Archive for May, 2011

Scheme involved cell phones and a pinhole camera

Two men in Richmond, B.C. are charged with six offences each, including theft, after one helped the other to cheat on his Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) in January, according to CBC News. Police say that Josiah Miguel Ruben, who was at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, used a pinhole camera and a cell phone to transmit answers to co-conspirator Houmam Rezazadeh-Azar, who was writing the test in Victoria, B.C. and sending photos of the questions.

Police say that Ruben was getting the answers from three students who had been told they were taking a test for a job as an MCAT instructor. It was those students who became suspicious and alerted the police after they found it odd that they were presented with low-quality images of MCAT questions and one of them discovered online that MCATs were being held elsewhere that very minute. Cell phone records showed that Rezazadeh-Azar was in contact with Ruben the entire time.

Should students be able to negotiate their final grades?

There’s plenty to hate about grading. Professors hate coming up with the grades, for one thing, and, unless the grades are very high, students hate getting them. Besides, the whole process, as almost everyone seems to agree, interferes with the learning dynamic. Knowing the importance of grades, students work towards the grade more than learning itself. Professors resent students who only seem to care about what’s going to be on the test.

Many solutions have been suggested. Pass/fail grading has been proposed as a way to get students to learn for its own sake, but there is good reason to believe that,  for most students, a pass/fail system discourages hard work. After all, why do your best when you’re going to get the same grade as the guy next to you who’s just sliding by?

Contract grading –where students are guaranteed a certain grade provided they do enough work–has similar problems: how do you distinguish those who have superior mastery of the material from those who have merely got the gist of it?

A few years ago I had a conversation with a close friend of mine who proposed a radical solution to this problem, a solution I have never had the guts to try: negotiated grades. The idea is that students would do their normal work throughout the year, getting feedback, but not actual grades. The students might be required to come and talk to their professor a couple times over the course of the semester to get a sense of how they are doing, and at the end of the course they would meet, look over all the work the student has done and decide together on what would be a reasonable grade for that work.

This model has a lot of potential. For one thing, marking papers would be less onerous knowing that no specific grade had to be applied. The feedback would no longer be designed to justify the grade but rather to really help the student to improve. The student, out from under the tyranny of constant evaluation, would have the freedom to really try things, knowing that one bad result is not going to sink her chances in the course. Most importantly, the student and the professor become what they ought to be: two partners in learning rather than a stern master and a cowed apprentice.

The potential for disaster is also great. It’s easy to imagine students slacking off all year, telling their friends it’s okay because “in this course you just get whatever grade you want.” And what happens when the student comes to the final meeting confident that he has done A-level work while the prof thinks he deserves a D? Do they meet in the middle with a C+ or B-? Or does the prof get final say? But then what happened to the negotiation? And isn’t there an incentive for students to high-ball their profs by proposing a grade higher than they deserve so that they end up with something they are happy with?

I will probably continue to mull this idea for some time. It’s like cold fusion — it’s such a revolutionary  idea that someone has to be working on it. If anybody makes it work, let me know.

Tories call for elimination of foreign scholarships program

Ontario’s government, which will fight an election this fall, outlined its plan for higher education yesterday in Toronto and the opposition PC Party responded with their education platform. John Milloy, Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, said that the Liberals’ plan, Putting Students First, is a response to a single goal of Ontario families that can be summarized as: “I want my kids to go on in school and get a good job.”  The most striking detail of the plan is that the government would negotiate mandate agreements with institutions “to align both provincial priorities and institutional aspirations.” That could mean that universities and colleges will be asked to focus on delivering what they deliver best, whether that’s applied degrees, two-year college certificates, or the traditional teaching-research model. The need for more “specialization” was a central conclusion of the 2009 book Academic Transformations, The Forces Reshaping Higher Education in Ontario, written by four of the country’s leading post-secondary researchers. They argued that Ontario wastes money by teaching such a high percentage of students in research-intensive universities, when many students don’t want or need that type of education. The authors called for measures that would compel existing institutions to concentrate more on certain kinds of activities and less on others. The Ontario PC party’s platform calls for the elimination of Ontario’s $30-million Trillium Scholarships for foreign students.

Lunabotics Mining Prize includes tickets to space shuttle launch

Students from Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont. have won the NASA Lunabotics Mining Competition, beating out teams from 40 other universities, reports CBC News. The prize was awarded to the team whose robot collected and deposited the most lunar-type material in 15 minutes. Laurentian’s robot carried 237 kilograms — far more than the second place robot, which carried 172 kilos. ”They won the most prestigious prize you could win for an engineering student,” Laurentian faculty adviser Markus Timusk told CBC, adding that it’s ”an especially sweet victory” because the students will be the first-ever graduates of the school’s mechanical engineering program. The team won $5,000 cash and VIP passes to the July launch of the space shuttle Atlantis. McGill University was the only other Canadian team in the competition.

Nearby condo dwellers fear “ghosts”

A plan to build a hospice on the University of British Columbia campus is slated for approval in June, despite opposition from neighbouring condo-dwellers, who are worried about “bad luck” and “ghosts.”

They have protested the prospective 15-bed palliative since January because of culturally-specific fears. “Eighty per cent of the residents in this building are Asian, and 100 per cent of them are very upset,” said condo spokeswoman Janet Fan, at the time. “In Chinese culture, we are against having dying people in your backyard.”

While the project was initially delayed, a May 25 staff report recommends facility approval, to be finalized sometime next month.

I hope we will see construction sometime thereafter. This particular spin on ‘residents vs. new building’ can’t help but elicit hyperbole. You can dress is up with culturally sensitive language and subtle empathetic nods, but the issue will still be that a group of million-dollar condo owners don’t want to dying people soiling their 10th floor panoramic views. Physically or spiritually, it’s all the same.

But there are several reasons why UBC should not yield to demands to move the hospice. For one, the hospice does not pose any real, tangible threat to its neighbours. Data commissioned by UBC showed that property values of homes in nearby communities have increased since hospices have opened in the area. And unlike similar situations of community resistance—say, when a halfway house is proposed in a neighbourhood—the threat of physical danger is not present in this case. Bad luck can’t slash your tires.

But what about emotional turmoil? Surely some devout residents will experience anxiety and stress living next to a place where people are dying. Indeed, that’s unfortunate. But it’s no reason to change course. Institutions such as universities—as well as cities, provinces, and democratic countries as a whole—cannot allow religious belief to dictate policy. If someone legally purchases land and, for example, wants to open a LGBT community centre on that land, should she be prohibited based on its proximity to a church opposed to the LGBT lifestyle? Can a person prevent an interracial couple from moving in next door because he feels uneasy? Of course not. It would be unacceptable to force change in those cases, so it’s unacceptable to force change here.

The phrase ‘buyer beware’ is cliché for a reason. We too often forget that we can’t control who moves in next door. UBC has been shopping for a place for this hospice for years and it has done it’s best to balance different stakeholder’s concerns. I hope it gets built without anymore delays.

Photo courtesy of fauxto_digit on Flickr.

The school won’t say how much money it received

In Beijing, students of Tsinghua University were outraged Tuesday when they arrived at school and found that a building on campus had been renamed after a well-known Australian clothing company. Students blamed the university for “selling itself,” reports Xinhua, the state news agency. The outrage wasn’t limited to students. As of Friday there are 90,000 comments about the renaming on social media site Weibo.com, according to Shanghai Daily. The building formerly-known as the No.4 teaching building now has shiny new lettering out front that spell “Jeanswest Building,” followed by smaller type that says “Jeanswest, as a leading company of casual clothes, has contributed its share to the nation’s education.”  The 2,200-store chain has been in China since 1993. A spokesman for the university would not tell Xinhua how much money Jeanswest had donated.

PayPal co-founder says that university isn’t the only way to success

He uses props and technology – anything that makes physics fun

3M Fellow Adam Sarty

In 1986, to recognize the importance of university teaching, the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and 3M Canada created the 3M National Teaching Fellowships. Ten university faculty members are recognized each year for their educational leadership and exceptional contributions to teaching. Maclean’s On Campus is profiling all 10 of this year’s winners. This week, we look at Adam Sarty, a celebrated nuclear physicist and acting associate dean of science at Saint Mary’s University.

Taking Adam Sarty’s introductory physics course often requires dodging flying objects — whether it’s water from a container that he’s using to demonstrate centrifugal force, freezing balloons that show how volume is proportional to temperature, or sometimes even Sarty himself, who jumps off of desks to demonstrate that objects in free-fall are weightless. “I admire how far he goes to demonstrate physical principles,” says Alejandra Vera Monge, a fine art student who says she understands basic physics because of her energetic prof.

Sarty credits his high school physics teacher for teaching him that physical demonstrations and a bit of showmanship will keep people coming to class. That teacher, Norman Stonehouse, would do “crazy things” in class that helped him grasp the basics, he says. ”Stonehouse was a dynamic and energetic individual — one of the coaches of the wrestling team — and he brought that energy to physics class,” says Sarty. “He broke bricks with his hand to teach about momentum, he laid on a bed of nails and had us walk on him to teach about pressure. I try to emulate that as much as I can.”

To engage students even more, Sarty gives them electronic clickers and asks them to reason out what might happen during his demonstrations. “By getting them to commit to a specific answer using the clickers, students become quite interested to see if they got it right — and then interested to find out why they were wrong or the formal proof of why they were right,” he explains. Although clickers may be considered the latest technology for some professors, Sarty was already using them 10 years ago, when most of his current students were still in first grade.

But it would be a mistake to think that Sarty’s emphasis on physical displays of principles means students with other learning styles miss out. “I ensure that my lectures are lively and animated for those who learn by hearing,” he says. “I use PowerPoint in combination with writing on the big screen for those who learn by reading and writing,” he adds. “And I’ve led the development of a library of demonstrations [that are] video-taped and posted on the web so they can be accessed by students after class.” In fact, they can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection, right here.

Putting his lectures online, for free, is typical Sarty. He believes it’s important that everyone gets a chance to understand the basics of the physical world, he says. ”For 95% of the students in these courses, it’s their last chance to formally learn about physics,” he says of his introductory courses. “I believe that a solid appreciation of the basic physical principles is a powerful tool in preparing students to be informed participants when decisions on difficult issues will face them in their future, such as climate change, energy use and energy generation alternatives.”

But his “physics is for everyone” mantra doesn’t stop there. Despite an impressive list of research projects to oversee — Sarty has been awarded more than $1.5-million of funding during his career — he still makes time to offer his Physics is Phun presentations to high school classes, daycares and community groups.

Samples not only pile up, they also cause ethical dilemmas

To those in any other job, free books probably sound like a perk. In my job, they’re more of a curse.

Yes, we professors get free books. The publishers just send them to us. We don’t have to ask, and we don’t have to pay for them. They just show up in the mail from time to time. To a book loving lay person, I know, this must sound like paradise: manuscripts from Heaven.

But, of course, there’s always a catch. The catch is that the vast majority of these free books are plain old textbooks. Publishers’ representatives see that you are teaching, say, Introduction to Literature, so they send you the new Intro to Lit textbook that they’ve just published, hoping you will order it for your students the next time you teach the course. Sitting on my desk right now, in fact, are three tidy volumes of poetry, fiction, and drama, from the good folks at Nelson Education. In other words, the free books  are not books one has been dying to read; they’re mostly the latest version of books one has already read.

The problem then becomes what to do with all these books. I suppose I could just throw them away, but trashing a book outright feels wrong to me. I’ve given a few away to students, but most students don’t want extra textbooks any more than I do.

Or I could sell them.

Believe it or not, whether to sell one’s sample copies is actually a minor controversy in university circles. On one hand, selling such books is easy because book dealers come right to your office door, offering cash on the spot. From the prof’s point of view, the deal is nearly perfect: get rid of something that cost you nothing, that you don’t want anyway, and you get paid for it. It’s like someone coming to your house and giving you twenty bucks to clean your basement.

Publishers, of course, hate this practice. When I worked in publishing, I heard constant complaints about professors who sold their sample copies. The books, they said, are provided as a professional courtesy, and professors who turn around and sell them are betraying the good will of the publisher who sent them. This is why, I often heard, publishers have to keep bringing out new editions, and why textbooks are so expensive. Because the used-book market — driven partly by sold sample copies — drains away the profitability of  any book after a couple of years. From this point of view, selling one’s sample copies hurts students because it ultimately makes new books cost more.

I take a middle position. If publishers don’t want me to sell the books, they shouldn’t send me books I haven’t asked for. It takes time for me to collect the parcel, open it, and then find a place to put it. In short, if they are going to inconvenience me with heavy junk mail, I don’t see a problem cutting into their bottom line. But I make exceptions. I never sell a book I’ve specifically asked for, for one thing. And I try to avoid selling books from smaller publishers who have a  hard enough time competing as it is.

I hope the good people at Nelson Education understand.

BC Human Rights Court says there was no discrimination

The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal has decided that the University of Victoria was right to evict Alkis Gerd’son, a 43-year-old man who lived on campus  for more than two decades, but who left six months ago.* Gerd’son started at the school in 1988 and earned two bachelor’s degrees by the time he stopped taking classes in 1997. He then continued to live in residence until B.C. Supreme Court court ruled in late 2010 that he must leave his his one-bedroom apartment —- for which he had paid $655 a month until he stopped paying his rent altogether. The university told the tribunal that they allowed him to stay after graduation in 1997 “out of compassion,” because he has a mental disability, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and allergies. But they changed their minds and asked him to leave multiple times before taking him to court. Last week, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal heard his argument that he was discriminated against because of his disabilities. Barbara Humphreys, a tribunal member, concluded simply that his complaint “is not justified.” Either way, Gerd’son should  have been able to afford to pay his rent — he has received disability and housing support cheques since 2004.

This article has been updated from an earlier version that incorrectly stated that Gerd’son was still living in residence at the time of the Human Rights Tribunal’s ruling.