WTF? According to the New York Times:
With their arsenal of electronic gadgets, students these days find it easier to cheat. And so, faced with an array of inventive techniques in recent years, college officials find themselves in a new game of cat and mouse, trying to outwit would-be cheats this exam season with a range of strategies — cutting off Internet access from laptops, demanding the surrender of cellphones before tests or simply requiring that exams be taken the old-fashioned way, with pens and paper.
When (and where) did students stop writing exams? Seriously. It's news to me that students write their essay exams on a laptop!
Link: Colleges Chase as Cheats Shift to Higher Tech - New York Times.
]]>Proof that women are better students and that Linfield was a bit different than the state schools:
After six years, 59 percent of female students had earned degrees, while 53 percent of male students had. By institution type, 64 percent of students at private nonprofit colleges had a degree within six years, compared with 53 percent of those at public colleges and 25 percent of those at private for-profit colleges.
Link: The Chronicle
]]>Technology is not always a good thing, something that parents of young children ought to be aware of. As a future parent, I find the trend towards more tech toys for babies to be troubling. Consider:
New media products for babies, toddlers and preschoolers began flooding the market in the late 1990's, starting with video series like "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby." But now, the young children's market has exploded into a host of new and more elaborate electronics for pre-schoolers, including video game consoles like the V.Smile and handheld game systems like the Leapster, all marketed as educational. Despite the commercial success, though, a report released yesterday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, "A Teacher in the Living Room? Educational Media for Babies, Toddlers and Pre-schoolers," indicates there is little understanding of how the new media affect young children - and almost no research to support the idea that they are educational.
Now I have no problem with a parent putting a baby in front of a "Care Bears" video for twenty minutes to balance the checkbook or cook dinner, so I definitely have no problem putting them in front of a "Baby Einstein" video for few minutes. However, the idea that this or other technology is going to give a child some sort of advantage in life is just not supported by any evidence. There are simply no documented benefits to out weigh the costs. In fact:
In 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended no screen time at all for babies under 2, out of concern that the increasing use of media might displace human interaction and impede the crucially important brain growth and development of a baby's first two years. But it is a recommendation that parents routinely ignore. According to Kaiser, babies 6 months to 3 years old spend, on average, an hour a day watching TV and 47 minutes a day on other screen media, like videos, computers and video games.
I will most likely plop my future progeny in front of the Tivo to keep them occupied at times. I mean, I already plop my cats in front of the TV to watch a DVD of birds, fish, and rodents to keep them busy and entertained. Therefore, I know I cannot guarantee zero screen time for my young children. I can however guarantee that the most technological thing they are going to have is a speak-and-spell and that they will not be playing on a computer until they start school.
Link: See Baby Touch a Screen. But Does Baby Get It? - New York Times.
]]>The College gender gap is widening:
In May, the Minnesota Office of Higher Education posted the inevitable culmination of a trend: Last year for the first time, women earned more than half the degrees granted statewide in every category, be it associate, bachelor, master, doctoral or professional …
There are more men than women ages 18-24 in the USA - 15 million vs. 14.2 million, according to a Census Bureau estimate last year. But nationally, the male/female ratio on campus today is 43/57, a reversal from the late 1960s and well beyond the nearly even splits of the mid-1970s.
At first blush, your first thought is probably that this is a good sign of women's progress and you would probably be right. However, there is a darker side to the story:
Today, though, the blue-collar jobs that once attracted male high school graduates are drying up. More boys are dropping out of high school and out of college. And as the gender gap widens, concern about the educational aspirations of young men appears to be gaining traction, albeit cautiously.
But even as evidence of a problem - a crisis, some say - mounts, "there's a complacency about this topic," McCorkell says.
Young men are falling apart and we need to do something about it.
]]>This makes me feel good about being on the market:
Relax. The job talk is just a short, casual way for us to get to know you -- then judge you, ridicule you, and use you as a pawn in our vicious intradepartmental rivalries. (free)
Link: Job-Talk Blues
]]>Ahh, the joys of tenure reform. Some of the latest suggestions:
- Giving young professors up to 10 years -- instead of 6 -- to earn tenure.
- Allowing faculty members to work part time for up to five years at a time.
- Granting multiyear leaves to professors for personal and professional reasons.
- Creating postdoctoral jobs to help people who have stepped out of academe after earning their Ph.D.'s, perhaps to raise a family, to re-enter their careers in higher education.
While I applaud the effort to make academia less hostile to having a family life, isn't it about time we just gave up? Maybe having a defeatist attitude for a few years will improve the chances of actually getting some meaningful reform.
Currently playing in iTunes: The Road to Mandalay by Robbie Williams
]]>Good news if you are an advocate of raising tuition in Germany:
In a decision welcomed by university leaders but lamented by students, Germany's highest court ruled on Wednesday that a ban on tuition, imposed by the federal government in 2002, was unconstitutional.
The eight-judge panel of the Federal Constitutional Court, in Karlsruhe, decided in favor of the six states that had sued to overturn the ban, saying it violated Germany's postwar Constitution, which makes education the preserve of the 16 states, or Länder, rather than the federal government.
Germany's universities, once world renowned, have suffered under the current system, as cash-strapped state governments have cut back on financing for higher education. University classrooms are notoriously overcrowded, and facilities are often ill equipped and poorly maintained. Many universities have eliminated entire departments to save money, and those that remain are often understaffed. A recent ranking by The Times Higher Education Supplement of the world's leading universities placed only one German institution -- the University of Heidelberg -- in the top 50.
German university students pay no tuition and tend to take far longer to graduate than their counterparts in other European countries. The southern state of Baden-Württemberg, where the University of Heidelberg is located, became the first to impose tuition on long-term students in 1998, when it began charging undergraduates who had been pursuing their degrees for more than six years 1,000 marks, or about $550, a semester.
I have to admit I'm glad to see this. While I think the move to transform European systems of higher education into an "American model" is ill-advised, the resistance to making students pay in the UK and Germany (among other places) has really prevented them from raising the capital necessary to make their educational system top-rate.
]]>The Chronicle of Higher Education in an article entitled Four Academic Plagiarists You've Never Heard Of: How Many More Are Out There? comes to a sobering conclusion:
While this article delves into a few cases we uncovered, our reporting suggests that what we found is not exceptional. Indeed, an editor at History News Network receives so many tips about purported plagiarism that he now investigates only those involving well-known scholars. A professor at Texas A&M International University was bombarded with hundreds of e-mail messages after writing about being plagiarized. Many of them were from graduate students and professors who believed that they, too, had been victims.
In one of the rare surveys conducted about plagiarism, two University of Alabama economists this year asked 1,200 of their colleagues if they believed their work had ever been stolen. A startling 40 percent answered yes. While not a random sample, the responses still represent hundreds of cases of alleged plagiarism.
Very few of them will ever be dragged into the sunlight. That's because academe often discourages victims from seeking justice, and when they do, tends to ignore their complaints -- a kind of scholarly "don't ask, don't tell" policy. "It's like cockroaches," says Peter Charles Hoffer, a University of Georgia historian and author of a recent book about academic fraud. "For every one you see on the kitchen floor, there are a hundred behind the stove."
Read the rest of the article if you want to see examples of how dishonest academics have become and how little recourse people have when their work is stolen.
]]>I can't tell. Will Google adding major libraries to its database make librarians happy or sad?
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