Texas college professor tries to flunk his whole class
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
There is nothing at all to be gained in reading it.
There's no actual evidence of who was in the wrong or what the real story is.
(You could easily argue after 20 years in the game he fully knew all the students wouldn't actually get a F, even this is unknown)
Whole class plagiarized their papers and it wasn't a he said she said. Clear as day guilty. Some of the papers were word for word the same (The kids forgot to change words). Professor gives the complete class a failing grade. College within a week lets all the Seniors graduate and changed their grades to C and fires the Professor.
Professor appeals and is re-hired. Than he is fired 2 years later due to complaints that his classes are to difficult. Once again appeals and is rehired. He is now the easiest professor to get a D or C as long as you don't cut three weeks (AKA 1/4 of the class). You have to do projects for different grades. D = writes out 50 words and their definitions with hand drawn pictures. C = Pass a definition test of a possible 100 words (Super Easy). B = do research and turn in a short half page synopsis of your findings with printed out web pages or copies of books. A = write one 10 page paper and get at least an 80 on the paper with his simple rubric (AKA Jr High level). Only 10% actually ever attempt an A and he has a perfect Bell Curve the past 15+ years now.
His lectures are incredible deep (Philosophy and Theology) and you can either sit there and learn very little (Most do) or you can engage him and he will give the best lecture tailored for whoever tries hard and talks during class. When my friends who were alumni would come to visit I always took them to this professor's class and they were blown away at how foolish they were to dismiss him and think of him as a easy C or B class.
So this actually happened and it caused a professor to just not engage his classes brains or challenge them academically due to fear of being fired again. Philosophy and Theology field is incredibly competitive and there would be over 150 applications for his position if it ever opened up. You also would than be a person who was fired trying to get into a field where hundreds trying for the same job.
The story is part of a larger narrative. Those interested in that narrative will enjoy watching how it plays out.
I know far too many talented and insightful educators who have found themselves either unemployed or fleeing to commerce.. those who remain are increasingly embittered, embattled, or just don't care.
Things will get better when and if folks stop believing that all of their dreams will come true because they're a unique special flower, and start realising that most of life requires knowledge and hard graft, if you want to achieve anything worthwhile - and that you are just another head of corn in a field of billions.
“Just ridiculous. I had never had a problem in the class. I thought I had done pretty well, done pretty well on the first test, and then I get an e-mail saying I am going to get an F in the class. It was overwhelming,” Shaw told KPRC.
I don't blame you for not finishing the article but they did get a comment from at least one student.
I am okay with universities being a medium of education, where one can take any courses they want, and passing and failing is irrelevant (MOOCs?)
I am okay with universities being a place to enjoy four years of camaraderie and self exploration before committing to life or career goals.
I am okay with universities being a stamp of selection, i.e you were good enough to get into harvard so you must be smart.
However, universities try to be all three and fail miserably at all of them, while leaving students in a large debt that most are unable to reconcile with what they got out of it, along with a life-long 'average gpa' that barely reflects abilities.
When the thread topic title starts with "Texas College Professor" on a US hosted web site, in English, not appending "in the USA" to every single assertion is not unreasonable.
Those of us outside the US may feel it's naive, but it's unlikely they'll change. The simplest thing for us to do is to assume they always mean USA-[topic].
Even if you take the money factor away, Have non-US universities really figured out higher education? Most of them tend to either be a lot more rigid in structure, or they copy from the US system.
Not saying that this approach is "better" - just that it suited me!
This whole graduate in 4 years idea, is primarily driven by the college rankings. The lack of a good metric for post college "success" or information learned, means the rankings rely on feel good metrics like the average number of years to graduation.
There's not really anything to take from this article. When this sort of thing happens, the department hands the class off to someone else, the instructor is disciplined in some way, and life goes on. The students won't receive an ideal semester's worth of instruction, but that happens sometimes. The university probably ought to find some way to let students who want to take the class over to do so at no cost, but I have no idea if that's likely. The students who would rather not take the class over shouldn't have to. One class is not going to make or break their education. Meanwhile, they've learned that sometimes spectacular flameouts happen, and they have an interesting story to tell for the rest of their lives.
The problem I have with this story is that someone went to the media with rather than dealing with the school administration. Based on KPRC's online video of the report, it was probably John R Shaw Jr. The video was poorly made. About half of the video is shots of the same empty classroom. Another part is where they stage John walking on the sidewalk. Due to poor editing, you can see him turn around before walking and suppressing a smile.
The only reason that I can surmise that this is in the news rather than being dealt with appropriately, is because John R Shaw Jr probably wanted 15 minutes of fame. He says he has a job offer, but after this, I can't imagine what company is going to want to hire him if he goes to the media instead of the appropriate route every time he feels slighted.
"...he added that the university wasn't responding to his complaints about their behavior, pushing him to take this drastic step."
I look at that like a contract. Professor presented students with a grading scale, students accept by staying in the class or withdraw from the class.
Granted I know nothing about this particular incident, but it could be an interesting case to read about if it were to go to court.
"The court finds no legal support for treating a course syllabus as a contract. The few courts that have considered the issue have concluded that a syllabus does not constitute a contract....Indeed, a valid contract requires several elements, including mutual agreement and valuable consideration....A course syllabus — which commonly outlines reading requirements, test dates and the like — does not have any such attributes." Gabriel v. Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences – Vermont Campus
"[A syllabus] does not contractually obligate the college but instead, is a variable metric devised by the individual course instructor." - Miller v. MacMurray College
"There is no contract between a professor or instructor and a student created by the syllabus or university guidelines. A professor or instructor’s failure to abide by the syllabus or university guidelines will be actionable only under the same circumstances that any other academic evaluation decision is justiciable: that is when the conduct is alleged to be arbitrary or capricious or to constitute bad faith" - Collins v. Grier
I'm not surprised a syllabus is not a contract but I do think that most universities, when presented with a situation like this, have it in their interest to honor the syllabus.
Universities do not create syllabi, individual professors do for individual classes. Some universities don't even require a professor to give one to their students. I don't see how a syllabus is even really relevant here at all because (University wide) student honor/conduct codes and the like are what actually applies here.
Courts generally stay out of grading disputes (for good reason!)
"University faculties must have the widest range of discretion in making judgments as to the academic performance of students and their entitlement to promotion or graduation." - Board of Curators of the University of Missouri v. Horowitz (Supreme Court)
Not only that the probability of this going to court is zero - the university provided a replacement professor to assign grades instead of failing the class.
I also read about this in another paper this morning and it said that the university had assigned security to this class previously due to its behavior.
Generally, professors should try to find a balance that sets the syllabus to be difficult but still doable--difficult enough that students don't blow off the work, but also not so difficult as to frighten them away and cause them to drop in the first few weeks. Plus you can always move the grading scale down later which makes the students quite happy later in the term. Failing someone because they didn't muster up to this sort of syllabus is more "difficult" for the administration to roll over.
"Difficult" in the sense that admin will maybe, possibly sense a vague pang of internal conflict and disease (assuming they still have any sense of agency whatsoever) while rubberstamping the override.
I'm all for failing classes pervasive cheating. There isn't enough social pressure in schools to name and shame cheaters.
I'm all for failing individuals who cheat, including every single student in a class if that's the case. It's hard to tell if that's what's happened here. It kind of looks like the prof is (rightly) fed up with a bunch of things and (questionably) throwing a tantrum.
As for pressure to name and shame cheaters, note that it is usually a huge hassle to formally charge students with cheating. I know people who deal with this by giving exams that are hard to cheat on and really hard to pass without having done the assignments. The alternative involves a lot of interactions with the university bureaucracy for each case -- as it probably should.
Not a contract, but the terms and expectations of the class set out as clearly as possible in advance.
In this case, this has failed. The professor has then tried to punish all the students on his own whim, presumably because of the actions of a minority.
What about the other students: those who didn't cheat, those who didn't spread rumours, those who didn't contribute to an unsafe atmosphere, and those who met the educational goals of the class? There's no possible way the whole class deserves a blanket fail. Thankfully the faculty realise this.
As a faculty member, I can understand someone wanting to fail an entire class - some classes are just bad, and some students are bad people - but you just can't do it. If someone is disrupting the learning environment, they have to be removed. You're performing when you enter the classroom, and you have to deal with the hecklers and the critics.
The professor felt devalued from class behaviour, so he "made himself scarce". After establishing credibility by telling us about his past experiences and successes, he quits for reasons we can all empathize with. Scarsity, social proof and authority are 3 of the six principles described by Cialdini's Influence.
I wish we had a black box recorder for organizational and cultural failures.
[edited tone to convey agreement]
That seems pretty clear cut to me, definitely a bad move. It can't be justified, solves no problems and punishes innocent students.
I'd understand why he'd fail some of his students, and I can also imagine situations where it's tricky to pinpoint and isolate the unwilling students from his class, and if made out to be a clown day in day out, lacking the proper instruments, management backing and (understandably) mental fortitude, that you'd leave the school at some point.
But how that translates to giving an F to an entire class, including students who bore no responsibility and were as powerless to keep the class going the right way as he was, is beyond me.
What exactly did he teach? It doesn't appear he learned very much about "management".
Imagine a manager firing all 30 of his direct reports. What would you suspect was the problem, the manager or the workers? Same thing here.
Perhaps Professor Horwitz should get a real management job. Then he'd learn how easy he'd had it for the past two decades.
Well, "the manager's manager" is an option here too. "Mismatch of responsibility and authority" is certainly a fundamental problem that schools at all levels from kindergarten to university have been struggling with as our society goes through its social changes, as we keep loading responsibilities on to the teachers even as we strip away their authority.
Whether or not this is the case, I don't know. As others have observed, there isn't anywhere near enough info to conclude anything here.
Failing isn't like firing, its more like giving an maximally unsatisfactory performance review (and, really, more like being doing so as one of a panel of reviewers .) Professors, generally, neither admit nor dismiss students from the university (which is the nearest parallel to hiring and firing), and don't generally act as "supervisors" in other respects (except in the case when a faculty member has an "advisor" relationship to a student, particular a graduate student, but that's different than the relationship of an instructor to students enrolled in a course.)
“The administration is all about passing these kids through and making as much money as possible,” he said.
Horwitz acknowledged that “a few” of the best performers might not deserve an F. But the school wouldn’t let him teach just those students, so he had no choice but to flunk everyone and leave the course, he said.
[0] Assuming that it is an accurate representation of what he said. I was once the subject of a friendly story in my local paper, and, even with the best of intentions on the reporter's part, I was amazed at how different what she wrote was from what I meant (and, I believe, said).
I don't see any way how A&M is not negligent in performing their duty to assure an environment to allow him to perform his contractual obligation to teach the students that are there to learn. Especially if he requested that the disruptive students leave and / or be removed from the class, he and the affected students that were possibly not contributing to the disruption should really be suing the university for contract non-performance. If you go to a university and expect education and instruction and the school does not perform it's duty to assure that happens, they are in breach of contract. There doesn't seem to be any real difference from any other service contract.
It is every professional's responsibility to deal professionally even with unprofessional behaviour. That doesn't mean tolerating or excusing the behaviour.
For example, as a teacher, if I am repeatedly provoked and harrassed by students (which has never happened!), then I am within my rights to ask them to stop, to call security, and even to refuse to return to the classroom until some assurance is made that it is a safe environment. That is a professional response to unprofessional behaviour.
What I am not entitled to do is to say that there are some good apples, but, because of the few (or many) bad apples, I am going to fail everyone. That is an unprofessional response.
More interestingly, why should a single grade matter so much? Especially when it can so easily be due to the whims of the professor or to extraordinary personal circumstances of the student? Of course, it does matter in practice, and that's the bigger problem that I think is showcased by stories like these.
The kind of thing discussed in this article would absolutely not fly at my university. We are expected to formulate standards for grading, inform the students of these standards, and follow them when assigning grades.
A relatively standard term for grading in ways that does not follow announced standards is "capricious grading". And many -- perhaps most, perhaps all -- U.S. universities now have official policies against it. Egregious violations of such policies would be grounds for various kinds of penalities/punishment.
That is not to say that cheating is irrelevant. For example, every syllabus I write contains the line, "Academic dishonesty will not be tolerated, and will be dealt with according to [my school's] procedures."
In another comment, user hn_ says, "A syllabus is not a contract." This is correct. That means that a syllabus is not enforceable in a court of law. However, university policy may still dictate that a syllabus is an ironclad statement of how the course will be conducted.
So, for example, I have seen a student make a complaint against a professor and take it up the chain of command. The first question asked by each of the administrators the complaint came to was, "What does the syllabus say?" If the professor is found to be acting in accordance with the course syllabus, then the student has a much harder time making a case -- at the very least.
A related issue, which seems to be an important one in the case mentioned in the article, is that grading standards are generally to be applied individually. There is such a thing as group work, of course; in such cases we make it clear that each person in the group is judged by the performance of the group as a whole.
Now, I don't know how accurately this article is representing the actual events that occurred. But if Horwitz really is assigning individual grades based on a nebulous judgement about the class as a whole, then I would say he is clearly guilty of a violation of professional ethics. What "the class deserves" is simply irrelevant to an individual's grade.
From the experience with the two professors I knew trying something like that, I think that guy will be surprised that students and the other profs will bond together simply to avoid more trouble and continue with the university life.
Does he need a sabbatical? Absolutely. It sounds like after one-too-many classes of willfully unteachable students (as in students that refuse to learn, not students that are unable to learn), enough was enough and he had had it with these motherf%$&ing students in this motherf%$&ing school.
I think a lot of us here on HN can empathize with overwork and burnout, and it sounds like this professor may have ignored the warning signs for too long. I hope he can get the help he needs.
That appears highly unlikely given past experience:
"Speaking with the Houston Chronicle, he added that the university wasn’t responding to his complaints about their behavior"
Sounds like a bunch of straight-shooters with middle management written all over them. ;)