Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

not even reading that, it will give me a panic attack
esp if the first sentences are "we don't really know..."

aggggghhhhhhhhh

Cool time today dealing with a Canvas issue that others have had in the past, and which hasn't been solved by Canvas. I go to the support chat, and am placed at the back of the queue. Fine. I leave the computer to do work and walk the dog, checking the queue all the while, etc.

Eventually, I am working and realize the laptop has gone to sleep. I log back on and lo and behold, my session has timed out, and I'm now at the back of the queue again...for a problem that shouldn't be a problem in the first place.

If this is the future, then fuck the future, let it all burn.

ugh fuck canvas

this week sucks so much

i hate everything

Also, a query: anyone here quit an adjunct job a few days into the semester?

These fucks have increased course caps due to some fuckery and I'm now at 45 students.....and getting paid $4500 for the semester. So my question is: do I make things easy on myself and just give everyone A's, collect the check, and never work for this school again? Or should I just quit? While it would be hard to take the hit, I am ready to take one suffering over another at this juncture.

ha ha I submitted my expression of interest in a voluntary redundancy last week

and table that is unacceptable, negotiate or quit!

So my question is: do I make things easy on myself and just give everyone A's, collect the check, and never work for this school again?

seems to me to be a win (you)/win (students)/lose (the school) which sounds cool

Yeah, talked with a number of people, including one of my childhood friends who is a union leader at the school, and I'm going to go with the making things easy on myself option. Also seems like some more major labor action might be in the works, so I'd like to stick around for that.

this roundup of covid reactions at universities made me feel both despondent and less alone


https://annehelen.substack.com/p/between-fked-and-a-hard-place

I’ve got 34 students in a comp 2 writing class which amounts to 8.5 hrs of grading (at a modest 15 min per paper) per draft per assignment. Adjuncts are paid $2,000 for this class.

This thread stresses me out in the absolute worst way.

I agree w the “giving everyone A” option provided that the material in the class is not going to be essential to their future jobs or classes. I feel differently about shorting developmental writing students than I do about music appreciation students. They’ll live without remembering what the elements of music are but it’s hard to make it when you can’t write a coherent paragraph.

It is a class on short fiction. Like can you read and talk about a New Yorker story? Okay? Cool.

(though only 30% of the stories I used were in the NYer, but the basic thrust of it is that)

Oh ok! A’s for everyone!! The lit class I’ve been assigned this semester is basically that only it’s called “American Literature and Culture”

Still total bullshit that 45 students are crammed in there.

I saw a post on a fb group I’m in with a woman who is teaching a class with 232 students enrolled. No wonder people think college is a waste of time and a ripoff. 232!

Has to be automated and with multiple TAs at that point.

But yeah, that's not learning.

Definitely not, or not the place for me at least!

https://www.ajc.com/news/university-of-alabama-orders-faculty-to-keep-quiet-about-outbreak/7ZAHSQPNDRBINBEF3A6YAVMPRE/

“During that time, we encountered many students who have been exposed since returning to campus, particularly in the Greek system,” said Dr. Ricky Friend, dean of college of community health sciences

what a surprise!

As I mentioned on a other thread, my institution is 20% of the cases in our metro right now. So they've pivoted to online classes for the next two weeks...

Basically, the administration is avoiding making the safe and ethical call to cancel in-person classes for the whole semester because after a certain date, parents can't get back their room and board deposits. As long as the idea of in-person classes returning is put forward and the school can blame students for spread, which has already happened, then they're covering their asses.

To say that I am ready for this semester to be over and to never work for this corrupt institution ever again is an understatement.

Student posted incendiary, offensive, unfounded, and racist things on discussion board. In my haste, I simply deleted the posts without screen-shotting them— there is a policy in my syllabus that dehumanizing language will not be tolerated, and this was certainly that. Now incredibly nervous about potential blowback, though doubting there will be any...if there is, will simply bring up anything that happens to administrators.

I did note everything that was written in a separate email to myself, but then it is student's word against mine.

I'm not getting paid enough to babysit racists.

Well. I've been offered a redundancy and hope it will be a pretty solid deal. Now to think about life after academia at age 50.

Are you a full-time tenured faculty member or the equivalent wherever you are?

It's that time of the year when the student emails begging for grade adjustments start piling up.

Anyone feeling more amenable to give students the benefit of the doubt this semester due to the circumstances?

For example, I have a student who has done...D-level work all semester when it has been turned in, but she also lost one of her best friends to Covid and has been working full time. She needs a passing grade to graduate on time. I mean, fuck, I'm almost out of the academy at this point, should I just give everyone an 'A'?

Sorry Euler, missed your question, but yes I am and no I didn't take the redundancy. God knows what's coming though, the Australian sector is f-u-c-k-e-d.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/australia-universities-education-job-ready-scott-morrison-covid

and table are you able to offer some kind of supplementary task to let the student demonstrate that she actually does reach the standard? because otherwise a grade bump is an insult to the folks who did the work and reached the standard. Unless the standard itself is arbitrary or poorly assessed.

should I just give everyone an 'A'?

Does this fit your philosophy of the role of grading in education? It's a surprisingly complicated question.

My personal sense is that during classes letter grades are mainly an incentive/reward to do the work of learning. imo, the real controlling question for the educator as classes end is pass/fail. But if at the start of classes you set specific expectations about how final grades would be determined, then it seems like you need to honor your own announced structure.

pass em all imo

just make sure your own ass is covered

nb don't take advice from me

Several Canadian universities have now switched to a pass/fail system, which I think was the correct call.

I'm going to leave it up to the student...if they can get the rest of the work in by Saturday, then they might eke out a D. But I'm not chasing them around like I've done in the past.

sounds perfect

All I can say is bless that column in the excel sheet that is for "homework" because lord knows I do not grade homework and that column will allow me to jiggle a grade if I need to.

my students can opt for pass/fail and this semester I'm much more likely than in past ones to help nudge them over the 'pass' margin.

They can only take one class pass/fail at this institution, which seems objectively bizarre to me.

I went to a college where that was ALWAYS an option. In fact, you could just "Credit/No Entry" a course, and if you failed it, it would be as if you were never in the class at all.

at other places I've been you could do pass/fail but only if you set it up that way from the start; here right now students here can take the class as normal and decide at the very end if they want the actual 0 - 4.0 grade or a satisfactory/not satisfactory.

i actively found ways to nudge every person at least to a passing grade. it helped to just decide that deadline are there as guidelines to keep ppl generally on track, not as justifications to chip points away here and there. at least this semester. so i went back and removed late penalties from the entire spreadsheet, and then was very willing to round up any grade that was reasonably close to the next tier, etc.

like... we just have so much less a sense of what's going on with them than normally. someone who just looks, assignment-wise, like a disinterested student who slacked off and stopped doing the regular weekly homework, could actually be someone in a really dire situation. of course, that's possible in any semester! but i just have so much less information. at least one guy who i couldn't really get a bead on, it turns out his grandparents were in the hospital with COVID. couple of kids who started really strong and then fell off, it turns out they had health problems, one had COVID in their immediate family. so who knows if somebody else is dealing with something as bad or worse, but isn't telling me?

also, almost all of my turkish and east asian students had huge internet issues that i sincerely believe kept them from participating in section the way they normally would. so should I give them low participation grades just so i can "reward" the people who navigated Zoom well and were really talkative? that didn't feel right either, so i just said eff it and gave everybody full participation grades. IMHO, it doesn't take anything away from my A students for there to be a greater number of A- students than usual, or Ds that "would have" been Fs.

basically, i say give the benefit of the doubt. if they're actually really disengaged students, that can get detected and come out in their grades some other dang semester, y'know?

I like it. Sounds like principled, compassionate educatin’ to me.

Thanks, Doc. I am giving the benefit of the doubt to most students... To be honest, I really like this student, but their writing is incomprehensible. In fact, it's so bad that it made me do research into their background, because no student who writes like this should have been able to pass Comp. But they're a transfer, and the institution lowered standards this semester for transfer students in particular. The problem is that they need the grade in order to graduate on time, and they don't have money for summer courses, etc. It's a stupid bind to create for myself— do I pass the student with the lowest grade possible, grade on effort (which is there) rather than content, etc? I think for this particularly student, I've got to really just grade on effort.

In other news, it seems like there might be a course for me in the spring, which would be a godsend, since this medical editing gig I just started is FUCKING BORING ME TO DEATH.

As a former comp teacher, I can say that I've passed a few students with pretty terrible writing skills because they showed up and did the work - and maybe even improved, just not to the standard you'd want in a university class.

I cannot say the same— definitely have had students show up, do the work badly, and not pass. But things are slightly different now.

What I'm trying to get at is this student doesn't really seem to have a grasp on basic sentence structures.

does your school have any kind of system where you can flag the student for advising/counseling? we do, it still feels a little weird to me but in an ideal world, if the person who acts on the flag is someone whose job is to reach out thoughtfully to help the kid, it can mean that someone who's really struggling in whatever way doesn't slip through the cracks. may just be buck-passing, idk.

I would get in huge trouble with my supervisor if I failed students and they complained, even if they'd plagiarized every single thing they wrote. Much easier to pass them with a C- than to risk not getting hired back next semester.

Does your university have developmental/remedial comp classes? Students like that occasionally slipped through the cracks and made it to my English 111 class, but usually they got stuck in DEVE 070 or whatever.

(xpost to self - we're also supposed to do it if students are at risk of failing at the midterm, so their advisor knows that's happening, can see if it's happening in multiple classes, and hopefully put together some bigger picture problems the kid is dealing with, or whatever? the loop isn't really well closed though in that i don't always know what ends up happening.)

ugh yeah the plagiarism thing. at one institution the word on the grapevine really was that if you fail someone for plagiarism, it'll be more a hassle for you than for the plagiarist.

actually did not even fail my plagiarists this semester!! D's all around. one was super egregious, very obviously had used an automated thing to run sentences through a thesaurus so that copy-pasting would be less detectable.

Oh yeah, if my students plagiarized on the final paper (worth 30% of the grade), I was expected to give them an Incomplete and make myself available to work with them for the next year to get the work in. Which led to me getting irritated emails from my former supervisor after I had left the university and was teaching in another state, because a student had all of a sudden decided to turn in her late work and I wasn't grading it fast enough for her.

The students who just didn't turn in the paper, OTOH, I was allowed to fail. So if you couldn't get your work done, the smart thing to do was plagiarize; either you'd pass the class or get a free year-long extension.

The issue is that with the pandemic and campus closed, a lot of those resources are curtailed. I can make it absolutely necessary for comp students to go to the writing center for assistance, but for a 2000 (aka 200 level) literature class, I don't have that authority. I can simply suggest it, which I did.... But again, online consults with limited hours for a student who is working full-time? It's a hard road.

They turned in revised or more complete versions of their work. If they're any better than previous efforts, a C- it is.