Wait, there is a downside to being too woke? And have I mentioned how much I am looking forward to the 2022 elections? To anyone who’s spent time in Democratic politics in the past decade, a certain type of young person will immediately be familiar: bright-eyed, old enough to drive a car but not old enough to rent one without insurance fees, maybe taking a gap year before starting college or else...
Stanford U student cyclists wear masks but not helmets!
Via Tyler Cowen, : In April of this year, I witnessed something on the Stanford campus that will be seared into my memory forever: a student on a bicycle, wearing flip-flops, AirPods in ear, going the wrong way through a roundabout in an active construction zone, with no helmet. But like any good follower of science, the student was wearing a disposable blue face mask -- for safety, I guess. I...
NY Times: College students really are snowflakes
Avoid sending your children to college: besides the racism and rape culture, there is sauce. The bribery scandal has “just highlighted an incredibly dark side of what has become normative, which is making sure that your kid has the best, is exposed to the best, has every advantage — without understanding how disabling that can be,” said Madeline Levine, a psychologist and the author of “Teach...
Student evaluations of teaching are not only unreliable, they are significantly biased against female instructors
To answer this question, we apply nonparametric permutation tests to data from a natural experiment at a French university (the original study by Anne Boring is here), and a randomized, controlled, blind experiment in the US (the original study by Lillian MacNell, Adam Driscoll and Andrea N. Hunt is here). We confirm and extend the studies’ main conclusion: Student evaluations of teaching (SET)...
How to administer course evaluations
—Hand out evaluation forms when the most irascible student in class is absent. —Be sure that the only assignment you give right before the evaluation is a low-stakes one. “Have them write an easy paper where they can talk about themselves and their journey in the class,” Ms. Wilson advises. And never give back a graded assignment on evaluation day. —Don’t leave the classroom while the evaluations...
Should we be honest with students?
Other educators worried about a lack of candor when schools offered scholarships to students. A school might offer an attractive three-year scholarship to an applicant, with the seemingly easy condition that the student maintain a B average. The school knew that it tightly controlled curves in first-year courses, so that a predictable number of awardees would fail that condition, but the...
Student views own Yale admission file
Most of what I read was pretty nice. One of the two admissions officers called an essay I wrote “a bit cheesy for my tastes,” which turned out to be a huge understatement; the essay was included in my files, and it was so dripping with schmaltz that I couldn’t make it to the end. At one place, one of my readers must have confused me with somebody else, because she made a note in her text box...
W.H. Auden’s syllabus: read 6,000 pages in one semester
Brownshirts at NC State
What an idiot: A North Carolina State University administrator is encouraging student leaders to censor speech they don’t like in a tunnel dedicated to free speech on campus. In an email sent to all student group leaders Friday evening that was obtained by Campus Reform,Eileen M. Coombes, Director of Student Involvement, encouraged students to be creative while fighting against “social injustices...
Brownshirts at Ithaca College
But I’ll risk microaggressing you to note that the student government at Ithaca College in upstate New York has just passed a mind-blowing bill that will allow students to anonymously report offensive statements such as “Where are you really from?” and “You don’t look disabled.” The system will include “demographics” about the aggressor and the...