The Dilution of Higher Education

This has been a week from Stupidville.

Let’s see if I can describe the situation. I’ll need to describe events and motivations leading up to the recent controversy, and the immediate results and subsequent modifications I have had to make in order to make one of the institutions I am employed by happy. As always, I will try to place my interaction into a larger educational context. To hint at my summary, administrators at institutions of so-called higher learning are themselves responsible for the dilution and failure of the U.S. educational system.

I am very active in online education. Since 2004, I’ve taught approximately 32 sections of a world geography course for community colleges and a university. Examinations are always a sensitive component of any online course, i.e. how does one maintain integrity in an online exam when the student is miles away and unsupervised?

Faculty have adopted several positions to address maintaining assessment integrity. Exams are offered for a limited time, usually 24-48 hours. Exams are limited in duration, typically 90 minutes to two hours. A rule-of-thumb is used to determine test length. A student is provided 1-1/2 to 3 minutes per question; multiply by the number of questions and you arrive at the time duration for any exam. Additionally, a student gets one attempt. A single attempt is offered to avoid a student progressing through an exam, reading and answering questions, then closing their browser to shutdown the exam. The student then emails the instructor saying such as, “My browser just went away while I was taking the exam. Will you please reset my exam.”

Students have devised many ways around online assessments. Students will work in groups. Students will gather to watch one student take an exam, then the remaining students will take their exam. The group will take turns taking exams so none will suffer but one poor attempt.

“My browser just went away while I was taking the exam. Will you please reset my exam.”

Students will take screenshots or cut and paste exam text into a text document; then, the exam will be closed, the answers investigated, the instructor emailed, and the exam reset.

Students will never read or perhaps even buy the textbook. Students will immediately engage an exam or writing assignment in one browser window while using another browser window to Google answers. Often, they will use Firefox and Chrome, or some combination of two browsers in order to avoid a potential interruption by using Tabbed Browsing.

Students will rally themselves into groups to take exams. In the event an instructor has implemented a limited reset policy students will work as a team to circumvent the reset policy. For instance, a professor may have a “one reset policy,” i.e. the student receives one free reset for any exam for the semester. The professor may have, say, four exams for the course. The first student takes the exam until the end while making notes for the remaining team members. At the end, the student will kill the attempt and request his/her reset. Student Two will use the notes from Student One and take the assessment. Student Two will then take the second assessment. At the end Student Two will kill the attempt and request his/her free reset. Student Two will then distribute notes to the remaining team members.

Students will take an exam all the through to the second-to-last question and note the feedback answers. The browser is then closed, which ends the exam. The instructor is then contacted and a request for a reset is made.

“Students will rally themselves into groups to take exams.”

If these scenarios I outline seem far-fetched, all have already been documented “in the wild,” meaning students are working as teams at colleges and universities across the country to circumvent online testing.

The students who suffer are the honest ones who actually perform the required assignments. Some students in remote area, such as rural counties, also lack the physical social network to be a part of one of these testing teams.

Historically, I always allowed my students multiple attempts at quizzes and exams as I figured there was no way to really police the exam environment. Also, and based on previous experience, the network technology did not really exist to provide a stable connection over 90 minutes for a student to take an exam without some glitch shutting down the exam.

During the spring and summer of 2012, after considerable internal debate, I opted to implement a “no reset policy” for my exams. Many factors were considered in my decision. I personally took several Blackboard assessments, both my own testing and online assessments provided by the community colleges. I experienced flawless performance throughout. People I am familiar with taking classes also have experience success in taking online exams which last longer than 1 hour; some lasting longer than 2 hours. I have also heard students inform their peers how they were able to re-take an exam by closing their browser and claiming a “glitch kicked me off.” Based on the factors I described I decided to implement my own “no reset policy.”

The “No reset policy” is not unique to me. “One attempt” or sometimes called “One-shot attempts” are extremely common among university faculty. Students around me have complained about faculty who offer only two online exams from which the lion’s share of the grade is determined and have had some “glitch” interrupt the exam. Responses by faculty to queries about re-taking or re-opening the exam vary from silence to a simple “no.” But, a simple google of “online education exam reset policy” should provide enough examples.

Technically, no way exists to filter a student with a legitimate technical issue from a student who is gaming an online course. The technical issues manifest in precisely the same way whether the student is cheating or honestly has a real technical issue. Only an environmental interruption can be corroborated, a regional power outage, a regional disconnection of Internet access such as a fiber cut, a closure of a computer laboratory, or some other disruption at the institution. Those interruptions can be verified. Similarly, an ISP can offer a report in the event of an interruption of service.

A student sitting at home, with limited exception, has no ability to offer corroboration. A letter from a parent who has a vested interest in having their child succeed is not an unbiased instrument.

Many institutions of higher learning leave the policy of exam resets to the discretion of the faculty. Faculty are given ultimate sway in deciding the fate of a student who has become shutout of an exam. Faculty would like to believe students are honest actors in the taking of exams, but the evidence is against the student. All one must do is contemplate your own education to find validity in my statement.

Can you say you never witnessed nor experienced cheating in a college classroom? I know for a fact fraternities and sororities maintain files for all faculty and all courses. I know, because my fraternity did; we maintain several file cabinets worth of returned exams. Fraternity members would hire a brother to write a research paper, or hire a sorority sister to write a paper. Cheating was endemic within the entire Greek system. And, I also know the pattern of behavior persists.

My comments are not meant to simply indict the Greek system; social fraternities are simply a good example. In the Era of Online Social Networks, students across the board are organizing themselves via Facebook, and using Google Docs, SkyDrive, and Dropbox to organize and share coursework.

Thus, faculty are faced with few good options for policing the integrity of their online exams. The “no reset” policy may sound draconian yet few options exist.

The implications for online learning are staggering when considered against protecting the integrity of the tools which are designed to measure a student’s competency. When those tools are compromised, no entity benefits.

Last week was spent in a week-long debate regarding my “no reset” policy for my online exams. Controversy was ignited by a lone student who protested not being able to re-take his exam after being kicked off Blackboard. I said,

No, I’m sorry; I have no way to know if you had a legitimate technology issue, if you were googling-for-answers, of simply decided if the exam was too difficult and closed your browser. Furthermore, you read my syllabus and recognized my policy. You took my syllabus quiz, therefore implicitly accepting my conditions. I also provided specific directions, suggestions, and cautions in my course video (posted on YouTube) and also in my Blackboard tutorial (also posted on YouTube).

The student appealed to both the dean and the Vice-President of Online Learning. While the dean did not feel like my policy was “fair” she admitted my syllabus made a clear statement.

The Vice-President of Online Learning offered a different viewpoint. I paraphrase:

Since there is no way to tell whether or not the student suffered a legitimate technological glitch, the student should be granted another attempt. Any student which appeals your “no reset” policy is going to win the appeal.

There are at least three fundamental concerns with the position of the VP-OL. The most obvious concern is any student who complains about the closure of an exam, for nearly any reason, will potentially be allowed to re-take the exam. A subset concern to the negation of the “no reset” policy means the student can have as many resets as the student requires to complete the exam.

A second concern suggests the syllabus is not worth the paper upon which it is printed, not if an administrator can negate conditions, at will. Also, their ability to do negate syllabi conditions undermines every argument “a syllabus is a contract.” No, a syllabus cannot be a contract if an actor not party to the conditions of the syllabus can negate any or all aspects of the syllabus.

A third concern is the fundamental undermining of academic integrity which occurs when faculty are no longer able to control the integrity of the assessments they are charged to create and score, in many cases for “quality assurance” for accrediting agencies. Faculty are charged with assessing students, measuring student competency, for reports which are generated to satisfy agencies which accredit colleges and universities. Student are able to achieve higher scores; higher scores become integrated into measurements of student competency; measurements are passed along to state, federal, and accrediting agencies. Funding, recognition, and awards are then based on the accumulated data.

Flawed data.

Now, administrators become complicit in the dilution of education.

Faculty are then faced with controversy on two fronts. On one front, administrators negate policies written into syllabi which are deemed unfair and side with student upon appeal. On the other front, students can spend an hour or so circumventing an exam, working alone or with a team, to cheat.

Policies and attitudes described above then run the distinct possibility of achieving normalcy within our U.S. society. Students, the beneficiaries of benign administrators today, then see no harm in falsifying data later when hired into positions of responsibility. Students who were beneficiaries of appeals, or of team-cheating, realize the power of group-think to find loopholes around real business, finance, or political rules and regulations.

Ethics are undermined, and society suffers real problems. We are seeing evidence of unethical behavior which began well before employment. I would wager Wall Street financial cheats did not arrive at Wall Street with rigid ethical backbones. No, they cheated or found loopholes, or leverage social network connections get achieve their positions. Examples do not need to extend to Wall Street. School districts have been found cheating on No Child Left Behind test scores. Colleges and universities have cheated on scores to fraudulently obtain state and federal funding.

I offer my comments simply as an contemporary anecdote of one atomic bit in the fracturing of the U.S. education infrastructure. As our culture adopts and embraces online learning we must be very careful our attempts to share educational opportunities do not become so dilute as to make online learning of questionable value, at best, and worthless, at worst.

PAX

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Book Review: What Teachers Make

What Teachers Make: In Praise of the World's Greatest Job. By Taylor Mali. Penguin-Putnam Publishing. Hardback. 2012. $12

At 197 pages What Teachers Make is short, sweet and to-the-point. Mali has a wide following, having taught in numerous places, with experiences across curriculums and disciplines. He draws from his wide experiences in this brief collection of anecdotes, many humorous, a few serious, and all poignant.

Taylor includes some poetry samples which should be read aloud. I'm a big fan of "spoken word" poetry and Mali has been part of the HBO Def Poetry Jam, a brilliant show.

Taylor Mali on HBO Def Poetry Jam

What Teachers Make is not a salary survey of compensation or benefits. What Teachers Make recounts episodes in Taylor's teaching career in which he has affected or been affected by students (smart and dying), parents (allies and enemies), and bureaucrats (who should act smarter than they do).

Mali's book should be read by anyone thinking about a career in Education. Unfortunately, most teacher wannabees have no idea what they are getting into until he or she begins student teaching. When the real scope of teaching is discovered many teachers, almost 50%, resign from teaching after the first 5 yrs. A person must want to not only be a teacher but also understand the incredible demands teaching makes on a person's life. You will sacrifice time, energy, money, emotions, and a bit of your soul to be a teacher. Teachers spend over $1 billion of their own money to support their classes. And, as Taylor points out, and is well documented, the cost of educating one student per year is 1/2 the cost of incarcerating an adult. In Arizona, for example, the wonderful bastion of tolerance {sarcasm}, studies indicate a child who has failed to read by the 3rd grade will most likely end up in prison.

One idea Taylor presents is putting first year education majors into a real life classroom. Throw them in the pool and see if they can swim, he says. Make them teach something. Take the ones who really want to learn how to educate and help them become better educators. Keep tossing them back in. Why wait until the very end, after 4+ years have been expended, and 5 years thereafter the teacher quits. Better to show them the environment and then spend valuable time on the ones willing and able to learn. I have to admit, I like the idea.

The book will validate many of you who do teach. Having experience as a middle school teacher, Taylor may speak with a familiar voice. Those of you needing some new ideas, or are feelings de-energized by educational politics may also find familiar sentiments.

What Teachers Make are future adults who question, who doubt, who can think on their own, and who can cast a critical eye upon their world.

What Teachers Make would make a nice gift for a teacher as he or she prepares for the 2012-2013 school year.

Education, Economics, and Kurma the Turtle

Forbes magazine ran an article 6 May 2012 alluding to "creating innovators." Tony Wagner is an Education Fellow at Harvard, and author of The Global Achievement Gap. His research on identification of skills necessary for people to compete in the 21st century global workplace is outlined. More interesting is his web site, TonyWagner.com. I am not familiar with Dr. Wagner's work, though I apparently will need to find a copy of his book. He and I seem to be on the same page, at first blush.

If you are involved in Education, Homeschooling, even parenting, the "HomeschoolingMiddleEast" blog cannot be missed. I am humbled being followed by HSME, indebted by HSME's patronage, and after having whole pieces of a recent post used as fodder for a HSME post, I feel undeserving of the attention.

HSME raises so many valid points related to my comments I am compelled to clarify. To communicate my current sentiments about Education in the U.S. I'm going to borrow from Hindu mythology. Kurma the Turtle is the reptile upon which the world rests. In homage to Stephen Hawking, its "turtles all the way down," but the crux of my perspective remains unchanged regardless of the number or type of turtles.

Education is the U.S.'s Kurma, the turtle upon which all else rests. Our social fabric, the lens through which personal, local, state, and federal decisions are made, and the economic basis of our individual livelihoods are all founded upon Education. And, Experience; I can't omit experience. Together, Education and Experience are the elemental components of our economy. In lieu of experience, people attend colleges and universities to develop essential tools and earn BA/BS degrees which really indicate a unitary trait: how "trainable" a person is. I cannot express the importance of Education enough. But, I still haven't answered, "why?"

To show all of my cards, I am worried about the slipping position of U.S. Education vis-a-vis Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, and China, and India. 50 years ago, the U.S. was THE PLACE to be educated. For 5 decades, the U.S. enjoyed unparalleled success in being the go-to place to receive a college education. In fact, Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria have both stated the U.S. Higher Education System is the most important U.S. industry, employing more people, responsible for more innovation, driving the evolving knowledge economy, and educating unprecedented numbers of international students. The U.S. has, and continues to, educate the world.

Over the last 12 years, give or take, politicians and well-meaning and purportedly educated adults have been diligently working to undermine K-12 education in the United States as well as weaken Higher Education across all 50 states. "No Child Left Behind" is only a single example of policy meant to hold adults accountable, yet in attempting to do so neglected to consider the downstream deleterious effects, the creative stifling and restraint imposed, and the fudging of standardized tests by teachers.

Next consider the statistics of incoming freshman students needing remedial courses prior to even enrolling in college. In 2010, the Fairbanks, AK Sun-Star reported "50% of incoming freshmen entering the UA system require at least one remedial course." In 2011, the Columbus, OH Business Journal wrote, "the share of students under 20 needing remedial help has grown to 39 percent from 36 percent in the past five years, while that same measure for older students has grown to 46 percent from 40 percent."

I have my own anecdotes. A rough napkin calculation performed one afternoon, I estimated around 2,500 students have passed through my courses. Most of the writing is horrible. No punctuation, no capitalization, little attempt at sentence structure, or developing a thought or argument. Writing assignments look like they were typed as a text message, all lower case, missing vowels. In my syllabus I state, "do not write to me as if I am your mee-maw, mee-mee, grannie, or whatever you call your grandmother." Doesn't matter, though; I still get poor writing. A friend of mine who has taught in Missouri schools attributes poor writing skills to the lack of writing evaluation in K-12. Journals are written without regards to grammar, spelling, punctuation, or organization.

When I was a parent, I attended Parent-Teacher Organization workshops. Every seminar or workshop I attended. I also was a parent-volunteer, coming in at my appointed time to read, or center work, or help in the lunch room. The elementary school had one of the highest parent volunteer participation rates in the state. I cannot find the data to support my next comment, but I would swear the participation rate was ~23%. Less than 1 in 4 parents volunteered at their kids school, and according to school officials, we were in the "high" range. I have no trouble believing them. Parents, painting with a broad brush, place a huge amount of faith in a few people. Parents in Japan, South Korea, China, India, Germany, you name the country and pretty much the parents in said country emphasize education more than U.S. parents. I would guess a child from Vietnam, Thailand, or Ghana would adore a U.S. education.

A new freshman I am familiar with graduated from a local high school with honors. She felt very good about her abilities, as she had been groomed throughout her K-12 academic career, told how "smart she is," and apparently never hearing much in the way of constructive criticism. After her first semester of university, she enrolled in the local community college. Her opinion of herself shattered, her high school education an elaborate collection of lies, and feelings of betrayal. How could I be the valedictorian of my high school class and almost fail-out of university? I was totally unprepared for the rigors of university writing, math, and biology.

Some people have taken the education of their children upon themselves. Many of these parents are doing amazing work with their children. Some of these children will be progeny, the new Creative Class of Innovators, of Critical Thinkers who will carry forward their parent's intellect and will be remarkable among their peers. I follow some of these parents on Twitter and read their accounts. Not only are these parents giving their children an education but they are also helping encourage a Global Child who will become a Global Adult who will see the world in new and brilliant ways. The wife of a friend of mine homeschools their five children. Recently, the entire family had the fortune to spend a few months in Spain. By the time of their return to the states, their eldest was almost conversational in Catalan and the family had toured and explored Spain, and indulged in Spain's cuisine. How great of an experience for a 14-yo boy?!

On the other hand, a friend of mine related her experience. When two homeschooled graduates enrolled in the local community college they met with little success. Their lack of success was not due to a deficit of knowledge, their issues revolved around the fact none of their professors were as "good as their mom."

Everything is an ecosystem. Its not the homework assignment which is solely important, not in-and-of itself. No, I submit the homework assignment is also a testament to patience, perseverance, of being able to work through a problem set, to build patience and intellectual endurance. We encourage these behaviors not merely because we want our children to do well in school, but also because these traits will help them be successful as adults. Being able to focus, be single-minded, patient, to assemble skills to problem-solve are traits to be used not just to get through our 5th Grade math homework, but as a future college student, or future chemist, the child will need many traits to be both happy and successful. While the surface appears simple, complexity lies in the composition.

I'm not especially angry about being a witness to the U.S. government's critical neglect of Education; I am dismayed, saddened, chagrined, stymied, and incredulous, and usually all of these simultaneously. I can completely appreciate homeschooling of children by smart educated parents, technologically savvy and with more than a mere wit Socratic exuberance themselves who see the world as a laboratory, and have a thirst for learning.

I see our economic foundation fracturing as politicians, policy-makers, and parents tilt at windmills, chasing the spectres of school prayer, standardized tests, same-sex marriage, spreading the myths of "you're unique and special" when the World cares not one iota. Yes, Mom and Dad cares, and grandparents, and a teacher or two; the World, in general, does not.

China is closing the Education Gap. India is closing the Education Gap. The U.S. imports willing international students and exports educated chemists, physicists, engineers, financiers, and computer programmers. The Knowledge Export closes the education gap abroad as the Educated in turn educate. As these societies become more educated, their industry and technology will compete with ours. By allowing ourselves to be distracted by Same-Sex Marriage, Oil, and terrorism the U.S. economic infrastructure is undermined by our belligerence towards education.

The lethargic adoption of educational, social, and economic reforms collude to stagnate our society, a stagnation perpetuated by backward-focused, parochial, calcified, entrenched and dogmatic conservatives who fear The New and The Different. Without renewed and energetic focus on Education, the U.S. will find itself fighting not simply for economic stability and growth but merely to remain relevant in the face of China, India, and Brazil.

Thanks, again, to HomeschoolingMiddleEast for inspired thoughts and comments, for commenting, for revealing the weakness in my writing, and in doing so, helping to strengthen my rhetoric. Yes, due to the diligence of parents like you, "saviours" will no doubt erupt from future generations.

PAX