one for the team." A lot. And the more you don't talk about the score (how you're "crushing it" as the poster reads)--the more you don't even think about it--the closer to All-Star status you approach.
And like any other game, having a bad performance one day, does not imprint "LOSER!" on your character. The very next day, you get another chance to show off your championship capability.
David, are you saying "happy wife, happy life"? 😆
I suppose I am, Mary Ann, although for me it is still a theoretical. "Happy Mom" was reached early on and is quite a solid, carrying a lot of water.
If you want your marriage to last.... do NOT announce the score!
Had to learn that axiom the hard way.
My mother told me once that “Marriage is not a 50%-50% proposition. It’s a 75%-75% proposition.”
I've generally said 100%-100% but your mother is probably more accurate at 75%-75%!
Mic drop!! Dropping truth bombs like the US is dropping bombs on Iran, but instead of deception, death, and destruction, we are served with logic, laughter, and love.
This latest move shows the true colors of all of these Ivy league schools. Ostensibly based on merit, but actually based in fraud and deception. It's just another institution that has been corrupted by the kakistocracy that we find ourselves living in today.
Come to think of it, this nonsensical idea about scarcity is coming from the same playbook by the powers that shouldn't be. There is plenty in this world for everyone but the parasites up top want you to think there isn't so that we fight over resources. It's bananas that they are using the same playbook for school grades 🤣🤣🤣
There's three things going on here. (Isn't that always the way?)
Harvard's "Excellence!" product is primarily destined for Employers of Harvard graduates. #sowhocares
Harvard's "grades cap" is not about bringing reality back into grading; it's about setting up a straw man to take the heat for individual professors too spineless to write down "not the best work I've ever seen." #ourhandsourtied (If they really cared about grade inflation, they'd be sitting the professors down for a serious time-out, but tenure being what it is, that's a D.O.A. approach.)
Harvard must be like Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, "where all the children are above-average"--on steroids--where all the children are above-above-average.
My old department head, the finest of heads of electrical engineering departments who ever drew breath, Dr. Russell H. Seacat (RIP), ordered me to, "Teach to the C students, the average students. They are the largest group and they do the lion's share of work in the world. You 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 teach them, and if you do, the As and Bs will do fine on their own." He went on to say that "An A student will never miss an opportunity to demonstrate that they deserve an A," and then, as an afterthought, he added, "The same goes for F students..." Another time he commented that, "If you have a tough problem, assign it to an engineer who was a C student because A students are prone to prove it cannot be solved while every problem every C student ever faced in his education looked impossible, but he didn't give up." I was one of those A students. Dr. Seacat loved me, but like him, I came to love the C students who just slogged away; THEIR successes were real, and hard-fought. An institution that makes clear their disdain for "average" people subconsciously exposes a disdain for hard work. (Incidentally C students were outstanding in the labs, where practical ability shone.)
When our oldest was in public school in second grade, I took her with me to meet a fellow young assistant professor, Dr. Lilly (RIP), for lunch. During lunch John asked her about school and she brightly started chirping about how much she liked reading, so John asked for details. She said she was in the Bluebirds, and on further encouragement, added that their were Rose and Buttercup groups too. John looked at me, and said, "I really like that they are putting the kids into groups with neutral-sounding names; when I was in school they had 'Regular', 'Advanced' and 'Slow' groups and I hated that." At that point, my daughter piped up to help John out, "Yes, Buttercups is the slow readers."
Second-graders have a lesson to offer the "geniuses" at Harvard--if they can but stoop to learn: "It's POSSIBLE the only people being fooled are Yourselves." (It may be that the "slow readers" these days are in the group called "Harvard Administration.")
Who is this “sow ho” who cares? Sounds like you’re picking on frisky chubby girls now.
Underscore lives matter.
THAT's what you got out of that? #whydoibother ;^)
Not really. I loved the part about teaching to the C students, since an honest bell-curve of achievement does indicate that it would represent the bulk of your students.
But given that Harvard et al have skewed enrollment to deny whites and Asians in favor of blacks, who then require remedial courses because they can’t handle actual college-level classes, I tend to dismiss any discussion of “grades at Harvard” since it’s all fake. The 60% stat bears that out.
But I do love buttercups if that helps.
You might want to parse that to “so_who_cares”. Although I have to say “sow ho” is an interesting parsing that is probably used by some of their irreverent male classmates.
😁
College is a waste of money for most young people. I hope the marketplace for jobs recognizes that college makes people dumber and more ideological. Having said that, my kids are going to college, because they need to get out of my house (God's design is so perfect...making teenagers intolerable).
Here’s the thing about grades.
I got my doctorate in Chiropractic at age 40.
Hardest thing I’ve ever done. I graduated second in the class due to hard work and because I was good at multiple choice tests. If I had to take oral tests, I would have flunked out.
Those kids in my class that made Cs and Ds were darn good doctors. Just not good test takers, who probably would have aced an oral exam. Just saying.
This Harvard stuff is clearly idiotic bullshit.
As much as I have a hard time caring about California’s issues from yesterday, Hahvahd and the other Ivy’s can go suck an egg. If Pete Hegseth announced that campuses would be used for training pilots for bombing missions I’d be more inclined to start a Give Send Go for extra fuel and munitions than to sign a petition to stop it.
Getting some serious Harrison Bergeron vibes from Harvard here. 😯
Thanks for keeping me informed and smiling.
This is bad ass just like you. 🤬🍑😘
Ginny, BRILLIANT! In fact too brilliant for me, sending me to AI for the reference which I post here for the other dumb guy reading this:
[grok]
"Harrison Bergeron is the main character in Kurt Vonnegut’s famous 1961 dystopian short story "Harrison Bergeron. Harrison is a 14-year-old boy in the year 2081.
In this future America, the government has enforced absolute equality through the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution.
Anyone with above-average intelligence, strength, beauty, or talent is forced to wear handicaps (physical and mental restraints) to bring them down to the average level:
Intelligent people wear ear radios that blast loud noises every 20 seconds to disrupt their thoughts.
Strong people carry heavy weights.
Beautiful people wear masks or disfiguring items.
Harrison is extraordinarily intelligent, tall, strong, and handsome."
[/grok]
...what Harvard might call "a triple loser." After reading this, I remember that I read the story, but I'm putting this here because, having forgotten once, I'm likely to forget again.
OMG - We were required to read this in 1970s middle school! That and "The Button" and "The Lottery." Scarred for life!! And this was a Catholic school!
The hardest part of these elite colleges is getting in. Once you’re in, you can pretty much coast. It’s all about the connections you make while you are there. I live very close to Wellesley College and their graduates can go anywhere in the world and connect with a fellow graduate and get some kind of assistance whether it’s getting a job or an accommodation. I know a lot of Wellesley grads. It’s a weird system and yet not necessarily a bad thing. I’d still recommend going into the trades. We need plumbers and electricians and carpenters. They provide a good service and can make a substantial living.
And whatever they perform is nothing AI can do!