Carson Jerema

UManitoba to defend waiving exam requirement for PhD student

The University of Manitoba and math professor Gabor Lukacs are in court this morning over the awarding of a PhD to a student who did not meet all the requirements. Lukacs filed a court  application in the fall to reverse a decision, made by the Dean of Graduate Studies John Doering,  to waive an exam requirement for the student. The student had failed the exam twice and under faculty rules, he was required to withdraw from the program. The student, whose name is protected by a publication ban, is said to suffer from exam anxiety.

In response, university president David Barnard sent a letter notifying Lukacs that he would be suspended for three months, on the grounds that he violated the student’s privacy. In court Lukacs is expected to argue that Doering, as an administrator, had no authority to waive the exam, particularly since it was against the wishes of the Graduate Studies Committee in the math department. The university for its part will likely argue that Lukacs has no standing, and that he cannot claim to have been harmed in any way by the decision.

UPDATE: This story has been updated here.

UAlberta grades dispute ‘breaks trust in grading’

John Kmech, editor of the University of Alberta’s the Gateway, weighs in on the grading dispute between math professor Mikhail Kovalyov and the university.

It’s unclear what the department gains from failing so many students or giving the class a final average of 1.79, little higher than a C-. It could be seen as maintaining “standards,” and it’s true that students should do poorly if they aren’t pulling their weight. But what “fail” means inherently depends on the difficulty of the coursework, something that only an individual professor can judge. While it’s currently the department’s prerogative to approve the final grades, if they can lower the marks by bulk like this, there doesn’t seem much point to professors handing out grades at all.

Read the the rest here.

Why you might want not want to go to graduate school

A few weeks ago, the Economist ran a lengthy story, well lengthy for the Economist, on the apparent futility of pursuing a PhD. While advanced degrees may be pursued for purely intellectual reasons, doctoral students are being trained for specific careers, usually in academia. The supply has far outgrown the demand and some critics call doctoral education a ‘Ponzi’ scheme.

Indeed, the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships. Using PhD students to do much of the undergraduate teaching cuts the number of full-time jobs. Even in Canada, where the output of PhD graduates has grown relatively modestly, universities conferred 4,800 doctorate degrees in 2007 but hired just 2,616 new full-time professors. Only a few fast-developing countries, such as Brazil and China, now seem short of PhDs.

Read the rest here.

Course on pain management to be revised

The University of Toronto plans to revise a course on pain management in the faculty of medicine in order to limit influence, or the perception of influence, from pharmaceutical companies. The case centres around complaints about a book that is copyrighted by Purdue Pharma that was distributed to students by one of the authors who had visited the university as a guest lecturer. The story raises questions over whether younger doctors are more willing to prescribe narcotics than more senior physicians.

From the Canadian Press:

A complaint about perceived drug industry involvement in a pain management course for medical students has prompted the University of Toronto to revamp its curriculum.

An informal inquiry into the complaint about potential conflict of interest, lodged earlier this year by an unidentified student and two doctors in the faculty of medicine, has set out clear guidelines about how the course should be taught, by whom and with what sources of funding.

The complaint centred around students being provided a book on managing chronic pain that was funded and copyrighted by the maker of the prescription pain killer OxyContin. The book had been brought in by a non-faculty lecturer with financial ties to the drug company.

In a report obtained by The Canadian Press, inquiry head Lorraine Ferris says “time is of the essence” in revising the interfaculty pain curriculum, a 20-hour course jointly taught to medical, dental, pharmacy and nursing students.

Ferris, associate vice-provost in the department of Health Sciences Policy and Strategy, said by email that she found no evidence of wrongdoing or actual conflict of interest. “However, I was troubled by the perception of conflict of interest and therefore my recommendations … addressed this issue.”

. . .

Dr. David Mock, dean of dentistry at Canada’s largest university, said the four faculties involved in the centre are in the process of implementing the recommendations.

“I think this is a good thing,” said Mock. “I’m not looking at this as a hand-slap for the centre. I think what we’ve done is move it into the more modern governance system that we are developing at the university.

“The course will still be run by the people who know the most about the topic and that’s the people from the Centre for the Study of Pain. The course hasn’t been taken away from them.”

Ferris’s report also said the curriculum should not be “directly funded (in whole or in part) by industry donors who have, or may have, or be perceived to have financial interests in the assessment or management of pain.”

From 2002 to 2006, the pain course was funded by donations, included $117,000 in unrestricted educational grants from four drug companies — Merck-Frosst, Purdue Pharma, Pharmacia Canada and Pfizer — although they had no input into course content. Since 2007, the program has been funded solely from faculty budgets.

Mock said Purdue’s copyrighted book on pain management had been brought in by Dr. Roman Jovey, an unpaid guest lecturer and co-author of the book who left copies “for anyone to take.” Jovey, medical director for a chain of clinics called the Centres for Pain Management, is a member of Purdue’s speakers’ bureau, paid by the company to conduct workshops and lectures.

“It wasn’t distributed by the program,” Mock said of the book. “But we stopped that because, again, there’s reality and there’s appearances and it appeared as if we were pushing the books, so to speak. So we stopped doing that, we stopped before the inquiry.

Read the rest here.

Forget ‘investment,’ a better way to describe a degree might be ‘gamble’

Is higher education a scam? If the goal is for graduates to become gainfully employed and contribute to economic productivity, then it just might be. Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Innovations” blog, Ohio University economist, Richard Vedder, mines through American employment data for college graduates available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), for a post titled “The Great College Degree Scam.”

What he found was that “approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled—occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less.”

To put it another way, between 1992 and 2008, there were roughly 20 million employed graduates added to the American workforce, but only 8 million of that increase were employed in college level jobs, while 12 million, or 60 per cent of the increase, were working in low skilled occupations.

So, while in 2008, 65 per cent of total, or 49.35 million, employed graduates were working in college level jobs, Vedder’s analysis demonstrates that the chances of landing such a job with a college education has been steadily declining over time. In 1992, roughly 82 per cent of the 28.9 million employed college graduates were working in college level jobs.

To illustrate what is considered a low skilled job, Vedder uses waiters and cashiers as examples.

In 1992 119,000 waiters and waitresses were college degree holders. By 2008, this number had more than doubled to 318,000. While the total number of waiters and waitresses grew by about 1 million during this period, 20% of all new jobs in this occupation were filled by college graduates. Take cashiers as well. While 132,000 cashiers possessed college degrees in 1992, by 2008, 365,000 cashiers were college graduates. As with waiters and waitresses, 20% of new cashiers since 1992 are college graduates.

Of course, people can pursue an education for reasons other than employment or economic gain, but that is not how education is marketed either in the United States or in Canada, and creeping credentialism has long been flagged as a problem on both sides of the border.

The obvious beneficiaries of ever increasing enrolment in college and universities are, of course, the institutions themselves, who gain tuition and funding for each student they admit, but also businesses who can use the holding of a degree as a signal device without having to invest resources into properly vetting job candidates. And, as Vedder notes, the trend points to growing inefficiencies in the education system. Whereas not that long ago, it took the system 12 or 13 years to prepare most people for adulthood, it now takes 17 or 18 years.

Not exactly the type of information to find its way into university recruitment pamphlets, is it? Students and parents might fairly ask: at what point is pursuing a degree no longer an “investment” but a “gamble”?

UPDATE: A more complete study based on Vedder’s research was released Thursday.

Another controversy for the University of Ottawa

The University of Ottawa is an interesting place, or at least it is a place that generates a lot of attention. Most notably, a scheduled talk by Ann Coulter was canceled in the spring amid student protest, and after the university had warned Coulter she could be jailed if she didn’t watch her mouth. In late April, a freedom of information request revealed support for allegations that U of O administrators spied on and attempted to cancel a talk by Burmese human-rights activist Ka Hsaw Wa in 2007. Then there is the former lecturer accused of being a terrorist and Denis Rancourt, the physics professor who was fired after giving everyone in at least one of his classes an A+. Rancourt has also alleged the university spied on him.

And, just this week, student Marc Kelly was acquitted for trespassing on university property. At the time of his February arrest Kelly had been banned from the campus, but for reasons the university has yet to fully explain. In fact it was the second time in the past few years that Kelly was apprehended after U of O officials called police. The first time was after he had attempted to videotape a senate meeting back in 2008. He was charged with disturbing the peace, but the Crown ultimately dropped the case.

Despite being cleared of criminal charges, Kelly remains banned from the university and will be completing his degree at Carleton University, though he will officially remain a U of O student. It is a curious case. Judge L. Girault of Provincial Offenses Court in Ottawa ruled that even though the Student Appeals Centre, where Kelly was arrested, is located in the middle of the university, the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa is the legal occupier of the space and therefore has the right to determine who can and cannot enter. The ruling should help clarify the relationship between universities and students’ unions.

Of course students should be punished but it isn’t uniquely offensive

My first reaction to the minor plagiarism scandal at King’s was to denounce the university for being soft, flabby, and altogether unconcerned with academic standards. How could the harshest punishment be a mere fail of a single assignment? Surely the university can no longer defend not subscribing to plagiarism detection software because it has a “bond of trust” with its students.

Don’t they realize that cheaters are narcissistic and quite possibly psychopathic? Have they not read that more than half of university students already admit to plagiarizing? Why would a respectable institution like King’s not want to draw a line instead of administering a series of wrist taps? Can’t they see their degrees are now worthless and no one will ever hire their graduates?

Then I had a cup of tea.

Turns out my instincts had less to do with any objective understanding of the case than with the fact that I only recently left university where I had spent the better part of a decade. Those were years where I had no choice but to abide by the rules of the academy, from meeting deadlines to learning obscure citation styles, to leaving any soapbox I might be standing on at the door.

And rules against plagiarism are just that, rules. They might be particularly important rules, and no doubt rules that should be enforced, but when isolated, it is hard to see what exactly it is about plagiarism that makes it uniquely offensive.

The typical explanation is that plagiarism involves “intellectual theft” but when applied to students, as opposed to, say, artists, the analogy falls apart. Professors who copy another’s work when submitting a paper to a journal, may be depriving another of prestige, respect, or research funding. There is a real identifiable harm to another individual.

Students who plagiarize in most cases aren’t depriving anyone of anything, except maybe the self-respect of an embarrassed professor who might have been fooled into giving a student an undeserved grade.

Todd’s counterfeiting analogy is sharper. The value of money is only reliable so long as it is real money. The same goes for grades. Grades are based on the assessment of a student’s performance, and if students don’t do the work they cannot be properly assessed. But the same might be said for enforcing deadlines, using accepted research methods, being a stickler for spelling and grammar, and other demands aimed at instilling in students the importance of academic rigour.

We are still left with the question of what makes plagiarism particularly wrong. If students cannot be said to be stealing, and if ensuring students are properly assessed applies to a range of academic criteria, is there anything that makes plagiarism special?

I think Stanley Fish had the right idea when he wrote “Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal.” Whether or not a work is authentic matters to those initiated in a particular setting. It is a guild concept intended to regulate and enforce how scholars, or journalists for that matter, should conduct themselves and how their accomplishments are to be measured. Handing in original work matters because professors say it should.

In other contexts, passing off someone else’s work as your own does not matter, and might actually be encouraged. When preparing reports for their ministers, government bureaucrats typically help themselves freely to the work of their colleagues without giving credit. No one talks about plagiarism scandals in the federal bureaucracy, unless the prime minister is implicated.

With that in mind, it is unsurprising that students, particularly first-year students as in the King’s case, plagiarize. Some of them might have been motivated by laziness or self-entitlement and there is something to that explanation. More likely many are still just learning the rules.

UManitoba blames the media for its own PR disaster in Lukacs case

The University of Manitoba has been the target of a lot of negative attention over the suspension of math professor Gabor Lukacs. Nearly three weeks after the story was first covered here at On Campus, the university released a statement attacking “misinformation” on the part of the “mass media.” It is a ridiculous assertion.

Lukacs, it should be recalled, was suspended without pay after filing an application in Manitoba court to reverse a decision made by John Doering, Dean of Graduate Studies, to waive a comprehensive exam requirement for a PhD student. The student had failed the exam twice, and under Faculty of Graduate Studies regulations was initially required to withdraw from the program. The official reason for Lukacs’s suspension is that he violated the student’s privacy. The last professor to be suspended without pay was facing charges of sexual assault.

In his court application Lukacs argues that Doering, as an administrator, did not have the authority to make such a decision without consulting an appeal committee of academics, particularly since there was widespread opposition in the math department to the move.

Before waiving the exam altogether, Doering asked the graduate studies committee in the department of mathematics to administer an oral exam, since the student, whose name is protected by a publication ban, is said to suffer from “extreme exam anxiety.” The committee offered instead to allow the student to write a third comprehensive with double time and relaxed conditions, but it refused to proceed with an oral exam.

“The graduate studies committee indicated its preference for a waiver of the exam as opposed to an oral exam in this unique situation,” reads a joint message from Doering and Mark Whitmore, Dean of Science. “Any previous suggestions made that the Dean of Graduate Studies made a unilateral decision, without consultation, are simply false and irresponsible.”

Doering says he also consulted with student advocacy and disability services. But even if those bodies supported an oral exam, that doesn’t negate the fact that those actually responsible for overseeing academics in the math department rejected the Dean’s idea. What’s more, any consultation the dean may or may not have done before finally waiving the exam requirement does not absolve him of responsibility. He made the final decision, and he is on record taking credit for it.

As reported in our earlier story, when responding to an email from Lukacs who challenged the dean’s powers, Doering replied, “I heard that appeal and rendered a decision, i.e., I reinstated the student and waived any requirement to sit another comprehensive exam.”  The dean then added, “Moreover, I would note many of the things a dean can do are not written down.”

There is evidence to suggest that Doering was not trying to accommodate the student, so much as he was trying to find a way for the student to pass no matter what.

In his court affidavit (page 19), Lukacs quotes a memorandum sent from Doering to the head of the mathematics department giving instructions for how a supposed oral exam would take place. “Each oral examiner should convey to me the outcome of his respective oral exam of [the student]. In the event that failure is reported, alternative testing will likely be explored,” the memo reads. (Emphasis added).

The entirety of this document has not yet been made available to the courts, but that Doering intended for the student to pass is further supported by an email from Yong Zhang, who was chair of the graduate studies committee at the time of the decision.

“[Doering] directed the department to give some oral exams to [the student] to let him pass the exam,” Zhang wrote, adding that the “committee refused to set such an exam because it could not keep the standard of the comprehensive.”

Doering also elevated a fourth-year course to a PhD level course because the student was short one class to meet graduation requirements.

In explaining his decision to waive the exam, in the statement coauthored with science dean Mark Whitmore, Doering noted that the student “scored slightly below an ‘A’ grade,” but failed because the Faculty of Graduate Studies considers an “A” to be a pass for comprehensive exams.

As Todd has already pointed out, if the student’s examiners had considered his grade sufficient, they would have passed him in the first place. That the student failed with a grade just short of an “A” attests to the standards employed by most reputable universities when awarding doctorates.  If a “B+” is to be considered a pass, then the regulations should be amended to reflect this.

When researching our original story, Maclean’s requested an interview with Dean Doering. He did not respond. Science Dean Mark Whitmore did respond to a request but referred all inquiries to the university’s public affairs department, where a representative declined to speak to specifics. Maclean’s also contacted the head of the math department—who did not respond—and the student’s advisor (who hung up the phone). In the weeks following the publication of the story, no one from the university contacted Maclean’s to dispute the facts as presented.

But that doesn’t mean the census debate is igniting a culture war

A new Ekos poll released today suggests that university graduates prefer the Liberals over the governing Conservatives. Ekos president Frank Graves says this “trend” might reflect not only discontent over the great census crisis, but is also indicative of “a deeper structural divide between the educated elite and what Galbraith calls the ‘not so rich.’” By “not so rich” Graves is referring to “college graduates.” In other words, we are in the midst of a culture war, the census debate is the catalyst, and the line is being drawn between the university educated and the college educated. Too bad Ekos’s own data doesn’t appear to support that conclusion.

The two-week survey, conducted between July 7 and 20, shows that 29.9 per cent of those with a university degree would vote Conservative against 32.0 per cent who would vote Liberal if an election were held tomorrow.  For the college educated the numbers are 34.8 per cent Conservative and 23.7 per cent Liberal. Apparently this is what Graves means by a “deeper divide” between the “educated elite” and everyone else.

For that speculation to have even a whiff of credibility, wouldn’t it have to be shown that the divide has actually deepened over time, say by tracking Ekos’s own polls? If the numbers are substantially different than they were in May or June, before the phrase ” long-form census ” found its way into newspapers on an almost daily basis, than Graves might have a point. But that isn’t the case.

In the Ekos poll released June 24, results were nearly identical to the July poll. University grads still favoured the Liberals (34.3 per cent) over the Conservatives (29.0 per cent) and college grads still preferred the Conservatives (34.1 per cent) against the Liberals (23.7 per cent). Despite these largely unchanged numbers, support for the government among university grads in fact increased in July over June, if only a little (0.9 per cent) and decreased for the Liberals by 2.3 per cent. While support among college grads for the government also increased between June and July, (0.7 per cent), support for the Liberals among this group was unchanged. Hardly a widening cultural chasm.

Now, as the Globe points out, the second week of the July survey does appear to show a drop in support for the government among university grads (to 28.3 per cent) and a rise in support among the “not so rich” college educated ( to 38.7 per cent). Even these numbers, however, appear to be consistent with long-term trends as opposed to a sharp divide precipitated by recent events. The Ekos poll released on May 24 had support for the Conservatives among the university educated at 31.6 per cent, but it was 27.8 per cent at the beginning of April. In the May poll 36.0 per cent of college graduates supported the government, while the April poll had the number at 34.4 per cent.

Removing the long-form census may be bad public policy, and it might be fun to argue that university graduates (with their apparently superior understanding of data collection) would be particularly irked, and it might also be fun to argue that college graduates (with their obvious affinity for “red meat” policies) are ecstatic over no longer having to fill out lengthy census forms. But, this week’s poll is just another in a long list of polls that demonstrates shifting support for this or that party according to level of education. That’s not to say it has nothing to do with the census debate; however, even if these changes in polling numbers were the result of what’s in the news, and they might very well be, there is nothing special about it.

To be clear, Graves was only offering “speculation” over the presence of a “deeper structural divide.”  But shouldn’t even speculation, particularly coming from a company that boasts the scientific accuracy in its polling, be based on evidence?

Photo: Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff speaks to University of Manitoba students: Ashley Gaboury

A U-Pass compels students who don’t use transit to subsidize not just other students, but everybody

A student running to be mayor of Ottawa is opposing a U-Pass program set to launch in the fall. Charlie Taylor, a Carleton University journalism student, says the mandatory buss pass approved at his school and the University of Ottawa earlier this year, should have an opt out option. And so it should. U-Pass programs, that affix the cost of a bus pass to tuition, punish students for living in close proximity to their university, or for cycling, or for carpooling, or for living too far away for transit to be a prudent choice. Student transit users on the other hand will see their fares reduced. City council approved the program in February and there were referenda subsequently held at both universities, a prerequisite for bringing in new fees.

As an internal subsidy funded through tuition U-Pass programs see money flow from students who don’t use the bus towards those that do. But it is not just the fact that students will have no choice but to pay for transit that should raise suspicions, it is the nature of the subsidy–the fact that transit is not a service directly related to education. Student fees are used for all sorts of on campus services that are not universally used (unfortunately, libraries fall into this category), but the difference is that most such services are part of running a university. Transit is a municipal, and sometimes provincial, responsibility.

Any improvements  made to transit systems as a result of U-Pass schemes like this, that have been popping all over the country in recent years, will not only benefit students but all bus riders. So students who don’t take the bus are not just subsidizing other students, they are subsidizing everybody. Why does that make any sense?

And, no, the fact that the U-Pass was a brought in after a student poll doesn’t legitimize it. The university population turns over every few years, and, so, the legitimacy of a student vote quickly vanishes.

Taking money from tuition to fund municipal infrastructure projects, or to promote a “transit culture,” or to support environmentally sensible choices, is, I suppose, one way for city governments to accomplish their goals. Another way would be to, uh, fund it through the regular taxation system. Of course that would require using property taxes or expending political capital to lobby other levels of government for funding, or for new taxation powers. Extracting money through tuition, from students who will only be in school for a few years, is much easier. I imagine students who walk or bike to school encounter potholes, so why couldn’t we use student fees to fix that problem?

Of course student unions  are the ones who actively lobby the government for U-Pass programs. But isn’t it odd that when tuition is being raised for purposes weakly related, if at all, to a university education that student unions are so supportive, but when tuition increases are proposed for more direct educational services, they fly off the handle?

I doubt Taylor has much of a shot at the mayor’s office, but if he helps to raise the U-Pass as a municipal issue, which it is, as opposed to an educational issue (students are broke!) then good for him.