As far as I can tell (I attend UC Santa Barbara, where graduate students started striking Thursday) this has only strengthened the resolve of the protesters. There were complaints about the strike "hurting the quality of education" which may have turned some against the graduate students involved but with this move (specifically, firing 52 number of graduate students, not providing appointments to others) I can only see the issue getting more heated.
I find it ironic that on the same page where the University is detailing how badly they intend to treat the graduate students, they also have a link to make a gift to the University.
If I were in a position to make a significant gift, I would be more inclined to make it to the graduate students (e.g. through a strike fund, or other means).
I graduated from the University of California at San Diego more than 45 years ago. I graduated with honors, and I was proud to be a UCSD graduate. After I started working, I made (modest) contributions to UCSD's scholarship funds. I stopped doing that after Janet Napolitano was named president of the University of California.
It makes me sad that the University of California seems to be determined to join the Ivy League schools in becoming a hedge fund with a minor side business in education.
One of the better ways that occurred to me when we Cal grad students were protesting a couple of decades ago was, rather than withhold the grades, simply to give everyone an 'A'. That form of protest most directly targeted the institution since it simply affected its reputation. The students were not hurt, the grad students could comply with their obligations and move on. I am surprised that such an approach never took off.
How are the students not hurt if the reputation of their university is damaged? Especially if you are a good student. Graduate admissions are aware of this kind of stuff, and it will screw over real A students royally.
I can tell you with 100% confidence that grade inflation is taken into account in grad admission. Been there, done that. Same as arbitrary scale changes (Let's give A+...).
But it will be a long time until this impacts Harvard. OTOH, it seems Princeton steered back.
At first, they did not give out grades at all. There was only a written evaluation that the professor did for each student at the end of the quarter. Eventually, in the mid 1980s or so, other schools demanded that UCSC give out a grade in addition, so they they could compare Slugs to other students when admitting for post-secondary education. When I send my official transcript over, it's ~75 pages long, not just one page. It's chock-full of detailed personal information about my efforts in Psych-101, Intro to Jazz, etc (or, rather, the total lack of effort, in my case).
Grads don’t provide meaningful feedback for how a student can grow or the challenges they’re facing. As soon as you introduce grades they become the sole metric to be gamed.
I understand there’s real issues with scaling, but national tests seem to resolve that. At most a pass, high pass or fail system would be best. Letter +/- grades are just silly when you step back and think about the goal of education.
Some literally just put down my scores on tests/papers. Some just copy-pasted the class description and then gave the grade I got.
Others wrote pages of feedback, not all of which was useful. My name is common enough that I was confused with another student once, including with my grade, so that was fun.
In large 500+ person intro classes, the feedback could never have been meaningful due to class size. In other 10 person classes, the feedback was generally pretty good. Upper division classes were better in term of feedback, broadly.
In practice, it's a bit of a mixed bag and each professor was different and themselves differed over time. Generally it's great though, even years after the events.
When I send in my transcripts, I vainly go over them again, and it's always a welcome exercise. Seeing my growth (good and bad) is so incredibly rewarding. It's very rare to get to be assessed like that in such pivotal years.
Some of those forms are the last communications I will ever have with those people as they have since died. Even if those forms are generally bland, I treasure them, as those people helped me so very much and were generally kind to me. I'm tearing up right now thinking about one professor I never got to say goodbye to (Dearest Reader: this is the universe telling you to email that person you've been meaning to email, FYI).
One last thing: if you are a person that designs websites that happen to accept transcripts, please bump the file limit up from ~25mb. Mine is ~200mb as the official download from the school and I always have to go in an scale down the .pdf to the varying mb limit that the website accepts, none of which are the same limit. Also, it always looks terrible after I scale it back.
Undergrad students? If it’s a CS class and not one of the intro to programming/algorithms ones you’re probably mostly checking if they read the book they were forced to buy (thanks ACM) so I would say it doesn’t really hurt them.
A student who gets an A when they should have failed the course may be wrongly encouraged to continue in that direction when they really ought to change programs. This could end up costing that student a huge amount of time and money, to the point of jeopardizing their ability to graduate and ruining their future.
Failing grades aren’t supposed to just be a punishment for not studying hard enough. They can be a warning sign that the student may need to try something else.
Depends on the school. All of my math classes and most of my CS classes at purdue were bell curved around like a C+/B- and you had to get a C to pass the class. Thus, a portion of each class would not pass and be effectively forced to retake the class to learn it better or switch to an easier major.
What schools do you have experience with? Also, never heard of ACM so I have no idea if that was used whatsoever for our classes.
>Like the UC Santa Cruz strike, the UC Santa Barbara work stoppage is a “wildcat” strike, meaning that graduate students are acting separately from the United Auto Worker (UAW) 2865, the union which represents more than 19,000 workers across the UC system.
I thought that was a mistake somehow, but it turns out that, yes, the UC students are organized as a branch of UAW despite not being auto workers.
Look at what they've been doing, especially around construction. Part of it goes towards interest payments on bonds they issued to pay for new buildings. Part of it goes towards the staff and maintenance of those buildings. Part of it goes towards administration. Whatever is left is used to the benefit of students. Now, when I see a campus with construction projects, or planned construction, I don't think that's great I see it as another expensive boondoggle university administrators are engaging in.
Yes. A lot of donations to schools are earmarked for specific things like libraries and sports complexes bearing the donor’s name. The university is then forced to hire all kinds of staff to run and maintain these buildings, lest they ruin their reputation by allowing the fancy buildings to fall into disrepair.
Donations that are earmarked to help students are in the form of scholarships and bursaries. To be honest, there aren’t nearly enough of those to go around.
>The university is then forced to hire all kinds of staff to run and maintain these buildings, lest they ruin their reputation by allowing the fancy buildings to fall into disrepair.
I talked with one of my professors at Iowa State about this topic. He said back in the day, donors only needed to pay the cost of the building and then the university would get hit with tons of maintenance and utility expenses.
For some time now, they have to donate the cost of the building and money for an endowment for expected maintenance costs and operating costs.
Fancy buildings are a marketing tool for schools, even if they're unneeded. Schools would rather raise tuition and compete for ever-wealthier students than refuse a shiny new building.
Yale and Harvard seem to have hit upon a successful model. The university is actually a hedge fund that educates young people on the side in order to cultivate a lifelong client base of alumni and donors. It's ironic that the Mormon church seems to function the same way Harvard does but without the education component, just the social club system.
Striking coincidence that I’m reading a biography on Jimmy Hoffa right now.
$2500 a year is a slap in the face to the $1800 / month the students were demanding.
Something needs to change there. For the Midwest small college town where I went $20,000-30,000 was plenty (for people without kids at least). I imagine it’d be a lot harder in CA coastal cities.
When I was represented by a graduate student union, our department actually tried to raise wages.
This was opposed by the union (solidarity!), and the result was that the department essentially invented fake courses to pad the hours of the grad students; the union didn't care because we were "working more" rather than getting "paid more"
This led me to believe that grad student unions were not a particularly useful way of dealing with issues affecting graduate students.
Not that I'm aware of. Most of the time when I talk about this topic it gets downvoted pretty hard. Part of the program not covered in the article was to train the population that anyone questioning those policies is the usual litany of bad words. I was very careful this time not to even hint at the content of the article. That seems to have helped.
NIMBYism in Santa Cruz has resulted in a massive increase in prices over the past few years.
Additionally, the students at this campus voted with an 80% majority against the prior contract that the union had negotiated on behalf of grad students at all campuses simultaneously. Students at other campuses with lower cost of living are not squeezed nearly as much.
Wanting to have your cake and eat it too is no great sin. In fact, it's what everyone, everywhere in modern society is trying to do. You want a job you enjoy, and that pays well. That seems like something worth fighting for. Just what you're doing eight hours a day is a very large amount of your lifetime.
