Texas A&M professor fails entire class

Texas A&M professor fails entire class: Is this a millennials problem?

Not distance ed but interesting

But the university has not backed up Horwitz. Vice President of Academic Affairs Patrick Louchouarn made it clear that as much as the administration respects Horwitz, the professor did not have the authority to assign failing grades while the semester was still in session. The department head will take over the class until the end of the semester.

 

Trying to be fair I'd say that there's not enough information to make a clear judgement on this but my first thought is that the Professor lost his cool. If there was cheating or insults thrown then there is recourse against the specific student(s) involved and they would be out of the class.

 

I could see it from either the perspective that a professor blew a gasket and overreacted or that an entire class is really up to no good. I think the former is a bit more likely.

When I was in college we had a professor give all of us "A's" out of protest of, what he felt, was a cheapening of academic standards in higher ed. The course was a one credit career planning course that was required of all freshmen. I think he was supposed to be teaching us how to read a syllabus and how to pick a major to set yourself up for future goals (and how to identify future goals). Instead, he used it as a weekly soap box to espouse extreme libertarian politics (which sounded an awful lot like anarchy but that observation tended to make him mad). For the entire semester he also told us we'd get "bonus points" if we brought him lunch. Ended up not needing those bonus points in the end due to the protest A and all.

Anyway, I am actually a bit confused by the whole concept of "millennials." I fail to see how someone born in 1982 (and is this around 33) can be lumped in with someone born in 1995 (and is thus in their early 20s). My understanding of the original usage of the term was that it was for individuals who reached adulthood in the early 2000s which would basically exclude anyone, save a few possible adult learners, in this particular class at Texas A&M.

But obviously this present young adult generation is the first and only generation to piss off a professor or be called lazy or entitled by older generations. I cannot think of a single occasion where that might have occurred anywhere in human history.

 

“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
Socrates

 

Well, I can't fathom getting anything but an A from such a course anyway.

 

Nor I. But when I spoke to people taking the course in other sections they had to do...well...stuff. We just had to sit there and listen to him rant.

It was actually funny how it came up. A student was eating a sandwich at his desk during his ranting and he kept glancing over at him. I assumed it was because he was not happy about a student eating during his "lecture."

Instead, he eventually just stopped mid-sentence and said:

"Hey Tyler, is that salami? What do you think about going halves on it?

Afterward we were encouraged to bring him offerings of various snacks. Some people did. I don't think anyone seriously thought it would impact their grade. But I got the impression that they gave him food for the same reason you feed animals at the zoo; you just want to see if he'll eat what you give him.

I think he was a History professor, if memory serves. I never took another course with him. Others told me he was the sort of guy who didn't use texts and seldom gave actual exams. He would just rant and give you a good grade as long as you tended to rant in a way that he liked.

But, you know, at least it didn't reach the depraved depths of UofP.

 

I know this isn't the point.... but

Currently, Common Core has everyone freaked out. I just held a presentation last week where we discussed if CC and how CC influences the homeschooling high schoolers as well as if there is any influence over the exams they may use: SAT, ACT, AP, CLEP, DSST. College Board is in progress of revising SAT - 2016 versions will be revised, and AP - all versions revised 2015-current. We discussed how AP and SAT were "accountable" to K-12 so it made sense that these changes were inevitable...but I hesitated to think CLEP/DSST would revise because they are absolutely NOT accountable to k-12..... and now look here...

(half way down the page) “It’s going to be a while before we see a significant change in the preparation level of student, Jacqueline King, director of Higher Education Collaboration for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, told Politico. “That would really require that higher education adjust their introductory courses,”

And so she says.

 

The SAT is revising its test like it has already done many times because it is losing market share to the ACT. It is already well-known that high school grades are a better predictor of college success than SAT scores. Colleges started preferring the ACT over the SAT because the ACT tests skills taught in high school that will be used in college. The SAT tried to mimic IQ tests, and the verbal portion has a strong cultural bias. It tests words that many rarely or never use and will rarely or never use in college or in the workplace.

 

Precisely, a business decision (the alpha and omega) purely based on, as you point out, SAT’s (the College Board) continual drop in market share /admission exam assessment credibility…

 

It's true. As a result, I abjure my faith in SAT scores. It sounds as if you join me in my abegnation of this abject failure of a measurement.