Marking desperation

1st exam paper marked and already I've resorted to cheering myself up with a cake & coffee :-( Hopefully not the shape of things to come, but at least my marking scheme is objective and unequivocal!

Students Should Check Their Sense of Entitlement at the Door - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Not shocking, not surprising, just disappointing: Students Should Check Their Sense of Entitlement at the Door - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The sad thing is, I'm not alone. Every college teacher I know is bemoaning the same kind of thing. Whether it's rude behavior, lack of intellectual rigor, or both, we are all struggling with the same frightening decline in student performance and academic standards at institutions of higher learning. A sense of entitlement now pervades the academy, excellence be damned.

Set to get worse in the UK as fees increase and the I'm paying for it attitute grows. Hold on to your hats...

Bad semester for cheating :-(

Unlike last year (when the game was "sliding blocks puzzle") this year's Snake game in my Javascript module seemed to encourage lots of copy-off-the-web cheating :-( mainly because there's lots of crappy DOM0 downloadable examples out there - the students all got 0% because I mark their "mini viva" presentations but it's a depressing waste all the same.

One group was different: their game went beyond the module, using <canvas> and object-orientation, so I was really looking forward to discussing it with them! Sadly they disappointed me by not being able to explain the simplest decisions that the author of the code had made to make the game work and so they got 0% too. Academic misconduct hearing anyone? Sad end to the module...

True story

An electronic engineering academic complained to an administrator today that the link to [a file I wanted] is broken ... upon investigation the administrator established that the academic thought that the text announcement on our VLE which contained the name of the file underlined was a broken link because it was underlined text that did nothing when clicked upon! Is that the most severe Pavlovian reaction ever or gross stupidity?

Plagiarism: It's not fair excuse doesn't work

The exact same excuse appeared in the papers last year IIRC ... let's hope it doesn't catch on ;-)

Assessment tasks shouldn't be Googleable

If your students can complete your assessment task and receive high grades by copying from Google or Wikipedia, the problem is not with the student but with the task.

Amen to that!

21st century academic

via MASHe:

more than a quarter (28.7%) said they deal with over 250 emails a week and those with 250 or more emails a week said they did just 0-5 hours of research a week, 5-15 hours of teaching, but 25 hours or more of administration

sad but true :-(

Until the academy recognises that a true academic (not an ersatz one who (a) isn't a Reader/Prof but (b) "focuses on research") has to balance all three legs (teaching, research and admin) instead of just playing lip-service, things will not change. You'll get promotion from research or admin, but teaching is the main income-generator and raison d'être of higher education!

What Harry Potter can tell us about teaching styles

Great post from Dot Physics summarising "teaching styles" from Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix — when I first read the book I thought Dolores Umbridge's comments were pretty horrifying but, sadly, close to what's said in HE circles about the UK's National Curriculum and what the government's obsession with targets forces schoolteachers to focus on …

Sadly we're not immune: Learn-by-rote-memory is an easy/lazy approach for the lecturer, Learn-by-suffering is an ego-trip for the sadist, and whilst Harry's apparent workshop approach is better it doesn't work for every subject/topic — sometimes knowledge/information/curriculum needs to be learnt and experienced that has no practical analogue.

Meeting verbiage

Thanks to Swans On Tea for this morning's moment of amusement:

On Thursday I accumulated the datum that the phrase I might work better wearing lederhosen, but we’re just not going to find that out instantly ends the meeting.

http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/4388

Don't you just love/hate (depending on side of fence) people who derail meetings with "amusing" absurd analogies, reductio ad absurdum arguments, etc., no matter how fallacious? In my experience the likelihood that someone will bring one of these up depends on the length of the meeting (long => more likely) or, of course, the ridiculousness of the subject from that person's p.o.v. ...

It's a useful tactic in one's arsenal (as a meeting attendee) and motivation for having short, focused meetings (chairs please take note! — academia is notoriously plagued by ouroboros-like sequences of long, pointless meetings that seem to exist for their own sake & no other purpose.)

IELTS not spell-checking own web

We were discussing the use of IELTS for PhD students so I was amused by the irony — stackeholders?!