Beer and Circus (16 page)

Read Beer and Circus Online

Authors: Murray Sperber

BOOK: Beer and Circus
7.9Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
As always, the results varied from school to school, but again correlated with the
Princeton Review
's categories on this topic. For “Their students (almost) never study,” in the late 1990s and 2000, Alabama, Arizona State, Arkansas, Auburn, Florida, Florida State, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana State, Miami (Florida), Michigan State, Missouri (Columbia), Mississippi, Rhode Island, Seton Hall, Tennessee (Knoxville), Wisconsin (Madison), West Virginia, and, inevitably, the University of Buffalo rank very high. In the questionnaire for this book, respondents
from these universities as well as other big-time college sports schools spent the fewest number of hours per week “studying and doing course assignments.”
The category, “Their students never stop studying,” listed Carleton, the Claremont (California) schools, Cal Tech, Swarthmore, Reed, Grinnell, Middlebury, and similar institutions. The questionnaire for this book revealed parallel results: only 12 percent of the respondents from “never stop studying” schools spent less than eleven hours a week on this activity; 27 percent logged eleven to fifteen hours; 36 percent, sixteen to twenty hours; and 25 percent, over twenty hours per week, many over thirty hours. The only universities in NCAA Division I-A with undergraduates spending comparable hours were Rice and the University of California, Berkeley.
 
Yet, the one statistic shared by students in both of the
Princeton
“studying” categories were similar grade point averages.
Whether they never studied or always worked hard on their courses, almost all of the undergraduates received high grades
. Did these GPAs, averaging 3.3 (out of 4), indicate that the students at the big-time college sports schools were smarter than those at the more academically oriented institutions, and therefore had to study less to learn as much? No. The answer is what the
Chronicle of Higher Education
termed
Education's Dirty Secret: Grade Inflation.
Not only does it rule public universities, but it also exists at many excellent private schools—except, at the latter, some undergraduates learn something on their way to high grades, whereas at beer-and-circus universities, the inflated grades tend to be handed out as part of the tuition deal, a key element of the “mutual nonaggression pact.”
The nub of the problem seems to me to be the customer-supplier model that has been adopted by academia … [because of] relatively high tuition, there is considerable incentive to give the customer what he or she wants, with no hassle. If a substantial majority of students want good grades without commensurate effort and preparation, then it's easiest to give them what they want—after all, they're paying for it. Never mind that the universities become credentialing agencies rather than institutions of learning.
—Frederic A. Lyman, Syracuse University professor
Before the consumerist model overtook higher education, faculty at large universities did not regard ordinary students as customers; they mainly tolerated them as necessary guests in the “groves of academe.” Hence,
professors awarded A's only to academically talented undergraduates, usually their “professional children”; they doled out B's to students who completed course work competently; and they gave C's and lower grades to all others in their classes. In the 1970s and 1980s, as higher education adopted the student-consumer model, grade inflation accelerated, continuing full throttle into the 1990s.
In that decade, the topic also moved from anecdotal report to researched phenomena. In a comprehensive survey of thousands of transcripts for selected years from 1969 to 1993, Arthur Levine discovered that “the gentleman's C has become the gentleman's A as the percentage of C's and A's given to students in college has reversed itself.” In 1969, only 7 percent of undergraduates in Levine's sample earned A range GPAs, whereas 25 percent possessed C range averages; in 1993, only 9 percent had C range GPAs, versus 26 percent with A range averages. The number of B range averages—the majority of GPAs—also grew because, by the 1990s, very few D's and F's were awarded; thus, the 1960s C students had become B or better students, replaced in the C cohort by formerly D and F students.
Within academia, scientists tend to blame humanities faculty for this “lowering of standards,” but a biology professor informed the
Chronicle of Higher Education
that “grade inflation is not limited to the humanities but is very prevalent in the sciences as well,” especially at schools and within departments that pressure faculty to fill their classes with as many students as possible to generate as many tuition dollars as possible. What better way to please students than by giving them high grades for little work?
But pressure on faculty to inflate grades is generally more subtle than direct orders from college administrators or department heads. The promotion, tenure, and salary system of the research university exerts the maximum amount of pressure (see Chapter 7). Many faculty believe that every hour spent on undergraduate teaching is an hour stolen from research, and they become skilled at cutting corners in all phases of their teaching, especially grading. Even in upper-division classes, they move quickly when grading papers or exams, often only putting a brief comment or a letter grade on each student's work. (In lecture courses, most professors never see student papers or exams; the TAs or the scantron machines do all the grading.)
In determining specific grades, faculty frequently take the path of least resistance, and also direct their TAs to this route—
inflate
. No student ever complained after receiving an A+ or an A, although some now whine about an A-. Many students object to B's, most protest C's and become
angry at D's. If a professor actually flunks a student, or allows a TA to do so, that faculty member must have documentation to justify the F, not only that student's papers and exams throughout the course—all carefully marked, with each grade fully explained—but, for comparison, samples of the work of other students in the course who earned similar and higher grades, also thoroughly marked.
A professor who wants to grade hard embarks upon a very time-consuming and labor-intensive course of action: throughout the semester, he or she must respond accurately and at length to the work of every student in the class. Moreover, to fight grade inflation, a faculty member must be prepared to answer complaints from students and their parents, inquiries from department heads and deans, requests to appear before various student committees, and even lawsuits. Predictably, few faculty members at research universities choose to go down this lonesome road or, as a cinema studies professor called it, The River of No Return.
(One exception to grade inflation exists: those faculty who teach subjects in which many students want to major, for example, in this era, business. As a result of this demand, these professors can grade “on a [statistical] curve” and determine beforehand how many A's, B's, et cetera, they will dispense. In addition, because they mainly use scantron exams requiring no writing from students—or reading by instructors—they can arrive at numerical point totals that undergraduates cannot easily challenge. However, for faculty using this pedagogical model to condemn professors in other disciplines for inflating grades is absurd. Designing a multiple-choice business exam is an efficient process; creating a multiple-choice exam for an English composition class is impossible because it cannot test a student's writing ability and progress.)
 
Conservative critics of grade inflation like William Cole argue that on this issue faculty must act individually, and that “solving the problem of grade inflation … requires simply [to] acknowledge the problem and act responsibly.” O that academic life were so simple! Because grade inflation connects to the finances of research universities and their bottomless hunger for tuition dollars, as well as their privileging research over undergraduate education, asking each professor at these schools to “act responsibly” is a myopic request. These schools would have to transform their internal culture and values to truly fight grade inflation. Moreover, the administrators of Big-time U's, as well as the research faculty, have far too much invested in the “nonaggression pact” with student-consumers to change it.
Only a major shift in the missions of research universities—an earthquake
in higher education equaling the end of the Cold War—could halt grade inflation. The dismantlement of the Soviet empire terminated the nuclear arms concept of mutual nonaggression; however, it is hard to imagine a similar event occurring in American higher education. Therefore, the faculty/student nonaggression pact will remain in place for the foreseeable future and, along with it, grade inflation. Eventually, every student will receive at A+ in almost every course.
CHEATING
J
ust as the internal culture and values of the modern research university prevent an end to grade inflation, they also block a solution to the problem of student cheating. According to many studies, cheating by undergraduates has reached epidemic levels, but many faculty at research universities neither attempt to curtail it nor even seriously discourage it. Details on this situation—the hidden clauses in the “nonaggression pact”—follow.
 
 
One factor often overlooked is the relationship between cheating and the grading and testing environment … . Students frequently report that cheating increases … when instructors are viewed as inattentive and inaccessible, when papers are not read and graded carefully, and when students perceive a very high level of cheating on the part of their classmates.
—Richard A. Fass, professor of ethics
In the history of American higher education, undergraduates have cheated in a large variety of ways: “ponies” (primitive
Cliffs Notes
) to facilitate studying for exams; “crib” sheets and notes for the exams themselves; and the constant recycling of essays and papers. One historian noted that “at Yale in the 1860s, perhaps less than half of the compositions were actually written by the supposed author.” Because of the collegiate subculture's aversion to academics, matched by professorial disdain for most undergraduates, cheating was normal behavior at many schools. This tradition
continued through the twentieth century, faculty and administrators usually blaming the “deficient moral standard of our students” for the cheating, and never considering the connections between undergraduate dishonesty and a deeply flawed pedagogical system.
In the final decades of the twentieth century, by all measurements, student cheating accelerated at many colleges and universities to the point where, in 1999, an authoritative poll stated that “three-quarters of college students confess to cheating at least once.” On some campuses, officials estimated the number of one-timers as high as 90 percent, with repeat offenders topping 50 percent of their undergraduates.
These statistics prompt the question: Why is cheating so widespread at a time of grade inflation? It seems counterintuitive that these two phenomena would occur simultaneously: if high grades are so easy to obtain, why bother to cheat for them? This paradox contradicts the students-cheat-out-of-desperation hypothesis, as well as the moral-decay-in-society explanation: high grades are so common that, like pennies, they are not worth bending over for or stealing. But the paradox points directly to the abysmal state of undergraduate education at Big-time U's—by most accounts, the schools with the highest number of student cheaters.
The 1990s studies on this issue contain some version of the following conclusion from a survey of thirteen thousand undergraduates: “A major factor determining whether a student will cheat or not is the academic culture of the specific institution that he or she attends.” Students at large, public research universities that treat them as tuition dollars, not individuals, and that channel them into mammoth lecture courses with distant, frigid professors or inexperienced and overworked TAs, tend to cheat. They cheat for a variety of reasons, including as a show of contempt for a contemptible system. Or, as a Michigan State sophomore described his conduct in lecture courses—he rarely attended, bought lecture notes from an off-campus service, and cheated on papers and exams—“It's an eye for an eye, it's my insults for the school's insults.” The name of a popular website that facilitates a variety of cheating practices also sums up the attitude of many undergraduates at Big-time U's today:
www.SCHOOLSUCKS.com
—its motto is, “Download your workload.”
Michael Moore, a Rutgers student and the author of
Cheating 101: The Benefits and Fundamentals of Earning an Easy A
, admitted that students also cheat because they “want to spend more time partying and meeting people instead of burying their heads in books,” but he placed much of “the blame on professors, [citing] their laziness in using the same teaching methods every year.” Such comments prompt the question: Where do
student indolence and rationalization end, and faculty laziness and contempt for undergraduates begin? Rutgers professor Michael Moffat answered the query, in part, by noting that “undergrads who know their professors and respect them are less likely to cheat in those classes” than students in huge lecture courses.
No observer can or should condone cheating and, finally, every student can and should act as a responsible and ethical individual. However, the neglect of undergraduate education by research universities begins to explain some of the increase in student cheating.
 
Predictably, most faculty and administrators regard cheating differently than do undergraduates. A professor of anthropology, also an associate provost at his university, denounced all forms of cheating, including the form “perpetrated” by off-campus companies posting course lecture notes on the web—he termed this an “assault on the integrity of higher education.” Surprisingly,
USA Today
weighed into the debate with an editorial:
Net Notes Trump Boring Lecture
Quick, a test: You're a freshman and you're running late for Psych 101. You could drag yourself over to the lecture hall and strain to hear the tiny professorial speck down at the lectern impart wisdom. Or you could clock on
www.StudentU.com
and download the speck's course notes … .
Students who download notes are right. The notes are adding value to the assembly line of undergraduate education, where grad students and minor [faculty] lights, not earth-shattering geniuses, lecture, and where traded paper notes have long been the order of the day.
A University of Texas (Austin) student columnist confirmed
USA Today
's argument: “The unwritten UT philosophy,” exemplified by the mass lecture courses at the school and the arrogant faculty, is: “We [professors] are smart, you [undergraduates] are stupid. We lecture, you take notes.” Obviously, this system generates undergraduate cynicism, the purchase of lecture notes, and more serious forms of cheating.
A dissident professor at the University of Virginia offered a sensible but biting solution to the lecture note controversy:
Maybe the course should be distributed as a book, rather than having this charade of somebody standing up and going through a lecture
that, for all purposes, doesn't change from year to year and doesn't allow students the possibility of discussion.
Most academics who oppose course notes appearing on the web have considered the book option—for that reason, they generally cite copyright issues, not pedagogical ones, in opposing the web note-taking services. Indeed, many faculty members publish the book and require the hundreds of students in their lecture classes to buy it. The professor then makes a profit from these forced purchases and still lectures from the book! This prompts the question: Who is cheating in this situation?
Anthony Scimone, a high school teacher, neatly summed up the debate about the new websites: “I suspect that the best teachers are not threatened by the new note-taking services. These teachers … encourage students to generate ideas and engage in scholarly discourse.” The current studies on why students cheat confirms Mr. Scimone's intuition; one authority commented, “It's clear that when students really care about learning, they're much less likely to cheat.” An official at a large public university noted that “In the 100 and 200 level [lecture] classes you see much more cheating” than in small upper-level courses; in the latter, “students take greater pride in their work because it is more important to them,” and because they have direct contact with a professor.
The most striking proof of how a low faculty/student ratio short-circuits cheating comes from a study of schools with honor codes—where students can cheat easily and constantly if they choose to do so. Because these institutions emphasize undergraduate education, have few lecture courses, and because the “honor codes [are] rooted in a campus tradition of mutual trust and respect … between faculty members and students,” they succeed in eliminating almost all student cheating.
At Rice University, for example, professors hand out exams and allow students to return to their dorm rooms or apartments with the exams in order to use their computers there to write their answers. Faculty trust students to take the exam without seeking any outside aid, without even opening their course books or notes. According to a current Rice undergraduate, “I've never seen anyone or heard of anyone breaking the honor code. Anyway, you'd mainly be cheating yourself [out of a good education] … . Also you become friendly with your instructors, and so cheating on them is like stealing from someone you know.”
 
Rice University and other schools with low faculty/student ratios try to provide their undergraduates with quality educations. But what occurs at
large public universities with high ratios? A faculty member at the University of Central Florida, a school that recently moved to NCAA Division I-A, has research ambitions, and features many lecture classes, explained that “The increasing casualness with which students seem to be cheating and committing plagiarism is just another symptom of the paradigm shift … to education as a consumer product—something that must be handed over on demand to all who pay their tuition.” But the paradox reappears here: Why would students cheat if, after paying their bursar bills, they are simply handed what they want?
One answer, suggested by P.S. notes on the questionnaire for this book, is that some undergraduates cheat as a primitive, inarticulate form of consumer protest: they feel that because their U cheats them out of their money by giving them worthless classes, their dishonesty is justified. “This place constantly screws me over and takes my money,” wrote a student at the University of New Mexico. “So why should I have a conscience about cheating in class?” Nevertheless, primitive individual actions—unlike the organized student protests in the 1960s—fail to disrupt the current system in any way; indeed, they deflect attention from its failures and allow college officials to place the blame for the cheating problem on “student immorality.”
An Indiana University undergraduate offered his view of student dishonesty in a caustic article in the campus newspaper. He described “The Only Syllabus You'll Ever Need” at this school, and his cynicism about the huge lecture courses and indifferent professors premised his approval of student deceit. Under “Cheating” on his mock syllabus, he noted:
Students caught cheating will be dealt with swiftly and severely by the Dean of Students, although you have to be practically brain-dead to get caught cheating in a huge lecture class. There's like, 300 kids in there—it's easy.
Under “Grades,” he wrote: “Your grade in this course will be determined by two fifty-minute tests,” no papers, no writing assignments.
As this student noted, cheating during lecture course exams is not difficult: in addition to the time-worn methods of copying from the person next to you and using crib sheets, undergraduates now employ such hightech devices as cellular phones to dial multiple-choice answers into alphanumeric pagers, for example, 1C-2B-3A, to exchange answers with friends. One teacher remarked, “I get the sense there's a thrill to it, that [students think] ‘my teachers are too dumb to catch me.'”
Probably some undergraduates hold this belief; however, dumbness does not prevent most professors from catching student cheaters—deafness does. Faculty simply do not want to hear about it. Tolerating cheating is a hidden clause in the nonaggression pact between many faculty members at research universities and their students. A classics professor at Northwestern University explained: “Most professors at a place like Northwestern can't be bothered [about undergraduate cheating]. They're not rewarded for teaching; they're rewarded for research. There's no future in pursuing cheating from the standpoint of a professor's self-interest.”
As for students cheating for “the thrill of it”: undoubtedly some undergraduates do it for the risk-taking thrill, but others also regard cheating as an active, engaging experience, far superior to passively ingesting the lectures and, without retaining anything from them, dumping them out on the exams. An undergraduate at the University of Iowa explained, “I'm into gambling and I'm into cheating in lecture classes. The only times when I feel alive in those courses is when I'm cheating. I'm really concentrating then, like when I'm on a river boat [casino].” This student was disappointed to learn that probably some of his professors did not care whether he cheated or not. “That sorta takes the fun out of it,” he admitted, “but that explains why it's often so easy.”
 
 
A few years ago, a professor at a southern university suspected a student of plagiarism. What did the professor do? Absolutely nothing. The messy case didn't seem worth the anxiety or aggravation, so he graded the assignment as usual and passed the student on.
—Allison Schneider,
Chronicle of Higher Education
reporter

Other books

Five Days in Paris by Danielle Steel
My Lost and Found Life by Melodie Bowsher
Bill for the Use of a Body by Dennis Wheatley
The Vampire Stalker by Allison van Diepen
Layers Off by Lacey Silks