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| Authored by: Prabhakar Ragde on Wednesday, May 25 2005 @ 04:55 PM CDT |
It may not sound like it, but I have a lot of sympathy with what you're saying.
I have a reputation for making assignments and tests too hard and not
adjusting the marks enough. I routinely drive away half of the first-day
attendees in nonrequired third- and fourth-year classes I teach. Come see my
teaching evaluations if you want confirmation. (You'll discover how vicious
people can be under cloak of anonymity -- but, then, no uwstudent.org
reader would be surprised by this.)
I sit in my office hours unvisited, and the tutor twiddles their thumbs, and
then students we've never seen fail the midterm, and we just want to slap
them. But then I think: did I really do it all correctly? Was my midterm fair?
Was my teaching good enough that they should have been able to do those
things? Or am I just assuming that they should? There isn't a good way to
answer those questions. I can't be the only one to set the bar. I know there
are instructors who make exams full of questions that are tweaks on the
examples and assignments. I know that students look in the Exam Bank and
see five almost identical exams from five consecutive terms. Why are my
standards the right ones?
I also know that we're a publicly-funded institution, and we get two BIUs for
an Honours student whether they're a 95 or a 65 student, and one BIU for a
General student. If we toss half our students out, we get half our money
taken away. We have the faculty to teach twice as many as are left. So no
hiring for the next ten years. That includes when other institutions, laughing
at us for being idealists, cherry-pick our most attractive faculty (not me, I
doubt I could get a job elsewhere). What kind of standards do you think we'll
be able to maintain?
Finally, there's the idea of having to say to these kids, "Mike Harris failed you,
and your high school failed you, and now, heh, we're going to fail you." They
would have succeeded had they been in the last OAC year. They would have
succeeded under the 1970-1992 rules.
Maybe they'll go back to school when they're better prepared (and maybe not
-- who is going to prepare them?). But sure as hell they won't come back
here. Their loss? Maybe. Our loss? Possibly.
If you want to make the case that there should be an elite CS institution that
gets twice as much money to teach the top students, or that it should be
entirely privately-funded, go ahead. But even if you can win the political
battle to have such a thing, U of T would then flick their little finger and have
it located there. On purely academic grounds they have a decent enough
case, but throw in their clout and it's game over.
Some of the kids will take four terms to crash instead of two (most or all of
them, if you're right). Some will pull their socks up -- most, if I'm right. A
handful will get away with something that they couldn't under the old rules.
That is called a compromise. And we make them every day. You will, too, one
day. --PR[ Parent ]
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