Many online classes are way too easy. (not a joke, sorry)

The issue of grade inflation and pressure to give good grades in my opinion is not unique to DL. I have worked at few for profit schools and have worked as a faculty manager and there is concern about the grade inflation among few schools as schools know that this could hurt business in the long run. In my opinion it happens mainly because the adjunct is paid less than 2K to grade projects, assignments and discussions.
Many of these adjuncts are professional adjuncts working at several schools to make ends meet, if you need to teach 10 classes a term to make a living, you don't want to bother with complaints and long feed backs so the easiest way to do this is by just giving As if the assignment looks good and a B if the assignment is of OK quality. This binary way of grading just saves a lot of time and allows an adjunct to teach a large number of classes to make a salary.
From the student point of view, this is a concern as you feel that your education has little value as anyone with the right cash can get the degree. However, I can tell you that for profit schools have the advantage that most of their classes are designed with the job market in mind and they are current and less dated than classes given at non for profit or government schools. Over the years, I have noticed that a lot of for profit graduates do really well as they have motivation and they profited from learning from courses that are more relevant to the market.

So in my opinion, you decide what you get from your education, if you want just to earn a degree by scanning text books, buying assignments at coursehero.com and so on. You can get a degree no problem but you are investing money that is wasted as you are just buying the diploma but not training for the job market.

 

So have I.

I had one instructor who actually gave out the multiple-choice questions and answers to his tests a week before the tests were administered. All one had to do was memorize the answers and you were pretty much guaranteed an A.

This instructor did the same thing with the exams in every class he taught. I took as many of his courses as I could.

 

Eh. One could argue that's just adjacent to an open book exam. I've seen much worse, like in one of my ground-based classes the instructor gave us the answers WHILE we were taking the exam. He was disgruntled and in the middle of mounting a lawsuit against the school. Not sure how he thought this would help him, but he did it.

 

Yeah, I agree. That's pretty bad.

 

Many of the online for profit schools have a model that grades students based on discussions and assignments with no exams. Few problems with this model:
1. There are places like coursehero.com that solve assignments and create essays for a fee. I have checked and a student can pretty much get all the work done for a course for less than thousand dollars.

2. For profits pay very little to adjuncts, an adjunct is not going to spend hours reading essays very carefully so many just grade with As and Bs. This saves time as students will not complain so there is no time needed to explain grading and the adjunct also has a binary system (A or B) that helps to speed up grading.

Some schools use online exams to grade courses, with electronic text books, students can easily now search for answers for online exams by using a search tool within windows or other system to locate answers. Some schools are now using paper text books to prevent this problem but the student can still scan the text books.


A possible solution would be to make mandatory a proctored final exam. Not a proctored final exam where the student decides the proctor but a proctor system where the school decides proctor and place.

The problem with this last solution is that many students chose online for profit because many do not have exams or have online exams that can be easily cheat. If these schools were to switch to proctored exams, they would lose a lot of customers.

I am convinced that a student does not need exams to learn, the discussions and assignments might work but this under the assumption that the student does the work and the instructor spends time grading the work carefully. If the student tries to find short cuts then it is the student's fault in my opinion, the student can graduate but he or she is getting no education. Some people believe that the piece of paper will change their lives but it is not going to do much if the student just uses loopholes to graduate.

 

I'm not seeing any proof that any of my classes have been easier or dumbed down or whatever. I know that the schools I have (and currently) attended are known for having their online classes match up to the in person classes. I would hold my ASU and UofF degrees that I got online up against the same degrees obtained in person, and guaranteed they are the same. Same difficulty, same information, same everything. And the one I'm working on right now? Forget it. Not likely you'll see anyone complaining that my USC degree is easier than ANYTHING. Online classes are really all in what you make them. Work hard, study, really do the work, and choose a reputable school and you should never have a chance to complain the classes are too easy.