<p>So it will be interesting to see – did other faculty members think that the quizzes were too hard? Unfair? </p>
<p>Lots of classes in college – even general ed classes – have attendance requirements, and you still don’t find the vast majority of the students failing or dropping.</p>
<p>This does remind me of a calculus professor once assigned to teach a lower division calculus course against his will. He had rather ordinary problem sets, worth a small part of the grade, and a couple of midterms that were totally proof oriented, and not particularly easy proofs – and with three proofs per test, even failing to get one gave you a D or an F. I knew a kid in the class who withdrew rather than risk losing a scholarship. To what degree are people willing to defend “academic freedom” to support a petulant professor trying to make the point that he doesn’t want to be bothered teaching lower division courses?</p>
<p>A 90% failure rate is indicative of pi** poor teaching, and not insufficient student effort/ability. I’d bet this has been going on for a long time and things finally came to a head. And I am equally sure this situation would even had occurred if she were not protected by an outdated and destructive notion of “tenure”.</p>
<p>While I agree with many of comments on this topic regarding the importance of mastery of the subject matter, the use of tests to confirm that, and the importance of engaged attendance at classes, I don’t get a positive impression of this particular instructor.</p>
<p>My sense from the article referenced by the OP is that this instructor created a hostile classroom environment. The result of such environments, whether in the classroom, or in the workplace is predictable: withdrawal, and lack of acceptance of the leader – whether teacher or manager.</p>
<p>That this introductory college-level biology teacher would place the question:</p>
<p>“Describe the biggest ‘AHA’ reaction you had during the course.”</p>
<p>in a biology exam suggests lack of touch with the students. I can imagine such a question in a middle-school course, but not in a college level course.</p>
<p>"That this introductory college-level biology teacher would place the question:</p>
<p>“Describe the biggest ‘AHA’ reaction you had during the course.”</p>
<p>in a biology exam suggests lack of touch with the students. I can imagine such a question in a middle-school course, but not in a college level course.
"</p>
<p>Seems like a pretty easy question – a light question to offer students a chance to easily get a few points , and for the teacher to find out what the students did find enlightening. In fact, sounds like a prof trying to be in touch with students, whose answers to such questions can be very surprising.</p>
<p>For instance, when I took a group of students to the Caribbean one spring break, at the end of each day, I asked students to fill out a form that among other things asked what risk they felt they took that day. I was surprised that for one student, it was a big deal to literally cross the street by himself in the city in which we were staying, a city that was the same size or smaller than the small U.S. city where their college was located.</p>
<p>"Lots of classes in college – even general ed classes – have attendance requirements, and you still don’t find the vast majority of the students failing or dropping.:</p>
<p>In many cases, that’s because professors will give students Bs for doing the very bare minimum. That way, the professors don’t have to deal with complaints from parents and spineless deans.</p>
<p>Sounds like she wastes a lot of instruction time on daily quizzes. Since the questions have 10 possible answers, a student can’t even complete the quizzes in a timely manner.</p>
<p>She sounds like a nut.
**
If it was discovered that Dr. Amy Bishop had been doing this**, everyone would have been saying that it was obvious how nutty this lady was. (I’m not suggesting that this lady would shoot anyone.)</p>
<p>I think the Professor was definitely in the wrong. I am teaching a few classes this year for the first time. I am writing quizzes and exams. I don’t curve and don’t need to but what I do have to do is occasionally throw out a question because everyone or nearly everyone gets it wrong. As a teacher, that tells me that either I didn’t cover that material well enough or the question was confusing. I just gave a midterm a few weeks ago and one question that I had thought was perfectly clear turned out to have more than half the students take in a different way. I did not grade them down for my unclear question. </p>
<p>One of the hardest things to do is to teach a beginning class of a subject where you think the students have some knowledge but you are not sure how much. I was doing that this year and so I gave a completely anonymous quiz at the start of the first class just so I could adjust my teaching to the level of the class. As it was, my initial plans were correct but they could have just as easily been too easy or too hard. Since the professor hadn’t taught an introductory class for fifteen years, I think she didn’t adequately adjust her expectations to the level these students were at. This was a freshman class of non pre-meds. How hard should the bio be? Certainly not at the same level as the bio for bio majors or pre-meds.</p>
<p>I would expect that an intro to biology class (even for non-majors) to be a different course at CalTech than intro to biology for non-majors at a state university like LSU where the 25th-75th percentile ACT math score is from 21-27.</p>
<p>I’ll share an anecdote from the local flagship my son attends during his senior HS year, since it is on my mind, and may (<em>may</em>) have some relevance to this LSU story.</p>
<p>Son is a talented math/science student, but not a genius. My family is littered with geniuses – I recognize them. He is taking a vector analysis class which is typically the last or next to last maths class that engineers take, and spends 3 - 5 hours a week doing the homework. His uncurved grade from tests is around 95, while the class median is in the 60’s. </p>
<p>The only way these kids graduate (and at this stage, graduation is expected) is through grade inflation. This is not simple grade curving to normalize tests to a presumed typical student cohort, it is a mass dumbing down of what it takes to be an engineer.</p>
<p>Therein lies the question for LSU: are they grading to pass a low student performance standard ? The prof obviously thought so.</p>
<p>“I would expect that an intro to biology class (even for non-majors) to be a different course at CalTech than intro to biology for non-majors at a state university like LSU…”</p>
<p>I wonder whether anyone would have doubted that the professor was a poor teacher had this situation occurred at CalTech, and whether her removal would have been questioned?</p>
<p>I also agree that Military Mom got it right. </p>
<p>Father05, in my defense I said I didn’t know if she had taught “the” (bio for non-majors) course before. The article said she hadn’t taught “an” introductory course in 15 years. She may have taught the course for the Bio/pre-med majors in the past and not the course she was teaching for non-majors. I was making the point that she wasn’t aware of how deficient her non-bio majors may have been in her starting couple of weeks in the course.</p>
<p>As to the pop-quiz defense BigTrees, I’m not buying the “too much time testing, not enough time teaching” argument. If you aren’t frequently measuring retention in a course where later concepts are built upon earlier material, you can get quite far off into the weeds before you realize how lost your students are. While daily may be a bit much, if the quizzes are short (10 minutes), you are not hurting your lecture. In fact, if you discuss the correct answers immediately following as a leadin to your next topic, it can help get the students’ thinking into what you are about to discuss. The daily pop quiz, if structured correctly can be a very effective tool in teaching.</p>
<p>As to the 10 answer multiple-guess questions, if a teacher can find 9 answers to a question that are “that close” to the actual answer that students can’t discern the difference, there may be a problem. My guess is that most of the 9 wrong answers are so incorrect that if you had done a cursory reading of the material you could eliminate most of them without hesitating. It didn’t sound like the students here were complaining about not enough time on the test. I’m sure the 10 answers were probably meant to discourage students from relying on random luck to pass the course. I think it was a little too successful in this case.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, this intro to bio for non-majors was probably a course most took because they were required to take a lab science (fairly typical for a state-U). Many students drop out early when they discover they aren’t in the Mick class for these requirements. Homberger made that entirely clear very early. You can’t hang a professor for students shopping for an easy grade.</p>
<p>That being said, Homberger clearly did not execute well, especially with regards to understanding the desired outcome (both by the department and the students). It sounds like she didn’t exactly jump up and volunteer to teach the course (others suggested it) nor did it sound like they help her to prepare for teaching this level of student. Plenty of failings here. Easy to throw rocks at Homberger. Definitely some responsibility for being a bit tone-deaf to the students’ level of preparedness for what she was asking them to do.</p>
<p>10 minutes in a 50 minute lecture is 20%. You can’t reduce your lecture by 20% and not have the students learning suffer (unless your lectures are so bad that they don’t learn something anyway). That is like saying you can skip Fridays at work for a year and nobody would miss you being gone. </p>
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<p>In that case, students wouldn’t be complaining if a cursory reading of the material was sufficient. Students really don’t go complaining to administration when standards are tough but passable. They complain when they feel it is impossible to pass.</p>
<p>If the 10 minutes of quiz has the students thinking about concepts that will be built upon in the next 40 minutes, it is time well spent. A certain portion of every lecture should be referring to previously covered material. If instructors never retrace their previous material, they miss an opportunity to interconnect the topics.</p>
<p>And in many types of work, spending 20% of your time reviewing your previously covered work is not outrageous, especially if you are in a job that requires you to switch topics frequently.</p>
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<p>A student who is totally lost (either because they haven’t followed carefully or haven’t been taught well) will complain about anything that isn’t like other courses. I wouldn’t put too much stock in students’ critique of test design. They are lost; they are lashing out. If everyone is complaining about the grades, even the ones who didn’t read the book will complain about an unusual test design. That is easy to do.</p>
<p>“In that case, students wouldn’t be complaining if a cursory reading of the material was sufficient. Students really don’t go complaining to administration when standards are tough but passable. They complain when they feel it is impossible to pass.”</p>
<p>Many students complain when they are required to study for a course. They think they deserve at least “Bs” for showing up --when they feel like it. As MLK said, “Nothing pains some people more than having to think.” I encountered many students like that.</p>
<p>That’s your opinion and you are entitled to it.</p>
<p>When I was a student (a few years ago) I actually saw a lot of students who enjoyed learning and worked hard in classes. Yes, they didn’t like bad grades but they put serious effort into classes and graduated with a lot of knowledge.</p>
<p>Apparantly the teachers here just think students are lazy. That’s fine, but if that’s your opinion of students I think you’re in the wrong business.</p>
<p>Why should Student B’s grade have any bearing on Student A’s grade? An “A” should mean “exceptional understanding of the subject matter,” not “there happen to be a lot of slackers in my class and I really shine by comparison.”</p>
<p>Maybe this teacher’s class was indeed too hard . . . Maybe she was focusing on minutiae from the textbook rather than the underpinnings of biology. But I have to echo her question . . . “Why didn’t the university talk to her or sit in on her course?” Why was the “solution” to yank her off the course instead of meeting with her and saying, “Hey, we have some concerns. Let’s talk about them and address them.”</p>