Duh. Comment.

Some clown at Dissertation Help really needs to improve his "robot commenter."

Dissertation help said... This is a sort of blog we can have loads of information i would like to appreciate the intelligence of this blog's owner

If this is their idea of intelligent comment and correct grammar, who in their right mind would ever go to that website for help with a dissertation?

Okay, I'll bite.  Let's go look.

Nope, they suck.  Let the students go there, spend their money, pretend they actually wrote a paper.  Thank you for your time and we'll see you in this class again next year.

Cheating starts with The Administration

From the NYTimes

One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average. But it’s not because they are all working harder.
The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.

No. The goal is to make the school look more attractive. The student benefit is secondary.

Colleges have been playing this game for years: paying students to retake the SAT to raise the USNews rankings, gaming the enrollments to increase "diversity", fiddling with grading to improve student "satisfaction", and now they're out and out lying about GPA calculated from the inflated grades of watered down courses presented by professors who have lessened their requirements and overlooked more.

Changed to pass/fail so the pressure is reduced but "This new grading system also makes it harder for employers to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, which means more students can get a shot at a competitive interview." Total bullshit.

and we wonder why the students feel entitled?

And you thought teenagers' excuses were bad, part 2

from NYTimes, via SlashDot:

Helene Hegemann's first book ... what's interesting now is that she has been caught plagiarizing many passages in the book. Amazingly, she has not denied it, but instead claims there is nothing wrong with it. She claims that she is part of a new generation that has grown up with mixing and sampling in all media, including music and art, and this is legitimate in modern culture. 

Bullshit. "Sampling?" Please.

I like this Grade - FD for Failure, Dishonest

In this article explaining the new policy, Simon Fraser University announced a new grade: FD, meaning "Failed for Academic Dishonesty" intended to curb the growing trend of plagiarism using the Internet. They've also created a central system for recording academic issues like these, which remind me of the infamous "permanent record" of years past. Multiple offenders face suspension and even degree revocation.

I'm going to think about this one. I still have a bit of time before school starts and I may add this to the syllabus in the section explaining the grading, grade codes, and relative percentages. Now that we're going to Internet grade reporting, this might be a real eye-opener. I'm just not sure for whom.

Here's the whole article, if you wish:

New FD grade a student’s record of shame
April 30, 2009 - By Stuart Colcleugh

Is there a grade worse than F? There is now at SFU: It’s called FD–failed for academic dishonesty–and it’s the last thing you would ever want on your transcript.

The new grade is one of several significant and extensive changes recently approved by senate and the board of governors to toughen the university’s policies on academic dishonesty and student misconduct. The changes are the result of a university-wide, three-year investigation by SCAISLE—the Senate Committee on Academic Integrity in Student Learning and Evaluation. SCAISLE was created in the fall of 2005 following the release of a report by a university task force on academic dishonesty and integrity issues, which was prompted by a series of incidents in different faculties involving academic dishonesty.

"The idea was to create a fair, consistent, and effective policy on academic integrity matters across the university that would be enthusiastically embraced by students, faculty and administrators alike and that mirrored a zero-tolerance approach both in theory and in practice," says SCAISLE chair Rob Gordon, who directs the School of Criminology. "And we believe the combination of policies, procedures and strategies we’ve come up with will do that."

"We now have a single student code of conduct that covers both academic integrity and good-conduct issues," says Gordon. "We also have a network of faculty-member academic integrity advisors across all academic units, and an academic integrity coordinator who is an assistant registrar. And we’ve created a reporting system with a central record keeping mechanism so we can better detect multiple offenders across campuses and departments.

"The FD grade will be available to department chairs who feel that a student’s behavior warrants a severe penalty, usually because they are repeat violators, A chair may also request the imposition of more severe penalties through the University Board on Student Discipline such as suspension and the rescinding of a degree."

Clueless on Cheating

from eSchoolNews:

"A recent report commissioned by Common Sense Media about the use of cell phones and the Internet for cheating (see story) is representative of how students and adults can look at the same behavior or activity and have very different perceptions of technology's impact."

This should not surprise anyone. Teenagers are fundamentally different in how they perceive the world, assess needs and risks, and how they apportion time and manage their resources. They have always been different from the adults. Adults have always had to be the responsible ones, though the roles do sometimes get mixed. (I have no intention of talking about those parents at this time.)

Not everyone seems to understand this, however, and they are increasingly making excuses for teenagers and basing these excuses on "digital nativism."

This is a joke. I am just as capable as my students in using all these digital tools and I started on a PDP-8 with a punch-tape reader, for criss-sakes. Digital familiarity is not a psychological difference nearly as large as that driven by age and experience. I can use all of it. I just don't want to.

Call me old-fashioned. Call me old.

Tech toys are not an excuse for cheating and the availability of technology is not an excuse for not thinking. Students still need to think. As Dan Willingham put it in his terrific book Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom, schools ask students to think and thinking is HARD. This fact is never going to change. Pretending that wikipedia copy-and-paste is ethical and desirable simply because technology makes it easy is itself a simplistic and ultimately incorrect argument.

Claiming that students who text each other for the answers to a test or quiz are somehow being digitally masterful is missing the obvious insight that 40 years ago it was a high-tech Bic pen and a piece of paper.

eSchoolNews:
At the root of this digital disconnect is a fundamental difference of perception. Our students, who are not only digitally native, but increasingly mobile, view the world through a new lens that has been framed by a myriad of emerging technology devices and the use of such tools for increased communication, collaboration, content development, and connectedness. Their parents, teachers, and many other digital "immigrants" in education policy and media spheres are startled by the speed with which students are not only adopting these new tools, but adapting them to new, previously unforeseen uses. And quite often, the context of this adaptation is misunderstood by the adults whose lenses are not quite as digitally focused.

Context, my foot. New lens, my eyeball. "Previously unforeseen uses?" 99% of what kids use technology for is chatting. Just as we oldtimers used the high-technology of our time, the telephone, so much that our parents had to install a second line? How many of you had a sister? How many parents had to scream daily "Get off the phone, I need to make a call!"

Nothing new is really new, it's just packaged differently. The technological icing on the cake is sweet and not too sustaining. We'll adapt to different ways of doing things but we'll also come to understand how desperately wrong folks like eSchoolNews and the Techno-philiacs really are.

Cheating is wrong not because of my hurt feelings. Cheating is wrong because it's easy and doesn't lead to anything meaningful. Not every kid understands this but I've never let a kid decide things for me. I'm still the adult in the room, I hope.

If only I can get this damn blog thing working.

(Exit, muttering.)