![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Hot about nothing...
Jan. 31st, 2006 10:52 amA recent story involves an instructor at UPEI, one David Weale, who offered to give anyone registered in his overcrowded class a passing grade if they would simply not show up and allow those with a burning desire to learn to do so in a less crowded environment. According to what I read in a post by LJ friend ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rfmcdpei, Weale has apparently been dismissed from his job as a result.
My immediate reaction to the news is: the person behind Weale in the unemployment line ought to be the dumb jerk at UPEI in charge of class registrations. Better yet, assuming that Weale is as good an instructor as some say he is, the only person in the unemployment line ought to be that nameless administrative REMF.
Yet to be frank, I don't really understand what all the hullabaloo is about. Back when I was attending SUSB, there was at least one social sciences professor who gave all of his students unqualified A's just for signing up for his course. The chairman of the Slavic and Germanic Languages department had a similar philosophy, except that students who didn't show up or take any exams could expect a grade of C. (Indeed, the fact that I could get an A grade for a 6 credit-hour intensive elementary-level class just for showing up was a pretty compelling reason to sign up for the course.)
And since neither those professors nor the environment at SUSB differed in any significant measure from the ambient lay of the land in academe of that time, and since I cannot imagine things having tightened up in the interim, I therefore cannot understand what the deal is with the Weale case, unless it's as Weale states, a manifestation of bureaucratic hypocrisy.
There are those who apparently feel that Weale has "diminished the value of the product that his employer sells." Hmmm. This raises an interesting question: what product, exactly, does an institute of higher learning sell?
The simple answer is, of course: an education. This merely pushes the issue back one step. What is an education? (Or perhaps, more tractably: what do we expect of a person who has been educated at an institute of higher learning?)
Do we expect someone with up-to-date knowledge, who can be seamlessly integrated into a working environment?
Puh-leeze! Back in the days of LSI, I spent my time struggling to understand electrical science, where the curriculum was heavily oriented toward vacuum tubes and – during the second semester of electrical science – basic transistor theory. Nothing I learned in fluid mechanics came in handy when I started working with piping and pumps. Indeed, had it not been for the fact that I was part of an experimental group learning BASIC (instead of FORTRAN) in my senior year, I would not have been drafted, early in (but not at the start of) my career as an engineer, to write the software for a coal-handling control system at a power generating plant.
I've seen the same phenomenon among prospective translators, fresh out of school, and indeed, among those who have gone back for graduate study. (Indeed, some of the latter are even harder to deal with, as some truly believe that theory always trumps practice – assuming, of course, that they concede that practice ought to be admitted into the game at all).
Certainly, I suppose we expect someone who is the product of a university education to have some kind of skill set, but I think given the almost mind-boggling range of rigor even among instructors at the same school, it would be impossible to properly assess the extent of such a skill set without examining a graduate's transcript, and suicidal to assume much past a minimum level of competence based on someone simply having been awarded a degree.
In the end, however, I think it's useful to assess how much of an impact on anyone's education would one (or even a small handful) of what we used to call "gut" grades have on one's final worth as a "product"?
For a school known for being easy-going, none (because one can expect that the lack of rigor at said school is equally known); for a school renowned for its academic rigor, the impact would be little to none, unless it were to widely occur among "core" courses or within entire departments, in which case the school's (or department's) reputation would devolve from rigorous to easy-going. Based on published reports, I don't think the Weale case fits in very well here.
Cheers...
rfmcdpei, Weale has apparently been dismissed from his job as a result.My immediate reaction to the news is: the person behind Weale in the unemployment line ought to be the dumb jerk at UPEI in charge of class registrations. Better yet, assuming that Weale is as good an instructor as some say he is, the only person in the unemployment line ought to be that nameless administrative REMF.
Yet to be frank, I don't really understand what all the hullabaloo is about. Back when I was attending SUSB, there was at least one social sciences professor who gave all of his students unqualified A's just for signing up for his course. The chairman of the Slavic and Germanic Languages department had a similar philosophy, except that students who didn't show up or take any exams could expect a grade of C. (Indeed, the fact that I could get an A grade for a 6 credit-hour intensive elementary-level class just for showing up was a pretty compelling reason to sign up for the course.)
And since neither those professors nor the environment at SUSB differed in any significant measure from the ambient lay of the land in academe of that time, and since I cannot imagine things having tightened up in the interim, I therefore cannot understand what the deal is with the Weale case, unless it's as Weale states, a manifestation of bureaucratic hypocrisy.
There are those who apparently feel that Weale has "diminished the value of the product that his employer sells." Hmmm. This raises an interesting question: what product, exactly, does an institute of higher learning sell?
The simple answer is, of course: an education. This merely pushes the issue back one step. What is an education? (Or perhaps, more tractably: what do we expect of a person who has been educated at an institute of higher learning?)
Do we expect someone with up-to-date knowledge, who can be seamlessly integrated into a working environment?
Puh-leeze! Back in the days of LSI, I spent my time struggling to understand electrical science, where the curriculum was heavily oriented toward vacuum tubes and – during the second semester of electrical science – basic transistor theory. Nothing I learned in fluid mechanics came in handy when I started working with piping and pumps. Indeed, had it not been for the fact that I was part of an experimental group learning BASIC (instead of FORTRAN) in my senior year, I would not have been drafted, early in (but not at the start of) my career as an engineer, to write the software for a coal-handling control system at a power generating plant.
I've seen the same phenomenon among prospective translators, fresh out of school, and indeed, among those who have gone back for graduate study. (Indeed, some of the latter are even harder to deal with, as some truly believe that theory always trumps practice – assuming, of course, that they concede that practice ought to be admitted into the game at all).
Certainly, I suppose we expect someone who is the product of a university education to have some kind of skill set, but I think given the almost mind-boggling range of rigor even among instructors at the same school, it would be impossible to properly assess the extent of such a skill set without examining a graduate's transcript, and suicidal to assume much past a minimum level of competence based on someone simply having been awarded a degree.
In the end, however, I think it's useful to assess how much of an impact on anyone's education would one (or even a small handful) of what we used to call "gut" grades have on one's final worth as a "product"?
For a school known for being easy-going, none (because one can expect that the lack of rigor at said school is equally known); for a school renowned for its academic rigor, the impact would be little to none, unless it were to widely occur among "core" courses or within entire departments, in which case the school's (or department's) reputation would devolve from rigorous to easy-going. Based on published reports, I don't think the Weale case fits in very well here.
Cheers...
