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University Overrules Professor Who Failed Entire Management Class
McGruber writes: After a semester of disrespect, backstabbing, lying, and cheating, Texas A&M Galveston Professor Irwin Horwitz had all he could take. He "sent a lengthy email to his Strategic Management class explaining that they would all be failing the course. He said the students proved to be incompetent and lack the maturity level to enter the workforce." Professor Horwitz's email cited examples of students cheating, telling him to "chill out," and inappropriate conduct. He said students spread untrue rumors about him online, and he said at one point he even felt the need to have police protection in class. "I was dealing with cheating, dealing with individuals swearing at me both in and out of class, it got to the point that the school had to put security guards at that class and another class," said Horowitz.
However, Vice President of Academic Affairs Dr. Patrick Louchouarn made it very clear that the failing grades won't stick. The department head will take over the class until the end of the semester, according to school officials.
However, Vice President of Academic Affairs Dr. Patrick Louchouarn made it very clear that the failing grades won't stick. The department head will take over the class until the end of the semester, according to school officials.
Those students sounds like perfect management material. Don't fail them, but them on fast-track to vice presidents of fortune 500 companies! They will fit the job perfectly.
With so little information it's hard to take sides. Is it wrong of me to think that maybe this professor is incompetent AND the entire class still deserves to fail?
Why bother with classes? Just give everybody a passing grade.
people copy each other's homework and watch youtube on their phone in class and the professor cant flunk them because he would be fired because he gets graded on how well the class does. I'm guessing he did what a lot of teachers would LOVE to do.
Which probably means that at least one of the students will then go on to fail.
Will they sue?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Failing everyone in the class because you can't control the class is ridiculous (assuming the class size is not 10). If there are disruptive students that make you feel you need police protection, then you should do something about them (whatever's relevant for your schools policy, suspension, filling charges, etc).
I think two outcomes should have been upheld:
(1) Each student was graded according to his or her own merit.
(2) The prof. should perhaps have sued the school for a hostile workplace. And maybe the disruptive students arrested for disorderly conduct and/or suspended.
Watch the documentary Ivory Tower. It's all about keeping graduation stats up, which leads to more enrollment and, you guessed it, more money.
sig: sauer
I've seen a lot of whining about special snowflakes always needing passing grades, but in this case I think the overrule was the correct call. From the Inside Higher Ed write up on it, this is the section that gets me:
Instead of failing just the students that deserved it and giving appropriate grades to the rest of the students, he decided to fail everyone because the school wouldn't let him quit the course. So several students are doing the work and paying the tuition only to get a failing grade on their transcript because the professor wants to make a point. That's why it's getting justifiably overruled.
He didn't approach this in the correct way--rather than announce what is going on, he should "adjust" his curriculum on the remaining tests, projects and labs. First make the students sign a (re)acknowledgement about the school's policy on cheating & plagiarism. Next adjust the projects/labs--make them "in class"---you can work with people (including seeking info from the instructor/teachers assistants), but no internet, only allowed to use the course material etc. (I had a teacher who did this--and was interesting approach as you actually learned more than straight lectures). This mitigates plagiarism. Next bring in half a dozen people for the exams to proctor it (if this is where the bulk of cheating was happening). If you are caught, then it's a dead to rights thing, and you are turned into the university. This mitigates cheating. Finally, from personal experience, in some cases if you get a "D" in a class, you have still technically "passed" but most of the time you have issues later on if you try to use it (most universities won't accept it if you transfer for instance). Change up the tests (and curve) enough that the class still passes, but with a VERY low mark--enough that the majority of the students have a "D"
The professor's mistake was not picking one or two of the students who did not participate in the incidents (there had to be some) and giving them passing grades...
Obviously the university can't afford to punish its customers. At least, not for very long.
I'm also skeptical that 100% of students deserved to fail. Maybe they did, but that should be a consequence of individual evaluations that have a coincidental outcome, not a group evaluation that affects every individual. The older we get, the more we tend to use the shortcut of categorization instead of individualized evaluation. Categorization is efficient, and often "good enough," but honestly, students deserve the individual evaluation they paid for.
I had a high school teacher burn out in much the same way. He was actually a great teacher -- excited about the material, animated, and he always encouraged debate. He had a large number of students in one of his classes that would taunt him for childish reasons like his mannerisms, and eventually he lost it and told the entire class that they had failed, and told everyone to report to the principal's office in an expletive-laden tirade. Teachers are people, and they have limits. The behavior of the students was inexcusable, and while the reaction of the teacher was understandable, it was unprofessional and thus unacceptable.
The entire class did not fail, nor did it deserve to. It wasn't the job of the well-behaving students to moderate the behavior of the bad actors -- the other students were victims as well. I think the lesson is to really nip this sort of thing in the bud. If disruptive students had been removed after a couple of infractions, it would have both decreased the level of disruption and set an example to the rest of the class. Allowing things to get to the point described in the summary is the real failure.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Depends on your criteria for success.
My friends tell me they're amazed and jealous of my career, and consider me a beacon of success in a corporate environment.
I'm in a corporate environment so I know many people more successful than me, and work for some of them. They're going higher, faster, and earning more money. Some of them are arseholes, some are not.
I'm always trying to be nice to people, make constructive relationships and not be an arsehole. Hopefully sometimes I get that right.
But my personal achievements and those of the people I see in management positions above me do show that you can achieve success without being an arsehole.
Maybe not Steve Jobs level of success, but frankly I don't want to be a Steve Jobs level of arsehole either. There's a happy compromise, and it's making me happy enough and successful enough and people don't accuse me of being an arsehole. Often.
Instead of just giving the CEO that rape and pillaged their customers a slap on the wrist and a bonus you also punish the employees which will fall back onto the company and future or current CEO.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I mean, many students really want university to be free so everyone can have a chance. Employers want to demand university for everything. Guess what, university is going to be 4 more years of high school when it contains 95% of the students that were in high school with you.
As someone who does not do well in organized education, I look forward to the day when a BA or BSc is about as useful on a resume as graduating high school. I have enough years under my belt it shouldn't matter now, of course, but every advantage is a good advantage! :D
This is pretty much a university level prof acting like a High School teacher. A good portion (but not all) of the class was misbehaving, so he failed the lot of them.
That's like "Billy did X so you're all staying in at lunch." That shit wasn't fair in Elementary/Secondary school, and it's sure as hell not acceptable in a venue where students have paid to take the course. Fail the bad students, but don't shit on the ones that were there to learn and not causing issues.
I can sympathize with number 1, and partially with number 4, but 2 and 3 hold no water at all. They should not be the concern of the professor. These undergraduates are supposedly a subset of adults.
Your immediate reaction is to ask: "How did the teacher fail these students?" Sadly, your reaction is endemic; and, moreover, indicative of the problem at every level of U.S. education.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I've always been under the impression that academic dishonesty (cheating) has been grounds for expulsion ... basically for any accredited university.
As such eject them from the University, and good luck getting into any other 1st class schools with out a lot of work and growth (if ever).
The rest would seem to fall under the University's harassment policy. Which I'm sure has it's own way of removing trouble makers from class
What this says to me is that the Prof didn't activate the appropriate responses early in the term AND more so, the department head was asleep at the switch and didn't have a clue what was going on at the Prof's level (and provide guidance on how to address the issues with the class). And before you way it wasn't the department head's responsibility to do so, it is.
As a leader, your responsibilities not only include the direction of tasks and responsibilities for your subordinates. It also includes looking after their well being (and their subordinates). It's not enough to just provide Bob with safety equipment and training, you need to make sure Bob is using it. Likewise, it's not enough just to provide a harassment policy and enforce it, if Bob is not recognising he is being harassed, it's important to pull them aside and help them activate that process.
I used to be a part time teacher since I am an animation/computer specialist and the schools hire me for the things they can't teach.
One of those things I've noticed is that the teachers doesn't have any say anymore, it's all about the money and how happy the kids parents are. The happier the parents, the more attendance they get. And if they get a lot of attendance, then the government will increase the schools income and support. This breeds a new kind of school, an unhealthy school system where teachers are constantly burned out, have to suck up to kids and their parents instead of concentrating on the real job at hand, teaching!
Teaching AND learning demands a lot of focus, and focus demands discipline.
Kids are NOT stupid, they will figure out that they can get away with whatever they want and will naturally do so - kids being kids, testing new grounds.
We need to give more power back to the teachers, and educate parents to discipline their kids into wanting real achievements instead of "whatever they can get away with to party every night". Discipline never hurt anyone, it helps you to FOCUS.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
As found by another Slashdot user, the following article gives a much more complete picture.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
He was a sessional lecturer in his first semester at Galveston. He had made multiple attempts to deal with the bad actors in the class, and the university hadn't supported him. In addition to his love letter to the students, he wrote one to the department telling them what he thought of them and saying: The students are "your problem now." While burning that particular bridge may have seemed worthwhile to him, I doubt he's happy to have made the news. He probably would have liked to remain hireable as an instructor.
I taught the second semester of anatomy and physiology to a group of nurses a couple of years ago. They didn't think that knowledge of the subject was something needed to get an 'A'. They wanted extra-credit for points. I didn't agree with that philosophy, but did allow additional tests over the material to be taken (different tests each time), but there was no way in hell that I was going to give someone an 'A' if they did not know the subject matter. It was pathetic, and these are now the nurses that are taking care of you in the hospital.
The entire class fell so far short of expectations that they should be failed?
I think the Professor probably just needs to take some management classes. Once he gets a better handle on leading groups this shouldn't happen again.
I stole this Sig
Honestly, people have the right to be drooling morons and have a degree.
Expecting people to have an IQ or education is not normal today. Let them be dumb, and accept it. They have a god given right to be dumb.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
While I'm sure there were significant issues with *some* students, the prof himself sounds like he has problems also. I'm sure there are many who believe themselves infallible. When I attended university there were end-of-course surveys given to students in class in the last few weeks, to rate the professor, course material, etc. They were to be handed out by the professor with a student designated to collect and seal them while the professor left the room. One professor refused to hand them out, saying that it was preposterous for mere students to rate someone with 15 years experience. The student union had to step in. He was rated very poorly.
So aside from the details of this particular incident, why doesn't this happen more?
I want to be clear that I don't want this to happen, it's clearly a bad, bad thing when it does, but think of it this way: Each term (semester, quarter) millions of people enroll in classes. Tens of thousands of classes. Business 101, Advanced Operating System Design, Underwater Basket Weaving, whatever. Statistically it's very unlikely that any given class will fail (there's probably at least one person who's going to do the work well enough to pass) but over the whole set of classes, term after term, year after year, shouldn't we expect to see this happen at least once every so often?
Agreed, the professor overreacted at the end. It's obvious he reacted out of frustration.
When a student cheats one of two things should happen. If the school has an honor code, then there needs to be an ethical hearing by the school to determine the punishment. I think it would be a good idea if the student were also automatically be dis-enrolled from that course. The professor should have the option to fail that student immediately for the entire course or, at minimum, the professor should be authorized (maybe required?) to give that student a zero for the assignment with no opportunity to make it up.
I wouldn't find it too far out to allow the professor to lower a grade for disrespect either but that's a weaker argument. Part of being a professional is figuring out how to play well with others, even difficult teachers.
If the kids pass, they have succeeded in degrading the value of the diploma that they (or more likely their parents) are paying for.
The kids will be lucky if they fail the class, and that it is public. At least a prospective employer might entertain the possibility that those kids actually ended up learning the material before graduating.
The K-12 system is loosely test-based. Meaning that the job of the school is (partly) to help kids get a good score on a set of standardized tests (culminating in the SAT, SAT2, etc). There is a disincentive to merely pretend to prepare the kids for these tests. The school is paid by the state, not the students directly.
The bachelor program is based on internal grades. The university can give out whatever grades they want to. The students pay the university tuition. There is an incentive for the school to give good grades to the students (i.e. their paying customers). The only disincentive to this practice, is that it destroys the facade that the kids are actually learning, and therefore value of the diploma they are purchasing. It is in the interest of both the students and the school to keep up this facade. The students can pretend to know things, and the university can profit.
Unfortunately for these students, they don't realize that if they are not going to at least pretend (much less realize) that they are learning, then they may was well just go out partying with their tuition money rather than wasting it on a worthless (made so by them) degree.
Seriously, Texas A&M has a reputation as a low quality school. I reads some papers from A&M researchers...... painful.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Why shouldn't "keeping graduation stats up, which leads to more enrollment and, you guessed it, more money" be the goal of every institution? I'm guessing the methods are whats deplorable. Perhaps you should mention those instead of just the things that could just as easily be hugely beneficial to students.
My professors conducted research in areas that were only slightly related (on a good day) to the material that they were assigned to teach. These people carefully preserved overhead transparencies from previous teachers that were cracked and faded. They obviously had little enthusiasm for their teaching duties, and my fellow students mirrored the excitement.
Some became prima donnas that flew into a rage in the wrong circumstances. Some actively preened their students for (low-paid) graduate research (not entirely suppressing a greedy desire to exploit). And some simply took apathy to levels that I had never seen before.
I went through a real circus with a professor going for tenure (who did have basic problems with competence) that had to endure not only the stifled laughter of fellow faculty in our class, but video tape recorders documenting his poor teaching style.
School, at all levels, needs to put people who want to teach in front of people who want to learn, which is diametrically opposed to the structure of a research university. If you don't have both of these types of people in the right place at the right time, the results will be substandard, as indeed they have been for the past century.
Fail the school.
So, they're qualified to be managers!
When I was 19 or 20 I was a whiny jerk to my professors. I let a couple cute girls copy off my test in a comp sci class they had no business being in.
When I went back to get more schooling at 30, I got really tired of listening to the 20 year old whiny jerks in the comp sci classes I was in, The professor basically gave up on the last two weeks of one course because the whiny jerks belittled him into not moving forward with the last part of his class. I wish he would have stuck with it, because about half the class would have failed that part of the final test.
Can we send these students to manager our competitors over seas? Because that would really be ideal here.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The class that was too big to fail.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I was a lecturer at a university in Melbourne (AU) for over 3 years. I quit after being told I could not fail students whose work was way below par, as well as finding them directly plagiarizing (copypasting) work from the Internet. This was a design school, and the students they would not let me fail were all overseas students. The problem is that if these students get below a certain score they are "sent home" and the massive amounts of money they pay the university is gone. The thing that really horrifies me is that the universities are more tied to the money they get than what the degree they give stands for!
There are too many imature idiots and spoiled brats in college. That's a plain and simple fact.
So many times I've wished to be rich enough to start my own ivory-leage style university for that exact reason.
Best teachers in the world. Best equipment in the world. Best building in the world. Best campus in the world.
But:
Babble in class: You're out.
Babble repeatedly: Get a warning.
Cheat: Fail and you get a warning.
Drink and misbehave: You're out.
Drink and misbehave repeatedly: Get a warning.
Dress and/or behave like a bum: Get a notice, then a warning.
Three warnings and you get booted from campus for all eternity, you're last semester tuition forfeight. End of story.
I am effing sick and tired of these countless spoiled f*ckwits clogging up the first two or three semesters until they're weeded out by the math curiculum in CS.
I further propose that every student should do 15 months of German-style civil service (Zivildienst) taking care of elderly or handycapped or do some other solid useful work like fixing damns or cleaning out environmental disasters before he/she is allowed to enter any higher education of any kind whatsoever. Grow the f*ck up before you waste my, the teacher/professors and everybody elses time!
If you want to drink yourself into a coma or slack off for a year or two: By all means, go ahead. Every yound person should take a year or two to travel the world, slack off and surf in indonesia or hawaii. But they should also be sternly corrected if they can't act like grown-ups when they finally come to college.
It's also for this very reason that I'm probalby going to roll in a remote tutoring college. (I'm planing on heading a CS degree or someting real soon now in part-time)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Bad students are certainly a thing but any time I've seen a professor talk about how bad a whole class is (and I've seen it, I do IT support at a university) is the PROFESSOR who is the bad one.
We had a guy who only lasted one semester before being told to leave. He disrespected his students, did a shit job teaching anything, and expected everyone to have advanced processor design knowledge that was PhD level or beyond. He gave them an impossible project and then raged at them when they couldn't do it.
While there may well have been a few lazy and/or disrespectful students in his class, the overwhelming problem was him. He expected everyone to kiss his ass all the time, not expect anything from him, and have education far beyond their years. With unrealistic expectations like that, of course he was disappointed in his class.
Everyone "failed" his class by raw numbers but he just curved it so in the end grades were a representation of intelligence, not mastery of the subject.
It's perfect preparation for the real work world:
* Unfair (you take a hit for others' screw-ups)
* Backstabbing
* Grudges
* Grumpy bosses
* Getting fired by surprise
* Reinventing variations of the same work (retake class)
Table-ized A.I.
I practiced that for weekly graded exercise sheets. (You had to get 50% overall to be allowed to take the exam.) Students get really upset at first and demand justification. Then you show them the stupidity of their errors (without naming names), like an exponent that became a factor and then became an index (over several generations of copying). They do not like you after that, but they shut up and at least invest some effort in understanding what they are copying.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well, the goal should be to improve the lives of their students, not to make money. Many not-for-profit schools lose money per student, and are subsidized by alumni.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Err ... this course was in "Strategic Managment", right? Backstabbery, cheatage, etal are necessary or at least ubiquitous skills. Just what does the prof expect?
It's a joke, LAUGH!
...it's probably the student's fault. When the whole class fails, it's probably the teacher's fault.
That's terrible. People should retire before they get into that state.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It sounds more like the fault of the university not enforcing academic discipline. The fact that it seems for a while it was known that students were cheating, and they were not suspended. It seems they were abusive and not suspended. It seems they were threatening and not suspended. I mean the university posted security? Ridiculous. Kick the students out of program. There is no fail if they are not in the program, or not in the university at all anymore. It is certainly not the fault of the professor. The students who didn't get suspended or kicked out could then finish the class. The only fault I see, is it seems rather unlikely that ALL the students were at fault, so failing everyone seems a bit unfair of the professor.
While not the same thing I've been in classes that were, let us say very hard. I started in a CS 300 level class which I think was "Unix Programming" with about 40-45 students. At the end of it, there were exactly 6 of us who passed the course. The rest dropped out or failed. I think I was #6 and probably only passed on a curve or something. I know there was some student complains about that class. At the same time the professor I think was pretty frustrated with us dumb students. Though I think the fault was somewhere between. It probably should have either been a full course rather than a half, or two halves with one being the pre-requisite for the other. There was just a lot of material to cover, so we probably went over everything rather fast. Also unlike a lot of other courses, we pretty much had to use the facilities to do all the work, which meant going into a computer lab that you didn't always have access to. In many cases it might have been some peoples first introduction to Unix as well which wasn't really fair. It wasn't something that you could do on your own (I don't believe the facilities had remote access either at the time). Anyway it did certainly separate the dedicated to those that were not. Though I know some dropped it simply because they didn't want the low mark affecting their overall average...
Another more funny story, is I had a geography 101 prof yell at his entire class of probably 200 after the first exam. One of the questions was "What is the title of your textbook?" Apparently most people in the class got it wrong (can't remember if I did or not). He seriously threw a fit and stormed out calling us the dumbest class he had ever had! Anyway I could argue that the title of a textbook has exactly nothing to do with geography or any geographical content, so I think he was a bit off base. Why the hell would anyone study that? Other than maybe remembering it because you have seen it so many times.
Profs can be weird people also and stubborn. I had one weirdo on joining his class late (because I dropped another) had to hand in a paper the day I join, which obviously I couldn't. I asked for some time to complete the assignment so I didn't just get a zero (otherwise why let me transfer in?). He refused. Said it wasn't fair to the rest, and suggested I get a petition together and if all the other students signed it he would consider it. So that is what I did the first week or so, when the lecture was over I would stand outside the door and got people to sign the petition. I got the whole class to sign. I presented it to him, and I don't think he remembered it at all. Anyway he just said fine, delegated it to a TA, who I gave an oral presentation to at their house (which was kind of weird), and got a mark for it in the end. It was for some weirdo CS lite course like Cyberspace or Artificial Life or something...
I'm an arsehole on Slashdot. I don't pretend to be successful on Slashdot.
Shit, only 25? In well over a decade? I need to be nastier.
Yes every class has a different personality but it's the professor's job to motivate students and get them to perform at higher levels than they have ever done before and do this in a way that provides the students with the tools to learn to self motivate. You need to teach students how to learn and that should be a process reinforced in every class. It sounds to me this professor is burned out and it may be time for a sabbatical? lets see how the other professor does with the class and see how his personality blends? Teaching is all about personality. I'm not saying these students are not culpable but you need to deal with things every year. Then you get burned out then you take time off and recharge take some motivational coursework and then hit the ground running once again. Or get out and make your mark in the markets....
Paul E. Bahre
There are probably two sides to this story.... At least. We only have one of them. Ordinarily, the university management failing to back up a lecturer would be appalling.... Unless the lecturer was appalling. We can't know from the summary.
Only boring people are ever bored.