Colleges & universities should take action against professors who deliberately fail too many students

[Koldo]

Choice is the factor in college. Grade school is required. Throughout history college, trade school or apprenticeship has been required for a job and throughout history if you failed learn the requirements you lost your place no matter the field.

Sure. I am not saying that teachers ought to give a free pass to students that have not learned what they must. What I am saying is that in both schools it is the teacher's responsibility to provide a viable candidate to the workforce.

 

[Quintessence]

Some thoughts from someone who works in higher ed:

Let me start with this: A professors main job is to ensure that student's are getting the training they need for the real world. To make sure that they know enough to pass the test's and know the material.

I'm not sure if you are writing from the perspective of another country here, but in the United States there is a distinction between colleges/universities and vocational/trade/professional schools. There's sometimes some overlap between the two which can make things a bit confusing, but only vocational/trade/professional programs really fit what you are describing here. At colleges/universities, professors are scholars and researchers first and foremost. Tenure is granted to professors who are innovators in their fields, not on the basis of teaching or instruction. This does depend somewhat on the rules and policies of the specific university, but I think undergraduate students in particular just misunderstand what the university is about and what faculty are hired to do. They think it's like high school where hiring is primarily for their own benefit. And while teaching faculty are sometimes hired by university departments, by and large they are hired as researchers, not teachers.

When a significant # of people are failing a course, we really need to ask what’s going on.

Universities do this already, routinely. What gets done about it varies in part because each department is an autonomous unit and more or less gets to do its own thing. I can think of multiple cases where this got done in courses that resulted in some significant changes. Restructuring of courses, changes to prerequisites, changing teaching assignments, sometimes even new hires. But all this happens behind the scenes where the students, for the most part, aren't aware of it happening. There are also some pretty strict enforcement mechanisms in the case of legitimate academic grievances that go above and beyond simple grading, such as when a student feels singled out because of a protected class. If a professor were deliberately failing students without good cause that would be an academic grievance which could lead to the professor's termination from the university.

Now let's say that they didn't set out to fail students. When a lot of students are struggling, we have to wonder: is the teaching any good? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done my homework, felt ready, and then the test hits hard. The questions r totally different from the homework/books. It really messes with your confedence.

At a university students are expected to become independent, self-motivated learners who think critically and solve problems on their own. Just doing your homework doesn't cut it. It's not like high school. And many, many students struggle with this transition. They also struggle with things like metacognition, or their awareness of their understanding of the material. Students with poor metacognition think they know more than they actually do, then are surprised when they do poorly on exams. Good news is metacognition can be improved, as can study skills. Learning is something that is learned and pretty much every university has a separate office dedicated to precisely that. It's up to the students to take advantage of these academic support resources.

The long and the short of it is college is challenging and takes work. For faculty, staff, and students. Each share in these responsibilities, and do so. And to close off, a fun web comic demonstrating some of the other side of things:

 

[EinGeheimkonto]

A 30% or worse failure rate seems high.
However the success of a teacher at every level is reflected in the successes of their students.

In some American universities, courses are deliberately designed to have a high attrition rate. They are called "Weed Out" classes.

Consider it like a sort of boot camp for university students. They are difficult-but-introductory classes, taken in the large-lecture format, which tend to thin out the herd a little bit. Of course, if you fail the first time you can re-take; most people if they don't pass the first time end up passing the second time.

Depending on the department it could be any number of things. They're often things that do require quite a bit of memorization (i.e. Anatomy and Physiology for pre-medical students), but can also be things that require quite a bit of multi-step or lateral thinking. In engineering it can usually be Physics I and Multi-Variable Calculus; but depending on the institution, it could be the Freshman Seminar (At my undergrad it was coded as ENGR101, a required course). Technically the latter isn't really a weed-out as most people pass, but there was a lot of busy work and essay writing for that.

For religion studies majors, I'm told that learning Greek and Hebrew can be quite taxing for the uninitiated.

Here's the kicker: funding does in large part depend on keeping students in the program, paying fees. Also, the prestige of our program depends on sending out competent graduates.

We are NOT intentionally trying to screw people over, but by the nature of things it is bound to happen.

If there is material that you absolutely must know before you go on to the real world, I have to try and make sure that you know it. Yes, some people do get screwed in the process - but they might actually find the major isn't really for them and go on to try something they actually like.

 

[Koldo]

At a university students are expected to become independent, self-motivated learners who think critically and solve problems on their own.

Therefore making the whole point of going to college redundant? The kind of person you are talking about is necessarily able to learn by himself/herself any subject as long as they have access to a good pile of books.

Just doing your homework doesn't cut it. It's not like high school. And many, many students struggle with this transition. They also struggle with things like metacognition, or their awareness of their understanding of the material. Students with poor metacognition think they know more than they actually do, then are surprised when they do poorly on exams. Good news is metacognition can be improved, as can study skills. Learning is something that is learned and pretty much every university has a separate office dedicated to precisely that. It's up to the students to take advantage of these academic support resources.

The long and the short of it is college is challenging and takes work. For faculty, staff, and students. Each share in these responsibilities, and do so. And to close off, a fun web comic demonstrating some of the other side of things:

This works as an excellent excuse to do a poor job at teaching people though. I have a rule of thumb when it comes down to evaluating (regular) exams: The subjects must have been taught by the teacher at a difficulty level equal or higher than what is being demanded and the required knowledge must be pertinent to judge whether the student truly understood the important parts.

 

[Quintessence]

Therefore making the whole point of going to college redundant? The kind of person you are talking about is necessarily able to learn by himself/herself any subject as long as they have access to a good pile of books.

Not sure how you figure this, but you have an interesting perspective on human beings and how (higher) education works I suppose.

This works as an excellent excuse to do a poor job at teaching people though. I have a rule of thumb when it comes down to evaluating (regular) exams: The subjects must have been taught by the teacher at a difficulty level equal or higher than what is being demanded and the required knowledge must be pertinent to judge whether the student truly understood the important parts.

It can be a problem, one I'm well familiar with. Nevertheless it is still true that learning (and flourishing as a society just in general) is a shared responsibility. Things break down when any party involved doesn't cooperate. Just as there has been an unfortunate trend where universities fail to adequately consider teaching ability of faculty hires (this really, really frustrates me at the uni I work for), there has been an unfortunate trend of student absenteeism and disengagement and entitlement as well. These issues themselves are grounded in yet other systemic social problems that have no simple solution. In the mean time, folks do the best they can to help each other flourish in spite of adversity.