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An ex-student at the University of California, Davis, was arrested Thursday and charged in three recent stabbings that have left many in Davis unsettled, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Carlos Reales Dominguez, 21, was arrested on two counts of homicide and one count of attempted murder.

The university said in a statement that “Dominguez was in his third year at UC Davis until April 25, 2023, when he was separated for academic reasons.”

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The first stabbing death was two days later.

Two days after that, a second person was stabbed to death: a student at Davis.

Dominguez could not be reached for comment.

Reached by phone by the Los Angeles Times, his father said the family was in shock. The father, who asked not to be named to protect the family’s privacy, said family members had been trying to reach Dominguez for the last three days because they had heard about the stabbings and were worried about his safety. He had not responded, the father said, and they assumed he was busy with his studies.

“This is inexplicable to me,” he said, adding that he was unaware that his son had been separated from UC Davis last week. “He was so excited to go to Davis. I don’t understand how this could happen.”

Faculty members at Stanford University are looking to update the institution’s long-standing honor code to better address academic dishonesty on campus. But undergraduate resistance to one proposed change—the introduction of proctoring on a campus that has disallowed it for over a century—has complicated those plans.

The Undergraduate Senate voted on April 25 against changes to the institution’s honor code proposed last month by a group called the Committee of 12, or C-12, which had been charged with evaluating it and the Student Judicial Charter. The proposal needed to be approved by five governing bodies on campus to be implemented; the Undergraduate Senate was the only one to vote against it.

The sticking point was a new provision to allow the university to conduct a study on the impacts and effectiveness of proctoring tests—a move the Undergraduate Senate strongly opposes for a number of reasons, according to Senator Juan Becerra, a junior.

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First, the senators worry that the introduction of proctoring would transform the campus culture into one that is hostile and distrusting of students.

“It creates this sort of atmosphere or environment that makes students feel like they’re cheaters and they’re not academically honest,” he said. “We don’t want students being shadowed with this looming figure over them, pressuring them.”

Undergraduate senators also worry that unconscious biases might lead proctors to unfairly overmonitor Black and brown students.

But to proponents of the honor code change, those fears are exactly why an in-depth study of proctoring is needed. Among other things, it would help the university better understand the impact that bias has on proctoring and what can be done to circumvent it, they argue. Any decisions made about proctoring after the study would have to be approved by the same bodies that were asked to approve the C-12 proposals.

“The undergraduates brought forth a number of valid concerns about students from underrepresented backgrounds and potential bias when it comes to proctoring,” said Lawrence Berg, a fourth-year chemistry graduate student member of the Graduate Student Council who teaches undergraduates. “I think these are valid things to be concerned about, but they’re not something we can know the answers to right now without the study. I think we realistically need answers to these questions that come from a rigorous academic study.”

Becerra sees it differently.

“I think maybe one can infer that [the study] would obviously lead to the implementation of proctoring,” he said. “And we just didn’t want anything to do with proctoring.”

After the Undergraduate Senate voted against the revised honor code, the Faculty Senate took matters into its own hands. It passed, in a split vote, a resolution brought forth by mathematics professor Richard Taylor that would allow instructors to begin proctoring exams next semester—unless the Undergraduate Senate reverses its decision and approves the revised honor code.

Essentially, the new proposal said students must agree to a study of proctoring or face potential proctoring starting next year.

Dubbed the “nuclear option” by some faculty, the move shocked the Undergraduate Senate as well as some faculty senators, who expressed unease about the body’s apparent abandonment of shared governance. But Faculty Senate members found research showing precedent for faculty amending the honor code without the input of the other governing bodies.

“The Academic Secretary’s Office did extensive historical and legislative research to determine whether the Faculty has the authority to change the Honor Code. Senate staff also conferred with the Office of General Counsel,” Faculty Senate chair Kenneth A. Schultz, a political science professor, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “Based on this, we concluded that the faculty have this authority. In fact, it was the Faculty alone that originally enacted the Honor Code.”

Undergraduate senators expressed a sense of betrayal, questioning why they were asked to approve the proposal in the first place if their vote didn’t matter.

“We thought as representatives of [undergraduate] students, of individuals who are going to be effected by this honor code, we thought we had a say in this,” Becerra said. “We thought that our voices were going to have some weight.”

Re-Evaluating Academic Integrity Policies

In response to the rapidly changing culture of academic dishonesty on campus, in 2019 C-12 was charged with providing recommendations for updating the university’s honor code and student judicial charter, the latter of which was first implemented in 1997.

The ever-increasing availability and variety of technology has forced Stanford and many institutions of higher education to re-evaluate their academic integrity policies. Can students use Google during take-home exams? How much, if at all, can they use ChatGPT when writing essays? Does it make sense to prohibit group work in the classroom when so many workplaces depend on open-source collaboration?

“It’s not just here. All over the country, the difficulties of how to manage learning and academic integrity in the face of artificial intelligence technology is a huge challenge,” said Brian Conrad, a professor of mathematics at Stanford who also served as the honor code subcommittee chair for C-12.

But as one of very few universities where the honor code still requires teachers to exit the room while students take tests, Stanford faces unique challenges. While students have grown accustomed to the freedom that unproctored exams grant them, instructors argue that they’ve taken advantage of that trust; incidents of cheating and failure to report infractions by fellow students, as the honor code dictates, are rampant, they say. Only two of the 720 honor code violations reported at Stanford between 2018 and 2020 came from students, according to the university.

Berg, the chemistry graduate student, favors proctoring precisely because he has witnessed so much cheating in his courses.

“No one respects the honor code in its current form—not graduate students, not faculty, not undergraduates,” he said, adding that cheating has become “part of the fabric of the university.”

The other universities that still ban proctoring are dealing with similar pushes to adapt their honor codes—though not all coming from the faculty side. At Middlebury College, which in 2014 allowed its economics department to begin proctoring exams, the student newspaper this week published an editorial calling for the end of the honor code due to its ineffectiveness; two-thirds of Middlebury students admitted to breaking the code in the college’s annual student survey.

Holly Tatum, a psychology professor at Randolph College in Virginia who has studied honor codes, believes that students may be less motivated than previous generations to follow the traditional rules of academic honesty, such as working alone on individual assignments.

“I believe that there may be some cultural shift going on right now that is changing how students perceive honor and integrity,” she said. “I sometimes think of this generation as the ‘group work’ group of students.”

An Inside Higher Ed Student Voice survey from December 2021 found that students’ views of using technology to help with assignments differed starkly from traditional academic integrity standards. Nearly half of respondents—47 percent—said using a study website to look up answers for homework or a test was fully or partially acceptable. And 53 percent said the same about googling answers to homework assignments. A smaller but not insignificant share, 17 percent, said it was fully or partially acceptable to use forbidden technologies or tools during an online exam.

Seeking Compromise

Faculty and graduate students are eager to reach some sort of agreement with undergraduates that will allow the proctoring study to move forward, rather than automatically introduce proctoring in the fall. But so far, it seems unlikely; according to the minutes of last Tuesday’s Undergraduate Senate meeting, there was no revote on the proposed changes to the honor code; instead, student senators reiterated their view that the Faculty Senate’s resolution violated the principles of shared governance.

The members of C-12 always knew the proposal would be a tough sell. After all, their charge, according to Jamie Fine, a sixth-year graduate student and the student co-chair of the body, was to “broker a compromise between five sometimes very diametrically opposed stakeholder groups.”

The committee’s research—which included outreach to students, instructors and other institutions of higher education—indicated that there was resistance among students to the idea of proctoring, but it wasn’t universal. Just under half the students they spoke to said they were against proctoring, though members stressed they did not conduct a scientific study.

In addition to the Undergraduate Senate’s arguments, students noted that the majority of honor code violations don’t take place during exams, making proctoring a relatively ineffective solution to cheating concerns, according to C-12’s final report, issued last month.

But some students said they favored proctoring, noting that it would be convenient to have a professor or teaching assistant in the room during exams to answer questions. It would also eliminate the responsibility of students to monitor one another during exams and afford students the opportunity to fight accusations of cheating in the moment.

Fine said this feedback, as well as the feedback from instructors, is what led C-12 to suggest a proctoring study.

“A big reason why we have the [study] is exactly because of what we heard from different stakeholder groups, in terms of wanting to see change and wanting to see change that was meaningful” rather than a “knee-jerk” reaction to Stanford’s academic dishonesty problems, she said.

Other changes to the honor code included new text and definitions aimed at clarifying the responsibilities of both students and professors.

The committee also proposed significant changes to the student judicial charter—namely to replace what has been referred to as a “one-size-fits-all” judicial system, in which students must undergo the same process regardless of the suspected violation, with a new, tiered approach based on the seriousness of the violation, past offenses and other factors. The new charter will also center education, rather than punishment, for offenders.

The changes to the judicial charter—which were approved by all five bodies, including President Marc Tessier-Lavigne—are designed in part to ensure that a single dumb mistake, or even a misunderstanding of what constitutes academic dishonesty, does not follow a student forever, Conrad said.

C-12 won’t be involved in whatever comes next for proctoring at Stanford. But Conrad said he hopes the committee’s years of hard work, outreach and research will ultimately have an impact.

“I certainly would hope whatever the final outcomes are of the discussions around the honor code, the part of our work that gave rise to these suggestions can at least be looked at by some university body in whatever form that might take, to improve the culture of academic integrity,” he said.

A few articles and postings I’ve noticed lately take it as a given that life in the highly industrialized countries transformed in some deep but tangible way circa 2010—within a year or two, at most, on either side. Quite a few disrupted norms and forced readjustments in ordinary life either began then or followed in its wake. Three developments, in particular, define that period. One was the global financial crisis of 2008. Another, the increasing variety and ubiquity of mobile devices. And finally there was the arrival of social media as a factor in public life, soon to exude the subtle authority of an 800-pound gorilla.

Cause and effect among these factors interlocked in ways that make sense with hindsight. For example, it was clear by 2010 that ebooks were being taken up by non-technophile readers. This came after years of dire musings within the publishing industry, which had endured much “consolidation,” as the euphemism puts it, stemming from the recession. Was the change in reading patterns a cause or an effect of growing reliance on mobile screens? Both, probably. Likewise with the mutual exchange of influence between mobile devices and social media.

And so it became possible, and ever more routine, to produce, share and consume content of almost any sort (instantaneously, or just about) with no restraint and seldom much accountability. The potential for unfettered creativity proved enormous, as did the potential for incessant self-aggrandizement and gutless malevolence. Strangely, this no longer seems strange.

“I did not decide in 2009 to prioritize screen time over live relationships,” writes Gaia Bernstein in Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies (Cambridge University Press). The indicated year, which falls within the epochal-shift pocket, was when the author and her friends, family and colleagues started relying on smartphones and social media to stay in touch. (The author is a professor of law at Seton Hall University.)

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“I did it gradually, and at least initially, through a series of specific decisions,” she explains. “But over time, I ended up spending an alarming part of my waking hours online. Technology makes us especially vulnerable to finding ourselves in unanticipated places. Once we get used to technology it often becomes invisible … This is particularly true for digital technologies, where much more is hidden than is seen.”

The hidden element referred to here is not a device’s hardware but, rather, the behavioral engineering incorporated into social apps, in particular. They are designed to absorb as much of a user’s time, attention and personal information as possible by delivering an addictive little surge of neurochemical gratification when the user checks the app and finds notifications. The impulse to reach for the device is cultivated through such standard features as “pull to refresh.” Pulverizing the individual’s attention span to sell off the fragments is the core of the business model. This is not speculation. Whistle-blowers from the tech industry have documented as much in recent years.

Bernstein cites a national survey from 2019 showing that children between 8 and 12 years old “spent, on average, five hours on screens per day, while teens spent on average seven and a half hours” (not counting time spent on schoolwork). That lines up with another 2018 study’s finding that 45 percent of teenagers said they were online “almost constantly.” The impact of the pandemic on screen time was unsurprising: researchers determined that “the percentage of kids of all ages spending more than four hours daily nearly doubled.”

The cumulative impact of heavy screen usage includes “significant increases” in “anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide,” particularly among girls. In a study at the University of Pennsylvania, one group of students “limit[ed] Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat use to ten minutes, per platform, per day,” while another consumed social media in their normal manner. After three weeks, those with a restricted intake “showed significant reduction in loneliness and depression … as compared to the control group.”

Bernstein notes that an internal review by Facebook “showed that ‘problematic use’ affects 12.5 percent of Facebook users.” Curious what qualified as “problematic use,” I found a report from 2021 explaining that it covered “compulsive use … that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships.” While Facebook implemented some of the recommendations made by its team focused on “user well-being,” perhaps the most decisive action it took was shutting that team down.

In 2017, Bernstein started lecturing to groups of concerned parents on the benefits of digital connection and the risks of its overuse, advising them on ways to limit kids’ time online. Efforts to do so rarely had the desired effect, or not for long. Parental-control passwords are, it seems, made to be broken. In discussion periods, much frustration came to the surface—as well as a lot of self-blame, as if inculcating sound digital hygiene were a parental responsibility that people felt they were failing to perform.

Some of the self-blame probably also derived from parents’ struggles to get a handle on their own time online. The author is candid about her own susceptibility to the lure of social media, and makes a few references to the struggle for balance in her own life.

But Unwired is neither a screen-junkie confessional nor a recovery handbook. Bernstein regards framing the issue as ultimately one of self-control as part of the problem. So is the fatalistic strain of technological determinism that treats the impact of a given invention as more or less inevitable.

What we have with social media, she argues, is akin to the effects of smoking or of trans fat in food. These are now understood to be matters of public health, but for decades the respective industries had a vested interest in subsidizing bogus controversy, in the case of tobacco, or ignoring the issue for as long as possible, as food manufacturers did with evidence that trans fats increased the risk of heart attack, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.

An oft-repeated sentence from Upton Sinclair seems germane: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” And even if he does understand it, the salary will remain a priority. Documents showed that Big Tobacco not only long knew its product damaged users’ health but was, as media outlets reported in the 1990s and as the industry has since admitted, adjusting nicotine levels in cigarettes to make them more addictive. (Getting new smokers hooked as fast as possible made sense, given that longtime users tended to die off at disproportionately high rates.)

Bernstein points to the troves of information made public by Silicon Valley whistle-blowers over the past few years to argue that time has come for legislation or litigation, or both, to mitigate social media’s damage to public well-being. The message of Unwired is, in short, that we need fewer digital detox workshops and—à la tobacco—a lot more class action lawsuits. There’s more to her argument about strategy and tactics, of course, but that would fit on a bumper sticker, which is a relevant consideration.

“With all we now know,” we read in the book’s opening pages, “it seems increasingly unlikely that we would have opted for all of this, had we known this information [about social media toxicity] around 2009, when we had the opportunity to choose.” Probably not, but the thought experiment is hard to conduct, in part because it is difficult to imagine who, or what institution, could have framed the question or enforced the decision.

The same consideration applies to making social media socially accountable. Bernstein is shrewd about the political maneuvers and public relations options available to industries challenged for doing harm to the general welfare. At the same time, she shows that imposing some control or countermeasures—no-smoking areas, for example, or food packaging that gives nutritional information—has been possible in the past, and might be in the future.

It’s worth a try, or a whole series of tries. But that will mean somehow defending public health or the common good when large swathes of the population doubt either one exists.

The University of Miami promotes graduation among undergraduate students by providing financial and personalized support to create the most expeditious path to graduation.

University leaders created ’Canes Complete (with a nod to students as Hurricanes) to help students facing unique challenges return to college and finish their bachelor’s degrees. Since the program launch, more than 100 students have graduated, improving the institution’s graduation rates.

What’s the need: A recent report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found the population of students who stopped out of college without completing grew by 1.4 million learners between July 2020 and July 2021, an increase of 3.6 percent compared to the year prior.

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At the University of Miami, administrators noticed a trend among students who were near graduation who would stop out due to a variety of personal or financial reasons, says John Haller, vice president of enrollment management. As a result, the university began outreach to eligible students, regardless of enrollment status, to move them back toward degree completion.

The initiative started in 2012 and became a formalized program in 2015, says Darby Plummer, executive director of student success and first-year foundations.

How it works: Outreach is done in various ways. Some students receive a mailed brochure to their permanent address, which links to a webpage with additional information and a form to submit for more information. Three times a year, staff in the Cane Success Center reach out to eligible students via emails, phone calls and texts to share program opportunities.

Once in the program, students and staff work together to figure out the quickest, least expensive path to degree completion, Plummer says. This path development takes place through in-depth interviews with the students as staff evaluate their ability to return to campus, financial resources and the student’s desired academic path to completion.

Students in ’Canes Complete often take one of three forks to finishing: completing their original program of study, completing a bachelor of general studies or just tying up loose ends.

Sometimes the final step to a degree doesn’t require the student to return to campus or complete an additional course, but it does require processing transfer credits, finishing a pending grade change or wrapping up an incomplete course.

If a student needs to finish one or several classes, they can take those online or in person, depending on where the student is located.

The bachelor of general studies program can be completed online or through Saturday courses and is offered at a lower tuition rate than on-campus classes, making it more accessible for students with more than one term left. The B.G.S. program allows students to create an individualized area of concentration that is most interesting or relevant to their studies.

“In all cases, the Cane Success Center will support the student in addressing any other challenges that could interfere with their degree completion—such as applying for financial assistance or finding accommodations,” Plummer says.

The logistics: ’Canes Complete helps to tear down existing barriers on the road to degree completion and also meet student where they are.

If personal finances are a barrier to finishing, ’Canes Complete provides grant funding for students within 15 credits of degree completion.

A present hurdle for ’Canes Complete is working with students with a past-due balance who cannot be readmitted or re-enroll. U Miami doesn’t have a process to forgive previous debt to the institution, and many students cannot produce those funds on their own.

Most often, staff have a challenge encouraging a student to return to the institution for personal reasons or students don’t see the return on investment, Plummer explains.

“It is hard to develop a plan that works for students who no longer live in the area or who now have work or family obligations, [or] getting students to re-engage when their current job doesn’t seem to require that they complete their degree—creating that sense of urgency and value in the degree can be an uphill battle sometimes,” Plummer explains.

The impact: Since 2012, 169 students have graduated through ’Canes Complete support, improving Miami’s six-year graduation rate by around 1.5 percentage points each year, Haller says.

One graduate of ’Canes Complete recently reached back out to Plummer, sharing his plans to go to medical school. That student is just one indication, Plummer adds, of the long-term impact an initiative like this can have on a student’s trajectory in higher education.

Note: This article has been updated from an earlier version to correctly identify the University of Miami.

This story was submitted to us by a reader just like you! Share your student success initiatives with us here.

I’ve long believed that student engagement is the necessary precursor to all learning. 

Sure, you can get students to complete academic work via external motivators like grades or the more nebulous indefinite delayed benefit of climbing the successive rungs of the credentialing ladder, but these are not necessarily the best ways to get students learning.

One of the core elements of engagement is “autonomy,” essentially giving students some element of choice and freedom in the doing of the assignment. The biggest problem with the writing instruction students tend to have received prior to college is that it is highly prescriptive, as they are coached to pass assessments judged on surface-level criteria, rather than given the opportunity to deeply engage with the challenges of writing.

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The thing to keep in mind about freedom, though, is that in many cases it’s just another word for having no idea what you’re supposed to be doing. If you want a student to be frozen, unable to produce a piece of writing, just tell them they can write whatever they want.

But how can you privilege freedom in a way that allows students to also take advantage of the benefits of autonomy?

The key is providing structure that allows that freedom to be unleashed.

How to do this can get complicated, particularly if you have specific learning objectives in mind. (This is one of the reasons I worked to corral my learning objectives into a framework that could contain multitudes, what I call “the writer’s practice.”)

Thinking about these challenges reminded me of an earlier period of my life where I was desperate to help total strangers with whom I would barely interact write funny stuff so I could have enough material to publish on the website I was editorially overseeing.

I took over the editorship of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency in July of 2003, sort of by accident when McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers called me and asked if I could “help out” with the site for an unspecified period of time. I was provided significant autonomy in what I wanted to do provided what I published was up to snuff and fit with the overall ethos of the organization. 

At the time, the site was not featuring short humor exclusively, but it was a plurality of the material for sure, and to me in those earlier days of the Internet, humor seemed like the best route for drawing audience. It was also the area I felt the most confident in terms of my editorial judgment.

I set a goal of publishing two to three new pieces of humor per day. While McSweeney’s (under my far superior successor editor Chris Monks) is now flooded with more good submissions than it could ever hope to publish, in those earlier days this was not the case.

Writing a fully-realized short humor piece from an original premise is not easy. It is easier for some people, and seemingly impossible for others, but having read literally tens of thousands of submissions and done my share of trying to write these things, given the blank space of total freedom to try to be funny on the page is much more likely to end in failure than success.

Really, it doesn’t end anywhere because in most cases, the writer doesn’t even make it to the starting line.

So, needing funny things to put up on a website that’s trying to make people chuckle, I realized that I had to give people a couple of playgrounds to work within to provide the necessary structure that would allow them to be funny and free. 

One no-brainer was to break out the many lists that had already been published on the site into its own section and encourage more submissions. Reading even just the titles of the lists could nudge potential contributors toward trying their hands at the form by thinking of a humorous juxtaposition and then seeing what came next.

“Are You Playing Dungeons & Dragons or Doing Your Taxes?”

“Eight Wilderness Survival Tips for Adjunct Writing Instructors”

“The Nine Circles of Renovation Hell”

So, that was good, but not sufficient. I needed other forms that anyone could try. Then inspiration struck.

One day, while eating a plum I experienced my usual frustration with the truly appalling size of the pit relative to the fruit pulp. I imagined what it would be like if rather than a (probably) ancient fruit, I pretended that plums were some kind of new product that I could review and suggest improvements for future models.

That became the first of what I called “Reviews of New Food.”

Because I couldn’t launch a new section with just one piece of content, I also wrote up my take on something called “Uh-Oh Oreos” which had vanilla cookies and chocolate cream. 

I’m pretty sure the third, unbylined review of new food we published on “Mountain Dew type 3: Live-Wire Orange” was by Dave himself. It sounds like him anyway.

Once I had the examples, the submissions started to come in. As I scroll through the archives in a march down memory lane, I see a mix of people who would go on to be professional comedy writers with others who – at least if Google is accurate – have never published another piece of publicly available writing.

That might be my favorite byproduct of my moment of inspiration. I think one of the reasons that the McSweeney’s website has managed to solider on – and is currently thriving – over the last twenty-five years is that it has always created a sense of community and belonging between the publication and the audience. Providing the simple structure was a way to give a swath of the audience that would perhaps never try their hand at writing otherwise, an entry point into being a direct contributor.

Under the proper conditions with structure and examples, anyone can be a writer.

This ethos quite easily carries over to the classroom. One of the first things I try to point out to all students, regardless of the success (or lack thereof) they have had with writing in school contexts previously is that they likely write all the time and are probably pretty effective at communicating in writing in other contexts.

Having reached agreement that they have had previous success at writing, it is then a matter of giving them the next experience which seems explicable and doable. In my first-year writing course, this happens to be a review (though a serious one) which provides students with clear objectives and structure while also giving them freedom to write about anything they want to review.

Over the years I often got the balance wrong, either too much freedom/insufficient structure or too much structure that began to feel prescriptive, but once I knew that trying to balance these things was the key to getting students engaged, at least I had a specific problem to solve.

It wasn’t until many years later that I realized when it came to my teaching, I’d given myself the same thing I’d been trying to provide students, sufficient structure to make sense of a difficult challenge.

Students at the University of California at Berkeley are rallying to save the anthropology library and are now occupying the library full-time to do so, The New York Times reported.

The university plans to close the library and move its holdings to storage or another, larger library.

The fight is “about fundamentally writing a different story about what education is, what the university is for,” said Jesús Gutiérrez, a graduate student who works at the library and is writing a dissertation about folk art forms of the African diaspora.

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Berkeley administrators say they can’t afford small departmental libraries. “We are aware of the protest and are monitoring the situation,” the university said in a statement. “Regarding the anthropology library’s closure, we, too, wish the library could remain open, but that is not an option at this point.”

A roof collapsed at an off-campus home near Ohio State University Saturday night. Fourteen people believed to be students were hospitalized, CNN reported.

“It appears that the roof was overloaded with students—we’ve heard numbers between 15 and 45 students on a rooftop that was not designed to have anybody on it, and it gave way,” Columbus fire chief Steve Martin said.

Ohio State said that the university has “been monitoring this serious situation closely and assisting first responders in any way possible. Our thoughts are with the individuals who were present and their friends and family.”

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Guest Post by David Eubanks, Furman University

I am not proud of the fact that early in my career I thought giving Fs in Calculus 1 made me a good teacher: every zero plopped into the course average signaled the rigors of college math. Now that my role has changed to institutional research, I spend much of my time analyzing student success.  The importance of grading practices and GPA is everywhere I look: graduation rates and learning,  teacher qualities and learning, instructional quality and learning, selection of majors, and sense of belonging in college. Given the stakes, it’s fair to ask what is our justification for the peculiar letter grade of F? Why do we skip over “E” just to emphasize failure, and then—adding injury to insult—average a zero into the all-important GPA? What purpose does this serve to the student, the university, or the world outside? I’ll offer some reasons and considerations.

1. Failure is a warning to the world. Students who have failed in the past are likely to do so again in the future, so the F is advertising a deficit in personality or academic ability that is our duty to report on transcripts. 

Sure, but Fs are like Dostoevsky’s unhappy families: they’re all different. A student who stops attending to take care of a sick parent is different from a student who is working two jobs to pay for school, or one who was unlucky or unwise with course selections and ended up with a too-difficult schedule. Or one who just missed the withdrawal date. And that’s different from a student who was only admitted for tuition dollars, not because they had a chance academically. 

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As someone who works with educational data and thinks a lot about reliability and validity of measures, the predictivity argument is weak, and needs empirical support to be taken seriously. But let’s assume that Fs are fairly given and valid indicators of future success. This still leaves us with a philosophical burden. 

Doesn’t schooling entail the possibility of making mistakes that can be forgiven? Don’t we encourage students to be curious, to take chances so they can more freely explore their intellectual horizons? How does that peacefully coexist with “but you may be forever marked as a failure?”  By comparison, shoplifting convictions may be expunged to give someone a chance in life to overcome a youthful indiscretion. What if every failed job application or paper rejected from a journal incurred a mighty F on your vita? Even if it was predictive, would that be fair? 

2. The student didn’t learn anything. We use transcripts to advertise the skills and knowledge gained by students. What are we to do if they didn’t demonstrate any such gains?

I didn’t take any college courses on American Poetry (my loss: I enjoyed a MOOC on the subject years later), but my transcript doesn’t indicate this deficit with an F for that course, or any of the thousands of other courses I didn’t take. Transcripts don’t exist to say what we didn’t learn, but what we did learn. We could simply not list the course a student received an F in, or transmute it into a W without losing any information. 

3. An F sends a clear message to the student. The severe consequences of an F motivate students to work harder and therefore learn more. 

An F tanks a GPA, which can put a student in peril of academic sanctions, not qualifying for a desired major, losing financial aid, having to repeat a course, and so on. So the cost of failure is high. Is it high enough? Maybe an F should result in immediate expulsion. That would motivate the students even more, right? Exactly how severe should the consequences of failure be so that our standards aren’t allowed to slip due to unmotivated students? 

Given the high cost of college and the high opportunity costs of being out of the labor market for years, a grade of W is already severe enough. A couple of these may mean an extra semester to finish. Do we really need to add a permanent signal of moral failure to the scales? This is measurable, if you want to test it, and the stakes are high, so I think students would be justified in asking for an empirical demonstration of the motivational effects of F-giving. Note that there is good evidence that the rigor of grading matters, but rigorous grading can exist without the F. 

4. Surely cheaters deserve an F. In cases of academic dishonesty, an F serves as suitable punishment as well as a permanent mark of sin.

If you want to give an F for cheating, go right ahead, but note that the course isn’t the issue. Cheating in chemistry isn’t morally different from cheating in English. So rather than a course grade, a declaration of the finding is more appropriate (“The student was found to have committed plagiarism”).  If Fs signal cheating some of the time, how is the reader of a transcript to distinguish between dishonesty and the many other reasons a student could receive an F? Rather this confusion, it would be better to cleanly separate the business of rating course mastery from moral judgments by removing grades from consideration. It makes sense that a student should have to repeat a course if they cheated, but the connection to grades is unsustainable. Consider a student found to have cheated in a one-credit class, who then receives an F, and a different student in a five-credit class in the same situation. The GPA consequences are five times as much for the second student. Is the magnitude of moral failure proportional to course credits? 

5. Some students just aren’t going to make it. Many students must retain full-time status to receive financial aid. If they can’t withdraw because of the credit threshold, we don’t have any other options than an F for failure. 

This is unfortunately a significant reason why we give Fs, but the moral failure is ours, not the students. If we admit them to the university, are we not obligated to provide a path for them to succeed? Why then are the most vulnerable ones–the students who are already financially and academically stressed, the ones most likely to need to withdraw–why are they put in the position of having to trade GPA for cash? If we really care about equity of outcomes, we could do worse than starting with this problem.

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It’s probably impossible to change the grading system in the short term, with all its cultural inertia and algorithms within administrative software. However, this is an issue where individual choices can make significant differences. Give students every chance to withdraw if they are in peril; make the last date as late as possible or bend the rules. For students who can’t withdraw without losing full-time status, there are other workarounds, like a pass/fail class that can be added near the end of the term.  Even better, create class schedules for at-risk students with some forgiveness built in. 

If none of this convinces you, ask the Institutional Research office to analyze what types of students are most likely to receive Fs. See if the answer is acceptable. 

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David Eubanks is Assistant Vice President for Institutional Effectiveness at Furman University, where he works with faculty and administrators on internal research projects. He holds a PhD in mathematics from Southern Illinois University, and has served variously as a faculty member and administrator at four private colleges, starting in 1991. Research interests include the reliability of measurement and causal inference from nominal data. He writes sci-fi novels in his spare time.

Navarro College is facing a federal lawsuit by a woman who says the head cheerleading coach tried to cover up a sexual assault, NBC Dallas reported. The cheerleading team was made famous by the Netflix documentary Cheer.

The suit charges that a male cheerleader sexually assaulted a female cheerleader in the fall of 2021.

The lawsuit further alleges that head coach Monica Aldama promised to help advance the cheer career of the plaintiff—if she remained quiet about the alleged assault.

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“Defendants permitted a campus condition rife with sexual assault and lacking the basic standards of support for victims as required by state and federal law,” the lawsuit said.

Navarro denied the charges in the suit. In a statement to NBC Dallas, it said, “The safety and welfare of students is always of utmost priority. Navarro College prohibits sexual harassment and sexual misconduct against all students and is deeply committed to providing an educational environment free from sex discrimination and sexual assault.”

Two former professors have filed a suit to block the sale of some art by Valparaiso University, ARTnews reported.

The two professors who sued are Richard Brauer, the museum’s first director and its namesake, and Philipp Brockington, a former professor at Valparaiso’s law school who has an endowment in his name at the museum.

The fight involves the controversial planned sale of three valuable works of art from the museum’s permanent collection. The paintings—by Georgia O’Keeffe, Frederic E. Church and Childe Hassam—are estimated to be worth a collective $20 million.

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The university says it needs to sell the paintings to refurbish the freshman dormitories.

But the professors and many others say the sale would violate rules on deaccessioning.

The faculty at West Texas A&M University has voted no confidence in President Walter Wendler, The Texas Tribune reported. The vote was 179 to 82.

The vote was prompted by Wendler’s decision to bar a drag show on campus, for which he has been criticized and sued.

Wendler said at the time that drag shows “stereotype women in cartoon-like extremes for the amusement of others and discriminate against womanhood.”

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The resolution announcing the no confidence vote said that banning the show was just one example of “divisive, misogynistic, homophobic and non-inclusive rhetoric that stands in stark contrast with the core values of the university.”

A spokesperson for the Texas A&M University system, of which West Texas A&M is a part, declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Americans of both political parties believe that college students should hear from people with a diverse range of opinions, according to a poll conducted by HarrisX for The Deseret News.

Colleges should invite speakers with a range of views, said 86 percent of Democrats and 85 percent of Republicans.

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On the question of whether students should listen to controversial speakers with diverse viewpoints, a majority of Democrats, 59 percent, agreed. Among Republicans, 73 percent also agreed.

There was wide support for some activities to protest speakers with whom students disagree, such as petitions or rallies.

But most Americans believe that students who interrupt speakers (78 percent) or shout them down (79 percent) should be disciplined.

The board of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Education announced Thursday that Felecia Nave, who has been president of Alcorn State University since 2019, is no longer in that role.

The board appointed Ontario S. Wooden, who currently serves as provost, to begin serving as interim president.

The change is effective immediately. The board did not say why, or whether Nave agreed with the change. “The board wishes Dr. Nave well as she pursues new opportunities,” said the statement announcing her replacement.

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Mississippi Today reported that in October 2021, students held a protest in which they called for Nave to resign. “She has continuously shown a lack of empathy, transparency, and communication,” said a letter from the student government to the board.

A group of alumni, Alcornites for Change, issued a report last year on numerous problems at the historically Black university.