Re. your post on AI with no sources (which I'm going to reblog; but I wanted to note this outside of the tags): I work in higher ed too, in administration. As it happens, my program is having a meeting next week, required by the office for undergrad education, to talk about "what we're going to do about Grade Inflation". *SCREAMING* I've been in this job for 24 years. I've seen past attempts to deal with grade inflation! I've seen past attempts to deal with honors inflation! They haven't figured out a solution YET. But what's especially NOT a solution is pushing it down on all of the individual depts. Because all you'll get in that case is inconsistent amounts of change (if any), and all that happens then is that those depts that DO try to address the issue find their enrollments plummeting. It absolutely HAS to be an across-the-university push all at the same time, or nothing is going to work. But yeah, sure, we'll sit around a table next week and talk about how we can grade more harshly. An idea that, as things stand, is basically asking the instructors to kill their enrollments and thus kill their student evaluations, which are examined by the administration when it comes time to renew their job appointment. I do NOT know the solution to all of this. Because there's all that on the one hand, and there's the "college as commodity" issue that you mentioned on the other hand. How do we get to a point where we can get the students to focus on the learning opportunity in front of them, rather than on the distant post-graduation job market? I just don't know, because the whole mindset is so foreign to me. And I think for a lot of teachers, too (which I am not), there's this same issue of... we weren't the ones in that mindset when we were IN college, so it's very hard to understand it now. It's not hard to understand the *fear*, or the pressure. It's just hard to understand the not-caring at all. Anyway. Just wanted to say: solidarity. This is such a big problem. AI is exacerbating it, making it worse, but the problem really was already there.
oooof yeah. Good luck and I’m really sorry about that :(
as one of the reblogs of my post said: the solution to this is UBI. Unfortunately, the solution to quite a lot of things is UBI.
Because that’s the problem, right? It’s not so much that AI exists, it’s that it makes it exponentially easier to just give up and fall into the attitude that is already pervasive anyway. I’ve never had to talk about great inflation but ugh yeah. If college is a commodity, and you need a good grades, and if college is a business, you need to keep coming and paying for those good grades… you have to revamp basically the entire economy to get out of the hole that’s been dug, both by us and for us!
Like, what, we need “college does not cost thousands of dollars” AND ALSO “4-year college is not a requirement for getting a ‘respectable’ job where you can support yourself and survive comfortably” AND ALSO “community college gets respect and support” AND ALSO “professors shouldn’t be expected to teach, research, and do administrative work all at once, all the time” AND ALSO “get rid of the publish or perish model for real” AND ALSO “teaching and public outreach are institutionally valued” AND ALSO “college professors actually get taught how to teach, like get taught education theory and pedagogy” AND ALSO “not have students’ housing or scholarship depend on their grades” AND ALSO “not have a grade school culture of teaching to the test and standardized tests that instills in you for your entire childhood that grades are everything” BUT THAT WOULD MEAN “not funding grade schools/high schools based on student test scores, just actually funding them all for real” AND ALSO “hiring more teachers” BUT THAT WOULD MEAN “making teaching at a school a task that isn’t horribly thankless and burns people out real fast” BUT THAT WOULD ALSO MEAN “making school not a miserable place to be a child” WITH A SIDE OF “make sure everyone is teaching phonics again for real so from a young age, students learn how to read well and don’t struggle with reading and writing in a way that encourages them to give up and use ChatGPT” AND ALSO “generally having a culture that values learning and knowledge rather than money”… it is all SO MUCH and it will be hard to do and also expensive so nobody with the power to fix it really wants to try that hard to do so!!
and yeah, I definitely think you’re right that because all the professors and TAs are the people who liked school enough to keep doing it forever it’s just, incredibly hard to grok the students who don’t care. But the mess of a culture we’re in makes it all so hard to challenge because it feels like we need to untangle EVERYTHING to fix ANYTHING.
UBI would be a great start though.
