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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.
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.
All it takes for this strategy to fail is that the most disruptive students being in some way "special". And I'm not even meaning that they're retarded or belonging to some minority and failing them could get the PC crowd breathing down your neck. All it takes is that the parents of such an asshole student are "important" because they donate money into the school's coffers, basically buying their precious little dud a degree.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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"
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.
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.
In any case I am sure these problems exist a the colleges that occupy the space between community colleges and legitimate universities, where such problems are much less dominate. That is why it still makes a difference where one goes to school, and why some schools can charge a premium.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.