LSU removed Bio professor for being too tough???

[3littlekeets]

Really? This seems to be a bit problematic to me. I'd have to guess they had a wealthy donor's kid in the class and he or she complained to daddy or mommy who called the President b/c the Dean NEVER even discussed the matter with the professor first. WOW! 90% failing IS extreme...but something could have been done before removing the professor!

 

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-04-15-IHE-tough-prof-removed-LSU-15_ST_N.htm

[thescrappyhomeschooler]

That does seem like a rash decision. But that silly professor was expecting the students to actually do their work. What was she thinking? :lol:

[i.love.lucy]

That does seem like a rash decision. But that silly professor was expecting the students to actually do their work. What was she thinking? :lol:

I know, right?

 

She hasn't taught an intro level course in 15 years, so she is used to students who study and read the material and show up to class. Shows how out of touch she was!

 

On a serious note though, as a respected professor there of 30 years, she should have been advised by her dean that she was being too tough and worked on more appropriate methods of motivating the students. At least she didn't lose her job, just the one course.

[Corraleno]

Homberger said that no one has ever questioned whether any of the test questions were unfair or unfairly graded, but that she was told that she may include "too many facts" on her tests.

Imagine that ~ expecting students to actually memorize facts for a science test! Surely they should just be "journaling" their emotional responses to the textbook. :rolleyes:

 

The "90% fail rate" was actually only on the first test, it wasn't for the whole class. The prof said that every student in the class could still have passed it if they did the work. In fact, the grades on the 2nd test were already considerably higher, once students realized they actually had to study for the exams. But they pulled her out of the class ~ and raised all the student grades on the first test! ~ before they even saw the grades for the 2nd test.

 

Jackie

[TravelingChris]

It isn't a matter of grading on a curve. I don't curve my students but I did throw out a question that everyone except one got wrong and then not even fully right. Obviously that question was confusing.

 

Teaching for mastery is great. I do that with my students. However, making insanely hard quizzes is not great. Why have ten answer per multiple choice question? I have never seen such a thing and I went all the way through all the classwork for a doctorate. I think she was used to teach biology majors and did not realize how little the non science major students she had knew coming in and set up the class on the wrong level.

[mcconnellboys]

It's weird to me that they would ask a professor who normally teaches higher level courses to teach a freshman course, then penalize her for requiring high standards. It's not as if she's been doing this to class after class for years. This was a one time thing......

 

I've been reading about grade inflation for years. There are few schools around now that do not engage in it, apparently. Many of the Ivies are highly implicated.....

 

Of those we've looked at in my older son's college search, I've heard that DePauw is one of the few that will not engage in grade inflation.....

 

I was just talking to the wife of a UK professor a few weeks ago about grade inflation. He also sits on dissertation panels, etc. and tells story after story of professors passing grad students who don't know their stuff, helping them answer their questions (!), and other such absurdities......

[GWOB]

Can I tell you how proud I am at this moment to be from Louisiana, where LSU is considered the premier school?:glare:

[Tap]

This is a hard one. I think that we need to hear the students point of view.

 

When I was in college I was an art major, but always had an interest in science. I graduated high school with a 4.0 and had all As at this point in college. I took Intro to Chemistry as a course requirement. The professor was very, very unrealistic in his expectations in the class. On his exams it was common for 75% of the class to get a grade in the 30's. He would grade on a curve so that a grade in the 60's was an A. The only people who would get an A, were ones who had had chemistry in high school.

 

He decided to order the class on the topics that were the most important to least important. H liked to jump around in the text book so the test may be a chapter 2, 8 and 12 test. The problem was that the information in chapter 12 assumed you had read through to that chapter. To read chapter 12 we would have to go back and forth in the previous 12 chapters to figure out the vocabulary. That is why the only ones who did well at all were the ones who had chemistry before. He made the class wayyyyy harder than it should have been.

 

It wasn't just that he graded hard, I was used to that. I was taking several other classes that were considered the hardest on the campus and was doing fine. It was that he talked so far over our heads as an intro class, that his lectures would leave us wondering what he meant or confused on what he wanted. He also graded strictly. If an essay question had 10 things he thought you should have included, it was all or nothing. If you didn't list all 10, you got 0 points. He didn't say "list 10 xyz" you were just supposed to know there were 10 key points because the chapter was broken into 10 parts. After the exam, you could see where he got his answers, it all made sense, but during the exam it was too vague. Like in the professor's class that was cited here, we all did a bit better on subsequent exams, because we started seeing more of what he expected. Out of 75 students, only 1 was passing on non-curved grades.

 

I dropped his class after he told me I couldn't make up an exam because I stopped in to tell him was very sick with the flu. I had a major project I had to turn in for another class or I wouldn't have been there. He said if I hadn't have told him ahead of time that I was sick, I could have made it up, but since I was there, I should stay and just take it. :confused: I could barely stand, was very nauseous, had a fever.... and by sitting in a room with 75 others was risking passing it on to them as well. He had a policy that allowed for make ups, he was just adding a new clause to it on the spot.

 

As far as I saw or heard, he never taught an intro class again.

 

 

 

So, when I hear about professors that are deemed too hard, I flash back to this guy and know where the person is coming from!

[mcconnellboys]

LOL, I thought that was Tulane....

[Renee in NC]

I admire the professor and I am sorry that she was removed from the class. Non-majors or not, she was doing those students a *service* by teaching them what it means to work hard for a grade. If 90% of the course failed the class as a whole, then you have a problem. The first test is not a reason to pull the professor, especially when the 2nd tests showed higher grades.

 

When I was in college, there was a history professor that everyone avoided because his class was "hard." At one point, I had to take him because no other professor would fit in my schedule. He gave quizzes on the readings at the beginning of every class of 5 identifications. They could come from the actual text, from picture captions, etc. I worked HARD in that class and got a B - I was very, very proud of that B! I wasn't a history major and it was an intro level class that everyone had to have.

 

I see the grade-inflation and coddling in high school as well. My oldest ds is in school and teachers have allowed him to make up missed work weeks after it was due to bring up his grade (even if he missed it because he just didn't do it.)

 

When I was in the 10th grade, my English teacher gave a test that most people failed. She went to the administration to see if the test was too hard. It wasn't the fault of the test, it was the fault of the English teachers before her who had low expectations.

 

This is a "flagship" school. These are college students! Why shouldn't they work hard? Why does everyone have to get an A or a B? Why is a C no longer average?

[lllll]

...

[Pamela H in Texas]

I think it goes both ways also. Yes, she should be able to require the students to participate and master the material. However, intentionally making tests extra hard to trip people up is inappropriate. I also think that quizzing over the reading alone should have limited effect on your class score. Seriously, the REASON you go to class after pre-reading the material is so that the professor can TEACH after you have some exposure, not mastery. What would be the point of teaching after you've ascertained the students had read the text, looked things up on the internet, talked among themselves, etc enough to pass a quiz the very next day?

 

Anyway, I have actually thought of this though. I *want* to be a tough teacher (jr high, probably). I'm not going to have open book tests (the norm in my school district). I'm not going to give three class periods of studying for this test. And there is much more. I intend on going through a reasonable amount of work and expecting mastery. That will require studying. If you do Pre-AP (I hate that designation), then you'll actually be expected to learn more than if you don't. When I have a sub, you'll have WORK to do and you better treat the sub well. But I won't be intentionally tripping kids up. You can have a pretty good idea about the topic and get tripped up by a intentionally challenging question, especially one that has 3 answers and then 7 more answers that are combinations of the first 3!

[Sebastian (a lady)]

Really? This seems to be a bit problematic to me. I'd have to guess they had a wealthy donor's kid in the class and he or she complained to daddy or mommy who called the President b/c the Dean NEVER even discussed the matter with the professor first. WOW! 90% failing IS extreme...but something could have been done before removing the professor!

 

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-04-15-IHE-tough-prof-removed-LSU-15_ST_N.htm

 

You can be rigorous without being capricious.

 

DH had a grad school prof who had short answer identification questions on ever test. You had to identify and explain the significance of about 50 different items (out of a list of probably 250). You can be sure that people studied hard for this.

 

But there are also profs who act as gate keepers, weeding out students. Not just students who don't do the work, but the larger quantity of students who are middle of the road producers. There was an engineering prof at my college who was infamous for failing most of his students in intro level engineering students. (He had gone for many semesters without submitting his student evals. I thought of him when I read this and wondered what her reputation among the bio majors was.)