But, they’re already out there. They are MRI techs and nurses and doctors and schoolteachers and principals and professors and deans and used car salesmen and education profiteers and senators and even a president or two.

But the NUMBERS of them now…whoa!

And they’re crowding out the competent from being given the simple opportunity to demonstrate their competency.

What better way to kill a country?

Re: performing to the same curve. Absolutely. It’s pretty much a Law: Student performance will equal half of their perceived expectation of the requirements. I.e. X(asked) => 1/2 X(result).

The funniest instance of that I’ve seen was in a beginning computer operating system class I took to broaden my horizons. I was the only actual beginner. The rest were all sysops satisfying job requirements for continuing education. And they made so much noise about how difficult the first exam was that the prof actually asked me whether it was really that bad. It was so far from bad it was easy. He seemed very relieved.

I know I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.

(What’s up with that, by the way? I know I’m dating myself, but even when I was a temp, it was understood that all academic matters were the sole purview of the Department. The Chair could give you beans about inconsistent grading across sections, but not a Dean or Provost. Has this changed while I’ve been off in my own little world?)

Non-majors Bio classes, if they have a lab, satisfy the biology requirement for many medical and nursing schools. So plenty of the students are pre-health professionals, even if not strictly bio majors.

As one of my colleagues often said, his worst nightmare was arriving in the operating room and recognizing one of his students, still looking just as gormless.

There are some vital (literally) reasons for rigor in these classes.

And even if the students are dance majors, many current issues require some knowledge of biology (eg, stem cells, climate change, estrogen-analogue pollutants like BPA). Democracy is supposed to depend on informed voters, so requiring all students to show some grasp of the information doesn’t seem unreasonable.

As for the 90% failure rate, that, too, is not uncommon. You don’t hear about it because most people curve the scores, but tests — especially early in the semester — where 90% of the students answer less than 50% of the questions correctly are not uncommon.

I, and many other profs, “frontloaded” our classes, like Homberger, although maybe not as vividly. The idea is to make it clear to the students just how much time, studying, and aptitude the class requires before the drop date. It seems kinder, overall, to give them the option of a W rather than an indelible F.

The part that blows me away about this story isn’t even whether Homberger was doing anything unusual (only in her honesty). It’s that the administration takes it upon themselves to tell her how to grade! There’s a name for those places. Diploma mills.

Matt L: “I didn’t have a chance to read the link, but there has to be more to the story. Was some state legislator’s kid in danger of flunking bio 101?” I’m sure, and also probably some ExxonMobil execs’ kids.

90% drop/fail on first test, well I typically get this as a raw result in any course with freshmen in it — especially if I apply the standards I learned to have as a TA. What I do is, bump everyone up half a grade automatically and see what it looks like then.

If not enough are passing at that point, I then start curving more. The results are that students are not pushed improve that much unless they are motivated for their own reasons, and/but that the higher ups are less unhappy with me than they would otherwise be. Women are supposed to be NICE, you know!

But I notice that the students who are most freaked out about grades are the ones who don’t study or plan to, or who aren’t prepared for the course but also aren’t willing to go back and take the prerequisites. I always advise dropping to these groups of students but they don’t want to hear of it: they want some sort of guarantee that they will not only pass, but earn a high grade without meeting the regular course requirements.

Also, I notice that students decide to be intimated on really irrational grounds. I gave a quiz the other day consisting of 5 items to identify. I revealed 3 of the 5 48 hours ahead of time. There was an additional list of possible items given out at that time. I explained that of those items, 6 would appear on the quiz and of those 6, each person was to choose 2.

So: 3 items were pre-revealed, and the other two came from a pre-revealed list, and there was to be a choice on those two.

But what the students said at the time of the quiz was that they had not understood that I would choose 6 items from that list and they would choose 2. They said they had not been sure *and had been afraid to ask*, and so had decided I meant they were to choose any 2 from the whole list. Now, they said, it was unfair of me not to let them do that.

What seems bogus to me in all of this is that they allege having been afraid to ask for clarification of the quiz format ahead of time, but were not at all afraid to ask for it to be mega-easy when the moment of truth came.

What is strange is that nobody talked to the professor, they just acted. This is getting more and more common. Administrators believe whatever is first said, and do not actually investigate.

Still, I do not really understand why it is no longer seen as the student’s responsibility, if they are failing, to either study or drop — although I have some ideas.

1) Many cannot afford to drop because if they do they will have to refund some of their student loan money, so they will not be able to make rent, etc.

2) Others cannot afford to drop/fail because they have TOPS. This is a partial or complete tuition waiver for which you can apply if you have a 2.5 or higher GPA in high school and an ACT score around the state average. Many students enter college with TOPS but do not keep it, because college is harder than high school and the minimum requirements for TOPS are not terribly high. However, since TOPS came in, there has been a lot of pressure on faculty to give grades that will allow students to maintain their tuition waivers.

The students are totally within their rights not to like her class, but they need to take responsibility for their educations. The administrators’ end-run appears to make the professor and administrators responsible for students’ educations, not the students.