In his article ``It's WHAT they teach, STUPID!'' John Elson writes in TIME/the Princeton Review (Spring 1997), p. 14 :
In a new book called 'Generation X Goes to College' pseudonymous author Peter Sacks tells of quitting his job at a newspaper to teach writing at a suburban junior college. What he found was discouraging: intellectually incurious students and time-serving professors who cynically condoned grade inflation to please administrative bureacrats. The result, charges Sacks, is the classroom equivalent of consumer fraud.
This paragraph reminded me and a few colleagues of mine time and again of many cases, or many actions of mathematics administrators which seem to border on cheating. Let us omit a long list of their strange actions in this category.
But I will mention one example which goes beyond any anecdotal evidence and provides statistics with thousands students involved:
In the years 1995 and 1996, at the start of a quarter at Ohio State University (OSU), the Math-148 class's students went to the President's building (or other COPEZ locations) and paid $1.06 for a special booklet (a good value for $1 spent !). This booklet listed the problems which would be offered (with slight variation: Terry's typing services becoming, for example, Rose's catering services) on their three midterm tests and final exam. It was not a collection of 200 or 300 exercises to practice before tests; no, just 10 or 12 problems for each midterm and final --
neither more nor less.
Is this testing system
(a) a smart pedagogical method to focus students' attention on important concepts and skills,
(b) an institutionalized fraud (in a system closely coordinated by the administration, without any participation of regular faculty), which cannot be tolerated any more,
(c) something else?
To make this question or answer easier I will give more information. Under pressure from some faculty, in Winter 1997 the midterm-1 set of exercises was different from the booklet's one; students were told in advance about this change.
The table below, formed from data obtained from the OSU Mathematics Department Course Office, gives the (ranges of) results of MidTerm-1 in AU'96 quarter,Column (1), when the assignment followed the booklet, and in WI'97 quarter, Column (2), when the assignment followed syllabus, the material taught in the previous weeks, and the stated course objectives as it is required by the OSU Bylaws, Rule 7-19, - but not the booklet.
(1) (2)
Quarter AU'96 WI'97
A 16.38% 0.44%
B 20.09% 2.73%
C 20.01% 7.21%
D 16.75% 12.02%
E 26.76% 77.60%
Number of
Students 1349 915
Did the Mathematics Department administration set up the Math-148 instruction and grading in 1995 and 1996 as -- in John Elson's and Peter Sacks's terminology -- ``the classroom equivalent of consumer fraud''?
-- Boris Mityagin
Ohio State University
(Received June 25, 1998)
Society for A Return to Academic Standards
