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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.
Isn't that all the entitled youngsters care about anyway - good grades, not actually learning anything?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This is actually quite the opposite. I find it hard to believe that there wasn't a single person in the back of class just trying to get their work done and get out. Not everyone swears in their day to day life, let alone at authority figures. Not everyone cheats. Not everyone lies.
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.
If all of the people coming out of your school have diplomas, but no clue ... eventually people look at diplomas from your school as being worthless.
Oddly enough, people expect diploma actually translates into "has received an education".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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 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 ran into this line in a Wikipedia article last weekend and just stared at it in amazement for a few minutes:
"Others may want a high school diploma to represent primarily a certificate of attendance, so that a student who faithfully attended school but cannot read or write will still get the social benefits of graduation."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-stakes_testing
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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!