Joint Humanities & Computer Science Majors at Stanford

From the Chronicle of Higher Education (21 March 2014)

What the Survey Did Not Ask

I recently spent a half an hour filling out yet another higher education survey instrument. Lots to say about methodological issues, but also about content. One thing that's always interesting is how what is asked, and how it's asked, reveals the politics of the moment in higher education. And in institution-specific addenda, you get a real clear-eyed view of what's on the mind of institutional leadership. And what's not.

Efficient Evaluation of Student Work

Ask any teacher - at any level of education - about their job and "time stress" and its variants will be a number one complaint.  It's no surprise; in higher education, at least, there's been a steady contraction of clerical support for professors along with a steady expansion of the clerical tasks they are given, a stagnation of resources and wages along with an expansion of the roles they are expected to play, and a steady decline in student preparation and steady increase in what students expect from teachers.

That said, I've noticed over the years that the average professor (myself included) is sometimes not the model of efficiency in terms of how s/he organizes work.  It's common to fall into the trap of being busy rather than being productive.  Sometimes when I catch myself being especially inefficient I notice that I feel too busy to do it more efficiently. As illogical as that sounds, it happens a lot.  As an antidote to that vicious circle, I keep yellow stickies that remind me TO be efficient and lists of time-saving tips I've discovered or gotten from colleagues.

One activity that absorbs lots of time (and for me at least generates lots of frustration and strongly tempts me toward procrastination) is grading.  And so here's a list of ideas for making the grading process a bit more systematic, less onerous, faster, more efficient.

I limit this list to things that make the grading process easier for the instructor.  There are other sources out there that focus on fairness, pedagogical effectiveness, and so on. I certainly don't deploy all of these at once, but sometimes pausing, reading through ideas like these, and thinking about the process is enough to help me spend less energy just spinning my wheels.

1. At the start of the semester put all of your courses' due dates on a single calendar.  Have you timed things in a manner that's going to make you insane (or cause you to delay getting papers back to students) at midterm?
2. Design assignments with grading in mind.
3. Budget your time. As early as when designing syllabus allocate time for grading in connection with assignment due dates. Be realistic.
4. Develop a shorthand for the most common comments and provide students with a key.
5. Once a comment shows up on a certain number of papers just put it in a "general feedback document," perhaps giving it a number or abbreviation for use on individual papers.
   
6. If you haven't done it already, before you start grading, or after skimming through a random sample of papers, write down some notes about your grading criteria - what do you want to keep an eye out for, etc.
7. Be organized about simple stuff like receiving the papers, filing them, etc. Take 3 minutes before papers are due and write down what the process will be.
8. Require a "I did the basics affidavit" (Proofread, check; spellcheck, check; Spent at least 5 hours, check) with paper. Do not "grade" for these things. List not checked, paper returned.
9. Don't copy edit.  Papers that are seriously unproofread are not worth your time.
10. Consider blind grading not just because it might be fair but because it can save you time and emotional energy of thinking about particular students as you grade and write comments.
    
11. Figure out when using a rubric saves time and when it just creates more work for you.
12. Grade exams and problem sets by questions, and not by complete exams or individual submissions.
13. Type your comments rather than writing on papers. Develop quick and easy page/paragraph/line system and start each comment paragraph out with student name.  You cut and paste common remarks. Provides a record.  
14. Using a grading sheet that asks you questions about the paper or exam and forces you to answer concretely. Does the essay or answer do X? Is the title appropriate for the essay? Does the essay say what it will do?
15. Time yourself.  Develop a realistic allocation of time for each student's paper and focus on what the most useful feedback you can provide within that time frame so that you prioritize correctly. Be fairly ruthless about that allocation.  Set aside special cases that seem to be taking too long.
    
16. Writing final grade on a sticky note, or lightly in pencil. After all papers graded, check for distribution and then "ink them."
17. Focus on one skill per assignment. Or tell students your written comments will address, say, only one main strength and one main area for improvement.
18. Only grade part of an assignment (random sample, most important part, part student says is her best work).
19. Outsource the grading (swap with a colleague) and tell students. Student performance often goes up when another audience is involved.
20. Keep a teaching log. Use the papers for feedback on what you need to do a better job at getting across to students - not just as comments on this assignment, but as what they do and don't seem to be getting at this point in this course.

Some Sources for the Above

• Tips on Grading Efficiently from Teaching Guide for GSIs at UCB
• Some Ideas on Efficient and Effective Grading from University of Maryland
• "Tips for Grading and Giving Students Feedback"
• Miguel & Larson, Seattle University. Efficient and Effective Grading of Student Work

From the Majoring in the 21st Century Blog

(Not 95) Theses on General Education, etc.

General Education reform has a long history in higher education of being a no-win zone. Correct that: in any given GenEd campaign there is often a player or group of players (e.g., an administrator or administrator want-to-be who gets credit for shepherding the program through to approval (and to be fair, it's probably good training) or a department that gets a influx of resources it will never lose (even when GE is next revised) or a group of faculty who have opted out of discipline-based work and now rise to institutional importance) who manage to get something out of it.

The kudos and benefits, though, are almost never dependent on whether the program actually works and there is never any accountability for problems associated with the diversion of time, energy, and resources required by the program.

I share the Camelot-esque urge to champion the life of the mind, to fight against the forces of mediocrity in the modern world, really educate our students for the 21st century, and just generally to work for a better tomorrow, but I've seen this windmill tilted at too many times not to offer some ideas, collected over the years, about GenEd revisions. Offered partly in the spirit of provocation and healthy debate, but mostly on the (naive) optimistic belief that it IS possible to do better at higher education reform than is usually the case. The problem is that the ruts in the road are deep ones indeed.

Read the rest at Major 21

Part of the Gender Gap in Majors May Lie in Intro Courses (Sort Of)

The following describes an interesting morphing of memes on the web and something that might be especially relevant to me and my colleagues at Mills College in our role as advisors.

Harvard Economist Cladia Goldin posted a piece back when Janet Yellen was first nominated to head the Federal Reserve. She wondered whether this new "role model" might increase the number of women who major in economics. She wrote about some of her own research as well as that of others relevant to the question. In particular she discussed some work in which she discovered that

Women who thought they would major in economics often become discouraged when they don’t get sufficiently high grades in introductory courses. Men are far less likely to be discouraged by similar grades. In other words, the gradient of major choice with respect to grades in the “gateway” courses is steeper for women than for men.

In other other words, on average (assuming lots of things are equal) women may take a stronger "you can't do this" signal from not getting an A in intro courses than do men. Evidence shows it happens in economics and some STEM fields too.

This does NOT, of course, imply we should pursue gender equity through grade inflation, but it does suggest that those of use who teach and mentor young women might focus on this particular point of leverage. Not unrelated is research by Chambliss and Takacs on how important intro courses are for influencing college major and career decisions. We should, perhaps, stop focusing our energy on distribution requirements and instead focus on what goes on in intro courses and in the first year advising context that surrounds them. It's not unrelated to the message of a graduation speech I gave a few years back.

One can imagine that similar effects might exist in connection with other demographic differences.

The internet meme part is that the blog post was picked up the other day by a Washington Post writer, Catherine Rampell, and mixed in with some other research (finding that disciplines with lower grades had higher career payoffs) in a piece titled "Women should embrace the B’s in college to make more later." On Slate the headline read "Women May Be Underrepresented in STEM Because They're Too Concerned With Grades" but the article went in the direction of saying maybe it's not all about wanting to find a major where one can do well grade-wise but rather a rational assessment of the likelihood of career success in various fields.  I'm sure a little googling will turn up even more morphs.

Will more of our daughters grow up to be economists?

Likelihood of Continuing in Major by Intro Grade and Sex

Claudia Goldin: Bloomberg View
Published: October 17, 2013 - 07:13 PM

Cambridge, Mass.: The nomination of Janet Yellen to head the Federal Reserve is an important milestone. But will her appointment as the central bank’s first female chief draw more undergraduate women to the field of economics?

Yellen’s emphasis on the human toll of recessions, along with her humanity, brilliance and intellect, could spur a greater number of women to become economists. But if history is any guide, there still is a long slog ahead.

Economics is an extremely popular major — for men. Ten percent to 20 percent of all male undergraduates concentrate in the field at the top 100 universities and top 100 liberal arts colleges as ranked by U.S. News and World Report.

Nationwide, however, for every female undergraduate in the major, there are three males in the major, adjusted for relative numbers of bachelor’s degrees by sex. Among the top 100 liberal arts colleges, there are 2.6 males for every female economics major; there are 2.5 males for every female at the top 100 research universities.

Worse, these differences have widened over the last two decades.

Students often realize too late in their undergraduate studies that an understanding of economic concepts, modeling, statistics and econometrics is a helpful career and life tool. Many initially believe economics is only valuable for those who want to work in the financial and corporate sectors. (This year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences are Eugene F. Fama, Robert J. Shiller and Lars Peter Hansen, men whose work focuses on financial markets.)

Many young women don’t seem to understand that economics is also for those who have broad intellectual interests and for those with research and policy interests in health, education, poverty, inequality, crime, obesity, the environment, terrorism or infectious disease. All students should be aware of the broad applications of economics when considering an undergraduate major.

Read the Rest at Bloomberg View

See Also

• Hess, Amanda.   "Women May Be Underrepresented in STEM Because They're Too Concerned With Grades" Slate 11 March 2014
• Rampell Catherine.  "Women should embrace the B’s in college to make more later." Washington Post 11 March 2014 

First Food Courts, Next Academic Content Franchises

My conservative prediction is that within five years we will see examples of not-for-profit private colleges turning into franchises for textbook publishers such as Pearson or Cengage.  The relationship will be similar to the one colleges now have with their food service vendors.

The academic content and platform industries (textbook publishing on the one side and products like BlackBoard and TaskStream) will soon converge.  They companies that brought us the mediocrity by turning text books into Time magazine look-alikes and the companies that turn teachers into data entry clerks know a gold mine when they see one.  Students are already accessing all manner of internet content as a part of their education - why not figure out how to package the lot of it and license it to colleges and universities who will market it to students for you? 

There are almost too many contemporary trends supporting this convergence to keep count.  

The play being made by textbook companies has long been facilitated by faculty members who over-rely on textbooks (either because they are over-worked teaching 5 courses a semester or because they'd rather do their research than teach or because they are burned out).

A lot of investment in educational technology is motivated by the dream of allowing administrators to manage education centrally. As often as not there is a direct tradeoff: centralized information and control equals more clerical work for faculty and increased attractiveness of out-of-a-box teaching.

Meanwhile, the push for competency-based education that "emphasizes assessment rather than instruction" further dupes us into believing in "full digital learning experiences" as the El Dorado of higher education.

One could continue with what accreditation agencies and state and federal education departments and major educational philanthropies are up to, but you get the picture. 

This from most recent issue of Chronicle of Higher Education:

   

Read more at Chronicle.com

The "Competency" Bandwagon: Check Out the Full Itinerary

One of this decade's fads in higher education is "competency-" or "proficiency-based" education. The discourse around it is littered with phrases and concepts that are seductive to the left-leaning progressive educator. Personalized, flexible, affordable alterna-tive, transcending hours in seats, students gain ownership of their degree, accountability, employable skills, real world, etc.  

This Inside Higher Ed piece raises one alternative take: does competency-based approach to curricula so fully buy into the student as consumer that it will eliminate the "off-rubric" experiences that might not be directly applicable to some skill but that might be the very stuff of growing up, seeing the world in a new way, and the transformation that education is really all about.

Another thing for those ready to jump on the competency bandwagon to think about is who is steering the train where. Ed reformers are skilled at generating strange-bedfellows in the audience for their ideas. I might like competencies as a way of motivating pedagogical innovation, but am I on-board with those who would design college curricula around the needs of corporate employers?

See Also

• "Missouri Budget Tiff Exposes Doubts About Competency Based Education" Chronicle of Higher Education 21 March 2014.