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Study Shows Professors With Tenure Are Worse Teachers
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "We all know the stereotype about tenured college professors: great researchers, lazy teachers. Now Jordan Weissmann writes in the Atlantic that a new study confirms the conventional knowlege that faculty who aren't on the tenure-track appear to do a better job at teaching freshmen undergraduates in their introductory courses than their tenured/tenure-track peers. 'Our results provide evidence that the rise of full-time designated teachers at U.S. colleges and universities may be less of a cause for alarm than some people think, and indeed, may actually be educationally beneficial.' Using the transcripts of Northwestern freshmen from 2001 through 2008, the research team focused on two factors: inspiration and preparation. The team began by asking if taking a class from a tenure or tenure-track professor in their first term later made students more likely to pursue additional courses in that field. That's the inspiration part. Next the researchers wanted to know if students who took their first course in a field from a tenure or tenure-track professor got better grades when they pursued more advanced coursework. That's the preparation part. Controlling for certain student characteristics, freshmen were actually about 7 percentage points more likely to take a second course in a given field if their first class was taught by an adjunct or non-tenure professor and they also tended to get higher grades in those future courses. The pattern held 'for all subjects, regardless of grading standards or the qualifications of the students the subjects attracted' from English to Engineering. The defining trend among college faculties during the past 20 years or so (40, if you really want to stretch back) has been the rise of the adjuncts. 'That said, there is something appealingly intuitive in these results,' concludes Weissmann. 'Professionals who are paid entirely to teach, in fact, make for better teachers. Makes sense, right?'"
Is the difference really tenured or non-tenured? Or is it, younger or older.
Have you read my journal today?
I wonder why a person with in a unremovable job would put low effort on classes...
Seriously this is news?
Sometimes it's better not having signature
As a tenured faculty member, I can attest to the fact that tenure/tenure-track faculty at many research schools are evaluated (raise/promotion/tenure) on metrics different from adjuncts and instructors. Devoting sufficient time and effort to teaching can be counter productive for your career. For many disciplines, external funding and publications are the primary criteria for evaluation. Ultimately, energies in teaching are focused on graduate students - who support those activities. Add in service (committees, societies and the like) and it's often an issue of limited time.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
Candidates at Universities get the opportunity to work with people who are pioneering their fields. They are often brilliant, will nurture talent when they see it, but can be a bit eccentric and will respond to something like "I can't remember how to do integration by parts" with a reference to a textbook or by passing them on to a more able student.
This works well for the brightest, and reasonably well for the average - but it has long been known that those of less ability (who are still bright by average population standards) would do better in a technical college. Here they would be taught by dedicated teachers, who would do little or no research.
Is the solution to make Universities more like technical colleges? Well, maybe now they are looking at taking closer to 50% of all kids instead of the 10% that hey did decades ago then it is. We should not forget that even if we need to add tuition staff then to turn out new scientific pioneers we still need the research professors, even though they may not be the best teachers for all students.
I hate to talk about correlation/causation, but there's typically some significant demographic differences between profs with and without tenure.
My experience is that tenure-track profs were a heck of a lot younger, meshed well with the students, hadn't spent the last 20 years teaching the course, and were more likely to put in more time and effort on the material. Tenured profs also tend to have a lot of things sucking their time (obviously researchers, but department heads and/or deans are worse), so they dump a lot more on the TA's and are pretty tight for office hours.
I'd be curious to see how things break down when they account for demographic differences. If that's even feasible.
Log in or piss off.
Study shows that people with jobs on the line tend to care more about said job. Stop the presses.
As far as I can tell there's little to no science behind this.
Does the study take into account the dumbness that has increased among students between those years?
So the state has to pay for it.
Get that morons? That's you. Now shut up and get the fuck back to work, these fucks needs them some government cheese.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92592545
"The rising cost of food means their money gets them about a third fewer bags of groceries — $100 used to buy about 12 bags of groceries, but now it's more like seven or eight. So they cut back on expensive items like meat, and they don't buy extras like ice cream anymore. Instead, they eat a lot of starches like potatoes and noodles."
That's strange in a land where gov't pays farmers NOT to grow food. Perhaps this should end? I mean wouldn't everyone be better off if farmers overproduced abundant cheap food and then we simply gave farmers some sort of guaranteed basic income? Wouldn't that be better? Not exactly standard welfare either just because having enough to eat is so important. Find a way to call it a "national security" issue and it'll never be opposed heh.
Teaching may not have much to do with getting tenure or in decisions to revoke it at Northwestern. I went to an major research Ivy and from frank talks by graduate students, post-doc's, TA's, tenure-track and tenured professors in social and physical sciences I learned that tenure was a complete nonfactor there. The criterion was research. Sure, they took surveys from students and gave seminars on teaching to new prof's and TA's to help them improve, but there were no real punishments.
I kid you not. I had a teacher in college who would spend all his classes talking about his friends in the Senior Olympics (this was a Sociology of Religion class, but he did the same in all his classes). Then he would periodically give a test that had nothing to do with the book or anything he said in class (i.e., no Senior Olympics questions). Everyone would fail, and he would grade on a curve. I scored the highest raw test grade in the class for the semester with a 46 (only thanks to a pretty good general knowledge).
Of course he had tenure, and of course everyone knew about his antics. A few years later he fell over dead while training for the Senior Olympics (again, I couldn't make this shit up if I tried). He would not be missed.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I am not completely in agreement with this study. I only read the Atlantic article, I did not read the study so maybe I missed something. From what I have observed, the younger teachers who were on tenure track in universities were always more focused on getting research grants because that is what helped them get tenure. The older ones were more likely to win best teacher awards. From my just my personal experience of 8 years in grad school I feel like it is just the enthusiasm that some younger teachers show that is infectious and makes you feel like the teacher is good. The older teachers are actually better at drilling down concepts however they were less excited about the material and somehow that transferred to the students as well. Students were more likely to feel bored in their classes. I was a TA and that was a frequent complaint about my advisor but I used to go throw his material and it was fantastic. That said there was one tenured professor who was an okay teacher but left the teacher survey on the last day of classes, on our desks, on the way out muttering "Write whatever you want, nothing can happen to me."
That might have something to do with the fact that tenure selection is (almost) entirely based on publications, research, and grants and not on teaching.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
It would be nice if we could have careful training of each of our precious growing minds, for years and years, at the lowest possible cost, by people who did nothing but deeply care for the interests of who these people were going to be... but having teaching (and research) being one of the lowest quality-of-life jobs, with very low relative pay does mean something.
The best way we end up compensating for that, historically, is offering other forms of quality of life - more time to prepare outside of teaching, more job security, and some other limited benefits. Take away these things, and you fully transform the role into a job for masochists.
The cost dynamics never made sense to me - it really wouldn't cost that comparatively much to make teaching a desirably paid position, and the research positions that go along with them. Instead, what we get are colleges charging historically absurd cost increases every year to have, well, better sports teams, I can only guess.
I guess if this trend continues, we'll just move to compensating them with coupons to Subway, then rail at how so many of them get 20% off for how 'little' they do.
Ryan Fenton
A surprising number of 4-year colleges want to get on the big grant chuckwagon.
FTFY
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Some of the biggest tea party assholes yelling about food stamps are also getting millions of dollars because they are "farmers" and qualify for subsidies. The tea party are stooges... always check out their background before listening to the bullshit coming from their mouths.
The problem is, if you are a farmer and you don't take the subsidy, you will not succeed in a market full of farmers who do.
The tea-party farmers may dislike the situation all the more for this, for the feeling of having to do something they find repugnant just to make a living because of government interference in their market. That is not hypocrisy. It is only hypocrisy if they really think the subsidies are great and go around advocating them.
The solution to food stamps that we can actually implement is to reform our tax codes and otherwise stop doing the things that make businesses want to move jobs overseas. The other great solution is to put into federal prison the people who crashed our economy, making sure they go into the general population of inmates.
Speaking as a tenured faculty member the conclusion that people employed entirely for their teaching with zero other consideration makes sense...but that does not make it correct and the evidence is rather circumstantial. For a start while having a sessional may cause more students to continue in a particular program is this because they are inspired or is it because they make the material seem simpler (perhaps partly because they may be better teachers but also because they will not complicate matters by introducing their own cutting edge research)? For many students, the perceived ease of a course is a large factor in their decision to take it.
The other issue is that many tenured faculty have been around for a while and find it increasingly hard to deal with students whose education at high school is getting increasingly worse. It would be interesting to see if the effect is still there at higher level courses where the ever decreasing academic standards and discipline of schools is less of a factor. Non-tenured faculty tend to be younger and so the gap in academic standards between their high school years and now is less so they likely have a better picture of what the incoming students do, or rather, do not know.
Oh definitely. Perhaps it was a bit too subtle.
Too bad its all starting to dry up.
Google.
http://www.salon.com/2011/03/31/welfare_tea_parties/
It works, bitches.
You can't rely on every instructor that you have in school to be the best. And to make things even more complicated, just because a bunch of other students consider an instructor to be good, does not mean that his/her teaching style will be good for you. For example, I learned the most when I had teachers that kept lectures to a minimum but designed very thoughtful and enlightening homework assignments, problem sets, etc. while other students preferred instructors who explained everything plainly while providing minimal assignments (this prevents you from thinking critically on your own).
If you want to get the maximum mileage out of your college experience, learn how to use the resources around you, whether they be textbooks, the internet, other students, and junior instructors. If you walk in expecting all your instructors to do the majority of the work in teaching you, then you're doomed from the start.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
"After all, you don't get tenure by dazzling 18-year-olds with PowerPoints. "
I don't know about the study, but the article is garbage.
The professor's job is not to entertain students, it's to teach them. Sometimes, students don't like the teachers who force them to work hard and learn the material.
That's why we have tenure.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Tenured professors are old and grumpy, non-tenured professors are young and eager. Guess which ones get along better with students?
I don't have a sig.
I don't think that what you're saying is really true. Students today aren't "dumber" than those of previous generations. In fact, I think that the evidence shows that they're quite a bit smarter these days.
Just look to the students of the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s, for example. These are students born between 1945 and 1955 (often called the "Baby Boomers"). Look at what their accomplishments were as students:
1) The hippy movement.
2) Rampant drug abuse.
Those are the kind of "accomplishments" that smart people would not be proud of. The hippy movement was obviously one of extreme naivety, mixed with narcissism and egotism. It can be seen as an inherently stupid movement. The same is true for their abuse of drugs. The physical destruction of one's mind and body using chemicals is not something that smart people do.
We haven't seen anything nearly as stupid from students of the following generations. In fact, we've seen the exact opposite. Students today are generally very talented with computers and other technology. They're out there starting high-tech businesses or engaging in advanced research, for instance, rather than sitting around wearing blankets and flowers, rambling on about "peace" and "love", while melting their brains using hallucinogens and other toxic substances.
Compared to the Baby Boomers when they were students, today's students are exceptionally far beyond in terms of raw intelligence and sensibility.
My husband just turned in his tenure portfolio. While the usual "two publications, community service, blah blah" is all in there, his school weighs his student evaluations as a full third of the requirements for tenure. So any prof who neglects students at his school in order to focus on research is going to have a tougher time justifying the promotion.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Now that he's gone, and the troll that was stalking and mimicking him has gone, we seem to miss them...
Either that, or this is his way of being remembered!
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
This is NOT news. Back in the mid-70's my advisor said "I love to teach. Except teaching freshmen. That a chore that's assigned to the junior faculty member". Teaching 10-20 people who give a flip vs. the maddening horde looking for a ticket punch is night and day.
And given that instructors are paid to teach, they sorta have to work to get good ratings. Tenured profs, particularly at large schools are there to lend status and bring in grants.
Of an educational study last week (on /.), I am glad to see at least someone knows the rudiments of conducting a decent study.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It about describes a great deal of MOST (but not all) academic professors (examples I'd seen, 2 of them, are below):
http://crypto.junod.info/2013/09/09/an-aspiring-scientists-frustration-with-modern-day-academia-a-resignation/
* Arrogant career-advancing seems to be "the rule of thumb"!
Yes, I've seen it myself - & I have taken a couple of prof's to the cleaners on tech & code personally, but I went in with years of hands-on in the trenches material I learned professionally on the job too, that they hadn't seen, since many prof's have never "BEEN THERE/DONE THAT" (hands on industrially/professionally no less) along with noted PhD's in this field over time also!
See - a degree doesn't mean you are "the best expert" (far from it) & I personally do NOT *think* such a man exists - everyone, has something to offer, & even "the best" can be proven wrong (lol, except me that is)...
Made an enemy of 1 in my academic career (he screwed me over on tests, grades, etc. & yet I took the next level course up CONCURRENTLY no less, implemented in JAVA also, & aced it/A grade - go figure, it was DataStructures too) that way!
(No biggie, he's reached HIS limit professionally there & I knew it + showed it in class)
So what's in that link above? It's true - many can't STAND to be "shown up"...
HOWEVER, by way of comparison:
Yet another prof. shook my hand though, for showing him up in class on a bet he made with me I couldn't DO what I said I could, vs. his methods (pretty simple task, & for all his decades of work in computing, since the 1960's, he hadn't seen the technique I used). It happens.
So - Do you *REALLY* need to go to college/university to learn, say, Comp. Sci.? Heck no - same with ANY OTHER discipline, when you come right down to it! You DO, however, have to put your nose down & learn, hands-on, hard (almost 24x7) by buying books + learning by their examples... since, after all, that IS pretty much what one does in academia!
Except you WORK HARD & PAY FOR IT (thru the nose), instead of GETTING PAID TO WORK HARD! Ironic... price of membership.
* However: I'll give academia 1 thing - it saves you years of mistakes by showing you "tricks" (e.g. proven algorithms) to use, but then again - so can ANY decent book on DataStructures (which I still consider one of the BEST courses in the art & science of computing to this very day)).
APK
P.S.=> There's a BIG LEAP between say, programming &/or network engineer/techie work though - not everyone's inclined to it (or imo & experience, ABLE to make the jump either)... apk
I have no idea which of my profs were tenured, But I do know which were not professors and which simply graduate students, or business professionals.
In my experience, almost universally, professors suck at teaching.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I've been both a non-tenure-track (NTT); I am now on a tenure-track (TT) professor; and I will soon be a tenured professor. I've been in the position of evaluating non-tenure-track instructors. (First off, a correct on the terms of art: very seldom is a NTT faculty member titled "professor.") In my experience, yes, NTT faculty are much better teachers. From working as an NTT faculty member, working with NTT faculty, and having them as close friends, I can say that there are three reasons that NTT faculty are better teachers. 1) They are younger and consequently fresher and have fewer family obligations. They are typically single. When coupled, they don't yet have or don't plan to have kids. 2) They are under constant threat of losing their jobs, so they work very, very hard--much harder than should be expected of people working for, often, about $35k/year, sometimes more, but generally not over $40k/yr. 3) NTT faculty are teachers only. They are not distracted by research obligations nor by substantial obligations to develop/run the program. ALL THAT SAID, I don't think hiring lots of NTT faculty is a good thing, at least as it is done now. Such faculty are treated as disposable, paid just enough to keep them around a few years, and worked hard enough that they will burn out pretty soon anyway. That may be good for the students (as long as that student is planning on pursuing graduate work that will lead to one of these dead-end jobs), but it's not ethical. Granted, to some, those salaries I listed sound pretty good, but keep in mind that level of pay is not enough to support a family and it is often further reduced by the need to repay the costs of graduate education. The answer may well be to admit fewer graduate students, produce fewer doctorates. But, a lot of the quality I saw in the instruction of NTT faculty was the result of very strong educations; many of those faculty were electing to pursue significant and demanding research projects on their own dime/time. So the undergraduates (and the employing institutions) are often effectively getting the benefits of a young professor without actually paying for a young professor. That may sound good, until you're the person in a similar situation.
Anything to slow the world-wide circlejerk that is academic writing.
As if getting Tenure had anything to do with how good a teacher you were...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
The study was conducted not merely *by* Northwestern University, but *at* Northwestern University. Its universal application is not obvious, given the variety of colleges and tenure requirements available.
As has been mentioned already, such universities typically reward tenure on the basis of *research* emphasis, not teaching, so the results are hardly surprising.
I submit that these results will fail to generalize when so-called "teaching colleges" -- those whose primary means of performance review for promotion regards teaching evaluation -- are included in a study. Professors at this colleges honestly are interested in focusing on teaching, and as mentioned above it is often the older tenured faculty who accumulate awards and student accolades for excellence in teaching. Some such teaching college are in the midst of increasing research requirements for faculty as regards promotion & tenure (as well as increasing class sized) -- in short, in efforts to become more like Northwestern. This study suggests that a loss of teaching effectiveness will result. (Do you want the focus to be on teaching, or research? You can't say "both"; there are finite amounts of time and resources available.)
Life is imperfect and unjust; quit your moaning, stay on your toes, and make the best of what you are given. If your tenured professor sucks (and for me, most of them did), pull your socks up and study by yourself or with friends. It all goes downhill from here so better get used to it.
:wq
Calm down a$$hole. Liberals are the biggest scum to walk the earth, then Republicans. Why anyone picks on the Tea Party is beyond me unless you love to kiss the governments a$$ and pay high taxes. I know its hard when you only have a third grade education like most people on this site not to fall under BO's spell but try hard little guy.
Most people on here hate the rich but claim to be engineers and technical people. Most of them make more than 20K a year and IMO that's f-ing greedy. So when all you little pigs get your way railing against the rich, remember that scale is adjustable so you will get yours in the end.
So keep up your ignorant, judgmental and bigoted ways, most second graders do. FU SD!
Tenured or not, universities have plenty of ways to reward and punish faculty. Tenured faculty aren't rewarded for good teaching, they are rewarded for bringing in money, serving in visible positions outside the universities, and generating buzz and publications. So that's where they spend their time and effort.
While teaching is used in evaluating some professors, the best universities and the best professors get the large majority of their funding and fame from research.
If you're bringing in $1M+ a year in grants and contract research, no university is going to care a bit about your teaching prowess or lack thereof. If you're not able to do that, welcome to the non-tenure track world.
Graduate education in science and engineering doesn't include pedagogy. If teaching mattered, it would.
Full disclosure: I did not pay to read the article. Based on the summary, there are some pretty outstanding flaws. Also, I have not received tenure yet (but will be up for tenure soon). I do spend quite a lot of time off-the-clock (i.e. anywhere not on campus) focusing on how to improve my teaching. I also feel that I am more enthused than some of my older, tenured counterparts. I teach both lower level courses as well as graduate courses. That said, 1. Non-tenure faculty tend to teach lower level courses. From a career standpoint, they are more likely to care about students' reactions to their courses because it could reflect poorly on their tenure portfolio. Grade inflation would not be out of the ordinary. If anything, the results of this study confirm my suspicion that there tends to be more grade inflation among non-tenured faculty. Not only does it make students a bit happier, it means these faculties are less likely to get bad reviews from students (and hence less likely to be fired). 2. Tenured faculty tend to teach more advanced courses. Not only is the material more difficult to learn, one may argue it is more difficult to teach (especially if the students are actually not well prepared due to weak foundations from lower level courses).
When 1% got to university, they self-selected for among the best 1%.
When 10% have to get to university to get any job, they self-select among the best 10%.
The best 10% are not as smart as the best 1%.
So that they can't be fired for being unresponsive to students.
Tenure evaluations focus on research that brings in money. The people who can do research well and are lousy at teaching are preferred over people who can do teaching well and are lousy at research. The latter group does not bring in the cash. The latter group rarely gets tenure. If you have a Ph.D you are expected to do more research than teaching.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
My adjunct professors who taught programming, object oriented analysis and design, and Psychology all were working in a related position while they were teaching; they actually worked with what they taught. Their recent, real world experience led to relevant and practical experiences being brought to the classroom. This may suit undergraduate degrees the best, as debated, but they were definitely better than every tenured professor I had without question.
Let me take a crack at decimating this "made to order results" "scientific" paper.
First some notes:
The actual paper is hiding safely away from the world behind a paywall . Where is Aaron Schwartz when you need him to help you take on the depredations of university administrators?... oh yeah, that's right. :
We can only read the abstract, so it's hard to critique because of course the most interesting - and indictable - parts of a paper are
1) the methods.. because if the methods are invalid, who *cares* what conclusion was reached?
2) The statistical analysis because bad math sinks papers
3) The full conclusions- do 1 and 2 above actually support 3? Often, actually, no.
and of course somewhere down the line at the bottom of the barrel lay the abstract, living there with it's close cousins, Daily Mail headlines.
2) This guy's salary is in direct competition for college money with his own class of test subjects' salaries. Enough said.
So shall we?
1) Tenure is a function of time. Tenured profs can be expected to be older. Older people are a class of people known to perform differentially on a variety tasks.
Perhaps the author knew in advance what the age profile of the tenured faculty under study was. Perhaps drawing subjects from such an age profile would be more or less guaranteed to result in a skewed statistic, one where what is actually being measured is - simple aging.
huh.
2) Tenured professors are a select group who can be operationally defined as "those who have mastered the incentive system put to them by, oh by administrators like the co-author of this study ! "
What are those incentives and do they impact the performance of professors ? Do those incentives, for instance, condition the professor to dedicate a substandard amount of time and energy to his or her own research rather than to teaching freshmen? Especially with respect to non-tenured, "whew !, glad got this job !" type employees?
Do I even need to answer that question? Haven't we all seen it in action? Isn't the person who wrote this paper as acutely aware of this fact as anyone ?
If I were a professor at this guy's university, I'd be doing a very long slow burn right now. They incentivize me - directly, openly and consciously using words , in the case of my department at my alma mater with words like "don't waste your time preparing for your classes the only thing they care about is you getting your research funded".. I mean literally those are the words from the tenured professors to the non-tenured (but hopeful!) "assistants professors" in the department of my own alma mater.
Then those same people turn around and use the fact that I did exactly as required against me. Nicely done!
Sniff sniff.. smells like Management Technique #10,305 aka The Devils Fork -
EITHER
fire the employee for not doing as required
OR
fire the employee for doing as required.
It's amusing to see the university system rip its own asshole apart trying to keep itself alive, which is all this is. The tuition party is over, and they know it. Now reality is setting in and they're starting to cannibalize essential functions and relationships. I think that's called "panic".
You know what the single biggest money maker on campus is? The bookstore. I knew the person who ran ours (a very large university system). The numbers were fucking unbelievable. It's basically an acting subsidiary of the US Mint.
And you know what they've started to go after, in an attempt to save themselves? The bookstores. The cost of the books to students. That can't be good (for them, not you). and it is a very clear signal that behind the glossy brochures and sprawling sports complexes, administrators are actually shitting their collective pants, throwing anything over board that they can lift.
Of course, it's all for naught, since no man can lift himself and what's really sinking the university is a combination of the very many weddi
There are a lot of fields where the adjuncts are retired or semi-retired practitioners.
When I was in civil engineering, my concrete professor was middle aged, but was still working part time. (I have no idea if he was scouting for talent for his company or not). The adjunct who taught environmental engineering (mostly water treatment) was younger, but actually working in the field. My dad taught law school after he retired 20+ years in the military, and he wasn't tenure track. (which is why he was okay with the joke, 'there are two types of teachers, good ones and tenured'.)
When I went to grad school for Operations Research (engineering management), I had an adjunct professor who worked at AARP (middle aged), and retired NASA (well past middle aged).
During my master's in Information Management, I had mostly tenured and tenure-track professors, and the tenure-track were younger than the adjuncts (who were teaching evening classes while working some other job ... including another from AARP)
All that being said ... there might still be some correlation to age -- even if they don't necessarily teach better, they might be considered more approachable than an older professor that the student have difficulty relating to.
My problem with tenured professors has been the ones with no current practical experience. I remember some of my co-workers during undergrad (we worked at the unversity's computing center) complaining about a Comp. Sci professor teaching computer security and showing slides obviously 10-20 years old, and insisting things hadn't changed at all.
Whereas, I took computer security from someone who was well past his 60s, and he had only gotten out of the field a year or two before ... and when some of the students complained that he wasn't teaching the latest tools, he explained that he didn't teach tools at all, because they're just going to change in 2-3 years, and you're better off knowing how they work so you can evaluate if they work for your needs.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
You go fuck yourself. You're literally engaging in the No True Scotsman argument fallacy, just substituting Tea Partier for Scotsman.
Jesus.
What did I see by comparison to the "students of yesteryear" in Comp. Sci., with those of TODAY? HUGE improvements in both skill AND overall knowledgebases, is what with students in that major, nowadays!
One boy, extremely bright & won national robotics competitions while still in highschool (my old "alma mater" no less, + he lived in my Ma's neighborhood too, so I 'took a shine' to him), put it pretty logically to me when I said:
"You 'youth of today'? You're BETTER @ computing, by far, than the folks I went to school here initially 15++ years ago with - astoundingly so in fact!"
(Since I went pro in 1994, said 'heck with this spending money to work hard when I can be working hard and getting PAID to do it - I can finish the paper, later'- taking a break to make money, which is, after all, the "end goal" along with learning!).
He said: "Well, think about it - we were growing up with these machines while YOU were going to school then, & we've been learning ever since, like you, except NOT professionally - for the SAME duration as yourself!"
He was right & yes. it showed in his scores/grades & abilities.
That kid, was good (damn good). There were 2-3 others as well there, of the SAME calibre as he too, mind you. I loved it - felt like I was surrounded by peers who had GOOD ideas & methodologies in fact (outta kids, no less).
(There's always "edge cases"/exceptions to the rules, but this is MORE than that - this is 1 field of endeavor that permeates today's society @ THE HOME LEVEL (making all the difference for 'academicians' entering it because of that fact - that they have "home labs" before collegiate academia to begin training on!)).
E.G./I.E.-> I started an Associates in 1993-1994, & finished off the 60 cr. hr. degree mark for it in 2009 (90/120 credits into the Bachelors in fact) after "taking a break" to go EARN MONEY via what I'd already learned instead. Never made sense to me to PAY to WORK HARD (when you should be working HARD to GET PAID). I was advised by a dual PhD in mathematics + comp. sci. to do so in fact: To "move around" to a few companies for a few years to learn from 'seasoned masters' where it matters most: Professionally. To "work up thru the ranks", bottom-level tech (2++ yrs), to network admin (2++ yrs. & then some), to coder eventually (last 11-12 yrs. or so here total time with overlap from the other 2 also (especially network admin/DBA stuff, which comes WITH software engineering anyhow)).
Hands-On, in the trenches: THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE!
Point-blank: I will tell ANYONE you learn more on the job, than in academia, by far. Certainly more currently & in the future applicable material as well. Put it THIS way: When I came back to finish the degree 15 yrs.later (between jobs)? Hey - I barely had to study (was NOT the case, 1st round/earlier). Trick is, you HAVE to be ready to go pro... & the tech interviews pretty much assure that (you either make it thru them, rounds of them, or you don't get employ). 3 of my profs knew it (2 did the same is why - working for a bit, going back to 'chipping away @ the stone' of the degree when time & monies permitted).
I can only offer "the voice of experience" on all fronts noted - best testimonial there is (is it the "end all/be all" ULTIMATE statistical sample? No, it's personal... anecdotal evidence?? Sure, but that doesn't LESSEN it by any means!).
APK
P.S.=> The rest of what I had to say on this topic came here & NOT from me (link is very good, very true in MANY cases & yes, I've seen it myself) -> http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4206489&cid=44839939 since, personally (based on decades of both academia & professional work that did EXTREMELY well for me in commercially sold code to this very day from 1996 onwards)? I don't THINK you NEED academia to learn anything (it saves you time in reinventing wheels though, by showing you PROVEN "tricks" (algorithms) but so can ANY book, which is all you really do in academia anyhow)...
... apk
Why are tenured professors teaching freshman introductory courses? They should be teaching upper-level classes. They have lecturers to teach the intro classes.
Was it done by a tenured or a non-tenured professor ?
Tenured or tenure-track faculty: Paid reasonably well, have some job security, but had to fight seventeen other applicants to the death in a gladiatorial arena just to be considered for the position. Understand that tenure makes their job completely safe, but reality means that they're always one spilled martini away from being out on the street again.
Untenured instructors: Generally sessionals, hired for a few months at a time, who need to beg for their own job back at the end of every semester. Rarely given the opportunity to teach the same class twice in a row, often prevented from working more than two or three years at the same school (to encourage them to apply for permanent positions which don't exist, naturally) and would make better money serving coffee to students than teaching them. Sometimes have difficulty refraining from asking "Would you like fries with that?" when handing out assignments or exams.
Really, it's a wonder any of these people have time for teaching at all. We're not that far away from handing students a list of textbooks to buy at the beginning of the year and then sending them to an empty classroom and asking them to teach one another.
Only a professor with tenure would need a study to figure this out. I'd be a worse employee too if I could essentially never be fired!
Most screw ups in the world, and they hardly ever get fired. When people get a "guarantee" like that, what do they have to fear? Heck, there are some teachers, due to tenure/unions, get sent to a rubber room, to keep them out of the classroom, but they cannot fire them!
First it's by frosh at Northwestern.
Second it ignores that tenured profs might be doing research most of the time.
Third it's by Northwestern students.
Did I mention the Northwestern part?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Not that it matters: This isn't a grade in academia, or formal written business correspondence, etc. - it's merely forums. Grade school children can read + write (& if THAT is your "biggest accomplishment"? You're a waste of life)!
Face it: IF YOU CAN'T UNDERSTAND WORDS WITHIN SENTENCES IN THE CONTEXT IN WHICH THEY'RE USED? YOU have the problem(get your "hooked on phonics" out again, troll, lol!).
* Too bad that crap's "the best you've got" (which isn't squat).
---
Funniest part, & I can PROVE it, no less:
Is that I've gotten 100's up upmods, even as an AC poster (harder to do than for "registered 'lusers'" like yo) -> http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2808773&cid=39855971 (I've doubled that since then): So, SO MUCH FOR YOUR "opinion" troll!
FACT: You're vastly outnumbered in it by many orders of magnitude (by your /. peers, no less).
---
Lastly - Please, lol: Get an intellect, would you? YOU are way, Way, WAY too easy to outsmart, with facts...
APK
P.S.=> An application of... "ReVeRsE-PsYcHoLoGy" - 4 off-topic trolls like you:
".etirw ot uoy thguat reve ydobon dab ooT" - by Anonymous Coward ANOTHER "ne'er-do-well" /. OFF-TOPIC TROLL on Friday September 13, 2013 @11:58AM (#44841297)
"???"
Could we get a translation of that off-topic "troll-speak/trolllanguage" of yours, please?
---
("ReVeRsE-PsYcHoLoGy", for trolls - Courtesy of this code by "yours truly" in less than 1 second flat):
---
#TrollTalkComReversePsychologyKiller.py (Ver #2 by APK)
def reverse(s):
try:
trollstring = ""
for apksays in s:
trollstring = apksays + trollstring
except:
print("error/abend in reverse function")
return trollstring
s = ""
print reverse(s)
try:
s = "Insert whatever 'trollspeak/trolllanguage' gibberish occurs here..."
s = reverse(s)
print(s)
except Exception as e:
print(e)
---
... apk
I believe the results. The next research should be to confirm my suspicion that having a tiny handful of low-paid administrators produces better results than having a large number of over paid self-important administrators.
In college I had some wonderful teachers and some terrible teachers. The wonderful teachers covered the whole spectrum in position, from graduate students to tenured professors. But every single one of the terrible teachers was a tenured professor.
The way academia works is just messed up, at least in large research universities. You become a professor because you want to do research. You get hired based mainly on your research skills. But once you get hired, you're expected to spend lots of time teaching, even if you don't like doing it and aren't good at it. This makes no sense. Hire researchers who like doing research and are good at it. Hire teachers who like teaching and are good at it. If someone happens to like doing both and be good at both, that's fine. But if they only want to do one, that should be fine too.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
'Professionals who are paid entirely to teach, in fact, make for better teachers. Makes sense, right?'
No. No it does not. The researchers are much more heavily incentivized to win grant money for the school than to teach, which is entirely secondary. Pure teachers merely aren't distracted by all this research, so they stand out by contrast.
The solution is to have all non-graduate classes taught by pure teachers, but occasionally invite the research professor as a guest lecturer on something he's passionate about.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
Is the difference really tenured or non-tenured? Or is it, younger or older.
Having been to graduate school I'd wager its Freshman classes vs interesting upper division or graduate level courses. Its probably less age and more teaching an uninteresting class. When teaching more interesting classes or classes related to their research the tenured professors probably do a far better job.
Consider a different explanation of the results. Adjuncts are contracted and likely need good student opinion forms to be re-contracted. That's a big incentive to make a class easy (hence the good grades) and fun (hence the desire for other classes from the same prof.), but not necessarily rigorous and worthwhile. It's really easy to make a class fun and simple and a total waste of time. Much more difficult (but not impossible) to make a class fun, worthwhile, and still simple. I'm speaking from experience as a prior adjunct and now a tenured professor.
So... Someone payed to do teaching full time is only 7% better than someone who's main job is to bring in research $$$ so the school can keep its doors open?
This really doesn't seem like a good deal to me...
For those who are not aware, tenure is generally granted to those who can bring in research grants. Universities generally take 50% of the grant for 'operating expenses', in other words right into the main budget. Like where tuition goes. Without this money, tuition would be significantly higher. Most tenured professors have a contractual obligation to teach ~40% of their time, and the rest is spent on research and administration.
So he wasn't around long enough to get tenure? Well, there goes the control experiment.
(besides, he wasn't half as funny as that Dr. Bob dweeb.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The solution to food stamps that we can actually implement is to reform our tax codes and otherwise stop doing the things that make businesses want to move jobs overseas.
Except that most businesses don't pay as much in taxes as they can save by moving jobs overseas. Plus, even with taxes at 0%, if a business can save money by moving jobs overseas, why wouldn't they? Some magic gratitude dust or something? Why don't you actually think about what you're saying?
The other great solution is to put into federal prison the people who crashed our economy...
Well, we can agree on that, although I figure we'd disagree on whom those people were.
Why would we want the rest of the inmates to have that much training for a new career in fraud?
That is all.
how about an even simpler explanation: tenured faculty tend NOT to teach introductory courses. If they do then typically they have to because there is nobody else willing or capable. The result: a less than completely excited teacher.
But which type "produces" more geniuses? I dare to assume that one genius is worth many hundreds (thousands?) of middle of the road scientists that only got into studying for their personal career and not to actually pursue science.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The study supports some popular beliefs about tenure-track professors, but people shouldn't be too quick too generalize. This study was very limited.
From the Atlantic article:
"Now time for a few disclaimers, some from the paper, some my own. As the authors note, this paper only looks at freshmen. Tenured professors might very well might do better in advanced junior and senior-level courses where they can incorporate their own research and special expertise into their curriculum and have a chance to work with students who've accumulated a bit more specialized knowledge. Also: Northwestern is a tony private university that attracts highly qualified faculty to work as adjuncts and non-tenured instructors. Who knows if these results would hold up at a typical state university. "
What holds for Northwestern freshmen may not hold for other populations. Such cautions are being ignored by a media (and a few intelligent commentators who should know better) too eager to confirm preconceptions.
IMO the problem is that teachers in higher education are evaluated on their research and not on their teaching.
The teacher that devotes time to preparing lectures has less time for research, and is therefore less likely to become a tenured professor that a coworker that is neglecting teaching
He's still around. He left a couple nonsense comments the other day about the Dell buyout.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2808773&cid=39855971
* "Read 'em & weep", troll...
(OH, that's right - you're TOO ILLITERATE to be able to read that, lmao...)
APK
P.S.=> Lastly: I've doubled that amount of upward moderations since then!
(So much for your ILLITERATE ADHD/Dyslexia ridden "opinion" - you're outnumbered in it by MANY orders of magnitude by your /. peers no less!)
... apk
Here in the UK this used to be the case. There were universities catering for future design engineers, scientists, historians &c., teachers and candidates for the senior civil service and which also did research, polytechnics that turned out applied engineers, business managers, science technicians &c. but didn't really do much research, and technical colleges that trained people in practical trades (plumbing, electrical installation, bricklaying &c.) but did no research. It worked well, as you could choose where you wanted to study according to what your aims were.
The along came the Iron Lady, and swept all this aside. Within a few years every institution that had survived was dubbed a "university", very few on the inside quite knew what to do as many of them had little or no experience of true academia, and nobody on the outside knew where to apply to, as there were no visible distinctions any more.
Then came the demand that 50% of the population should go to "university", which put the final nail in the coffin of higher education. We now have a situation where many new undergraduates have so few basic skills that the first year of a three-year course does not contribute to the classification of the degree - it's essentially a remedial catch-up year.
I went to university a second time in the mid nineties, having first attended 20 years earlier, and the decline in standards appalled me. I went on to a doctorate, which I abandoned for the same reason. With maybe one or two exceptions, our "universities" now operate as a cross between senior high school and polytechnics - right down to mandatory monitored class attendance. Prior to the Thatcher revolution, university students were expected to be autonomous learners who managed their own progress. Now they're spoon fed stuff to regurgitate in the exam room.