Beer and Circus

by Murray Sperber

  The entire discussion [in the apartment living room] began after someone mentioned a student who walked in five minutes late to class, then slept through every class [in that course] last semester … . Then someone interrupted [the discussion], articulating the sentiment of our generation: “Teachers should be happy that people just show up for class at all.”

  I pondered that idea—that we placate ourselves by lowering educational standards to the point where simply arriving at class equals valuing school … . The sentiment now is that since students “paid” for the class, they also “own” the rights to do with it what they will while in that class.

  —Amy Webb, Indiana [University] Daily Student columnist

  This writer protested the consumerist trend in university life, but she blamed her fellow students for this situation. She titled her article, “Students Should Respect Professors,” yet many undergraduates would respond to her declaration by listing the ways that profs “diss” students. A story in U Magazine captured undergraduate attitudes on this issue: a student in a theater course had to learn a dramatic monologue to deliver during the next class meeting, but he lost his tape of the speech. He could only rent a tape of a different monologue, so he rented it, claiming that “the professor was so far gone she’d never notice.” She never did, awarding him a high grade on this exercise, her “only comment [was] that he shouldn’t be afraid to pause longer between phrases.”

  This student’s description of the professor as “far gone” needs translation: probably she was neither demented nor absentminded; instead, she was mentally detached from teaching and, in student vernacular, “didn’t give a shit” about what occurred in her courses or whether individual students accurately fulfilled her assignments or not. She gave them high grades so that she could get through her teaching as quickly and easily as possible.

  U Magazine included this story in an article headlined, “WHAT ME STUDY?”—illustrating it with a photo of a male college student asleep on a park bench, a copy of a Cliffs Notes pamphlet covering his face. A major flaw exists in this symbolic photo: many undergraduates no longer need the Cliffs Notes shortcut to mastering reading assignments, as numerous professors now supply “study guides” that furnish everything a student requires for a course, including exam questions and answers. The Chicago Tribune quoted undergraduates who explained that the study guides sum up the course material, and “if they [students] put question marks at the ends of the topic headings in the study guide, they have the exam” questions followed by the answers.

  A similar “dumbing down” of university courses occurs when faculty members, not even bothering to dispense study guides, recycle the same exam questions year after year. Student organizations, particularly fraternities and sororities, assemble “test files” (called “test banks” at some schools) for these profs’ courses, and the Greeks and their friends use the old exams. A Purdue undergraduate commented, “It’s not what you know in a course, but who you know. Who’s got the ‘test files,’ even for profs who don’t let students keep their exams. Some students always sneak out copies for the ‘files’ and so the exams are out there somewhere.”

  Under these circumstances, many undergraduates feel that attending class is worthless, and studying anything other than the guides or the old exams makes no sense. This system seduces even conscientious students, and various reports on the amount of time per week that undergraduates spend studying reveal amazingly low numbers of hours.

  Almost every university, in its official handouts to freshmen, suggests a minimum of two hours of studying for every hour in class, therefore a student with a standard fifteen-hour course load should put in at least thirty hours per week studying. However, many surveys on this topic reveal that most students at Big-time U’s study far fewer than thirty hours per week. The responses to the questionnaire for this book indicate that 18 percent of undergraduates spent one to five hours a week “studying and doing course assignments”; 35 percent logged six to ten hours a week on these activities; 29 percent, eleven to fifteen hours; and only 18 percent, sixteen or more hours per week. Women studied more than men but not significant amounts of time more.

  As always, the results varied from school to school, but again correlated with the Princeton Review’s categories on this topic. For “Their students (almost) never study,” in the late 1990s and 2000, Alabama, Arizona State, Arkansas, Auburn, Florida, Florida State, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana State, Miami (Florida), Michigan State, Missouri (Columbia), Mississippi, Rhode Island, Seton Hall, Tennessee (Knoxville), Wisconsin (Madison), West Virginia, and, inevitably, the University of Buffalo rank very high. In the questionnaire for this book, respondents from these universities as well as other big-time college sports schools spent the fewest number of hours per week “studying and doing course assignments.”

  The category, “Their students never stop studying,” listed Carleton, the Claremont (California) schools, Cal Tech, Swarthmore, Reed, Grinnell, Middlebury, and similar institutions. The questionnaire for this book revealed parallel results: only 12 percent of the respondents from “never stop studying” schools spent less than eleven hours a week on this activity; 27 percent logged eleven to fifteen hours; 36 percent, sixteen to twenty hours; and 25 percent, over twenty hours per week, many over thirty hours. The only universities in NCAA Division I-A with undergraduates spending comparable hours were Rice and the University of California, Berkeley.

  Yet, the one statistic shared by students in both of the Princeton “studying” categories were similar grade point averages. Whether they never studied or always worked hard on their courses, almost all of the undergraduates received high grades. Did these GPAs, averaging 3.3 (out of 4), indicate that the students at the big-time college sports schools were smarter than those at the more academically oriented institutions, and therefore had to study less to learn as much? No. The answer is what the Chronicle of Higher Education termed Education’s Dirty Secret: Grade Inflation. Not only does it rule public universities, but it also exists at many excellent private schools—except, at the latter, some undergraduates learn something on their way to high grades, whereas at beer-and-circus universities, the inflated grades tend to be handed out as part of the tuition deal, a key element of the “mutual nonaggression pact.”

  The nub of the problem seems to me to be the customer-supplier model that has been adopted by academia … [because of] relatively high tuition, there is considerable incentive to give the customer what he or she wants, with no hassle. If a substantial majority of students want good grades without commensurate effort and preparation, then it’s easiest to give them what they want—after all, they’re paying for it. Never mind that the universities become credentialing agencies rather than institutions of learning.

  —Frederic A. Lyman, Syracuse University professor

  Before the consumerist model overtook higher education, faculty at large universities did not regard ordinary students as customers; they mainly tolerated them as necessary guests in the “groves of academe.” Hence, professors awarded A’s only to academically talented undergraduates, usually their “professional children”; they doled out B’s to students who completed course work competently; and they gave C’s and lower grades to all others in their classes. In the 1970s and 1980s, as higher education adopted the student-consumer model, grade inflation accelerated, continuing full throttle into the 1990s.

  In that decade, the topic also moved from anecdotal report to researched phenomena. In a comprehensive survey of thousands of transcripts for selected years from 1969 to 1993, Arthur Levine discovered that “the gentleman’s C has become the gentleman’s A as the percentage of C’s and A’s given to students in college has reversed itself.” In 1969, only 7 percent of undergraduates in Levine’s sample earned A range GPAs, whereas 25 percent possessed C range averages; in 1993, only 9 percent had C range GPAs, versus 26 percent with A range averages. The number of B range averages—the majority of GPAs—also grew b
ecause, by the 1990s, very few D’s and F’s were awarded; thus, the 1960s C students had become B or better students, replaced in the C cohort by formerly D and F students.

  Within academia, scientists tend to blame humanities faculty for this “lowering of standards,” but a biology professor informed the Chronicle of Higher Education that “grade inflation is not limited to the humanities but is very prevalent in the sciences as well,” especially at schools and within departments that pressure faculty to fill their classes with as many students as possible to generate as many tuition dollars as possible. What better way to please students than by giving them high grades for little work?

  But pressure on faculty to inflate grades is generally more subtle than direct orders from college administrators or department heads. The promotion, tenure, and salary system of the research university exerts the maximum amount of pressure (see Chapter 7). Many faculty believe that every hour spent on undergraduate teaching is an hour stolen from research, and they become skilled at cutting corners in all phases of their teaching, especially grading. Even in upper-division classes, they move quickly when grading papers or exams, often only putting a brief comment or a letter grade on each student’s work. (In lecture courses, most professors never see student papers or exams; the TAs or the scantron machines do all the grading.)

  In determining specific grades, faculty frequently take the path of least resistance, and also direct their TAs to this route—inflate. No student ever complained after receiving an A+ or an A, although some now whine about an A-. Many students object to B’s, most protest C’s and become angry at D’s. If a professor actually flunks a student, or allows a TA to do so, that faculty member must have documentation to justify the F, not only that student’s papers and exams throughout the course—all carefully marked, with each grade fully explained—but, for comparison, samples of the work of other students in the course who earned similar and higher grades, also thoroughly marked.

  A professor who wants to grade hard embarks upon a very time-consuming and labor-intensive course of action: throughout the semester, he or she must respond accurately and at length to the work of every student in the class. Moreover, to fight grade inflation, a faculty member must be prepared to answer complaints from students and their parents, inquiries from department heads and deans, requests to appear before various student committees, and even lawsuits. Predictably, few faculty members at research universities choose to go down this lonesome road or, as a cinema studies professor called it, The River of No Return.

  (One exception to grade inflation exists: those faculty who teach subjects in which many students want to major, for example, in this era, business. As a result of this demand, these professors can grade “on a [statistical] curve” and determine beforehand how many A’s, B’s, et cetera, they will dispense. In addition, because they mainly use scantron exams requiring no writing from students—or reading by instructors—they can arrive at numerical point totals that undergraduates cannot easily challenge. However, for faculty using this pedagogical model to condemn professors in other disciplines for inflating grades is absurd. Designing a multiple-choice business exam is an efficient process; creating a multiple-choice exam for an English composition class is impossible because it cannot test a student’s writing ability and progress.)

  Conservative critics of grade inflation like William Cole argue that on this issue faculty must act individually, and that “solving the problem of grade inflation … requires simply [to] acknowledge the problem and act responsibly.” O that academic life were so simple! Because grade inflation connects to the finances of research universities and their bottomless hunger for tuition dollars, as well as their privileging research over undergraduate education, asking each professor at these schools to “act responsibly” is a myopic request. These schools would have to transform their internal culture and values to truly fight grade inflation. Moreover, the administrators of Big-time U’s, as well as the research faculty, have far too much invested in the “nonaggression pact” with student-consumers to change it.

  Only a major shift in the missions of research universities—an earthquake in higher education equaling the end of the Cold War—could halt grade inflation. The dismantlement of the Soviet empire terminated the nuclear arms concept of mutual nonaggression; however, it is hard to imagine a similar event occurring in American higher education. Therefore, the faculty/student nonaggression pact will remain in place for the foreseeable future and, along with it, grade inflation. Eventually, every student will receive at A+ in almost every course.

  12

  CHEATING

  Just as the internal culture and values of the modern research university prevent an end to grade inflation, they also block a solution to the problem of student cheating. According to many studies, cheating by undergraduates has reached epidemic levels, but many faculty at research universities neither attempt to curtail it nor even seriously discourage it. Details on this situation—the hidden clauses in the “nonaggression pact”—follow.

  One factor often overlooked is the relationship between cheating and the grading and testing environment … . Students frequently report that cheating increases … when instructors are viewed as inattentive and inaccessible, when papers are not read and graded carefully, and when students perceive a very high level of cheating on the part of their classmates.

  —Richard A. Fass, professor of ethics

  In the history of American higher education, undergraduates have cheated in a large variety of ways: “ponies” (primitive Cliffs Notes) to facilitate studying for exams; “crib” sheets and notes for the exams themselves; and the constant recycling of essays and papers. One historian noted that “at Yale in the 1860s, perhaps less than half of the compositions were actually written by the supposed author.” Because of the collegiate subculture’s aversion to academics, matched by professorial disdain for most undergraduates, cheating was normal behavior at many schools. This tradition continued through the twentieth century, faculty and administrators usually blaming the “deficient moral standard of our students” for the cheating, and never considering the connections between undergraduate dishonesty and a deeply flawed pedagogical system.

  In the final decades of the twentieth century, by all measurements, student cheating accelerated at many colleges and universities to the point where, in 1999, an authoritative poll stated that “three-quarters of college students confess to cheating at least once.” On some campuses, officials estimated the number of one-timers as high as 90 percent, with repeat offenders topping 50 percent of their undergraduates.

  These statistics prompt the question: Why is cheating so widespread at a time of grade inflation? It seems counterintuitive that these two phenomena would occur simultaneously: if high grades are so easy to obtain, why bother to cheat for them? This paradox contradicts the students-cheat-out-of-desperation hypothesis, as well as the moral-decay-in-society explanation: high grades are so common that, like pennies, they are not worth bending over for or stealing. But the paradox points directly to the abysmal state of undergraduate education at Big-time U’s—by most accounts, the schools with the highest number of student cheaters.

  The 1990s studies on this issue contain some version of the following conclusion from a survey of thirteen thousand undergraduates: “A major factor determining whether a student will cheat or not is the academic culture of the specific institution that he or she attends.” Students at large, public research universities that treat them as tuition dollars, not individuals, and that channel them into mammoth lecture courses with distant, frigid professors or inexperienced and overworked TAs, tend to cheat. They cheat for a variety of reasons, including as a show of contempt for a contemptible system. Or, as a Michigan State sophomore described his conduct in lecture courses—he rarely attended, bought lecture notes from an off-campus service, and cheated on papers and exams—“It’s an eye for an eye, it’s my insults for the school’s insults.” The name of a popular webs
ite that facilitates a variety of cheating practices also sums up the attitude of many undergraduates at Big-time U’s today: www.SCHOOLSUCKS.com—its motto is, “Download your workload.”

  Michael Moore, a Rutgers student and the author of Cheating 101: The Benefits and Fundamentals of Earning an Easy A, admitted that students also cheat because they “want to spend more time partying and meeting people instead of burying their heads in books,” but he placed much of “the blame on professors, [citing] their laziness in using the same teaching methods every year.” Such comments prompt the question: Where do student indolence and rationalization end, and faculty laziness and contempt for undergraduates begin? Rutgers professor Michael Moffat answered the query, in part, by noting that “undergrads who know their professors and respect them are less likely to cheat in those classes” than students in huge lecture courses.

  No observer can or should condone cheating and, finally, every student can and should act as a responsible and ethical individual. However, the neglect of undergraduate education by research universities begins to explain some of the increase in student cheating.

  Predictably, most faculty and administrators regard cheating differently than do undergraduates. A professor of anthropology, also an associate provost at his university, denounced all forms of cheating, including the form “perpetrated” by off-campus companies posting course lecture notes on the web—he termed this an “assault on the integrity of higher education.” Surprisingly, USA Today weighed into the debate with an editorial:

  Net Notes Trump Boring Lecture