How Benno Schmidt Has Been Cheating Our CUNY Students
To: Benno Schmidt, Chair, CUNY Board
From: Edward Kent, Philosophy, Brooklyn College, CUNY
Subject: How You Have Been Cheating Our CUNY Students
I have been teaching in CUNY colleges -- also with experience teaching at Vassar, Barnard, and Columbia -- since 1966. I have watched with increasing horror the quality of teaching that we have been able to offer our students declining in measure with your decreasing funding for faculty free to do the tasks of teaching effectively
To make this graphic, when I was chairing our philosophy department at Brooklyn in the 1970s, which we had built to one of the finest on the East coast, we had approximately 18 full-time members doing 3/4 of the teaching with some specialists (e.g. the third ranked scholar in the U.S. in the field of non-Western religions, who happened to be an Episcopal priest), filling the gaps or extra adjuncts brought in when our numbers of students increased during our registration periods beyond our expectations.
Today with some 140 majors in philosophy, generally attracting the most exceptional students at Brooklyn -- our Rhodes or Beinecke scholars and other major fellowship award winners and others who head off to leading professional schools -- we have a ratio of 28 of our fall '05 courses being taught by our regular full time faculty out of our total course offerings of 70 -- SEVENTY!!! The vast bulk of our courses, thus, are being taught by harried part-timers and occasional 'substitutes' teaching overloads. Our part-timers and subs are first rate teachers -- but they are rushed - the adjuncts from college to college, to their own graduate courses with many pressures outside of teaching abounding -- mainly financial.
The upshots:
1) Our Brooklyn College students are being cheated out of learning the basic skills that you or I were taught as undergraduates and which our private school students learn in grades 10-12 before they enter college, e.g. how to take exams and how to write a critical research paper. I require the latter of all my students in electives - I used to ask 30 pp., but have reduced the requirement to 20 pp. as virtually none of my students have ever written what we used to call a term paper -- the sort that we would do 4 to 6 of in each semester in our humanities and/or social science courses!!!!
2) Our students are being systematically taught to cheat to get by in their studies. I know this because I ask each of my classes if any have not been cheating and occasionally one or two will raise their hands. Such happens even in our much vaunted BA/MD program, so students have told me who are enrolled in it. Why do students cheat? Because they are for the most part experiencing only mid-term and final exams -- and, if fortunate, perhaps a short paper or some quizzes along the way. These testing techniques do not teach learning. I watched one adjunct grading two courses of mid term exams. To my horror his grading procedure consisted of flipping through an exam booklet and placing a grade on the cover. I timed him after a bit a discovered that he was spending an average of 9 (NINE!) seconds on each exam so graded -- he is no longer with us. Our students never receive back their final exams with comments and criticisms. Thus, many never learn the basics of taking exams -- read the question to make sure you are covering all its parts, outline before writing, etc. It is now a widely reported fact that the much vaunted improvements in students' performance resulting from the obsession of our political reactionaries with testing are often the product of TEACHER CHEATING in giving and evaluating tests. Such even was admitted to me by the officials who administer the SATs and LSATs when I followed up on reports by my students of cheating on those exams -- they said there was nothing they could do to do to stop such cheating with their limited resources!
The bottom line here: You Benno Schmidt, just as you have boasted of your Edison's project improvement in doing the education thing (when you dumped your shares of stock just before Edison dive bombed) are a fraud in your characterizations of CUNY improvements on your watch! You have NOT improved the standards of CUNY. Your reports of improvements at CUNY are nothing but cheap photo op lies. We need the monies to hire full-time faculty with the time and energies to do our teaching right. You, as a much reputed fund-raiser at Yale before the faculty there busted you out of the place, have been sitting on your hands and doing nothing for CUNY except using it as a Edison credential. Shame on you and the other CUNY board members who follow your lead:
http://www.thestreet.com/comment/keyhole/774791.html
Yes, you are a fraud, Benno Schmidt. And your own example of cheating is a bad one for our students. Resign and take your incompetent board members with you who do not give a damn about CUNY. As the above Google hit puts it about Edison, so the same applies to your CUNY role:
"Bottom line? The deal's a dog, and the only investors who stand to come out ahead in it will be wily Whittle and his boola-boola buddy, Benno Schmidt."
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp
From: Edward Kent, Philosophy, Brooklyn College, CUNY
Subject: How You Have Been Cheating Our CUNY Students
I have been teaching in CUNY colleges -- also with experience teaching at Vassar, Barnard, and Columbia -- since 1966. I have watched with increasing horror the quality of teaching that we have been able to offer our students declining in measure with your decreasing funding for faculty free to do the tasks of teaching effectively
To make this graphic, when I was chairing our philosophy department at Brooklyn in the 1970s, which we had built to one of the finest on the East coast, we had approximately 18 full-time members doing 3/4 of the teaching with some specialists (e.g. the third ranked scholar in the U.S. in the field of non-Western religions, who happened to be an Episcopal priest), filling the gaps or extra adjuncts brought in when our numbers of students increased during our registration periods beyond our expectations.
Today with some 140 majors in philosophy, generally attracting the most exceptional students at Brooklyn -- our Rhodes or Beinecke scholars and other major fellowship award winners and others who head off to leading professional schools -- we have a ratio of 28 of our fall '05 courses being taught by our regular full time faculty out of our total course offerings of 70 -- SEVENTY!!! The vast bulk of our courses, thus, are being taught by harried part-timers and occasional 'substitutes' teaching overloads. Our part-timers and subs are first rate teachers -- but they are rushed - the adjuncts from college to college, to their own graduate courses with many pressures outside of teaching abounding -- mainly financial.
The upshots:
1) Our Brooklyn College students are being cheated out of learning the basic skills that you or I were taught as undergraduates and which our private school students learn in grades 10-12 before they enter college, e.g. how to take exams and how to write a critical research paper. I require the latter of all my students in electives - I used to ask 30 pp., but have reduced the requirement to 20 pp. as virtually none of my students have ever written what we used to call a term paper -- the sort that we would do 4 to 6 of in each semester in our humanities and/or social science courses!!!!
2) Our students are being systematically taught to cheat to get by in their studies. I know this because I ask each of my classes if any have not been cheating and occasionally one or two will raise their hands. Such happens even in our much vaunted BA/MD program, so students have told me who are enrolled in it. Why do students cheat? Because they are for the most part experiencing only mid-term and final exams -- and, if fortunate, perhaps a short paper or some quizzes along the way. These testing techniques do not teach learning. I watched one adjunct grading two courses of mid term exams. To my horror his grading procedure consisted of flipping through an exam booklet and placing a grade on the cover. I timed him after a bit a discovered that he was spending an average of 9 (NINE!) seconds on each exam so graded -- he is no longer with us. Our students never receive back their final exams with comments and criticisms. Thus, many never learn the basics of taking exams -- read the question to make sure you are covering all its parts, outline before writing, etc. It is now a widely reported fact that the much vaunted improvements in students' performance resulting from the obsession of our political reactionaries with testing are often the product of TEACHER CHEATING in giving and evaluating tests. Such even was admitted to me by the officials who administer the SATs and LSATs when I followed up on reports by my students of cheating on those exams -- they said there was nothing they could do to do to stop such cheating with their limited resources!
The bottom line here: You Benno Schmidt, just as you have boasted of your Edison's project improvement in doing the education thing (when you dumped your shares of stock just before Edison dive bombed) are a fraud in your characterizations of CUNY improvements on your watch! You have NOT improved the standards of CUNY. Your reports of improvements at CUNY are nothing but cheap photo op lies. We need the monies to hire full-time faculty with the time and energies to do our teaching right. You, as a much reputed fund-raiser at Yale before the faculty there busted you out of the place, have been sitting on your hands and doing nothing for CUNY except using it as a Edison credential. Shame on you and the other CUNY board members who follow your lead:
http://www.thestreet.com/comment/keyhole/774791.html
Yes, you are a fraud, Benno Schmidt. And your own example of cheating is a bad one for our students. Resign and take your incompetent board members with you who do not give a damn about CUNY. As the above Google hit puts it about Edison, so the same applies to your CUNY role:
"Bottom line? The deal's a dog, and the only investors who stand to come out ahead in it will be wily Whittle and his boola-boola buddy, Benno Schmidt."
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp
posted by Ed Kent at 7:33 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home