The Great Divide
Yesterday I went to a meeting of the college senate (that makes me a senator, I think!). It was my first since my boss asked me to be our rep. I may have missed one other as the email for this one just barely caught my attention and then I remembered I was supposed to go! In any case, I'm hoping it will be my only one since the next will be in January and my hope is to be ensconced in the close-to-home-job by then. (Speaking of which, I haven't heard anything about an interview yet. I will become concerned if I don't here next week sometime.) In any case, the meeting was interesting. They were coming to a final vote on a plagiarism policy. One of the faculty had suggested adding submitting the same paper to two classes without notice, to the list of honor offenses. The students on the committee had spoken to their peers and said that they believed that their work was their own and they had the right to use it as they wished. They felt that under the new rule, they would lose ownership when the paper was submitted to the teacher. The faculty said that things certainly had changed from when they were in school--they never would have considered submitting the same paper twice. College was all about learning new things and increasing the body of knowledge in the world. They opined that the students who tried to do this kind of thing were dishonest and just lazy.
I brought up the possibility that this was an example of the tension between the institutional purpose of education versus giving credentials. The students were just being practical. If one would go for two, that was an opportunity to be taken advantage of. If one is paying $100,000 for an opportunity to get a credential, one doesn't want to gamble on the outcome. Added to that (brought up by the students and others) was that with many of the students working one or two jobs and have family obligations, there isn't the luxury of time for the kind of exploration that constituted a college education in the past.
The kinds of assumptions behind the attitudes of the faculty are disquieting. It would be elitism if it were more conscious, but it seems to be a nostalgia for lost times and an obliviousness to the realities of other people's lives.
On the other hand, it concerns me that the scope of education is getting narrower and narrower in order to continue to try to make our very broken system to work. There are so few opportunities for students in k-12 to figure things out and apply concepts to new material. Then, in college they are expected to do those things without any of the tools. SInce I don't see revolutionizing the whole system anytime soon, I guess working on one teacher at a time is the mode.
I hope this wasn't too boring :-)
I brought up the possibility that this was an example of the tension between the institutional purpose of education versus giving credentials. The students were just being practical. If one would go for two, that was an opportunity to be taken advantage of. If one is paying $100,000 for an opportunity to get a credential, one doesn't want to gamble on the outcome. Added to that (brought up by the students and others) was that with many of the students working one or two jobs and have family obligations, there isn't the luxury of time for the kind of exploration that constituted a college education in the past.
The kinds of assumptions behind the attitudes of the faculty are disquieting. It would be elitism if it were more conscious, but it seems to be a nostalgia for lost times and an obliviousness to the realities of other people's lives.
On the other hand, it concerns me that the scope of education is getting narrower and narrower in order to continue to try to make our very broken system to work. There are so few opportunities for students in k-12 to figure things out and apply concepts to new material. Then, in college they are expected to do those things without any of the tools. SInce I don't see revolutionizing the whole system anytime soon, I guess working on one teacher at a time is the mode.
I hope this wasn't too boring :-)