Hacker News Reader

Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

> Professors can basically do whatever they want

Maybe that was true at some point, but they certainly can't anymore.

Speaking with professors around me (at universities on different continents!), they all report that they basically have to give everyone passing grades, they can't tell students off/kick them out of the class for engaging in outwardly rude behavior (eg wearing headphones, obviously playing games/watching videos/etc. for the duration of the class), they have to accept pretty much any request for extension/makeup exams/etc, they can't give a student a 0 when they've obviously used chatGPT (ie cheated) for an assignment.

If you want to go back to proper academic rigor and study, you have to return authority to the professors.

View on HN

My wife is currently a professor. None of that is true for her. She fails people all the time for cheating, non-attendance or whatever. She gives them a few chances not to dig their own grave, and some still do it.

Re: Do whatever they want. She has a colleague who is a terrible teacher. She hears all the time and students learned nothing in her class. That teacher does run a couple of software businesses on the side, and most likely is just trying to find smart kids and recruit them for cheap coding labor.

There is pressure to admit students from overseas colleges, where it's kind of known they are rich kids who cheated and bribed their way through undergrad programs and often come unprepared for the masters programs they are applying for. These are some the kids who I described at the start of my post, and the most egregious cheaters (turning in coding assignments with other people's names on them, getting caught cheating 5 times, and asking for a call where they ask if there's any way they can pass). It's nuts.

My time in college was 10 years ago, but absolutely none of that was true at the time (I personally seen pretty much everything you referred to as "not allowed"). I find it very hard to believe that much has changed since then.

My spouse is a professor at a highly ranked US university. While these things are not completely impossible, there is major institutional pressure against this sort of authority amongst professors.

Things really have changed over the last decade.

In Australia, two friends who are uni professors, one in admin/leadership position for their faculty, and my partner teaches some science undergrad courses in their phd topics. It is absolutely that bad with both subtle pressures and blatant failures aligning to progress fee paying students to completion regardless of competency or pedagogy.

> they can't give a student a 0 when they've obviously used chatGPT (ie cheated) for an assignment.

I used to teach at university level (not in the US). I gave a 0 to a cheating student. Next day, the head of the section came to me in a panic. "omg, what have you done? you can't do that...". Actually, I think he wasn't even worried about legal implications, he genuinely thought this was very unfair to the student and that I was some kind of prick.

Actually, there are very specific procedures to deal with cheating, and it's so time consuming that it's better to avoid them altogether and just close your eyes.

Edit: another anecdote, I refused late students to my class (after warning them several times). Again, I got reprimanded by the head of the department for being too strict.

This is a variant of 'kids these days', that we've documented all the way back to Plato.

If I buy a thing at Wal-Mart or Bezosmart, and it doesn't work, I can get my money back.

If I pay for service, like dry-clean my clothes, and its not done right, I can get my money back, or they offer to redo it.

In academics, none of this applies. Garbage professor? Too bad. Professor grades on curve? Too bad. Professor doesn't teach and just reads from book? Too bad. Professor does (bad but not illegal thing)? Too bad.

And failures are always assumed to be the students pure responsibility, and none of the professors' responsibility.

Combined with 'you will pay this and all other classes back up to when you're 50', and 'you need a diploma to be able to pay it back', the situation is set.

As I said, its a mixture of these premises is what leads to this situation. And there's no good answer here. Well, I guess de-capitalizing universities could work, along with jobs no longer demanding a 'degree', would go to that direction as well. But I am not hopeful.

Well, when almost all professors now are adjuncts...

Most uni admins push back hard against failing grades. https://old.reddit.com/r/Professors/

I disagree. I had a number of tenured professors who absolutely did not give AF. They were openly hostile and put in the barest minimum to teaching, because as they told us, they would rather be doing research. I attended a research university, and that's cool and all, but the job of a professor should be to teach, and research should be second. In my humble opinion, that has been turned around. So we do have a lot of tenured professors, essentially immune from their core responsibility, slowly phoning it in as they prioritize research over lecture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com