A couple of days ago, I noted that scandals and absurdities are pretty much anywhere that has generally avoided the spotlight (and lots of places that haven't!). In our time, all you’ve got to do is point somewhere and then walk up to the trouble. It’s there.
One such object of absurdo-scandalosity is “credit inflation” in higher education—that is, the trend of accepting less student effort (homework, etc.) per credit or unit. As things stand, many students pass (some of) their courses having made precious little effort. I’ve been carping about this for years.
Here’s the problem as it seems to play out at the community college level. Take my college: it is supposed to follow the old “Carnegie unit” standard, according to which the average student is supposed to put in at least two hours of homework per week per “credit.” The typical community college course is 3 units/credits (and 3 hours in class per week). And so, theoretically, a student does six hours of homework per course per week. (I snigger ruefully.)
Now do the math. The typical full-time student takes four or five courses per semester. Let’s say that Janey Jones is taking four courses this semester. That means she’s supposed to be spending at least twenty-four hours on homework per week. That’s on top of the twelve hours per week she is supposed to be in the classroom. 24 + 12 = 36 hours. (Do students attend class regularly? Heimatland!)
Sounds good, except that Janey is a typical student, and so she also spends maybe 20-35 hours per week at her job–and who-know-how-many hours per week on her social life.
That 24 hours of homework? It ain’t happening. Not even close. Not even close to close. (See the NSSE data for 4-year institutions above. 68% of freshmen do 15 homework hours or fewer per week. Nearly half do 10 hours or fewer.)
Meanwhile, the system refuses to acknowledge the problem. Indeed, “the system” endlessly shines its mute 'n' sunny gaze upon the phenomenon of working, socializing students taking full course loads, year after year, decade after decade.
The system is an idiot. (Are you dazzled at my command of understatement? Amused at my grasp of the obvious? Annoyed at my inveterate negativity? They execute philosophers, you know.)
The result? Well, in the classroom, it's like this. When an instructor of, say, anthropology or philosophy announces his expectation that students will do homework in accordance with the Carnegie unit standard (i.e., at least six hours of homework per week), most student are incredulous; they simply will not do it. If an instructor forces the issue, students become hostile. Eventually, torches are lifted and castles are marched upon in the night. Ouch.
As usual, dear reader, we’re going to hell in a hand-basket.
Well, this particular issue has popped up recently in the course of recognition of another instance of randomly noticed absurdo-scandalosity, one I identified a couple of days ago: the massive scam of for-profit “universities,” such as the U of Phoenix, taking shit loads of tuition money (ultimately provided by the taxpayer in the form of student loans—that students often do not or cannot repay) for their often hinky educational programs, many of which are on the “cutting edge” of such untried-n-true whiz-bangery as online instruction.
Here’s the latest:
Credit Hours Should Be Worth the Cost, House Panel Members Say (Chronicle of Higher Education)
The U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor heard testimony on Thursday from the Education Department's inspector general and Sylvia Manning, president of the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools [HLCNCACS], one of the nation's major regional accrediting organizations. Late last year, the department's inspector general recommended that the department consider limiting, suspending, or terminating the commission's authority as a federally approved accreditor after the commission gave its stamp of approval to American InterContinental University, despite a review that found the institution had inflated the amount of credit it was awarding for a small group of courses.
As a result of that recommendation, the Higher Learning Commission is negotiating with the department on ways to set more explicit standards for a credit hour "without being prescriptive," Ms. Manning said at the hearing.
The standard of a credit hour, which is not actually a full 60 minutes in most cases, is deeply embedded in higher education as a benchmark for earning a degree. But the definition of what constitutes a credit hour has become muddled in recent years with the increase in online education.
The Education Department is seeking to bring some clarity to that issue with its proposal to define the credit hour as one hour of classroom instruction and two hours of student work outside the classroom over 15 weeks for a semester and 10 to 12 weeks for a quarter. Institutions and accreditors, however, would have some flexibility under the proposals to develop alternative measures.
If it's a for-profit institution that is getting more money for a course than it's really worth, Mr. Miller said, then the awarding of credit hours could become a part of a company's business plan to bolster profits.
Ms. Manning said her organization shares committee members' concerns about the rising cost of higher education and accountability for federal aid dollars. But strictly defining a credit hour is a complex issue, she said, because credit is now related more to what students should learn during a course than the amount of time they spend in the classroom.
"Anyone who has ever taught or taken a class knows the concept of credit hours is mushy," Ms. Manning wrote in her prepared testimony to the committee.
Instead of setting a strict definition of what a credit hour should be for an institution, the commission relies on its peer reviewers—typically drawn from a corps of faculty members and administrators at similar institutions—to determine if the content of courses is compatible with the amount of credit a college awards for them, Ms. Manning said.
In the case of American InterContinental, the commission was able to persuade the institution to correct the credit hours it was awarding for the specific courses, she said. If the commission had simply denied accreditation to the institution, the college would have kept awarding the inflated credit because it was already accredited by another regional organization, she said.
Democrats on the committee, however, were critical of the commission for accrediting American InterContinental before seeking to correct the deficiencies in credit hours and pressed Ms. Manning on whether a more specific definition of credit hour would prevent such a problem in the future.
Rep. Timothy H. Bishop, Democrat of New York, said he found the state government's strict limits on credit hour helpful when he was provost of Long Island University's Southampton College. He asked what would be the harm of having a minimum definition of that standard.
Ms. Manning replied that having a definition of what constitutes a credit hour won't do any harm, but it also doesn't help accreditors or institutions set a standard for how much students are learning.
The for-profits really are on the cutting edge: they are a growing division, the avant-garde of the higher education army in America, marching itself off of a cliff. --RB (BvT)
SEE ALSO Method to Miller's Madness (Inside Higher Ed)
8 comments:
" . . . it also doesn't help accreditors or institutions set a standard for how much students are learning."
Now how is that supposed to happen? Through a series of standardized tests--checking grades--or pleasant interviews with students after the semester?
This is utter bullshit.
9:57, just what is "bullshit"? I don't understand your point?
Wonder what the SLOs at these for profit schools look like? And you wonder who's teaching those classes on line?
"Setting a standard for how much students are learning." Try deconstructing that ambiguous pile of frippery.
3:15, I'm just unclear what you are judging to be "frippery." I argue this: that we assert that we embrace a particular standard--the Carnegie unit--and, in truth, we ignore it and slide ever further from it. I take this to be a bad thing, something making it hard (to cite just one consequence) for college educators to teach at a college level. Things are complicated by the point that, ultimately, courses are about the attainment of knowledge and abilities, not the hours of homework, and some students can achieve these attainments without much homework, while some others cannot achieve them even with endless homework. But here, as in so many cases, one must adopt a policy for the great middle, not the extremes, and so I think it is a good and valuable thing to stick with something like the Carnegie unit--and to mean it. And so I say that we ought to take steps to ensure that students are putting in (on average) something like the amount of homework we claim to demand of them. This would not involve testing, but the usual array of surveys and inquiries that tend to give one a pretty good idea of what goes on, despite the obvious limitations. Here, great precision is unnecessary.
As to the measuring of attainment: I think that the difficulties here are much overblown. It is a scandal that we seem unable to introduce a couple of standardized tests without going apeshit or utterly distorting the educational process. Other countries seem to manage this, and they get better results than we do.
I'm not talking about a class hour to homework ratio; that's fairly simple. But Manning appears to be arguing for a "standard," whatever that is, for "how much students are learning." Grammatically, that's nonsensical. If you have a belief that there is are standardized tests that can be created that will indicate what a students have learned from January to May, say, in all of the academic fields from Art to Zoology, then please supply some examples of them and when and where they are applied.
4:20: I'm surprised by your skepticism. Obviously, such tests will be imperfect. They will be able to test some potential attainments better than others. (If you don't mind, I'll stick with higher ed.) A student who has taken a year-long survey of the history of (Western) philosophy should understand who the pre-Socratics were, the kinds of innovations typically attributed to them, and an outline of the major pre-Socratic philosophers' teachings--e.g., Heraclitus' notion that everything is in flux, Democritus' notion of atoms, etc. Now, I would be the last person to argue that a good understanding of these things is illustrated by an ability to answer multiple-choice questions about these factoids. On the other hand, I do think that one who has attained that understanding to any degree will necessarily understand those factoids. And so the testing of this knowledge is an imperfect tool, but not a useless one. I think one should be careful not to invest too much authority in such tests, but I can see no compelling reason to suppose that they are (or would be) without value. An intelligent system would be sensitive to the fact that the standard tests are better in some ways than in others in indicating what has been learned.
I can see no obvious reason why one couldn't take the same approach in, say, art history. One who has made any headway in understanding, say, the Impressionists will be able to identify many of the great figures of that movement and to describe their work and influence. Naturally, an understanding embraces more than that, but it also embraces such factoidal understandings. And the latter can be tested. It's rough and ready, but it is not worthless.
Similar points can be made, of course, with regard to K-12 education. Indeed, there, the arguments will be stronger, for so much that is learned at that level is basic or preliminary, the sort of thing that often can be captured in multiple choice tests.
No?
Yes! Thanks for the really fine posts, BvT. One thing that has reduced my frustration with the inevitable exercise of articulating "learning outcomes" and "assessment plans" at my own U. is what you say here: in many cases, testing even of philosophical knowledge (and even skills) "is an imperfect tool, but not a useless one." Well-said.
MAH
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