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Professors who fail large swathes of their classes get in trouble.
by ceejayoz 5mo ago
Professors who fail large swathes of their classes get in trouble.
- dmoy 5mo agoThis sounds like the real underlying problem then
- ceejayoz 5mo agoThere are several interrelated problems.
- conartist6 5mo agoA particular historical virus comes to mind
- Shank 5mo agoIt's kind of like how if you owe the bank $1000, you have a problem, but if you owe a bank $100M, they have a problem. You just can't reasonably ignore a huge portion of the class as a professor without a serious amount of documentation, and proof that you've tried to escalate and solve the issue. Ultimately, people are paying for these courses, and it's probably better to teach something rather than nothing.
- 9dev 5mo agoSounds like people are paying for these courses is part of the actual problem, then? Students should not have any kind of entitlement whatsoever to pass classes other than merit.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoWell... Maybe. From a customer point of view, they are paying for education. If they aren't getting education that's a problem. From a future employer point of view, they are looking for credentials. But the future employer isn't paying for it. Do we just admit that the purpose of school is to provide credentials, and that's what the students are actually paying for?
- 9dev 5mo agoFraming it as a transaction is part of the problem IMHO. We have a collective interest that the majority of the population gets the best education possible. Turning universities into credential stores leads to all the negative side effects we're dealing with - pay to play schemes, dubious credential mills, rich families bribing universities, and so on.
- mckn1ght 5mo agoYou do still actually need the credential process though, in order to demonstrate that a person has in fact received that education.
- lokar 5mo agoThey should not admit students who have little chance of success
- ceejayoz 5mo agoSure, but these students are likely two groups; those who are never going to be good at math, and those who were never really taught math. The latter may need an opportunity to succeed.
- lokar 5mo agoI agree, but they should be admitted into some special program. Like, turn up in July for 3 months of catch-up instruction 4 hrs a day.
- streptomycin 5mo agoThat's exactly what they did at my college (non-California state school) 20 years ago. Special program for students from poor high schools who otherwise wouldn't be admitted, where they came in the summer before freshman year and had to pass some prep classes first. IDK what the actual long term results were, but seems like a better idea than nothing.
- lokar 5mo agoIf nothing else they could flame out of the pre-freshman classes before wasting too much time and $
- account42 5mo agoAt the university level it should be up to the student to ensure that they learn what they need.
- bmn__ 5mo agoUnder the circumstance that the primary and secondary education levels have failed to adequately prepare a student for tertiary level, I think your idea would be unfair.
- john_strinlai 5mo agoprofessors who don't/can't cover their curriculum also get in trouble. if i had to dedicate half of my classes to reteaching things the students are required to know before taking my class, i would not cover what i am supposed to, which then has a knock-on effect to the classes that my class is a prereq for. whenever i have had a larger-than-normal percent of my students failing, i am provided an opportunity to explain it.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoThe full letter (https://ucstudentsuccess.org/ https://ucstudentsuccess.org/) gestures towards "growing pressure to dilute quantitative rigor". The strong implication seems to be that some administrators have told some faculty that the failure rates you'd get from holding the line are unacceptable. Presumably they don't want to frame this issue as a faculty vs. administration thing, which makes sense to me.
- btilly 5mo agoWhen we are put into a catch-22 situation, we should not expect sympathy from the ones who created the catch-22 situation.
- mckn1ght 5mo agoEspecially when “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." – Upton Sinclair
- RugnirViking 5mo ago> larger-than-normal percent it seems to me this is a ratcheting effect. If a larger than average is discouraged, even implicitly by being called to a meeting, people will target under the average. Repeat this and you'll quickly find the average plummeting
- 1970-01-01 5mo agoThat is the entire problem in a nutshell. You cannot reject more than one or two students in a year or the school will reject you.
- scarmig 5mo agoThat's a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. Treating universities as a system, it is deeply problematic and even immoral to saddle students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to enter programs that it is entirely predictable that the student will fail at. The solution is to use all the methods available to predict how successful the student is likely to be after matriculating, not to water down curriculum to the point where the most marginal student in the class will pass.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoBut universities need the tuition to support ever more bloated administrative hierarchies and salaries. Most are in a state of abject panic because international graduate enrollments (a cash cow) are way down in the past couple of years. Staff layoffs are starting to happen, which were previously almost unheard of.
- throw9494krrj 5mo agoNo, moral is to make student loans subject to regular bankrupcy. Student should be also able to get refound, if university misrepresents or lies about their job prospects! Universities are business as any other!
- scarmig 5mo agoThat would be a reform I'd get behind. At the same time, it's still a bad use of funds, and lenders likely wouldn't have the ability to discriminate based on likelihood of bankruptcy or success in an academic program. So it just shifts costs from the student unlikely to succeed to the lender and students likely to succeed.
- account42 5mo ago
- AlanYx 5mo agoThat's presumably why so many professors are banding together for this letter. 600 professors is a fairly significant chunk of the faculty.
- declan_roberts 5mo agoThe types of students who are entering college needing dramatic remedial math are not the ones you want to fail in large numbers.
- radiator 5mo agoSounds somewhat defeatist. Besides, the teacher nevers wants to fail anyone. Teachers would be happy if all students performed well.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoIf I may assume, I think GP is alluding to the likelihood that such students are going to be minorities from poor socioeconomic backgrounds. If they are failing in large numbers, that will open the door to claims of systemic discrimination.
- Ekaros 5mo agoAlso these are most likely the first classes. You can not block most of your entering cohort. Or even any way significant part. At least in the system these professors exist in. In some other systems like say German where getting in easy and getting rid of some is normal would be different.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoThis shouldn't be a hard problem to solve. At the state university I'm most familiar with, every incoming Freshman takes a math assessment test. If they don't pass it, they have to take remedial coursework (which does not count towards their degree requirements). And yes, every student takes it, even the ones with high school AP math and high SAT math scores. The only exception might be if they have already completed and passed actual accredited university math courses for credit.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoEven my local community college does it this way, I believe for both math and English.
- zdragnar 5mo agoDo they not have remedial classes for these students? It's been more than 20 years, but back in my day, if you weren't ready for entry level classes (but still got in to university) you took remedial classes first.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoThe processes for delivering remedial classes no longer work at the scale required. UC San Diego published a detailed report of what's happening at their campus (https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissions-review-docs.pdf https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...): their remedial math placement grew from 32 students in 2020 to 921 students in 2025, 665 of whom placed into an extra-remedial course covering grade 1-8 math which had not previously been needed.
- kzz102 5mo agoTenured professors do often fail large swathes of the class, and it's not hard to stand their ground because academic freedom is still very important in universities. This is not generally true for non-tenured and adjunct professors, but for a different reason -- their job review rely on a large part on student feedback forms, and failing students are not happy students. The idea that if only all professors stood their ground then somehow students will be motivated to study doesn't pan out in practice, though. There is already a significant number of students who are perpetually struggling. They are missing basic prerequisites, and instead of catching up on them, they repeated try and fail at learning the same materials, passing only when they got a lenient instructor. The problem compounds because failing brings helplessness and exacerbates their mental issues, which brings more failing. The university cannot sit on their high ground and watch these students struggle, especially if their number reaches a critical mass.
- vkou 5mo agoThe universities can just fail them out and admit people who barely missed the admission bar in their place. Many of them will make it. What's wrong with making universities easier to get into, but harder to stay in?
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 5mo agoCosts the failing students money and mental health issues, which are bad, if you care about those things
- vkou 5mo agoI care about those things but not enough to keep people who can't do the curriculum taking up a university slot.
- jobs_throwaway 5mo agoA lot of hurt feelings. Which to be clear is productive. We treat university students with kid gloves far too much
- swiftcoder 5mo agoThis is why universities have offered what amount to remedial math classes for donkey's years. Even in the early 2000's, if you showed up to Calculus I without sufficient preparation, you'd find yourself bounced to Pre-Calculus by the end of the week.
- thewebguyd 5mo agoIn 2005 I had to take placement tests before I could even enroll in my classes, so someone who wasn't actually ready for Calculus wouldn't get to enroll in it if they didn't pass the placement tests. It was all part of the admissions process.
- dmazzoni 5mo agoSure, but it used to be only a small fraction of students, not nearly half the entering class
- ginko 5mo agoWhen I studied in Austria everyone with a high school diploma would be eligible to matriculate at Vienna University of Technology[1], but then the first semester courses would have a bunch of "knock-out" exams that would have a large chunk of first semester students fail and eventually drop out. IMO this is "fairer" but of course it means you might lose a semester. Helps that there's barely any tuition fees. [1] Even then (~2005) that wasn't the case for all universities though. Medical university already had entrance exams, mainly due to the high number of German students trying to enroll.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ModernMech 5mo agoI was hired in my current role to replace one such professor who was fired because he insisted on giving a majority of his class failing grades. And honestly, it was the right call; he was being kind of unprofessional about it. He was teaching a very difficult subject -- C++ -- as an expert, and then getting mad that people weren't also experts at C++ within 3 months. So I agree that professors should have more control and authority over their classes, but also at the same time those professors who fail large swathes of their classes can be really unpleasant.