6 ms·

Professor makes his mark, but it costs him his job

65 points by mad44 18y ago

gaius 18y ago
The important sentence in that story is Prof. Rancourt's suspension is the most serious step in a long series of grievances and conflicts with the university dating back to 2005. Still, even if one-third of his colleagues have complained about him, I doubt they'll be willing to set the precedent of tenured profs being fired, they'll strike for him if the union requires it.
- TomOfTTB 18y ago
  Honestly, this is my biggest problem with Unions. I've never had an issue with them conceptually. For jobs that aren't in high demand it's strategically foolish not to band together when dealing with an employer. But for some reason Unions always end up answering to the lowest common denominator. So you have a group of people who largely want to do their job well being forced to walk away from that job to defend the idiots who do their jobs badly.
  - jrockway 18y ago
    Forced? Or decided that defending one idiot will make their lives easier when they are the "idiot".
  - rw 18y ago
    You really think this guy is an idiot? Have you attended college, seen what grades do to those who already have a passion for the topic at hand?
    - gaius 18y ago
      I think there's such a thing as choosing your battles.
- captainobvious 18y ago
  The grievances were: * Experimenting with eliminating grades. This was the issue at hand anyway. * Altering a course curriculum with student input. Every teacher does this to some extent; there aren't enough details to judge (i.e. did he make a class on physics into one on cooking?). * Criticism of his peers for paternalistic teaching methods. Not enough details, but it sounds like it was restricted to emails and was therefore just words.. * Held a popular course on activism that the university cancelled the next year. Can't fully judge from this; maybe this class was popular cause it was one where he was experimenting with giving free A's. Or maybe it was popular because it was good. * "[...] [M]ade headlines after 10-year-old twins registered for his course with their mother – and he supported the filing of a human-rights complaint claiming ageism when the university said they couldn't stay." Supporting their filing shouldn't be grounds for dismissal; sounds like he was just going through the appropriate channels. He didn't e.g. let them come into the class in defiance of the rule, he just supported their appeal. * Doesn't shy away from expressing his view that Isreal commits military aggression If expressing the opposing view can't make you lose tenure, expressing this one shouldn't either. Unless they want an Orwellian culture.
TomOfTTB 18y ago
I'm not sure arresting him was justified but other than that I agree with the University. He might not like grades but they are a basis by which employers judge job candidates. They represent a skill (hard work among other things) that employer's value. By doing away with them in his classroom he is compromising that whole system. University teachers like this one need to realize that they have two tasks. To open student's minds AND to ensure they are qualified to function in society. He's completely ignored the second task and thinks he's a hero for having done so.
- sanswork 18y ago
  I disagree with you on professors having those two tasks personally. Preparing people for the workforce shouldn't even be on a university professors mind. Open students minds, and advance research in their area of expertise should be their two roles. Too many people go to university now for the wrong reasons so I can see why you would think it should be about getting a job(because that's what 90% go for) but it really shouldn't be about that at all.
- Jebdm 18y ago
  I'd dispute the statement that good grades are a useful measurement of ability to function in society. All grades really measure is students' abilities to get good grades. There are lots of factors that can go into getting a good grade, especially in courses where the grading process is necessarily subjective: writing in a style which appeals to the grader, building a relationship with the grader, studying in an optimal way for taking exams, being dedicated to your studies, etc. Parts of this skillset are obviously useful in general. A person who is able to figure out how to appeal to their audience will do well in many fields. Some are more tricky; for instance, one might assume that someone who studies optimally for their exams will be able to figure how to perform other tasks optimally as well, but this is often not the case. One particularly misleading thing about grades is that they are often seen as an indicator of how dedicated/good of a worker students are. This might sometimes be the case; some students get good grades primarily because they work very hard. But some students get good grades without much effort, some only work hard because they have someone driving them (such as their parents), and some do well in an academic atmosphere but will burn out in a more job-oriented one. The biggest of these fallacies is that a student with low grades is a poor worker or bad in their subject; there are students who worked hard but just had a bad teacher, students who are overworked, students who prioritize certain classes over others, and students who are disenchanted with academic work but who will do well in a "real-world" atmosphere". As an anecdote: I go to a fairly alternative liberal arts school that is nonetheless highly ranked (not that rankings are good judges of schools, but here's the US News page: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/items/9645 http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/items/... ). My school accepts a fair number of students who in high school did not perform well academically. Many of these students pick up their grades while here; nearly all of these students are very smart and capable. The problem with grades is that they fail to provide any breakdown of the factors which contribute to them, which is the truly useful information. Even in the cases where a student got all A+'s or all F's, where it seems that the student is probably overall competent or incompetent respectively, there are still external motivations which are not taken into account but which are nonetheless vitally important. Another big problem with grades is that they fail to take into account differences between environments, school policies, and graders; that is, even when grading policies are objective, they differ from place to place but are compared nonetheless. Different graders grade differently; some may give A's to everyone who is qualified, while some may give them to only those who are most qualified. Some of these effects can be damped through normalization, but usefully normalizing grades seems difficult as well. Imagine trying to normalize grades between MIT and community college students. Additionally, the information required to do any significant statistical tricks is often not avaliable to those who could use it, and those who could use it would probably not take the time to even if they could. Finally, I feel like you completely missed the professor's point. (I'm assuming he believes arguments similar to mine.) Since grades don't provide signifcant metrics of anything, using them to judge people is both discriminatory and a bad idea. Thus, the responsible thing to do would be to get rid of them altogether (or at least reform them so that they actually measured something). But since he doesn't have the power to do that, he does the closest thing he can: give everyone the best grade possible. This has several positive effects: it lessens the potential future discrimination against his students; it, as you said, "compromis[es] that whole system", making more obvious how arbitrary it is and hopefully leads to its undoing; and it (he believes) makes students learn better. He hasn't ignored the second task at all.
bestes 18y ago
Good for him. The idea that trying different techniques in education (i.e. Not giving grades) seems silly. The system will not fall apart. College is not vocational school, although you can hardly tell the difference. Imagine if science had a rule: we'll do things the old way so it doesn't cause problems.
- jrockway 18y ago
  Imagine if science had a rule: we'll do things the old way so it doesn't cause problems. I'm pretty sure that's called "engineering".
  - tspiteri 18y ago
    No, that is manufacturing. New technologies are developed by engineers. But then, there is manufacturing engineering, so you may be correct for a subset of "engineering".
pchivers 18y ago
This article reminds of another Canadian university prof named David Noble who doesn't give grades either. He seems to have found a way to do it without getting fired though. Giving Up the Grade - David Noble http://www.policyalternatives.ca/MonitorIssues/2007/05/MonitorIssue1639/ http://www.policyalternatives.ca/MonitorIssues/2007/05/Monit... Throughout the 30-odd years of my university teaching career I have always found ways around grading, primarily by giving all A’s, thereby eliminating grades de facto, if not de jure. Last year for the first time, after long bemoaning my “anomalous” practice, York University officials formally prevailed upon me henceforth to designate my courses “ungraded “ (a pass/fail option without the fail), thereby taking them off the radar screen and perhaps unintentionally establishing a promising academic precedent.
azharcs 18y ago
He has also been an outspoken critic of “Israeli military aggression” and is not shy about expressing those views with students. I am certainly seeing a pattern here, first victims of the aggression are critical, world doesn't listen to them. Then neighboring countries are afraid and criticize Israel for being an aggressor. Then slowly decades pass by, smart people of other developed-countries start criticizing them for human-rights violation and then slowly most people will listen to the smart people of their own country and change their mind about Israel. So according to me, it is just a matter of time before everyone is critical of Israel (you can't fool all the people all the time).
tspiteri 18y ago
One of the professors during my degree used a different method. It was difficult to fail his subjects; he could not fail a student because of a poor showing in a three-hour test. But to get an A, you had to show him that you knew exactly what you were talking (writing) about.
endtime 18y ago
It sounds like this guy is a bit of a nut job and this was just their excuse for getting rid of him.
jballanc 18y ago
As someone intimately involved in the art of assigning grades in a university setting (I'm a TA), let me let you in on a little secret... Around 10 years ago, universities across the country awoke to a surprising new fact: they we're no longer bound by the expectation of being a benefactor of humanity. No! They were free to become thriving enterprises. And what was the product they should sell? Grades
- SapphireSun 18y ago
  Can you elaborate on that? Do people brazenly purchase grades? At my university, I have to fight damn hard for an A.
  - jballanc 18y ago
    Economics involves more than just the exchange of money... For example: Student X, a member of the sports team (any sport will do), has been missing classes, not paying attention to the material, and doing poorly on the assignments. Then, X sleeps through the big exam. X comes to me, saying that (s)he should still be allowed to take the exam. I send X to the dean, and not more than 15 min later receive a phone call from the dean: "Couldn't we just let X take the test?" Me: "X is a poor student, has shown no remorse for missing the exam, and by all right should fail..." Dean: "Yes, but couldn't we let X take the exam?" True story...X did get to take the exam, and got a C in the course. The school has sold X a grade in exchange for X playing on the team, which brings revenue in to the school. Even when X isn't an athlete, the school is exchanging tuition revenue for grades. ...it's a shame, but people were really sweating last time the accreditation board did their once-in-a-blue-moon review. All the higher-ups wanted to skate a thin line between remaining accredited and still allowing as many students to get by with Bs and Cs as possible.
- rsheridan6 18y ago
  Universities are selling certificates that the buyer expects will get them a well paying job. Employers believe that the certificate indicates something about its owners abilities. Universities can just start selling grades, but that's sort of like selling baking soda and calling it crack. People will figure it out eventually, and then the commodity will become worthless. That's actually a lot like what's happened with the credit rating agencies that were giving AAA ratings to trash.
aaw 18y ago
If he wants to teach his students that grades "poison our educational environment", why is the solution to give everyone an A+? He's just using grades as currency to buy his students' support for his experiment in anarchy. I wonder how many of them would have still participated in his class if he had announced on the first day that everyone would get a C, a D, or an F?
brianobush 18y ago
wish I could've had him for physics...
andreyf 18y ago
A couple of my professors at Rutgers did something like this in advanced classes, albeit at the end of the course.

65 points by mad44 18y ago

gaius 18y ago

The important sentence in that story is Prof. Rancourt's suspension is the most serious step in a long series of grievances and conflicts with the university dating back to 2005. Still, even if one-third of his colleagues have complained about him, I doubt they'll be willing to set the precedent of tenured profs being fired, they'll strike for him if the union requires it.

TomOfTTB 18y ago
Honestly, this is my biggest problem with Unions. I've never had an issue with them conceptually. For jobs that aren't in high demand it's strategically foolish not to band together when dealing with an employer. But for some reason Unions always end up answering to the lowest common denominator. So you have a group of people who largely want to do their job well being forced to walk away from that job to defend the idiots who do their jobs badly.
- jrockway 18y ago
  Forced? Or decided that defending one idiot will make their lives easier when they are the "idiot".
- rw 18y ago
  You really think this guy is an idiot? Have you attended college, seen what grades do to those who already have a passion for the topic at hand?
  - gaius 18y ago
    I think there's such a thing as choosing your battles.
captainobvious 18y ago
The grievances were: * Experimenting with eliminating grades. This was the issue at hand anyway. * Altering a course curriculum with student input. Every teacher does this to some extent; there aren't enough details to judge (i.e. did he make a class on physics into one on cooking?). * Criticism of his peers for paternalistic teaching methods. Not enough details, but it sounds like it was restricted to emails and was therefore just words.. * Held a popular course on activism that the university cancelled the next year. Can't fully judge from this; maybe this class was popular cause it was one where he was experimenting with giving free A's. Or maybe it was popular because it was good. * "[...] [M]ade headlines after 10-year-old twins registered for his course with their mother – and he supported the filing of a human-rights complaint claiming ageism when the university said they couldn't stay." Supporting their filing shouldn't be grounds for dismissal; sounds like he was just going through the appropriate channels. He didn't e.g. let them come into the class in defiance of the rule, he just supported their appeal. * Doesn't shy away from expressing his view that Isreal commits military aggression If expressing the opposing view can't make you lose tenure, expressing this one shouldn't either. Unless they want an Orwellian culture.

TomOfTTB 18y ago

I'm not sure arresting him was justified but other than that I agree with the University. He might not like grades but they are a basis by which employers judge job candidates. They represent a skill (hard work among other things) that employer's value. By doing away with them in his classroom he is compromising that whole system. University teachers like this one need to realize that they have two tasks. To open student's minds AND to ensure they are qualified to function in society. He's completely ignored the second task and thinks he's a hero for having done so.

sanswork 18y ago
I disagree with you on professors having those two tasks personally. Preparing people for the workforce shouldn't even be on a university professors mind. Open students minds, and advance research in their area of expertise should be their two roles. Too many people go to university now for the wrong reasons so I can see why you would think it should be about getting a job(because that's what 90% go for) but it really shouldn't be about that at all.
Jebdm 18y ago
I'd dispute the statement that good grades are a useful measurement of ability to function in society. All grades really measure is students' abilities to get good grades. There are lots of factors that can go into getting a good grade, especially in courses where the grading process is necessarily subjective: writing in a style which appeals to the grader, building a relationship with the grader, studying in an optimal way for taking exams, being dedicated to your studies, etc. Parts of this skillset are obviously useful in general. A person who is able to figure out how to appeal to their audience will do well in many fields. Some are more tricky; for instance, one might assume that someone who studies optimally for their exams will be able to figure how to perform other tasks optimally as well, but this is often not the case. One particularly misleading thing about grades is that they are often seen as an indicator of how dedicated/good of a worker students are. This might sometimes be the case; some students get good grades primarily because they work very hard. But some students get good grades without much effort, some only work hard because they have someone driving them (such as their parents), and some do well in an academic atmosphere but will burn out in a more job-oriented one. The biggest of these fallacies is that a student with low grades is a poor worker or bad in their subject; there are students who worked hard but just had a bad teacher, students who are overworked, students who prioritize certain classes over others, and students who are disenchanted with academic work but who will do well in a "real-world" atmosphere". As an anecdote: I go to a fairly alternative liberal arts school that is nonetheless highly ranked (not that rankings are good judges of schools, but here's the US News page: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/items/9645 http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/items/... ). My school accepts a fair number of students who in high school did not perform well academically. Many of these students pick up their grades while here; nearly all of these students are very smart and capable. The problem with grades is that they fail to provide any breakdown of the factors which contribute to them, which is the truly useful information. Even in the cases where a student got all A+'s or all F's, where it seems that the student is probably overall competent or incompetent respectively, there are still external motivations which are not taken into account but which are nonetheless vitally important. Another big problem with grades is that they fail to take into account differences between environments, school policies, and graders; that is, even when grading policies are objective, they differ from place to place but are compared nonetheless. Different graders grade differently; some may give A's to everyone who is qualified, while some may give them to only those who are most qualified. Some of these effects can be damped through normalization, but usefully normalizing grades seems difficult as well. Imagine trying to normalize grades between MIT and community college students. Additionally, the information required to do any significant statistical tricks is often not avaliable to those who could use it, and those who could use it would probably not take the time to even if they could. Finally, I feel like you completely missed the professor's point. (I'm assuming he believes arguments similar to mine.) Since grades don't provide signifcant metrics of anything, using them to judge people is both discriminatory and a bad idea. Thus, the responsible thing to do would be to get rid of them altogether (or at least reform them so that they actually measured something). But since he doesn't have the power to do that, he does the closest thing he can: give everyone the best grade possible. This has several positive effects: it lessens the potential future discrimination against his students; it, as you said, "compromis[es] that whole system", making more obvious how arbitrary it is and hopefully leads to its undoing; and it (he believes) makes students learn better. He hasn't ignored the second task at all.

bestes 18y ago

Good for him. The idea that trying different techniques in education (i.e. Not giving grades) seems silly. The system will not fall apart. College is not vocational school, although you can hardly tell the difference. Imagine if science had a rule: we'll do things the old way so it doesn't cause problems.

jrockway 18y ago
Imagine if science had a rule: we'll do things the old way so it doesn't cause problems. I'm pretty sure that's called "engineering".
- tspiteri 18y ago
  No, that is manufacturing. New technologies are developed by engineers. But then, there is manufacturing engineering, so you may be correct for a subset of "engineering".

pchivers 18y ago

This article reminds of another Canadian university prof named David Noble who doesn't give grades either. He seems to have found a way to do it without getting fired though. Giving Up the Grade - David Noble http://www.policyalternatives.ca/MonitorIssues/2007/05/MonitorIssue1639/ http://www.policyalternatives.ca/MonitorIssues/2007/05/Monit... Throughout the 30-odd years of my university teaching career I have always found ways around grading, primarily by giving all A’s, thereby eliminating grades de facto, if not de jure. Last year for the first time, after long bemoaning my “anomalous” practice, York University officials formally prevailed upon me henceforth to designate my courses “ungraded “ (a pass/fail option without the fail), thereby taking them off the radar screen and perhaps unintentionally establishing a promising academic precedent.

azharcs 18y ago

He has also been an outspoken critic of “Israeli military aggression” and is not shy about expressing those views with students. I am certainly seeing a pattern here, first victims of the aggression are critical, world doesn't listen to them. Then neighboring countries are afraid and criticize Israel for being an aggressor. Then slowly decades pass by, smart people of other developed-countries start criticizing them for human-rights violation and then slowly most people will listen to the smart people of their own country and change their mind about Israel. So according to me, it is just a matter of time before everyone is critical of Israel (you can't fool all the people all the time).

tspiteri 18y ago

One of the professors during my degree used a different method. It was difficult to fail his subjects; he could not fail a student because of a poor showing in a three-hour test. But to get an A, you had to show him that you knew exactly what you were talking (writing) about.

endtime 18y ago

It sounds like this guy is a bit of a nut job and this was just their excuse for getting rid of him.

jballanc 18y ago

As someone intimately involved in the art of assigning grades in a university setting (I'm a TA), let me let you in on a little secret... Around 10 years ago, universities across the country awoke to a surprising new fact: they we're no longer bound by the expectation of being a benefactor of humanity. No! They were free to become thriving enterprises. And what was the product they should sell? Grades

SapphireSun 18y ago
Can you elaborate on that? Do people brazenly purchase grades? At my university, I have to fight damn hard for an A.
- jballanc 18y ago
  Economics involves more than just the exchange of money... For example: Student X, a member of the sports team (any sport will do), has been missing classes, not paying attention to the material, and doing poorly on the assignments. Then, X sleeps through the big exam. X comes to me, saying that (s)he should still be allowed to take the exam. I send X to the dean, and not more than 15 min later receive a phone call from the dean: "Couldn't we just let X take the test?" Me: "X is a poor student, has shown no remorse for missing the exam, and by all right should fail..." Dean: "Yes, but couldn't we let X take the exam?" True story...X did get to take the exam, and got a C in the course. The school has sold X a grade in exchange for X playing on the team, which brings revenue in to the school. Even when X isn't an athlete, the school is exchanging tuition revenue for grades. ...it's a shame, but people were really sweating last time the accreditation board did their once-in-a-blue-moon review. All the higher-ups wanted to skate a thin line between remaining accredited and still allowing as many students to get by with Bs and Cs as possible.
rsheridan6 18y ago
Universities are selling certificates that the buyer expects will get them a well paying job. Employers believe that the certificate indicates something about its owners abilities. Universities can just start selling grades, but that's sort of like selling baking soda and calling it crack. People will figure it out eventually, and then the commodity will become worthless. That's actually a lot like what's happened with the credit rating agencies that were giving AAA ratings to trash.

aaw 18y ago

If he wants to teach his students that grades "poison our educational environment", why is the solution to give everyone an A+? He's just using grades as currency to buy his students' support for his experiment in anarchy. I wonder how many of them would have still participated in his class if he had announced on the first day that everyone would get a C, a D, or an F?

brianobush 18y ago

wish I could've had him for physics...

andreyf 18y ago

A couple of my professors at Rutgers did something like this in advanced classes, albeit at the end of the course.