Maybe a kid would want a lower grade because it would make their GPA something nice like X.69.
not on spidercrab’s watch
This seems very not good.
https://twitter.com/donmoyn/status/1395020459989774337
Basically, UNC went through the entire tenure approval process, which typically goes something like this:
department faculty → college faculty → college dean → provost → board of trustees
The board of trustees vote is typically viewed as automatic if the candidate has successfully made it through the earlier stages. But in this case, the BOT refused to approve it, presumably based on complaints like this:
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I’m pretty surprised that’s allowed in your neighborhood given that your town is so against signage that the Starbucks is in an unmarked white building and all of the street signs are painted blend-into-the-environment brown.
This is a very accurate description of my neighborhood! Are you stalking me?
I saw you type the name of it once and that was enough to trigger me because I’ve been there before, mostly driving around in circles looking for unmarked buildings.
I know this is an ancient conversation, but thought some would be interested to know that this exact request was fairly common at a particular college I taught at as an adjunct (definitely had Stockholm Syndrome too) a million years ago.
Cliffs: This school had (has?) a policy that essentially made a D more punitive than an F.
Details: Earning a D, while technically passing, was not enough for a class to count towards a student’s major and so the student had to retake the class so they can earn the credits for the course and move on to more advanced sections. The need to retake the class obviously happens in the case of a student earning an F. The issue was that the D was always factored into the student’s GPA while the F was NOT computed into the GPA after the class was retaken. Students who earned a D and were aware of the policy then sometimes asked for a change to an F to avoid the anchor of a D on their GPA.
I remember being confused and surprised the first time a student came to me with this request (I remember the student too) so I verified the policy with the department chair, but they didn’t offer any guidance as to what I should. After pearl clutching that the student should receive the grade that they earned, I spoke with some other faculty at the college who thought the policy was insane and so I lowered the grade as the student requested. Don’t regret it at all.
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That is an amazing policy.
Just craziness imo. No one could ever give me a sound reason for it either. And the policy was buried in the student handbook and was virtually impossible to find. It was mostly word-of-mouth that kept students aware of it. Although some faculty (always those who were senior and tenured and didn’t care about grade distribution) would inform their students at the end of the term and give them the option directly. It was never in anyone’s syllabus though.
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Feels like a cheating arms race is just going to be the norm in late-stage capitalism. About half of the U.S. population already thinks everything is rigged, and it’s not like education has some pristine reputation to defend. The online versions of the GRE and GMAT are now permanent options (lol). Also:
Two Chegg executives, vice presidents Arnon Avitzur and Erik Manuevo, support Rosensweig’s claims about Chegg’s intent. “It’s there to offer students personalized service to help them get unstuck,” Avitzur says.
What’s this about online GRE and GMAT? You can take them at home now?
This was my favorite part:
Yes. They were introduced during the pandemic and are now permanent options. The most blatant cash grab ever maybe.
The GRE and GMAT things are frustrating. I’m involved in doctoral student admissions, and it’s already close to impossible to predict who’s going to be a successful student. Making the standardized tests available online just reduces my reliance on them. Which sucks because, as bad as they might be, they are the only really comparable measure I have for many applicants.
It’s super frustrating to try to compare
- Applicant 1: Undergrad degree from an overseas school I’ve never heard of plus masters degree from a prestigious US school, with no work or research experience
- Applicant 2: Undergrad degree from US state school, no masters degree, 5 years of relevant work experience
At least the GMAT gives something I can compare across the two.
applicant 1 with an undergrad from an overseas school I’m not familiar with,
Don’t you interview them too?
After doing an initial screen of the applications, we interview a subset of them. But, in my experience, those interviews primarily reveal personality and English fluency. I don’t think either of those are terribly meaningful in terms of success in the program. (I mean, zero English fluency is an obvious deal breaker, but that usually gets revealed in the written statement of purpose already.)
So how rampant and how easy is cheating thought to be for these tests?
How familiar are you with the current state of GRE / GMAT prep and cheating schemes?
There is definitely a cottage industry for the essays too. I’d probably be more suspicious of an applicant who submitted a great statement but struggled with spoken English?
Given all of the standardized test cheating schemes that have occurred offshore, I’m unwilling to personally extend any benefit of the doubt. GMAT/GRE don’t get as much attention as SAT and others, but China was already busted specifically for ScoreTop GMAT back in 2008, and it’s not like that practice magically went away with the seizure of one website. It’s still alive and well on far more popular sites as I pointed out before.
When I was in grad school (quant), our DGS kept a list of blacklisted int’l test centers because the department had been burned so many times. We had one girl with a perfect TOEFL who struggled to speak more than a few words of English. The international students (a majority of my graduate class) cheated on every take-home exam in my program, which is to say most exams because they were generally sets of mathematical proofs that took many hours to complete.
I’m not sure I can characterize other peoples’ thinking about this, but the idea that the online versions can’t or won’t be cheated is comically naive. I won’t claim to be familiar with the credibility of Indian news outlets, but both of these seem to be pretty big and not fly-by-night fake news (?):
Wow, that’s more crude than I was imagining.
Is there no way to just feed the output to multiple monitors. Then you could just have one set up in another room. Or you could just have a well-concealed camera pointed at the screen.
And someone else coming into the room and handing the test taker a piece of paper with the answers on it? WTF. I was imagining a much more elaborate signaling method than that.
Again, none of this is new. There are so many similar stories that it should be clear this is systemic and not just isolated incidents. The big spike in demand for American universities from China and India over the past 20 years has led to way too many people fighting for too few seats. We’re in 2021 now where Aunt Becky’s gonna see the cage for bribing college officials, so none of this should really shock anyone.
The companies are prospering by exploiting two intersecting interests: the growing demand by Chinese nationals to study overseas, and the desire by U.S. colleges to profit from foreign students willing to pay full tuition.
As Reuters reported in March, some companies are leveraging weaknesses in the SAT, a standardized college entrance exam, to help clients gain an unfair advantage on the test by feeding them questions in advance.
There’s jijing again. While having an impostor stand in for you probably sounds more exciting, it’s not the one that can be executed on a wide scale. Getting live test questions in advance is always going to be a better play for the people who aren’t complete buffoons, and there’s no conceivable way that online versions of these tests won’t lead to more of that.
His study aid was far more valuable than the practice questions that students in America use to prepare for the SAT, the standardized test used by thousands of U.S. colleges to help select applicants. Known in Chinese as a jijing , the booklet was essentially an answer key.
Ding’s advance look at material from the test he took was no fluke. His cram school is part of a vibrant Asian industry that systematically exploits security shortcomings in the SAT. Chief among them is a vulnerability created by the owner of the exam: the routine practice of reusing material from tests that already have been given.
More from the first article:
In addition, Reuters has identified companies in China that help students contrive their entire college application – embellishing or ghostwriting application essays, doctoring letters of recommendation from high school teachers, and even advising kids to obtain fake high school transcripts. Other providers continue the illicit assistance after admission, such as those that performed coursework for hire in Iowa City.
This probably isn’t going away anytime soon: as these articles point out, international students spend $10B on American education. Reuters claims College Board knew multiple SATs were compromised, so not only is standardized testing a racket, there’s a billion dollar test prep industry built on its back. Read any of the popular prep boards for these things and you’ll find plenty of people who’ve thrown hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars at them, sometimes with no improvement at all.
It’s time to cancel this shit, and I’ve noticed that some graduate programs are now doing exactly that. Several psychology PhD programs I keep tabs on are not accepting the GRE at all this year, so I assume it must be more widespread than that. It’s not clear to me whether this is temporary due to safety concerns or them finally calling bullshit on it with the permanent online versions.