Update on grade strike
news.ucsc.edu
news.ucsc.edu
If I were in a position to make a significant gift, I would be more inclined to make it to the graduate students (e.g. through a strike fund, or other means).
I graduated from the University of California at San Diego more than 45 years ago. I graduated with honors, and I was proud to be a UCSD graduate. After I started working, I made (modest) contributions to UCSD's scholarship funds. I stopped doing that after Janet Napolitano was named president of the University of California.
It makes me sad that the University of California seems to be determined to join the Ivy League schools in becoming a hedge fund with a minor side business in education.
They’re not getting genuine feedback on their work.
At first, they did not give out grades at all. There was only a written evaluation that the professor did for each student at the end of the quarter. Eventually, in the mid 1980s or so, other schools demanded that UCSC give out a grade in addition, so they they could compare Slugs to other students when admitting for post-secondary education. When I send my official transcript over, it's ~75 pages long, not just one page. It's chock-full of detailed personal information about my efforts in Psych-101, Intro to Jazz, etc (or, rather, the total lack of effort, in my case).
I understand there’s real issues with scaling, but national tests seem to resolve that. At most a pass, high pass or fail system would be best. Letter +/- grades are just silly when you step back and think about the goal of education.
Some literally just put down my scores on tests/papers. Some just copy-pasted the class description and then gave the grade I got.
Others wrote pages of feedback, not all of which was useful. My name is common enough that I was confused with another student once, including with my grade, so that was fun.
In large 500+ person intro classes, the feedback could never have been meaningful due to class size. In other 10 person classes, the feedback was generally pretty good. Upper division classes were better in term of feedback, broadly.
In practice, it's a bit of a mixed bag and each professor was different and themselves differed over time. Generally it's great though, even years after the events.
When I send in my transcripts, I vainly go over them again, and it's always a welcome exercise. Seeing my growth (good and bad) is so incredibly rewarding. It's very rare to get to be assessed like that in such pivotal years.
Some of those forms are the last communications I will ever have with those people as they have since died. Even if those forms are generally bland, I treasure them, as those people helped me so very much and were generally kind to me. I'm tearing up right now thinking about one professor I never got to say goodbye to (Dearest Reader: this is the universe telling you to email that person you've been meaning to email, FYI).
One last thing: if you are a person that designs websites that happen to accept transcripts, please bump the file limit up from ~25mb. Mine is ~200mb as the official download from the school and I always have to go in an scale down the .pdf to the varying mb limit that the website accepts, none of which are the same limit. Also, it always looks terrible after I scale it back.
Failing grades aren’t supposed to just be a punishment for not studying hard enough. They can be a warning sign that the student may need to try something else.
What schools do you have experience with? Also, never heard of ACM so I have no idea if that was used whatsoever for our classes.
ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery. Hopefully someone mentioned it to you before you graduated…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/...
I suspect it would take a lot more than one "A strike" to substantially impact a school's reputation.
It's a dereliction, not compliance. Your job is to sincerely, fairly, and justifiably assign grades, and not arbitrarily.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxe45b/graduate-student-s...
>Like the UC Santa Cruz strike, the UC Santa Barbara work stoppage is a “wildcat” strike, meaning that graduate students are acting separately from the United Auto Worker (UAW) 2865, the union which represents more than 19,000 workers across the UC system.
I thought that was a mistake somehow, but it turns out that, yes, the UC students are organized as a branch of UAW despite not being auto workers.
Donations that are earmarked to help students are in the form of scholarships and bursaries. To be honest, there aren’t nearly enough of those to go around.
I talked with one of my professors at Iowa State about this topic. He said back in the day, donors only needed to pay the cost of the building and then the university would get hit with tons of maintenance and utility expenses.
For some time now, they have to donate the cost of the building and money for an endowment for expected maintenance costs and operating costs.
$2500 a year is a slap in the face to the $1800 / month the students were demanding.
Something needs to change there. For the Midwest small college town where I went $20,000-30,000 was plenty (for people without kids at least). I imagine it’d be a lot harder in CA coastal cities.
I didn’t realize most strikes were sanctioned...
They mean not sanctioned by the union leadership in this case.
https://twitter.com/payusmoreucsc/status/1234130912281010176...
This led me to believe that grad student unions were not a particularly useful way of dealing with issues affecting graduate students.
It seems like they're willing to pay extra money but not via a wage increase?
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...
Additionally, the students at this campus voted with an 80% majority against the prior contract that the union had negotiated on behalf of grad students at all campuses simultaneously. Students at other campuses with lower cost of living are not squeezed nearly as much.