Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries ….
- Censorship On The Rise: U.S. Schools Have Banned More Than 20 Books This Year – Yes, it’s much better if, instead of reading, those kids sit at home playing Nintendo and watching football.
- Costco Shopper Writes Insane Fake Shopping Lists For The Amusement Of Others – The Consumerist – Heh.
- Life Without a Chance – Lock ’em up and throw away the key, even when they’re kids, is the stupid-easy way to fight crime. It’s also evil.
- When C’s Became A’s – Well, that sucks.
- The GOP candidates have no time for your “science,” scientists – War Room – Salon.com – Science is scary!
- After Supreme Court Win Forcing Customers to Arbitrate, AT&T Now Sues to Stop the Arbitration – News – ABA Journal – It would be nice to see them hoist on their own petard.
- 6 Reasons The Guy Who’s Fixing Your Computer Hates You | Cracked.com – HA! Though, to be fair, the folks that I still do PC tech support for are not nearly this self-destructively stupid.
- Cute kittens playing in pots on Japanese TV. « Stupid Evil Bastard – AAWWWWWWWWWWWW …
- 10 Science Fiction Books That Changed the Course of History – That’s not a bad list, though I’ve only read half of them.
- As Union Membership Falls, RGA Chairman Gov. McDonnell Says There’s Been ‘More Unionization’ Under Obama | ThinkProgress – Don’t let your facts get in the way of my talking points!
- Most Android apps sit idle, top-50 apps make up 61% of all usage, Nielsen finds – I know I have a lot of apps on my phone that I downloaded for perfectly good reasons, and that I simply never use. This isn’t at all surprising.
- Liberty Counsel Declares The APA To Be A “Pseudo-Scientific Organization” – The truth can be sooooooo inconvenient.
- Consumer Rights Advocate Elizabeth Warren Explores Race for Mass Senate – Sounds like a great idea — and getting rid of Scott Brown is icing on the cake.
- Otters in jackboots – Today otters, tomorrow the wolves! (Okay, maybe I don’t want wolves wandering through my neighborhood, but it was too good to pass up.)
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RE “When Cs Became As”, I think the faculty are partly to blame. They have caved in to the pressure rather than standing against it. I tried to stand firm against it, not always as successfully as I would like, and I believe I paid a significant price in one case.
When I taught at University of Northern Colorado, a student complained to the department chair that my course was too hard. It was basically the same course I taught at WMU and CSU without any trouble, but I could see that the students at UNC were not as able as those at WMU or CSU. The chair came to see me in my office and I interpreted the conversation as an attempt to pressure me to make the course easier. I believe that I was not offered more teaching at UNC because I essentially ignored that pressure.
Second, there are a number of web sites where students rate their professors, and there are mechanisms at every university I taught at by which students rate their professors. I always received fairly low ratings, and I believe it was because I tried not to allow grades I gave to be inflated. I suppose it’s possible that I was a worse teacher than my colleagues, and that I’m somehow blind to the ways in which that was true, but I don’t think so.
I also saw things that I interpret as evidence of grade inflation when I was a graduate student in Computer Science at CSU, directly attributable, I think, to students’ ability to apply pressure on faculty via ratings, which some departments reportedly use for salary, promotion, and other administrative decisions, and via complaints to the administration. I think there’s less grade inflation graduate courses, in general, than in undergraduate courses, but I think I may have benefited from some grade inflation in a couple of cases.
The other thing that’s a little scary to me is that the existence of grade inflation implies the existence of people who are working but who are not really qualified to do their jobs. I don’t know if grade inflation is present in medical school, but I do not want a doctor who graduated because grade inflation brought him or her from a failing grade to a passing grade in one or more courses?
Having taught myself, once upon a time, I can understand the pressure (spoken or un-) to give decent enough grades to promote.
I think survey/review data could potentially be of value, as a starting point to analysis of a teacher, their styles, potential means of improvement, etc. but it’s more than a bit disturbing that they would be used in any more than a referential way in job offers, work assignments, promotions, salary, etc. Students are not customers, in the normal sense of the word, and their opinions should not be treated like like they were.