Academic Odds and Ends
Life skills, cheating, belonging, and the big picture
I didn’t mean to leave Tuesday’s post as the last thing on this substack for quite as long as I did, but when I was making lunch later that day, I cut the tip of my left middle finger moderately badly, and that’s turned out to be more detrimental to my typing than I thought. So, that wasn’t a statement, just incompetence.
Anyway, as we close out the week (and the academic term— today is the last day of spring classes at Union, though I’ve spent this whole year on sabbatical leave), I want to close out some academic topics I’ve had open in tabs for varying amounts of time. So this will be a bit of a grab bag…
The most recent of these is yesterday’s post from Timothy Burke on swim tests and ritual requirements at colleges— those sometimes quirky things that graduates are required to do for reasons whose origins are lost to history. The proximate cause of this was a story about my alma mater dropping the long-standing swim test requirement. I took this test back in the fall of 1989, and it was kind of silly— as I recall, I was asked to jump into the pool, swim across and back the short way, and then tread water for some set time— 30 seconds, maybe? As someone who grew up in a town whose second most famous feature is a lake1, this was not remotely challenging, and it went into the “Well, that was odd” file along with the similarly trivial phys ed requirement (which I fulfilled by playing rugby and taking the same PE golf class twice, once as a freshman and once as a senior).
Both of those requirements were a source of comedy to most of my classmates, but they did occasionally prevent people from graduating, because they couldn’t be bothered to take the remedial swim class, or because they never took the required PE courses. Attempts to call the institution’s bluff on these silly requirements actually failed, and I had a very entertaining conversation at a bar with a Dean about this during the week before my graduation.
It’s sort of been a back-burner issue for decades, but in the modern era has inevitably become framed as a racial equity issue, which finally led to its removal. Interestingly, though, I initially became aware of thise via a private Facebook group where a couple of alumni of color blasted the decision on those same grounds— that being forced to learn to swim had, for them, been a way of closing an equity gap. So, you know, people are complicated.
Anyway, what was most interesting to me about Burke’s post was his discussion of possible affirmative reasons for a swim test requirement— chiefly, that knowing how to not drown is a useful life skill— and offering other such skills in the manner of a counterfactual:
If you were going to take a bigger view of mortality for college students and young adults, you’d want almost as much attention to murder and suicide, especially the latter. Why not a mandatory class on mental health? Or vice-versa, since many colleges and universities offer a lot of resources aimed at mental health and drug and alcohol abuse that are voluntary, why not the same for swimming? Encourage but don’t require?
If you’re going to decide that life skills are an important requirement, why stop at safety or the reduction of death and injury? Why not require a course on personal finance, for example? Or a course where students coming from wealthy backgrounds are forced to learn about what it’s like to survive on the minimum wage? The rationalization of the swim test as addressing a missing life skill that some students have just not had the opportunity to acquire applies equally to many other things.
As I said in a comment there, I found this amusing because I have recently sat through a lot of meetings in which people earnestly discuss adding exactly these kinds of requirements for students. Most recently, the notion of adding a “financial literacy” requirement generated a lot of enthusiasm; previous meetings have enthused about various kinds of “wellness” requirements, and also mandatory study skills, and time management, and of course the full spectrum of DEIB content.
The analogy between those “residential curriculum” projects and the swim test/ PE requirements at Williams hadn’t occurred to me, but now that Burke brought it up, it seems really apt. It’s another way of getting at the problem I wrote about a while back, namely how to structure this stuff in a way that makes jaded 19-year-olds take it seriously. I do think it’s a useful exercise to think about being intentional in imparting a broader range of skills to our students in their non-classroom time, but an absolutely critical piece of that is thinking about how to keep those programs from turning into the equivalent of the swim test requirement.
I’ve had this epic post from Matt Crump about mass cheating in a recent class open in a tab for a week or so. It’s a very entertaining read, though my main take-away is that the disastrous second midterm was an entirely self-inflicted wound— he never should’ve let the official notification that he was aware of the quiz cheating slip past the midterm. Changing the test format without advance notice and an explanation of why it was being done was incredibly ill-advised.
In a broader sense, this sort of ties into my belief, which has been getting stronger over the years, that we waste an enormous amount of time and energy trying to ferret out cheating. What Crump describes seems like an awful lot of work and angst over something that’s largely pointless— as he notes by the end, a lot of this can be avoided by using a different design for the course and the assignments.
More than that, though, I find myself thinking that the core problem here comes down to students looking for a low-effort way to skate through courses they don’t care enough about to engage with the material in an honest way. And I’m just not convinced that dropping the hammer on the few of those students who get caught is going to change the underlying problem in any meaningful way.
Speaking of people who don’t want to be where they find themselves… A lot of folks on science-y Twitter were sharing around this article from Physics with the SEO-optimized title “Keeping Women in Physics is More Than a Numbers Game”, about a couple of new Physics Education Research papers looking at gender divides in “sense of belonging” and the effect that has on grades. They find that female students both personally feel less like people who can do physics, and feel that their professors and TAs see them less like people who can do physics. This is kind of a bummer result, in no small part because it’s not really that surprising.
Having skim-read the underlying papers, though, I’m a little underwhelmed by the studies. These just use pre-and-post-class surveys to measure attitudes, and don’t seem to involve any actual observation of practices in the classroom that might contribute to the negative effects they see, making the recommendations in the conclusions disappointingly generic.
Most importantly, though, neither of the articles seems to address what to my mind seems like an enormous confounding factor, namely the specific population they’re drawing from. The Physics piece describes them as “students in two mandatory introductory physics courses for bioscience majors,” which most likely makes this the dread “Physics for Pre-Meds” class.
I understand why they did this— it’s how they managed to get a class of mostly women, which provides the primary “hook” for these particular studies. But this seems kind of problematic in terms of the premise for the analysis— how surprising is it, really, that students who are taking a course only because it’s a requirement for an otherwise largely unrelated major don’t feel like “physics people”? And I’m really not sure it goes with that headline— this looks less like a matter of pushing out students who are trying to be physicists than a matter of convincing students who are trying to be life scientists that they don’t want to be physicists. And, you know, that seems like an issue that ought to get a couple of sentences somewhere in the discussion of the results.
(The strongest point that this shows a real problem is that the “sense of belonging” scores slightly improved for male students from the pre-test to the post-test, while they got worse for the female students. That’s generally consistent with well-known results from majors courses, so it likely reflects something real. But it’s still less dramatic than some of the presentations that I saw on social media.)
Finally, just to end on a slightly more positive note, I liked Matt Yglesias’s big-picture look at American higher education, complete with charts and graphs and comparisons to European systems. There’s definitely stuff around the margins that you can argue with, but also a lot of truth in the relatively positive outlook: American colleges and universities really are by and large excellent, and many widely shared stories about how it’s all a fraud that’s on the verge of collapse are mistaken or misguided. There are problems and challenges, to be sure, but there’s a lot of good parts of the system that get underplayed, and bad parts that are wildly over-discussed.
I don’t have anything all that coherent to add, and this is already running a bit long, so I’ll just stop there. It’s worth a read.
And that’s a bunch of academic-issues tabs cleared. For more in this vein in the future, here’s a button you can click:
And if you want to argue with any of these specific takes, the comments will be open.
It’s arguably best known for being one of the places you get off the highway and onto twisty rural roads if you’re coming from the south or east and heading to Ithaca. I’ve heard a lot of Cornell alumni making fun of landmarks in my hometown over the years.
Unrelated, but have you written anything about the book Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps? It feels like the sort of book that would be Your Thing, but I couldn't find any blogposts or reviews of it.