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| 5/24 |
| 2009/2/19-25 [Computer/SW/Languages/C_Cplusplus, Academia/GradSchool] UID:52600 Activity:low |
2/19 Student Expectations Seens as Causing Grade Disputes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/education/18college.html
\_ "I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do
and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C."
All well and good, but the problem is that 2.0 is perceived
as almost failing. Maybe once employers and grad schools
realize that 3.0 is not a minimum effort but a pretty good
student then students will adjust expectations accordingly. I
got a B in a very difficult upper division math class and I
had a recruiter tell me "You must not be very good at math."
I told her I was very good and where did she get that idea.
"Your report card." So as long as students have to deal with
that crap then hell yeah we won't accept a C for spending 40
hours per week on a class even if it's "what we deserve"
because the perception is that a C is really a D (pass for
credit, but that's about it). Perhaps this is a result of grade
inflation, but I don't think students spawned it. Competition
did. It used to be fairly easy to get into schools like Stanford
and very few students took the SAT. If 80% of the class got
C's that was fine. It's not fine anymore and from what I can
see from my nieces and nephews kids are working harder than
ever even at young grades. My 3rd grade nephew has like 3-4
hours of homework a night. I think we have to do this to
complete as this is common in places like Japan, but the older
people in the system don't realize how much things have changed
and have not adjusted expectations accordingly. You won't get
only the top 5% of students in college anymore at most
universities and the kids that are there are less motivated by
learning. They need that B to be able to survive while at the
same time there is a perception that C = poor student.
\_ C *IS* poor. My parents used to tell me that C is for
inferior native kids, B is for second generation immigrants,
and A is for people like us. -hard working immigrant
\_ Not with the definition professors are using:
"I tell my classes that if they just do what they are
supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that
they will earn a C." By the way, your parents sound
like real pieces of work.
\_ I agree, kids these days have no sense of perspective. They
want 100 column terminals, good grades, friendly professors,
&c. Back when I went to Cal everyone knew that a C- was the
mean and working your butt off to get mean was standard
operating procedure b/c the mean student was an asian
overachiever just like you. An A was a mythical promised land
reserved for future nobel prize winners - the ones who sat in
the front row and could correct the mistakes of the nobel prize
winner teaching the class.
\_ Wasn't there a CSUA'er who took like 39 units in a semester and
ended up with a 3.9+ GPA? calbear? I wonder if he's gonna win
a Nobel Prize. I had a crap GPA while at Cal but knew lots of
people with 3.7's who didn't study 24/7. College just seemed
easier for them, like how High School was just easy for most
Cal students.
\_ I went to HS with calbear. He was wicked smart. Last I
heard he dropped out of the PhD program at the farm. But
he might still win a nobel prize though.
\_ I thought he completed his Ph.D.
\_ http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~calbear/resume/mr.htm
\_ Guess I heard wrong. |
| 5/24 |
|
| www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/education/18college.html Enlarge This Image Monica Almeida/The New York Times Prof. Ellen Greenberger studied what she found to be an increased sense of entitlement among college students. "Many students come in with the conviction that they've worked hard and deserve a higher mark," Professor Grossman said. "Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before." He attributes those complaints to his students' sense of entitlement. "I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C," he said. They see the default grade as an A" A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B's just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading. "I noticed an increased sense of entitlement in my students and wanted to discover what was causing it," said Ellen Greenberger, the lead author of the study, called "Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors," which appeared last year in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence. Professor Greenberger said that the sense of entitlement could be related to increased parental pressure, competition among peers and family members and a heightened sense of achievement anxiety. University of Wisconsin-Madison, offered another theory. "I think that it stems from their K-12 experiences," Professor Brower said. And this hyper-efficiency has led them to look for a magic formula to get high scores." Vanderbilt University, said: "Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade. Jason Greenwood, a senior kinesiology major at the University of Maryland echoed that view. "I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade," Mr Greenwood said. "What else is there really than the effort that you put in?" "If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?" "If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher's mind, then something is wrong." University of Vermont, agreed, saying, "I feel that if I do all of the readings and attend class regularly that I should be able to achieve a grade of at least a B" At Vanderbilt, there is an emphasis on what Dean Hogge calls "the locus of control." "Similarly, if they make a lesser grade, it is not the teacher's fault. Attributing the outcome of a failure to someone else is a common problem." Additionally, Dean Hogge said, "professors often try to outline the rules of the game' in their syllabi," in an effort to curb haggling over grades. Professor Brower said professors at Wisconsin emphasized that students must "read for knowledge and write with the goal of exploring ideas." This informal mission statement, along with special seminars for freshmen, is intended to help "re-teach students about what education is." Examples include the conventional, like a global-warming seminar, and the more obscure, like physics in religion. The seminars "are meant to help students think differently about their classes and connect them to real life," Professor Brower said. He said that if students developed a genuine interest in their field, grades would take a back seat, and holistic and intrinsically motivated learning could take place. "College students want to be part of a different and better world, but they don't know how," he said. "Unless teachers are very intentional with our goals, we play into the system in place." |
| hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~calbear/resume/mr.htm rg Home: (650) 344-9347 Mobile: (650) 430-1445 Michael Baer Objective Research scientist in information systems, ideally involving algorithms, information theory, multimedia, compression, and/or security. Summary R&D in multimedia processing, data compression, and cryptography Programming and program optimization 5 years full time, 2 years part time, 7 summer internships Publication record in data compression and tree structures Education 9/97-6/03 STANFORD UNIVERSITY Stanford, CA Electrical Engineering (Information Theory), MS/PhD Dissertation Title: "Coding for General Penalties." This work involves families of source coding problems with nonlinear penalties, extending Huffman coding and related algorithms in cases applicable to low-bandwidth channels, security, queueing, and group testing for diagnostic systems. EECS Honors program with emphasis in human perception and research in MIMO antenna systems. Microsoft Technical Scholarship (sole recipient, UC Berkeley, 1995). Professional experience 4/08-10/08 Keystream Mountain View, CA Research Scientist Algorithmic improvements in video processing, both in speed and output, improving company's main algorithm to run three to four times as quickly and improving output quality via changes to the algorithmic model. Other technologies: Intel VTune (profiler), IPP (library), and ICC (compiler). Language: C 5/05-9/07 Electronics for Imaging Foster City, CA Scientist Algorithmic development and implementation of image descreening (halftone detection and processing) for embedded hardware implementation (ASIC), MMX/SSE optimization of software, development of tint (color) mixing algorithms, and code base debugging using Klocwork. Leading entropy coding project, video coding team, and XML compression project. Heading writing teams on successful government (SBIR) proposals. Leading initiative for better programming practices by introducing comprehensive inline documentation via Doxygen and an internal C++ coding standard. Tools and languages: C, Java, VRML, Tcl/Tk, Mathematica. Emphasized coursework Multiple courses in each of the following areas: signal processing, including but not limited to audio, video, and image; communications, including digital, wireless, storage media; Other skills Computing: Windows, Macintosh, Unix/Linux with some system operations and webmaster duties; Several Perl scripts to gather and reformat web pages for a PDA, foil email address web crawlers, etc. Attentive to good coding style and documentation, eg, Doxygen. over 100 articles - features, movie reviews, concert reviews, and CD reviews; recipient of both weekly and biannual awards (1998-2003). Teaching: Volunteer tutor 1991-2004 for junior high school through college. Reviewer for journals and conferences including IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. Patents and technical publications Journal papers: "Optimal Prefix Codes for Infinite Alphabets with Nonlinear Costs," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, March 2008. "Source Coding for Quasiarithmetic Penalties," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, October 2006. "A General Framework for Codes Involving Minimization," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, January 2006. Conference papers: Eight sole-author conference papers at the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), 2003-2008; one collaborative conference paper in Conference proceedings on Human factors in computing systems, 1998 (with E D Mynatt, M Back, R Want, J B Ellis). collaborative work at Hewlett Packard): Method for compressing images and image sequences through adaptive partitioning. |