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University Bloat

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Government. No Comments on University Bloat

The Wall Street Journal had a mostly-nothingburger of a story in it on Christmas Eve titled ‘Elite Colleges Have a Looming Money Problem’. This is about Harvard, Yale, Princeton and that lot, and I will suggest that the headline is b.s. Nothing in the article suggests those places have any financial issues looming. Princeton, leader of the pack in this dimension, has an endowment that is equal to $3.8million per student. That means that at a shitty 3% net return, they can generate almost $110,000 in revenue per year per enrolled student, and never touch the assets in said endowment. They could cut their tuition by half and still make ends meet. I think they’re going to be ok.

Harvard has a mere $2million per student, but I think they’re ok, too. If any institution should worry according to this article, it is the U of Texas, which has the highest per student endowment of any public university, but that is only some $250,000/student. And, the Texas legislature could (and probably has) cut funding to U of T over the years, and could also forbid them from raising tuition. Ontario has done that for years to its universities. So, Texas might have something to worry about. Princeton and Harvard, not really. The only solid thing the article seems to point out is that these places have been getting below-market returns on their massive endowments. Tsk-tsk.

That all being said, I did learn some surprising things from the article. Here’s an interesting quote:

“Despite a booming stock market, Harvard said alumni donations fell by 15% last fiscal year amid outrage over the university’s handling of campus antisemitism. Fellow Ivies Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania experienced even steeper drops.”

Apparently, having your Prez look bad in front of Congress is hard on donations. Whodathought?

The article also says this about Harvard:

“Last year the university relied on the endowment for 37% of its budget, up from about a fifth of the budget 20 years ago and far higher than the average across private, not-for-profit colleges. “

The change from 20% to 37% is certainly a notable increase. It is not clear that this involved actually selling assets in which the endowment is invested, and I rather doubt that it did. Still, maybe Harvard is feeling a little less bullet-proof.

The other interesting things all came from a policy paper written by Paul Weinstein Jr for The Progressive Policy Institute. There was a link to it in the WSJ article, and you can read it here if you like. The paper is titled ‘’How to Cut Administrative Bloat at US Colleges’, and I don’t see that it offers much useful or novel advice in that regard, but it does provide some careful documentation of said bloat. Weinstein provides data on 50 US universities, so he goes well beyond the ‘elite’, all of it gathered from the universities themselves. It turns out that 21st century universities have almost as many employees as students, and in some cases they have more, and the majority of their employees are not faculty.

Think about that in comparison to other service providers. Can you think of any other such org, a full service hotel, a hospital, a police department, in which that is the case? One needs to be careful about such comparisons, a hospital might have nearly as many employees working in at as it has patients at times, and a police or fire service has as ‘customers’ an entire city, but they rarely all need service at once.

Anyway, I plan to think about reasonable comparisons some more, but here are some of the numbers for universities .

Princeton has 6300 employees, only 1285 of which are faculty, and 8705 students.

Duke University has 3,983 faculty members, 25,873 non-faculty employees (that is not a typo) and 17,155 students. Yes, Duke has more non-faculty employees than students (all student numbers include both grad and undergrad).

Notre Dame, on the other hand, is a relatively lean machine, having 1,243 faculty, 4,467 non-faculty employees, and 12,809 students. Still, more than twice as many non-faculty as faculty employees.

The University of Texas at Austin has only 3,519 faculty and 11,645 non-faculty employees to deal with 52,384 students. I don’t know how they handle the strain…..

The Weinstein paper says without hesitation that the increase in the cost of university education is the result of administrative bloat, but to make that case we would need to see the same numbers for the same universities from 20 or more years ago. Those are not provided, and good luck getting them. I believe it is true that university non-academic staff have grown faster than faculty or student numbers over the last 20 years, based on my time as a professor, but what I believe is insufficient to make that case.

None the less, Weinstein is happy to give a recommendation for how to fix this, and his idea is pretty much what one expects from an academic; have the government fix it. I can do no better than quote from the paper:

“The federal government should shift its focus from increasing financial aid to using its significant leverage to encourage colleges and universities to reduce costs and cut the price of earning a degree. To do this, the government should be given the authority to negotiate the cost of tuition and fees with any post-secondary institution that accepts students who have received grants, loans, or tax incentives from the federal government. Schools could opt-out, but by doing so would not be allowed to enroll students who need to pay a portion of their tuition with federal aid or loans. Schools found in violation of this policy would be subject to fines in an amount equivalent to the aid provided by the government.”

Can you just imagine the size of the bureaucracy – both in universities and in government – needed to insure that all universities and students were playing by these new rules? And….negotiations between The US Federal Government and billion dollar universities over tuition? What could possibly go wrong?

Yes, a solution that only an academic could embrace. Or a budding, university-trained government bureaucrat, I suppose.

Coda

This all made me curious as to how my former employer stacks up against these 50 US universities on these dimensions, so I went to the UWO data book to find out. I cannot be sure that these numbers are calculated in exactly the same way as in the US schools, but then it is not clear that all the US schools calculate them the same way, either.

So, Western says it has 37,875 full-time students enrolled during this current academic year, under-grad and grad. It also employs 1,338 regular full-time faculty and 2,789 full-time staff. That puts it right up there with Notre Dame as a lean machine, although it does have more than twice as many staff as faculty.

The student-to-faculty ratio, one (highly imperfect) way rating orgs measure the quality of education in a post-secondary institution, is an eye-popping 28.3 to 1. Exactly one of the 50 US places in the Weinstein paper is higher than that – Georgia Tech at 37.3 to one. The paper claims GT has gone big-time into online education, which may explain that number partly. U of Texas, as huge as it is, has a student/faculty ratio of only 13.3, and U of Wisconsin, which is about the same size as UWO, is at 8.9.

PSE in Ontario is cheap, and you get what you pay for.

My Stock       

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Education. No Comments on My Stock       

After I posted my Learning Like Shakeespeare article a regular reader asked what was in my stock, meaning what are the books I have read. Hmmmm….

This got me thinking about that, so at the risk of boring some of you, here is Al’s History of Reading, in so far as Al (you have to remember that I’m old) can remember.

I was an avid reader from the time I could read at all, walking regularly to the local public library to take out several books at a time. My grandaughter has been the same way all her life, my grandson not so much – I have no idea how that happens, people are just different. The first books I can remember reading were in a series called Cowboy Sam, and after that I graduated to a lot of sports hero stories. Warren Spahn, Roy Campanella, Johnny Unitas all come to mind, but there were others.

I also read comic books by the ton. DC comics to start, because they came first, then Marvel when it came along, and Mad Magazine. The guys I grew up with loved Mad, and this brings me to my reading in school. I was reading a copy of Mad as an elementary student, during an appropriate free reading time, and one of the nuns took it away from me and said I should have my parents come see her. She asked my parents if they knew the kind of garbage I was reading, to which my Dad said he responded – ‘He’s reading, I think that’s what’s important’.

I don’t know if Dad knew how right he was, as Mad was a great way to learn about the adult world, not to mention to learn skepticism about it.

Then came high school, and while everything else about those four years is fuzzy, I was lucky enough to have a first-rate sophomore English teacher – Mary Smith. I know, probably an alias. She had us read Shakespeare, and then do readings of the plays, each student assigned a part. Same with Twelve Angry Men. And, we had to write, write reviews of what we read, write a lot. I remember clearly being given one particular writing assignment, thinking ‘ah, that’s easy, I can knock that off in an evening’ and then getting it back with an F on it. An F!! I didn’t get Fs, dammit. That was an eye-opener, garbage in, garbage out.

I don’t actually remember if it was Ms Smith who assigned this stuff, but I remember reading Austen, Twain, Willa Cather, The Good Earth, Thoreau, others. Not entire books, necessarily, but essays, short stories and excerpts.

Once I went off to University I was no longer required to take literature, but I had gotten interested in sci-fi so I read a lot of that, and took a bird course in that type of literature, where we were required to read Frank Herbert’s Dune. I still think that’s a great book, and I wrote a short story for that class that was published in some student journal. My only foray into writing fiction. I also read a lot of Hermann Hesse then; Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, The Glass Bead Game. My romantic period. Still have those books, but they don’t stand up well when I open them back up.

In grad school I remember reading nothing, although I probably did, and somewhere along the way through adulthood I became very interested in reading two things: history and Robertson Davies. I have by now read every one of Davies’ 11 novels, and a few other things by him, and my shelves are full of books on history. A lot of military history (a lot of that by John Keegan, the best of the best if you ask me) but a lot of other history, too. Catherine the Great, the Victorian era of the British Empire, a history of the Arab-Zionist conflict (eye-opening), Churchill’s memoirs, the Roman empire, a history of Prohibition, the Ottoman Empire, and two or three histories of Canada. Military history, particularly in the hands of a master like Keegan (and to some extent, Churchill) is about so much more than battles and generals and weapons. One of Keegan’s overriding ideas is that the way nations go to war, the way they train their soldiers, the weapons they use, are determined by their culture. And, the military is the ultimate LBO; I have learned much about individual and organizational behavior from military history.

I do read fiction, too, including all three of Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels, and the most beautifully written novel I’ve read in years was A Soldier in The Great War by Mark Helprin. He writes better than Davies, even, and trust me that it is about so much more than war. I was in a book club – co-led it, actually – for a number of years, where we read a variety of things, including a lot of contemporary fiction: All the Light We Cannot See and Bel Canto come to mind

But coming back to the original impetus for this essay, what is in my stock? Precious little Great Literature, at least since high school. I have copies of Fielding’s Tom Jones (said to be the first English novel), Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dickens’ Great Expectations on my many bookshelves here at home. I have started in reading all four of those more than once. I never seem able to stick with them for long. I did read Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus through, but his Magic Mountain sits on a shelf with a bookmark half way in.

I also have a large stock of books claiming to explain modern physics to lay people. Can never get far into those, either.

So, I think perhaps Scott Newstok would be disappointed in me. Never mind ol’ Will himself. On the other hand, I ain’t dead yet.

Thinking – And Learning – Like Shakespeare  

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Education, Standards. 1 Comment on Thinking – And Learning – Like Shakespeare  

I’ve just finished reading a book titled ‘How to Think Like Shakespeare’, which I first learned of on Gelman’s statistics blog, of all places. Having mentioned it to my sweetheart, she kindly gave me a copy as a Christmas gift. It’s very interesting, not long at 170 pages, but also very dense. Lots of quotations, from ol’ Will and many others, and a lot to think about. I will surely read it at least one more time in an attempt to do it justice.

What it is really, as its author Scott Newstok writes, is an argument for adopting many of the principles that underlie the Renaissance education that Shakespeare would have received into our contemporary educational system. On the face of it, this is nuts, as Newstok admits. Up at 7am to translate Latin for 12 hours, corporal punishment, exclusion of girls – really?

Well, no, not that, but he argues that there was much in the way youngsters were educated back then that would be highly valuable to contemporary students facing a world of information overload and the looming spectre of AI. A sub-text is that these practices would be valuable to all of us.

As I note above, I cannot claim to have digested all the book’s claims and arguments, but a couple of things seem immediately very worthwhile to me. Needless to say, they are not compatible with what Newstok calls ‘…our own student-centered, present-focused, STEM-driven schools’.

Idea 1.

He notes that in Erasmus’s Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style is recommended an exercise of writing out the thought ‘Your letter has pleased me greatly’ in 15 different ways.

So –

Your letter mightily pleased me.

Your affectionate letter brought me great joy.

Your brief note refreshed my spirits

My heart was gladdened by your kind note.

And so on…..

The point Erasmus is making is that to have an abundant style, one which is both precise and a pleasure to read, it is necessary to not use the same words and phrases over and over. To avoid doing that, one must practice. The value of ‘practicing’ runs throughout the book, in fact.

The ignorance of this principle of the value in variety is an aspect of contemporary journalism which causes me no end of despair. Every so-called journalist describes things using the same ‘correct’ words and phrases. It might as well all be written by the same person (and with the advent of AI, perhaps it soon will be, sans the ‘person’).

For example, it is not currently possible for any journalist to write about anyone famous without using some form of the word ‘icon’. Jimmy Carter, Beyonce, Leadbelly and Susan Sarandon – all ‘icons’, and the things they did were ‘iconic’.

People no longer criticize or object or excoriate or castigate – they ‘call out’.

No one tells or says or declares or states or claims, they ‘share’, or if in public, ‘speak out’.

Do copy editors shut down attempts by journalists to use different phraseology, or do said journalist simply not know of any way to write beyond the most common? Either way, it is a sad situation.

Idea 2.

In all student essay writing, whatever point the essayist wishes to make, half the essay must be devoted to arguing against that same point.

Revolutionary, but the idea is not simply to induce students to see that issues always have (at least) two sides, but also to help them develop empathy. In the non-Shakespearean phrase, to ‘walk a mile in another man’s moccasins’. The ability to see things from another person’s point of view is fundamental to functioning in society. And, Newstok argues, the ability to inhabit, and to get playgoers to inhabit, the lives of other people, was Shakespeare’s greatest talent.

This development of empathy lies behind another recommendation that pervades the book. That is, that students – not to mention the rest of us – must read. Read widely, and especially read what was written by authors of the past. What they wrote is the ‘stock’ society must use to move forward, and one cannot contribute to improving that stock unless one understands what is already in it.

As I said, much to think about in this book. I’m quite sure I don’t buy everything Newstok says – ‘twould be shocking if I did. But there seems to me much of value in it. Not that anyone in the contemporary educational establishment will have any sympathy with it. I can just imagine what the so-called Teaching and Learning Centre at my former employer would think about having university students read Erasmus or Ralph Waldo Emerson, or write an essay that includes arguments against immigration, the adoption of indigenous ways of knowing or democracy or any other current piety. Acts of oppression, I expect.

On Sin

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Education, Health Care, Popular attitudes, Standards. No Comments on On Sin

I recently did a post about disability accommodations at Canadian Universities, in which ADHD diagnoses played a prominent role. ADHD is far from the only non-physical disability whose presence in universities has increased greatly, but it is up there. After writing that, I was reading a post in a blog which I have come to find very interesting, called On the Contrary, written by a fellow named Simon Sobo. He bills himself as ‘81 year old unheralded, frustrated, but serious writer’.

The particular post I read was titled ‘ADHD and Other Sins of Our Children, Part 2’, and you can read it here. Free. (There is a Part 1, which I have not yet read, and which opens with the remark that Part 2 has been read five times as often as Part 1. Hmmm…..)

The post is quite long, and the first section of it is sub-titled A Memory. It’s an interesting account of how his Jewish parents raised him, and his attempts to behave as they wished him to, especially during a long sermon by the Rabbi in his synagogue. My own Catholic upbringing was not dissimilar. The penultimate section of the article is subtitled ‘Sin and ADHD’ and starts with this sentence:

“First a few interesting statistics about adults diagnosed with ADHD and their sense of moral responsibility.”

It makes for fascinating reading, although the academic in me wishes Sobo had done a better job of providing citations for those stats. (There is a set of serious references at the end of the article, which I intend to pursue).

Anyway, I found it thought-provoking, and think you might, also.

Disability, Inc.

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Health Care, Standards. 1 Comment on Disability, Inc.

‘You don’t ask a barber whether you need a haircut’.

I have no idea from where or who that bit of wisdom comes, but I also have no doubt of its wisdom.

A story in the Dec 27 Globe and Mail is titled ‘As demand for disability accommodations in universities grows, professors contend with how to handle students’ requests’

Not far into the piece one sees the graph which I have reproduced below:

 

A more than two-fold increase in the percentage of individuals in any sub-category of any population is notable. When something changes that dramatically there is something going on. Maybe more than one thing, but something, almost surely.

An important aspect of the phenomenon is depicted in the following graph, also from the article:

It is clear that the number of students with physical disabilities has not changed much over the depicted 5-year period, as the purple region’s upper boundary is nearly flat. However, the number of students registered with non-physical disabilities has increased by some 20,000 over the same period. Non-physical disabilities refer to things like test-taking anxiety, ADHD, difficulty with concentration, etc.

It is thus unavoidable that the source of the steep increase in students with registered disabilities is to be found in the source of the steep increase in non-physical disabilities. Importantly, these disabilities are not objectively verifiable. If a student claims to be blind or deaf or unable to walk, this can be verified by a doctor. More pointedly, if a test (like the PSA, for example) is used to diagnose prostate cancer, it is possible to determine how accurate the PSA test is. That is, it is possible to determine what percentage of false positives and false negatives arise in any population in which the test is used diagnostically. That is because surgeries and autopsies of individuals who are diagnosed in this way can determine whether they actually had prostate cancer.

There is no analog to surgery for test-taking anxiety or ADHD. There are tests, of a sort, and questionnaires, and criteria, for sure, but all of these have been developed by the ‘experts’ who are doing the diagnosis, and again – there is no way to objectively verify their results. One has ADHD if an expert on ADHD – whoever that may be – says so. That expert perhaps went through some process in determining that diagnosis but there is no device outside that ring of experts which can tell us how accurate are their diagnoses of ADHD. Determining ‘accuracy’ is impossible without the ability to determine what is true in a way that does not depend on who is doing the determining.

You can go to this link to get, for example, a pdf containing the DSM-5 Diagnostic Criteria for ADHD in children. You will find it a series of statements about observed behavior, such as ‘Lacks ability to complete schoolwork and other assignments or to follow instructions’ and ‘Incapable of staying seated in class’. The reality is that none of these observations are actually likely to be done by the ‘expert’, but come from the expert interviewing the parents and perhaps a teacher or two. The point is that this set of ‘criteria’ is all there is. An MD or psychologist talks to the parents and/or teachers, maybe the kid for a bit, consults this checklist, and then ‘decides’ ADHD, yes or no. One can go to another expert then, who might or might not agree, but one cannot get verification. It is not possible.

It is known, for example, that the PSA test produces ‘false positives’ at a high rate. This results in urologists generally requiring more evidence than a high PSA test value before they do anything invasive to a guy whose test showed such a high value. There is no way to talk about a ‘false positive rate’ for an ADHD diagnosis. Different experts might do the interviews, go through the checklist, then come to different answers, but there is no such thing as a ‘false positive’. If some expert says you have ADHD, the law and the university treat that as a certainty.

In my latter teaching career, when the explosion in disability exemptions among students was well underway, I was told that most university students with a disability diagnosis went into their first year with it already in place from their high school, if not earlier. The universities just carried on with accommodating them. The ‘advisors’ at Queens mentioned in the article don’t diagnose these conditions, they just decree what accommodation the student must be given for having them.

The psychology and psychiatric professions have been devoted to expanding the range of disabilities for decades now. Pretty much every kind of behavior has been given a spot as a ‘disorder’ in the DSM, including ‘oppositional defiant disorder’. Type that into google and see what comes up. I’m not an expert, but I’m quite sure I suffered from a bout of it at one point in high school.

These are barbers setting the rules for when someone must get a haircut. To be sure, not all members of all health care professions buy into the medicalization and amelioration of life. There is a reader comment at the end of the GM article from a health care worker who notes that when she pushed back against providing a ‘sick note’ for a student, the parent threatened to report her to her professional college.

Professional colleges in ‘regulated professions’ have become great agents for the enforcement of conformity. And the counsellors who set the accommodations for these diagnostic students, cannot be argued with, either. Certainly not by the likes of lowly faculty. It is worth noting that there is no science whatever behind the ‘accommodation’ business. That is to say, there are no scientific studies of the effects of giving vs not giving various ‘accommodations’ to students with registered disabilities. The standard two accommodations given are to allow more time to complete things, or to take tests in an environment separate from other students. Note that these are things that would likely allow any student to get a higher mark.

So, the disability accommodation system in Canadian education has become a system in which professionals with an interest in seeing disabilities and accommodations grow are in a position to help it do so, and in which the accommodations are such that every student would find them beneficial.

I would timidly suggest we may have found a cause for the pattern shown in the second figure above.

Predictably, this Globe article generated plenty of outrage in the comments sections, as well as some suggestions for what would or should happen now. I will close by dealing with a few of these.

  1. Universities should indicate on degree certificates or transcripts when a student has received accommodation in earning their credential. That’s a non-starter under both privacy and discrimination law. That it would improve the information available to society is quite beside the point, this cannot be done under current law, even if universities were willing.
  2. These accommodated students will be unable to compete or hold a job once they get out into the real work world. I fear this is false. The various Disabilities Acts in federal and provincial law – not to mention the Canadian Charter – pretty much insist that accommodation be given once someone is expertly diagnosed. I expect this will apply no less to workplaces than it does to educational institutions, so those accommodated students are likely to move into the workforce and insist on – and receive – similar special treatment from their employers. It is likely just a matter of time before most firms of any size have ‘disability counsellors’, just as they have HR and DEI people now.
  3. Once people start dying on operating tables and bridges start falling down, society will see that these accommodations are granting credentials to incompetent people and this will have to stop. This point is also often made with regard to DEI (now EDIDA at my old employer – guess what that stands for, gwan) policies, as well.

I actually think there is something to this, as some very undeserving and – honestly, ignorant – people have been receiving both high marks and degrees at my former place of employment for some time, and I have no problem believing their general ignorance, coupled with a sense of entitlement, will have costs down the road. Costs to others, I mean.

But neither the existence of EDIDA nor of disability accommodation means that all university graduates are ignorant and entitled; only that too many are. After all, universities have always given credentials to some who were undeserving. However, it is likely to take a loooong time for the impact of that increase in the undeserving to be visible out in the world, and an even longer time for it to be sufficiently obvious to enough people that the will to do something about it takes hold in society in general.

I would not hold my breath. Actually, I won’t be able to, as I expect to be long gone before it happens.

Grade Inflation Two – Local

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, LBOs, Standards. No Comments on Grade Inflation Two – Local

There are times when this blog writes itself. No sooner did my last piece on Harvard’s grading practices get posted than I acquired – by various means – documents that reveal what is going on in my old department regarding undergraduate marking.

First, a memo was sent around (including to me, for some reason) about new grading standards to be followed within the Dept. Instructors in the first year introductory courses and in the second year core theory courses (which almost all students take) have been informed that they should plan to give an average course mark of 75% (a middle B) and to award As and Bs to 60% of their students. Now, this is nowhere near Harvardesque, as that fine institution of higher learning is, as noted, giving As and A minuses to nearly 80% of its students. Even the Econ Dept-inclusive Faculty of Social Science at Harvard is giving out A-range marks to 65% of its students, much more generous than the new UWO Econ guideline, which in any case only applies to first and second-year courses.

None the less, this is a much higher grading expectation for UWO Econ students than reigned in my day, and the reasons for this are illustrative of what goes on in much of higher ed these days.  A separate report to the Department’s Committee on Academic Policy (also sent to me) notes that Economics tends to award fewer As and Bs than other Departments in courses of all levels. This is bad for enrollment in Econ courses, and enrollment in courses is what Departments live on in the 21st century. This is no doubt why the new grading guidelines have been struck.

Further, other information I have seen indicates that enrollment in all UWO Econ programs is on the decline, precipitously so, in some cases. For example, in UWO Econ’s once world-class Econ Honours undergrad program, enrollment in non-required courses has dropped 60% in five years. The PhD program took in 8 new students last year, when it used to take in 15-20 not long ago, when I was still employed. Even the new and previously successful Master’s program in Financial Economics has only 16 new entrants, where it used to have nearly 30.

The reasons for this are many and varied, as is always true, but for the undergrad Honors program, one cause is abundantly clear. Some 20 years back, when the Ivey Business School’s MBA program crashed and burned, Ivey had to find a new way to generate revenue. It chose to massively expand its undergrad HBA program, which students enroll in for only their last two years. Tuition for Ontario students in this program is for this year $25,200/year, so $50K for the program ($60K/year for foreign students). Ivey’s intake into the first year of this program has, since the 2000s, gone from less than 200 to 765 students in 23/24, according to its own website.

Not many programs at UWO have grown like that, although another one that has is also relevant, and its name is MOS. That stands for Management and Organizational Studies, and is a program within the Faculty of Social Science that – so far as I can tell – has also grown massively over the same period. The Faculty of Social Science is the largest at UWO, with nearly 8.000 students, and when I left my position two years ago, half of those Social Science students were said to be MOS students. (I note in passing that MOS now likes to be referred to as DAN Management, as entrepreneur Aubrey Dan left it a couple of large donations, and got the program and Department re-named in his honour some years back.)

Anyway, this quasi-business school’s growth, coupled with that of the older Ivey undergrad program has left UWO as The Business School of Western Ontario, and done much to reduce enrollment in Econ, as well as other non-Bus programs, I expect. The fact that Econ courses are hard, and, as noted last week, Econ profs are not much inclined to be easy markers, has helped feed the recent precipitous decline in Econ enrollment, and the resulting attempt to reverse this downward trend by awarding higher marks. This illustrates one of the forces militating against having grading standards that are difficult for students to meet. Another one can be seen in a document sent to me by one of my not-yet-retired colleagues in Econ. Said document is a product of what UWO calls its ‘Teaching and Learning Centre’ or TLC. It is headed:

Professional Development Workshop

Grading and Assignments

Under the heading ‘Assignment Design’ in the document is included this advice:

‘Cut down on the stuff they have to think about (and perhaps reduce cheating).’

Well yea, less reason to cheat – or study – if you aren’t expected to think about very much. I mean – who comes to university expecting to think about a lot of stuff, right?

The bureaucrats, who are really in charge now at Western, do not want faculty messing things up by making students thinkhard, or – heaven forbid – giving them low marks. It’s very bad for business and business, with a  Capital B – or maybe Capital I – is what BSWO is all about.

Learning, thinking – not so much.

I add an epilogue to further demonstrate what has happened in 40 years to Ontario universities. When I arrived at Western in 1980 I was absolutely floored by how well-prepared, smart and hard-working were UWO undergrads compared to the US undergrads I had taught during my graduate training. When I first was given an Intro Econ course to teach, I was sternly told that the Dept’s undergrad grading guidelines were to give about 1/3 of students an A or B, 1/3 a C, and 1/3 a D or F. Easy to remember, eh? 1/3, 1/3, 1/3.

So, 33% As and Bs versus 60% now, or 79% As, as at Harvard. You do the math. It’s a good bet UWO undergrads can’t. Math requires thinking about many things.

Grade inflation, Harvard Edition  

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Standards. 1 Comment on Grade inflation, Harvard Edition  

I sometimes write posts for this blog and then file them without posting, either thinking I will get back to them later and improve/shorten them, or just deciding that the post isn’t up to snuff. I have a looong one sitting in limbo right now on grade inflation, specifically in US universities. I think it’s an issue in Canadian universities (and secondary schools) also, but there is better data on it for the US.

Anyway, I may post that still-simmering article at some point, as it is a topic about which I care, but the Harvard Crimson, that august institution’s student paper, has published an article about grade inflation at Harvard that provides a nice introduction to the topic – and a shorter post.

Kurt Vonnegut is reported to have said ‘Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.’, and he wrote that long before Harvard’s most recent troubles – in 1987, in fact. It turns out that if a kid can afford it, he is at least all but assured of getting an A while being misinformed.

   or……….  

The Crimson article is from 2023, and titled ‘Harvard Report Shows 79% A-Range Grades Awarded in 2020-21, Sparking Faculty Discussion’

The Crimson has no paywall, so you can find the article and read it yourself, I expect, but here’s the graph that it opens with.

So, nearly 80% of the course grades awarded in 2020/1 were As or A minuses. Wow, is all I can say. I thought we gave marks that were too high at UWO back in the day, but I don’t think we ever approached 70+% As.

As is always the case, the percentage of As awarded varies by discipline. Here’s another graph from the Crimson report, which also goes further back into Harvard history.

SEAS is the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and I have to admit that I am surprised that Social Science profs were just as tough graders as were those in Science. (Economists, almost always housed in Social Science, are typically tough graders, but this is normally more than made up for by the Sociologists, Psychologists, Political Scientists, etc. Not at Harvard, apparently.) That the A & H faculty were the easiest graders should surprise no one. They would almost certainly look tough compared to the faculty in the Faculty of Education – if Harvard has one. And, of course, I am using ‘tough’ here ironically. The 60% A marks handed out in SEAS is anything but ‘tough’.

Yet the truly remarkable thing here is that the percentage of A grades awarded has more than doubled in 20 years in all faculties.

Now why do you think that happened?

I can tell you that there were administrators at Western in my day who attributed the ever-rising admission average to get into the Faculty of Social Science to the fact that ‘Western is just attracting better and better students.’ Secondary School grade inflation? – oh, no, certainly not.

The Crimson has some quotes from various administrators at Harvard about this, one of them from Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh:

In the meeting, Claybaugh said that the “report establishes we have a problem — or rather, we have two: the intertwined problems of grade inflation and compression.”

By ‘grade compression’ academics mean the fact that all grades awarded are concentrated on a few possibilities, making it hard to distinguish really outstanding students from others. I find it encouraging – remarkable, even, given my own interactions with administrators – that the Dean thinks this is a problem. She is later quoted again:

“There is a sense that giving a wider range of grades would give students better information about their performance, and it would give us better information about where they are ranked against other students,” Claybaugh said in an interview after the meeting.

Claybaugh said that the evidence for the existence of grade inflation was less clear, as many student grades are well-deserved and faculty have increasingly focused on learning objectives.

Yea, that sounds more like an administrator – these grades are well-deserved. At least, ‘many’ of them are.

The next quote actually makes me grumpy. Well, grumpier…..

Nonetheless, she said it seems, as one faculty member put it, external “market forces” are influencing grading, particularly as faculty rely on positive course evaluations from students for professional advancement, she said in the interview.

Ok, I’m an economist, I am used to the fact that everyone wants to blame those awful ‘market forces’ when things go bad, but c’mon, unnamed faculty member. If faculty are giving high marks to get higher student evaluations there is nothing ‘market’ about that, it is an internal Harvard decision to use those (almost entirely uninformative, imho) student evaluations for ‘professional advancement’. You could stop doing that, you know. I’m talking to you, Harvard.

Here’ my favourite quote:

Claybaugh said she would defer to the full faculty to decide whether or not to implement concrete reforms to Harvard’s grading policies, but said she would be “interested in exploring” changes “that put more information on the transcript that put the grade in context.”

The Crimson then mentions some of the things that ‘the full faculty’ considered in their meeting. Someone from A&H (natch) suggested grading simply be abolished, but in the end nothing was decided. Shocking. A faculty meeting in which nothing was decided.

Here’s a fact, from my time in the trenches, that is never mentioned in the article. Giving grades that use the entire grading range, from F to A at Harvard, from 0 to 100 at Western, is hard. It is hard for faculty to give students low marks, partly because they will come to your office and bitch and moan and plead, and their parents may call you (yes, they do) and plead on their behalf, but also because it is not fun. It is not pleasant. Few faculty are sadists, few want to be known as The Grim Reaper of Harvard – or Western.

But the thing is, it is part of the job. That is, it is part of the job to give accurate information to students about their learning, and giving almost everyone an A is not doing that. It is also part of the job to inform the world outside academia how good a student is. Giving almost everyone an A is not doing that, either.

This is, if you ask me – and I know you didn’t, but it’s my damn blog – the fundamental reason why over the last twenty years marks in secondary and post-secondary institutions all over North America have gone up and up and up. Instructors (most of them) don’t want to do that part of their job. And, since they don’t have to, they don’t. Giving lots of As is waaaaay easier on everyone, so that is what happens.

It is the ultimate slogan of the 21st century. ‘Easy is best.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Union Postures, CBC Reports It – Updated

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, LBOs, News Media, Safety. No Comments on Union Postures, CBC Reports It – Updated

[Note: I posted this first on Sept 26, after which another article (read it here) about this appeared on the CBC website. This caused me to update/amend various bits of the post on Sept 28, which you will see below. ]

A union, any union, is just another LBO, and so those in charge do what those in charge of any LBO do – stop behaving like sensible human beings. They become organization people, whose primary mission is the maintenance of the LBO and hence, of course, their own positions.

The faculty at The University of Western Ontario are ‘represented’ by UWOFA, a local union not directly affiliated with the Teamsters or CUPE or any other national labour organization, as are some unions at Western. I think it is affiliated with CAUT, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, and I think some of one’s union dues to UWOFA get shoveled up to CAUT. This faculty unionization at Western happened in the oughts, I voted against it back then, but having seen it happen anyway, was sure that it meant the end of good working conditions at Western. In fact, it took awhile for that expected deterioration in things to happen, in large part because there were enough reasonable faculty (including a couple of my Econ Dept colleagues) who were willing to serve in important union positions (like negotiating and salary committees) to keep things from going entirely off the rails immediately.

All those reasonable folks eventually got old and retired, like me, so the Union was becoming more and more unreasonable by the time I retired. A story on the Sept 26 CBC-London website (read it here) makes it clear that UWOFA has moved into full LBO posturing mode.

If you didn’t already know, CUPE local 2361, which includes caretakers, groundskeepers and many other folks tasked with keeping UWO running, walked off the job on Aug. 30 after contract negotiations with the university broke down.  They remain on strike as I write this.

The Sept 26 story headline and sub-headline from CBC was as follows:

Western faculty flag ‘critical safety violations’ amid strike, launches complaint to province

Infractions include: Eyewash stations, safety equipment not being tested and asbestos found in old buildings

If you had read this CBC story early enough, the first thing you would have seen was the photograph below, with the caption below that:

“Some students at Western University say they have seen full garbage and recycling bins on campus since facilities employees walked off the job on Aug. 30. It’s prompted the university’s faculty association to launch a complaint with the province. (Kendra Seguin/CBC)”

So, ‘some students’ have said they have seen full trash bins, but apparently the intrepid CBC reporting team, including photographer Seguin, couldn’t find a trash bin that was actually full, so they took and published the photo above. That doesn’t look staged at all, does it?

A picture is worth a thousand words – just maybe not the words intended.

If you wondered ever if the CBC thinks we’re all fools, their publishing that photo and caption perhaps provides some evidence. However, eventually someone must have pointed out to someone at the CBC that this photo and caption was rather  embarrassing, journalistically speaking, and it is no longer part of the story if you go read it now.

There are other photos, which I will get to in a minute.

The article’s sub-title raised some questions for me, as follows –

1.How do UWOFA people know that things have not been inspected or tested? Are they going around and checking? Interesting work for faculty to be doing, if so, but even if they are, how does a professor of Sociology know if a fire extinguisher or eyewash station has been inspected or tested?

2. Who ‘found’ this asbestos in old buildings? Are UWO faculty also going around buildings removing drywall and checking for asbestos? I mean, if there is asbestos in old buildings (and there certainly is in some, including the building in which I used to work) it has been there since the building was constructed. It all was certainly there before the CUPE strike, so just what does it have to do with said strike?

Well, as to 1, there are new photos in the story, taken apparently by UWOFA members, so yes, faculty really are spending their time on this – or UWOFA is paying someone else to take them, I suppose. Here’s one below, showing a station behind a glass case that holds a fire hose and fire extinguisher.

The point being that there are initials on the red sticker dated up to July, but not August or September. So what we can infer is that no one has come by and put their initials there. What does that certify? Well, that no one has come by to check that the equipment hasn’t disappeared. You don’t ‘test’ a fire extinguisher or fire hose, right? In the case of the extinguisher, that renders it useless, and in the case of the fire hose, it makes one hell of a mess.

Here’s another photo from the new and improved CBC story:

Well, someone wearing jeans and sneakers is apparently putting a new plastic liner in a plastic garbage can. I don’t know how UWO faculty can possibly concentrate on their work knowing such things are going on, possibly in the same building in which they are working.

But wait, there’s more –

So, there is indeed an eye wash and safety shower which may have not been tested since the 16th of August. That doesn’t mean the station doesn’t work, of course, but no one has put an initial on that card since then.

[Amendment: The more recent CBC story includes the following statement from the UWO administration:

A spokesperson for the university said weekly checks of eyewash stations inside labs are the responsibility of lab staff, not CUPE 2361 employees. 

Thus, if indeed these stations are not being checked and tested, it has nothing to do with the CUPE strike. I wonder who UWOFA may have gotten into hot water over this photo?]

But wait, there’s still more. Another quote from the story:

The faculty union also said HVAC systems in student residences are malfunctioning and replacement workers aren’t wearing adequate personal protective equipment.

How does the faculty union know what is happening in student residences, and who among these dedicated faculty guardians of safety is aware of what ppe is required by workers in any particular situation?

Here are two clarifying quotes from UWOFA’s stalwart president:

“For a replacement worker, the difference between a sneaker and a safety shoe is very significant when a heavy or sharp object falls on their foot,” said UWOFA president Johanna Weststar.

Ah, of course, this is about UWOFA’s concern for the replacement workers.

She is further quoted –

“A malfunctioning eye wash station could mean blindness for faculty, staff or students who work with hazardous substances. Western works because CUPE workers do. We need them back now.”

It could, indeed. Here’s a crazy idea, but stay with me on this. Suppose UWOFA members who go into a room or lab in which there is an eye wash station or shower check to see if it is working before they begin their class or lab work. You know, turn it on, and see what happens. Now, I know that would be doing the work of a member of another union, a definite Solidarity No-No, but….it would prevent, you know, blindness from happening.

That crazy idea aside, this last quote does kinda indicate what is really going on – UWOFA is trying to put pressure on the Administration to settle with the striking CUPE members. More precisely, they are trying to get a provincial minstry to put pressure on UWO to settle. I have no doubt having CUPE on strike is a pain in the ass for faculty, but it is of course never going to happen that UWOFA tries to put pressure on the strikers themselves, or good ol’ CUPE, to settle. Solidarity, right?

So, this is posturing by UWOFA to try to get something they want – the Admin to settle with the CUPE workers. I am no friend of the UWO Admin, I think the place was and continues to be incredibly badly run, but I think UWOFA is just as badly run, and does not in any sense operate in the interests of most faculty members. It was a tossup in my last years working whether it was the Admin or UWOFA that did the most to make my working life unpleasant.

I will close with one last bit of the CBC story. Another quote attributed to UWOFA:

The faculty union said it’s “alarmed by the potential for asbestos exposure in older buildings, where water and steam leaks occur frequently and require special precautions that may not have been properly communicated to replacement contractors.”

Ah, so those ‘special precautions’ that are required ‘may not have been properly communicated to replacement contractors’. Indeed, they may not have been. Or, maybe they were, it doesn’t sound as though UWOFA actually knows, does it?

But, being fair to UWOFA, it is unlikely anyone within UWOFA actually claimed to have ‘found’ asbestos in old buildings. That wording at the beginning of the story is almost surely pure CBC, devoted as ever to accurate reporting.

[Amendment: The later CBC story includes this quote from the UWO Admin:

“There is no reason to suggest that asbestos-related hazards have increased during the current strike – and the University is not aware of any contracted employees exposed to any hazardous conditions,” said Ledgley.

As I wrote, asbestos has been known to be in some UWO buildings for years – this has nothing to do with the present CUPE strike.

Again from the UWO Admin, quoted by CBC:

“In the unusual circumstance that asbestos abatement work was necessary, it would be conducted by individuals properly trained in asbestos work with proper personal protective equipment and the worker would be monitored by Workplace Health.”]

I suspect none of this posturing by UWOFA’s leaders is going to have an impact on the Provincial Ministry of Labour, and thus on the duration of the strike, but I suppose one shouldn’t blame an LBO for trying.

[Amendment: I was just wrong on this. The more recent CBC story includes this:

The ministry told CBC News on Thursday that it received two health and safety complaints from the university on Sept. 24, and has assigned an inspector to investigate.

“The ministry prioritizes worker health and safety, enforcing the Occupational Health and Safety Act to ensure compliance. While the investigation is in progress, we cannot provide further details,” a spokesperson told CBC News in an email.

The ministry is indeed investigating. I look forward to what happens next, and whether this has any impact on the duration of the strike. I suppose I should say ‘Well played, UWOFA’, but I’ll wait to see what actually comes of all this.]

 

 

 

Nonsense

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Language. 1 Comment on Nonsense

There are certain phrases one hears over and over again, and that are never challenged, despite the fact that they are clearly nonsense.

A minor instance of this is the expression: ‘That’s the exception that proves the rule.’ To say that an exception to a rule proves the validity or truth of that rule is just nonsense. If there is an exception to a rule, then it is not a rule. It is a rule with exceptions – i.e., it ain’t really a rule. Now, I have read that in fact the original statement of this was ‘That’s the exception that preuves the rule.’ The word preuves (a word I have not seen elsewhere) means ‘tests’. I have no idea if that was indeed the original statement, but that an exception might test a rule is at least not nonsense.

However the phrase of this sort that has set my teeth on edge for eons is of arguably more import in the contemporary world. I read it most recently in the following quote from an opinion piece in The Harvard Crimson by Lawrence Bobo, Harvard’s Dean of Social Science.

“The truth is that free speech has limits — it’s why you can’t escape sanction for shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.”

That is simply wrong. That you cannot escape sanction for shouting fire in a crowded theatre is only true if in fact there is no fire. If there is a fire, you damn well better shout it, and pull the alarm while you’re at it. This is a sanction against lying, or causing needless panic. It has nothing to do with free speech or limits on it.

I suppose it is too much to expect the Dean of Social Science at Harvard to understand this.

 

People Can Disappoint You; Bureaucrats, Almost Always

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, LBOs. No Comments on People Can Disappoint You; Bureaucrats, Almost Always

In my post of June 2, ‘People can Surprise You’ I had a number of complimentary things to  say about a statement put out by the University of Western Ontario’s president, Alan Shepherd, regarding the protest encampment on the university campus. I said at the end of my post that I would wait with hope to see if the university would actually put into action the principles put forward in that statement.

I expected to be disappointed, frankly, and I am.

First, included in the President’s statement was this:

“These commitments – to the extent that they are new and not already in place – are contingent upon organizers agreeing to dismantle the encampment and not return, and to not disrupt Western’s convocation ceremonies out of respect for their fellow students.”

And this:

“What’s more, individuals participating in the encampment have several times crossed the line. They are intimidating visitors including high-school students on campus tours. They are harassing our campus community members, including students and caretaking staff. They are committing acts of vandalism. And some have even engaged in assaultive behaviour towards our staff.

This is unacceptable and cannot go on.”

UWO’s convocation ceremonies are about to wrap up, and the encampment remains. I suppose that all the first quote above requires is that whatever ‘new commitments’ the University had made might now not be honored.

Further, there was a photo (no story) in the  June 21 London Free Press with the following caption:

“GRADUATES FACE PROTEST: Western University graduates are met by about 200 loudly chanting pro-Palestinian protesters in front of the Ivey school of business during convocation ceremonies Thursday afternoon.”

The photo shows two security personnel walking from the left side of the picture toward the right, where the protestors can be seen chanting into the faces of the graduates walking along in their graduation gowns.

As I said, there is no story beyond the quoted caption in the Freeps, and I do wonder why not.

So, here on June 21, the encampment remains, graduates – and I expect others – are being harassed, the Free Press appears to have no interest in reporting this beyond a photo caption. I fully expect that next week the encampment will remain and people on campus will continue to be shouted at by the campers.

I have to conclude that all of this is in fact perfectly acceptable to the UWO Admin, despite their noble words.

I am disappointed, but not surprised.

 

People can surprise you

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, LBOs. 3 Comments on People can surprise you

Those not living in a hermitage over the last several months will be aware of the protests and – in many cases – encampments that have occurred on university campuses across North America. So far as I can tell, all of these have been generated by people – students or otherwise – who wish to support the Palestinians in Gaza in what has become known as the Israel-Gaza [see addendum below]*war. They have called for the universities in question to do a variety of things, from divestment of university endowments in weapons manufacturers to the ending of all academic or other relationships the university has with Israel, Israeli universities, or in some cases, any organization that is thought (by the protesters) to be linked to Zionism, however they define that.

Universities have responded to these protests in a variety of ways, and while I cannot claim to have investigated every such occurrence, my impression is that universities have only rarely been willing to refuse to accede to the demands of the protesters, and have even less often been willing to use law enforcement to remove encampments that are, by any reasonable definition, illegal. At minimum, these encampments entail trespassing on university property, and in some cases, according to reports, the people in the encampments have been seen to be harassing members of the university community going about their daily business.

Many of the university responses – such as at U of Toronto – have featured the setting of repeated deadlines to abandon an encampment, deadlines that have been moved forward in time each time the previous one is violated. Here are the opening lines of a Globe and Mail article of June 2 about the U of T encampment:

“Convocation ceremonies for graduating University of Toronto students begin Monday against the backdrop of a pro-Palestinian encampment that has remained on campus for weeks despite a trespass notice and looming legal action.

More than 30 ceremonies are scheduled to take place through June 21 and the university says all events will proceed as planned with ‘extra precautions.’”

This particular encampment has been in place since May 2, and U of T has gone to court seeking an injunction order to clear it. Stay tuned….

Not surprisingly, the UWO campus is also home to an encampment located near what has always been referred to as ‘the concrete beach’ just outside the University Community Centre; a high people-traffic area. There have been ongoing discussions/negotiations between representatives of those in the encampment and UWO’s senior administration regarding the dismantling of said encampment, which has been there at least since May 3. (That was the last time I was on campus, and it was there on that date.)

I am writing this blog about the UWO situation because I got an email in which the administration of my former employer set out their response to the situation. You can read this at this link. – it’s public. However, going to that url will confront you with a whole series of dated updates and statements, and what I want to call your attention to is the one titled:

“Responding to calls from the Western Divestment Coalition – May 29, 2024”

I am about as far from being a fan of UWO’s current senior administration as you will find on planet earth, but I am writing this post because I read the above statement, and was pleasantly surprised by (most of) its content.

In particular, I direct you to the following statements in this response:

“There are also roles we do not – and should not – play.

For instance, with few exceptions throughout history, universities do not take unilateral stances on political or social issues. Why? Because by our very nature, universities do not speak with one voice. To do so would be antithetical to our mission as a place where all are welcome and where diverse ideas can be openly and respectfully debated and explored.

With this mission in mind, universities have historically not taken up wholesale calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions – and Western University is no different.”

To be sure, there is wiggle room in the last sentence in particular. They write that universities have ‘historically not taken up’ calls for boycott, rather than ‘Western will not take up a call for boycott, divestment and sanctions”. Only time will tell whether what UWO does varies from what they say universities have done ‘historically’.

Later in the administration response one reads:

“But the larger point is that, as an institution of higher learning, our role is to make room for the broadest range of views.

With that in mind, our investment policy is driven not by political motives or any institutional position on particular global affairs, but by a fiduciary duty to ensure the University is financially equipped to carry out its mission in support of all students, faculty and staff – today and well into the future.”

Later on there is this:

“Our goal is to end this unlawful encampment safely and soon. We are seeking a peaceful resolution, and we hope to continue engaging with our students to do so.

“Students should not fear repercussions simply by speaking with us and negotiating on behalf of their peers.

That said, any individual who chooses not to respect the bounds of peaceful and lawful protest cannot be guaranteed amnesty.”

And, as my final quote from the Admin response, there is this:

“These commitments – to the extent that they are new and not already in place – are contingent upon organizers agreeing to dismantle the encampment and not return, and to not disrupt Western’s convocation ceremonies out of respect for their fellow students.

The protracted occupation of the popular gathering place outside the University Community Centre is not only unsafe and unlawful but is making it impossible for Western to fulfil our promise of creating inclusive spaces across our campus for all our community members.

What’s more, individuals participating in the encampment have several times crossed the line. They are intimidating visitors including high-school students on campus tours. They are harassing our campus community members, including students and caretaking staff. They are committing acts of vandalism. And some have even engaged in assaultive behaviour towards our staff.

This is unacceptable and cannot go on.”

Once again I note that there is a rather large hole in this quote, through which one could drive almost anything. The last sentence says nothing definite about what will happen if this ‘unacceptable’ situation does go on until convocation. More negotiation, more statements, another deadline….? I do not want to see a confrontation between the protesters and law enforcement on the UWO campus. But I agree that what is described as happening there is ‘unacceptable’, and that word has no meaning without a willingness to bring it to an end.

Still, I write here not to bury the UWO Admin but to praise them. I am not happy with every word in the UWO Admin’s response – I should not expect to be – but the quoted statements lay out principles that align with my own principles regarding the mission of a university, and the bounds of what is acceptable behavior within them. That is not something I have said often about statements coming from that source, so I am tipping my hat to them, for one of the few times in my life.

What remains to be seen is the extent to which said Administrators are willing to take what will be  unpopular (with some) actions in order to uphold these principles. I wait to see what happens with admitted doubt in my heart, but hope in my soul.

*In fact, it is more often referred to in the media as ‘the war in Gaza’ or ‘the Israel-Hamas war’. My bad.

Sample-based bullshit

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Standards. No Comments on Sample-based bullshit

Standards in general, and in academia in particular, are a keen concern of mine, and I will be writing about them frequently here. This post is about an open letter written by a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Regina to the Head of the Department, a letter which he shared in a publication to which I subscribe.

The letter concerns an email sent to all CS students and faculty at UR on August 30, 2023, in which the following sentence appears – “In an effort to provide timely feedback on student work, some of our courses will be moving to a sample-based marking approach.”

The email goes on to explain what that means – that when a student turns in an assignment or test, not all of it will be marked. The parts to be marked will not be revealed until after the marked work has been returned to the students, and their grade will be determined only by that which is marked. So if a test consists of 6 problems, perhaps only three will be marked and feedback provided; the same three for all students.

The reason given for this is the increase in the size of CS classes, driven in turn by an increase in the number of CS majors, said to be nearly 1000 in the email.

The faculty member wrote his open letter to the Head of his Department (Computer Science) decrying this new grading approach, and explaining why he thought it would lead to a decline in academic standards.

I will first just record here that ‘sample-based marking’ as described, is in itself a reduction in academic standards. When I taught at University my assignments and tests were conceived as a whole, different parts of it designed to test different parts of the material, but also different abilities. Some questions could not be answered well without having the ability to write clearly and concisely about something complex, while other questions were designed to test one’s ability to deal with more formal logical or technical issues. To mark or provide feedback on only some aspects of the work is to ignore some part of what the course is about.

I understand well that the idea behind this is that, because the students don’t know up-front which parts of their work will be marked, they still have an incentive to work hard learning all of it. This does not change the fact they will get no feedback on some of their work, a primary point of marking. But in addition, anyone who knows students knows this will lead to a cottage industry in figuring out which parts of work any given instructor is likely to mark, which is not in any way part of what higher education is supposed to teach students.

This policy is, in the end, a further piece of evidence as to what University administrators’ goal is. Get as many students through to a degree as possible, at as low a cost as possible. So far as I can tell, their political masters in Canada are perfectly in agreement with this goal.

This is why sample-based marking is being implemented, rather than the solution suggested by the CS faculty member who objected to it; hiring more faculty to accommodate the growing number of students. Faculty are expensive. And, note that the letter did not indicate that CS students would be seeing a discount on their tuition bill to accompany this sample-based marking initiative.

Imagine a McDonald’s franchise-holder, or local restauranteur, who found themselves with a (delightful) increase in patronage, and responded by filling only part of all food orders, rather than hiring more workers, while charging for everything ordered.

One final note. The original email laying out how this scheme is envisioned working at UR also says that the parts of any student work that are not marked will none the less have solutions posted for the non-marked parts, or they will be gone over in class so as to provide students with the correct solutions. So, there’s your all-around feedback, eh?

Right. In a university atmosphere in which students feel free – indeed, are encouraged – to argue for higher marks for most any reason they can think up, this will open up a whole new area of student appeals. To wit: “ I got the parts of the exam you did not mark nearly perfect, according to your own solution key, so I deserve much more than the 63 I received, which is based solely on the parts you did mark.”…followed by the ever-popular ‘This isn’t fair.’

 

 

Surge Pricing Burgers and the Importance of Reading the Whole Post

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, News Media. No Comments on Surge Pricing Burgers and the Importance of Reading the Whole Post

Wendy, Wendy what went wrong? – Brian Wilson and Mike Love

Some weeks back a news story made the rounds that Wendy’s CEO had announced in a call with investors that the company was planning to institute ‘surge pricing’ in its restaurants. You can read a somewhat outraged story about it in the NY Post here, if you missed it. Surge pricing in this case would mean that what you pay for items on their menu would vary with the time of day, as does the amount of business at Wendy’s – busy times would see higher prices. The technology to do this is the installation of menu boards at the drive-thrus on which prices could be changed electronically whenever desired. Presumably the same would be true for the in-store menu boards, also.

Anyway, this generated a mostly predictable amount of outrage from mostly predictable quarters, but I am writing about this not because of the pricing itself, or the outrage, but rather about what happened next. On February 28 the Globe ran an Associated Press article with the headline “Wendy’s says it has no plans to raise prices at busiest times at its restaurants”. Similarly, CNN’s website (a place I rarely go) ran an article on Feb 28 titled “Wendy’s says it won’t use surge pricing’.

To its credit, CNN also provided a link to the blog post in which Wendy’s supposedly backtracked from its CEO’s original statement to investors about this. You can read that post here also, if you like.

However, what convinced me this was worth writing about myself, was an Opinion article that appeared in my print edition of The Globe and was headed up thusly:

Surge pricing for burgers? Wendy’s was wise to reject it

Woonghee Tim Huh and Steven Shechter

Special to The Globe and Mail – Feb 29, 2024

Woonghee Tim Huh is professor and chair of the operations and logistics division at the UBC Sauder School of Business and the Canada Research Chair in operations excellence and business analytics.

Steven Shechter is a professor in the operations and logistics division at the UBC Sauder School of Business and the WJ VanDusen Professor of business administration.

****

You can read the online version of this Globe article here. In it, the UBC guys explain, sort-of, why it was wise of Wendy’s to back off from their original surge pricing plan.

No doubt Bus School profs have superior insight into firm pricing than do I, but it seems to me that it behooves all of us to read what the firm in question has to say about what they are doing before analysing what they are doing. Professors Huh and Shechter do quote from Wendy’s ‘backtracking’ blog post, in the paragraph below, quoted directly from the Profs’ G&M article:

So, on Wednesday, Wendy’s said its dynamic pricing plan would not raise prices during busy times. The plan, the company said, would only “allow us to change the menu offerings at different times of day and offer discounts and value offers.”

Point one: learn to use ellipsis if you only quote part of a sentence. Here is the full sentence from the actual Wendy’s blog from which the good Professors’ partial quote is taken:

“Digital menuboards could allow us to change the menu offerings at different times of day and offer discounts and value offers to our customers more easily, particularly in the slower times of day.”

Point two: everything that is important about the actual sentence posted by Wendy’s is the underlined part of it at the end which the Professors left out of their own quote. Had they included it, they might have felt compelled to explain how ‘raising prices during peak times’ differs from ‘offering discounts during slower times of day’, and that would be a truly difficult task, because there is no difference.

Back when I taught price discrimination strategies in my Managerial Econ class, I would start with something familiar to everyone – Seniors pricing. You know, you walk into the movie theatre and find something that looks like this:

Admission: $15.00

Seniors (55+): $12.00

(Sidebar: I would ask my students why so many businesses offer lower prices to seniors, and get lots of responses about corporate altruism and Seniors being on fixed incomes. It was fun then to show them that this pricing increased profits for the firms, no altruism needed.)

But I digress.

My point is that one does not see this sign in a theatre:

Admission: $12.00

Under 55: $15.00

There is no bloody difference in the price anyone pays for a theatre ticket with the two different signs, but the second one just seems so mean, while the first one seems nice.

Well, it’s the same with Wendy’s pricing: offering discounts at slow times seems nice, adding a premium when it’s busy, well that’s just mean, and Wendy’s would never do that. They said so, after all.

Minor point: If Wendy’s actually had, in some alternate universe, backtracked from surge pricing, I can’t say there is anything in the Sauder School authored Globe article that convinced me that backtracking would have been wise, the headline notwithstanding. However, since Wendy’s did not backtrack, that point seems not worth pursuing.

Not so minor point: Since it is clear from their own blog post that Wendy’s is going to install these quick-price-change menu boards, the following scenario becomes possible. The drive-thrus already have cameras focused on the cars in the queue, so it would be easy to build a data base of licence plate numbers at each store, or even across stores, so the store could determine, for example, how regular a customer they were serving. If Wendy’s corporate strategists have kept up with what goes on at insurance companies, they could then program their menu boards to show higher prices to frequent drive-thru-diners.

I used to teach students about that sort of ‘disloyalty pricing’, too, because insurance companies do employ it – they call it ‘price optimization’, and last I read, some US States were trying to ban it.

Shattering illusions, that was always my mission.

Coda: Before this post went to press, the WSJ published another article on surge pricing and other restaurant strategies. A quote from that article:

While some consumers tend to resent surge pricing, as Wendy’s discovered last month, they like happy-hour discounts and other deals at slow times, industry consultants said.

Whatever would the world do without industry consultants?

 

Sci-fi in aid of Science

Written by Editorial Team on . Posted in Education, Research, Standards. 1 Comment on Sci-fi in aid of Science

I was a pretty big fan of science fiction in my younger days, and still read some from time to time. I think Frank Herbert’s  Dune is a great novel (the sequels not so much), enjoyed reading works by Heinlein, Le Guin and Asimov.. 

One of the genre’s leading lights back then was Arthur C Clarke, who wrote the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (in 1982) [not true, see below] on which the film was based. I was not a Clarke fan, don’t remember that I read any of his stuff. However, he made an interesting contribution to the culture beyond his books themselves, when he formulated three ‘laws’ regarding technology that have come to be known as Clarke’s Laws. He didn’t proclaim these all at once, and in any case it is the third law that is most cited, which so far as I can determine first appeared in a letter he wrote to Science in 1968. [If anyone has better info on the third law’s original appearance and antecedents I’d love to hear it.]

Clarke’s Third Law is: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’

That strikes me – and many others, apparently – as a perceptive statement. Think of how someone living in 1682 anywhere in the world would regard television or radio. 

As with any perceptive and oft-repeated assertion,  this prompted others to lay down similar edicts, such as Grey’s Law: “Any sufficiently egregious incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

[I cannot trace Grey’s law back to anyone named Grey – if you can, let me know.]

Note that there is a difference, as Clarke’s law speaks to how something will be perceived, whereas Grey’s points at the consequences of incompetence vs malice. If you are denied a mortgage by a bank despite your stellar credit rating, the impact on you of that decision does not depend on whether it is attributable to the credit officer’s incompetence or dislike of you. 

On to Science, then, and what I will call Gelman’s Law (although Gelman himself does not refer to it that way). 

Most non-academics I know view academics and their research with a somewhat rosy glow. If someone with letters after their name writes something, and particularly if they write it in an academic journal, they believe it. 

It does nothing to increase my popularity with my friends to repeatedly tell them: it ain’t so. There is a lot of crappy (a technical academic term, I will elaborate in future posts) research being done, and a lot of crappy research being published, even in peer-reviewed journals. What is worse is that as far as I can tell, the credible research is almost never the stuff that gets written up in the media. Some version of Gresham’s Law [‘bad money drives out good money’] seems to be at work here. 

A blog that I read regularly is titled Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference and Social Science (gripping title, eh?), written by Andrew Gelman, a Political Science and Stats prof at Columbia U. I recommend it to you, but warn that you better have your geek hard-hat on for many of the posts. 

Although I often disagree with Gelman, he generally writes well and I have learned tons from his blog. One of the things that has endeared it to me is his ongoing campaign against academic fraud and incompetent research. 

He has formulated a Law of his own, which he modestly attributes to Clarke, but which I will here dub Gelman’s Third Law: 

“Any sufficiently crappy research is indistinguishable from fraud.”

I think this law combines the insights of Clarke’s and Grey’s. The consequences of believing the results from crappy research do not differ from the consequences of believing the results from fraudulent research, as with Grey. However, it is also true that there is no reason to see the two things as different. If you are so incompetent at research as to produce crap, then you should be seen as a fraud, as with Clarke. 

I will be writing about crappy/fraudulent research often here, in hopes of convincing readers that they should be very skeptical the next time they read those deadly words: “Studies show…”

I will close this by referring you, for your reading pleasure, to a post by Gelman titled:    

 It’s bezzle time: The Dean of Engineering at the University of Nevada gets paid $372,127 a year and wrote a paper that’s so bad, you can’t believe it.

It’s a long post, but non-geeky, and quite illuminating. (Aside: I interviewed for an academic position at U of Nevada in Reno a hundred years ago. They put me up in a casino during my visit. Didn’t gamble, didn’t get a job offer.) You can read more about this intrepid and highly paid Dean here. His story is really making the (academic) rounds these days. 

You’re welcome, and stay tuned. I got a million of ‘em….

p.s. Discovered this since I wrote the above, but before posting. One of many reasons this stuff matters, from Nevada Today

University receives largest individual gift in its history to create the George W. Gillemot Aerospace Engineering Department 

The $36 million gift is the largest individual cash gift the University has received in its 149-year history 

Anyone care to bet on whether this Dean gets canned?

 Corrigendum: An alert reader has pointed out that Clarke’s novel was not written in 1982 – indeed, the film came out in 1968. In fact the 2001 film was based largely on one of Clarke’s short stories from 1951: The Sentinel. Clarke did write a novel called 2010: Odyssey Two, in 1982, and a not-so-successful movie was based on that, in 1984.