Sapere Aude!

NYU Student Tries To Get Professor Fired Over Current Events Assignment

NYU senior Sara Ackerman engaged in a war with college administration over her refusal to do a class assignment about the Occupy Wall Street protests.

NYU Local reports that the drama became public around 3 a.m. on Wednesday morning, when Ackerman sent out a series of bizarre emails chronicling the conflict. It began over an ethnographic assignment on Occupy Wall Street, which Ackerman said "forced" her to talk to "criminals, drug addicts, mentally ill people, and of course, the few competent, mentally stable people that stationed themselves at Zuccotti Park."

She wrote that her one visit to the protests -- with "two other young girls, who are quite attractive and thin, and don't look particularly physically fit enough to take on a potential predator, rapist, paranoid schizophrenic, etc." -- left her feeling like she had "escaped an extremely dangerous -- and even, life threatening -- situation." She refused to do the project, and requested an alternate assignment.

Ackerman's emails also singled out the class's TA for not calling on her in class, even though she left her hand up for 75 seconds on one occasion. Read the full emails at NYU Local.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Although this one sounds like an extreme case, it's not all that uncommon for students to complain that they are "forced" to learn about things against their preferred beliefs.  It's completely childish.  It's like complaining about your parents "forcing" you to eat your veggies.

Dogmatic Students Are The Problem, No "Liberal" Professors

This little study confirms what virtually faculty member already knows.  Students cry bias whenever anybody challenges their ideas.

A regular theme in conservative critiques of higher education is that liberal professors discriminate against right-leaning students. Many faculty members (with studies to back them up) reject the charge. Even if faculty members may lean left, they argue, there is simply no evidence of systematic bias in how students are graded and treated.

A new study in the journal College Teaching suggests that it's possible that some students do perceive bias, but that the reasons may have to do more with their own identities than with anything taking place in the classroom. Notably, the author does not cite his findings simply to rebut the conservative critics, but to suggest that there may be classroom techniques that would lessen the perception of bias.

The study examined 148 female students and 123 male students at a land-grant university in the Southeast where political attitudes among students are fairly evenly split. The students were given two sets of questionnaires -- one on how settled and resistant to change they were (in politics and the rest of their lives) and the other on their perceptions of bias from their faculty members.

The study found that students -- even in the same classrooms -- didn't perceive bias in the same ways (or at all), and those who perceived bias were those who were resistant to changing any of their views. The finding extended to some who identified themselves as being far on the left and resistant to change, and who believed that they had some biased conservative professors. But among both left-leaning and right-leaning students who didn't score high on resistance to new ideas, there was little perception of bias.

Darren L. Linvill, the study's author and director of basic courses in the department of communication studies at Clemson University, said that while his research (including interviews with the students claiming bias) found no evidence of real bias, the findings about perception should be of concern to faculty members.

Many faculty members -- himself included, Linvill noted -- play devil's advocate to many students, expressing a range of views. This time-tested classroom technique, he said, may not work with students who arrive in class determined not to hear new ideas.

Students, especially super conservative students, tend to make charges of bias whenever their preferred ideas are challenged.  So, in classes that emphasize teaching critical thinking skills and logical reasoning and where the professor plays devil's advocate in order to faciliate the development of those skills they are bound to get allegations of bias from dogmatic students.

 

Pop Quiz Learning Outcomes

Last Thursday I gave a pop quiz over the reading assignment in my ethics class.  The reading assignment was Philip Quinn's "God and Morality," which can be found in Reason and Responsibility edited by Joel Feinberg.    Here are the quiz questions.

1. What is one of the "legs" of Quinn's cumulative case for divine command theory?
2. What is one of the "arrows" or criticisms of divine command theory (other than the Euthyphro dilemma) that Quinn addresses in the article?
3. What is Quinn's response to the Euthyphro dilemma?
4. What is one other substantive point you learned about divine command theory from Quinn's article?

The class average was a 14.5.  There were a few 100s, but most of the students that took the quiz obviously did not do well at all.  Only 17 students out of 53 accessed the reading assignment.  Today, I gave a pop quiz over an eight page selection from J. L. Mackie on the subjectivity of moral values.  Here are questions:

1. What is Mackie's main thesis?
2. What kind of imperative does Mackie reject?
3. What is the basic idea of the argument from relativity?
4. What is the basic idea of the argument from queerness?

I provided some reading questions this time around, but they will not do much good if most of the students are not even bothering to do the readings.  Only 16 students accessed the reading and many of those were just before class.  And, of course, I had to remind one student to put away his computer and another to put away his cell phone.  

The silver lining of today's class was that one student did an excellent job on her class presentation.  Unfortunately, the second student that did a class presentation did not meet the minimum requirements for the assignment.  He did not access the directions prior to completing the assignment.

College Sucks!

This study on how college students spend their time came out a little while ago.

They seem to have a lot of spare time.  But, it does not seem to have had a negative impact on grades, which keep going up.  

And, finally, we have the latest study on how much college students are learning.

WASHINGTON — A large number of US university students fail to develop critical thinking, reasoning and writing skills because of easy classes and too little time spent studying, a study found Wednesday.

The study of 3,000 students at 29 four-year universities found that 45 percent "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" during their first two years in college as measured by a standardized test.

After the full four years, 36 percent had shown no development in critical thinking, reasoning and writing, according to the study, which forms the basis of the new book "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses."

"Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent," according to an excerpt of the book published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

"These findings are sobering and should be a cause for concern."

The study, carried out by New York University sociologist and education expert Richard Arum and University of Virginia sociologist Josipa Roksa, attributed much of the problem to easy courses and lax study habits.

US students today "define and understand their college experiences as being focused more on social than on academic development," they wrote.

In a particular semester, 32 percent of those surveyed did not take any course with more than 40 pages of reading per week and 50 percent did not take a single course in which they wrote more than 20 pages.

The study cited another report as saying that students now spend just 12 to 14 hours studying each week, 50 percent less than full-time college students did a few decades ago.

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

But, there is some good news in the study for Liberal Arts majors.

Students majoring in liberal arts fields see "significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study." Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the smallest gains. (The authors note that this could be more a reflection of more-demanding reading and writing assignments, on average, in the liberal arts courses than of the substance of the material.)

College Student Freaks Out About Pizza

 Via the Huff Post, I see that video featuring an LSU student is making its way around the Internet.