I commend Hunter Dayton for his letter Thursday about the effect that disinterested, lackadaisical, disrespectful and cheating students have on the majority of students who are serious about learning.
However, I do not think that the best solution to this is the removal of degree requirements — I believe it is to encourage our faculty to proactively address these issues.
I expect my teaching colleagues on campus to take teaching seriously — it is their primary responsibility to the university. We all should continually work to refine our pedagogy, and to provide our students with the tools that they need to succeed.
I encourage our faculty to follow the guidelines in the federal definition of the credit hour — a typical student should need to put in at least two hours of work outside of lecture for every hour in it in order to be successful in meeting the course learning outcomes.
I believe our departments and colleges should support our faculty when they assign the grades that their students legitimately earn, and to not inadvertently punish them for reasonable expectations when judging teaching evaluations. I encourage all of my colleagues to take advantage of the workshops on cheating and plagiarism offered by the Center for Teaching Excellence, and to report every incident of cheating to the Office of Academic Integrity.
Finally, I encourage our faculty to consider an electronic devices policy in their classroom so that students know they can be asked to leave, suffering any appropriate grade penalties as per their syllabus.
I believe that strong standards are an integral part of a high quality education and meaningful diploma. I also think that those would help alleviate many of Dayton’s concerns, hopefully early in the first semester of any course sequence, but definitely for all those allowed to start the second.
—Brian Habing, undergraduate director of the Department of Statistics