@ President Rex: While it’s kind of a secret of universities and not discussed the primary responsibility of professors with doctorates is research not teaching. Typically they are responsible for 2 lectures per semester for 2 semesters and pretty much the rest of their time involves research, conferences, etc.. Granted there are other teaching responsibilities like lecture prep, office hours and test design but less than half their time is spent on teaching related activities. If they marked stuff it would make it pretty difficult for them to carry out their research duties.
You know, if one of the professors here made the assertion that they should be able to get away with that sort of thing, they'd be looked on as a complete nutjob, regardless of their research. It just doesn't happen. Similarly, your approach of using TAs for lecturing comes across as fundamentally bizarre. And, well, the absurdity of running a 1700-person paper via such a method seems self-evident, so its not happening anytime soon.
@ President Rex: While it’s kind of a secret of universities and not discussed the primary responsibility of professors with doctorates is research not teaching. Typically they are responsible for 2 lectures per semester for 2 semesters and pretty much the rest of their time involves research, conferences, etc.. Granted there are other teaching responsibilities like lecture prep, office hours and test design but less than half their time is spent on teaching related activities. If they marked stuff it would make it pretty difficult for them to carry out their research duties.
You know, if one of the professors here made the assertion that they should be able to get away with that sort of thing, they'd be looked on as a complete nutjob, regardless of their research. It just doesn't happen. Similarly, your approach of using TAs for lecturing comes across as fundamentally bizarre. And, well, the absurdity of running a 1700-person paper via such a method seems self-evident, so its not happening anytime soon.
I'm not a professor, I'm a TA. I'm not sure where I mentioned TAs should lecture. Just to be more clear when I said 2 lectures per semester I meant they were responsible for teaching 2 lectures per week per semester. I've only ever seen two areas of deviation with this. 1. Is with accounting professors that don't have doctorates so are hired specifically for teaching with no research. 2. With professors that do 3 lectures in one semester and 1 lecture the second. I'm sure there can be the need for some exceptions to this but 2 and 2 is typical.
I admit bias because the subject was also one of my favorites, but one of my favorite teachers only taught because he had to in order to research, as stated by him to his students. I don't think it's a continuum with teaching on one end and researching on the other at all.
On this note, one of the best lecturers I've encountered was also very much a major participant in his field. Some people are good at teaching! Some people find it worthwhile! It doesn't imply all that much about their research.
@Newblar: I realise! I was just running with your examples of time and the North American model in general. Actually, rereading, I suspect I misinterpreted said time.
... We're not really talking about a modus ponens here. More that there is a skill set for research and a skill set for teaching, and the intersection of these is not equal to the union of these, and so there is likely some negative correlation between research ability and teaching ability in professors, depending on the basis of their hirings. I would consider it one of the really important factors in choosing a university to attend: big research versus small teaching, a distinction which is exemplified here in Toronto by the University of Toronto and York University.
I admit bias because the subject was also one of my favorites, but one of my favorite teachers only taught because he had to in order to research, as stated by him to his students. I don't think it's a continuum with teaching on one end and researching on the other at all.
On this note, one of the best lecturers I've encountered was also very much a major participant in his field. Some people are good at teaching! Some people find it worthwhile! It doesn't imply all that much about their research.
@Newblar: I realise! I was just running with your examples of time and the North American model in general. Actually, rereading, I suspect I misinterpreted said time.
My favourite prof was also really big on research. Even though I suspect if he had to pick one or the other he would pick research he seemed to genuinely enjoy teaching and has won several teaching awards.
One of the biggest surprises for me was how much emphasis gets placed on the research. Until my second year of undergrad I didn't realize how few classes profs taught and thought they only did a little research during the summer if they got bored on vacation. I also didn't realize that TAs marked pretty much everything.
Since we're discussing TAs, chemistry, and higher education, I'll share my little anecdote.
I TA'd two quarters last year in intro organic chemistry here - big class two sections of 350 each. I had three discussions of, nominally, ~30 students each. They weren't required to attend the assigned discussion or any discussion at all, or lecture in point of fact, since that's more or less impossible to administrate with 700 students. The first week I had ~25 students, the second I was down to ten, and after that I usually had between 0 and three show up for any given section. Whether that's because I'm a shitty TA or they didn't care is unclear. I favor the latter, but I'm biased.
Anyways, in interacting with the undergrads my biggest complaint is that many of them didn't want to think for themselves. They wanted rules they could memorize and make flow charts out of and generalities. That sort of approach really just doesn't work in organic chemistry; it's all situational. I don't know if it's because that's just what they'd had all their lives, but it's really frustrating when I get asked constantly, "is that always true?" or "will that be on the test?" I would always make them explain why they thought A was the answer, which I hoped would help a bit, but maybe not.
Another large part of it is that here, anyways, the majority of the kids are from the top 5-10% of their high-school classes. They're used to skating be without trying, then they get to college and they're just average and they don't know how to deal with that at first. I certainly didn't.
edit: re OT: Tell the prof, then it's his problem. I personally think she should get a second chance, with a grade penalty, but it's not up to you. CYA on this one.
Yeah. I tutor people in organic. They absolutely cannot grasp that if they just learned how electrons flow and how reagents work, then they wouldn't have to memorize 500 separate reactions.
My ideal university would hire professors that are fantastic at teaching and professors that are fantastic at research, and never will the two cross.
I have met so many brilliant professors who could barely talk to a student and should never have been put into a classroom.
Putting teaching above research is great for high school or even introductory-level courses at university. But when you get to advanced courses, you need a teacher who understands the material inside and out, who knows what is and is not important to device a syllabus, who knows the material in enough depth to answer all those pesky random student questions, and who is up-to-date to teach the latest information. In other words, you need a fantastic researcher in that given area to teach the courses. You don't want someone who just read a textbook and is teaching advanced material in a superficial introductory manner.
Research work in college, especially at the undergrad level, is so far beyond irrelevant that it does shame to the word.
It's kids looking up things other people did, and then citing it in a paper that tells the reader nothing. Of all the "research" I did in 6 years of undergrad and post-grad, the only thing I ever learned from it all was how to properly format papers.
Beyond a student's personal development, almost all undergraduate work is useless (the only potential exception is senior project work that needs to be at a publishable level - and many schools and programs don't require that). Graduate level work is very similar, but most students should end up with a thesis capable of being published (it's supposed to be vetted, anyway).
That was not my experience at all. I was doing original research the first semester of my freshman year of college. I actually got to be the first author on that monograph as opposed to a middle author on my senior project because that research was just a small part of a much larger project. Although I did get to spend a summer in Berkeley working at the national laboratory there to take the actual data which was amazing.
You guys obviously picked really crappy labs if you were doing research and it was just copying others work. How did your professors get funding for you to waste time doing that? It can't be common because the funding organizations here in the US do not like paying for people to do things that other people have already done. I really think you guys had exceptionally poor experiences if you were just copying other people's experiments and not doing your own and you shouldn't generalize that to everyone's experience.
Kistra on
Animal Crossing: City Folk Lissa in Filmore 3179-9580-0076
Research work in college, especially at the undergrad level, is so far beyond irrelevant that it does shame to the word.
It's kids looking up things other people did, and then citing it in a paper that tells the reader nothing. Of all the "research" I did in 6 years of undergrad and post-grad, the only thing I ever learned from it all was how to properly format papers.
In an undergrad senior-level literature class I once took, my professor allowed for functionally illiterate people make good marks because they copied the formatting algorithm from the MLA handbook with few errors. Is this what's important these days? I spent tens of thousands of dollars and years off my life being taught how wide to make margins and how far from the top of the page I should place my header.
The Taiwanese girl probably was trying to cheat. Good for her.
I always hate getting points taken off for stupid formatting errors. I had a teacher take my paper from an A to a B because my margins were 1.25" instead of 1.0" and my header was incorrect. I didn't realize the default in word 2003 wasnt 1 inch. Its not like it would have made my paper way too short either because it was 12 pages when it needed to be 8-12.
My ideal university would hire professors that are fantastic at teaching and professors that are fantastic at research, and never will the two cross.
I have met so many brilliant professors who could barely talk to a student and should never have been put into a classroom.
Putting teaching above research is great for high school or even introductory-level courses at university. But when you get to advanced courses, you need a teacher who understands the material inside and out, who knows what is and is not important to device a syllabus, who knows the material in enough depth to answer all those pesky random student questions, and who is up-to-date to teach the latest information. In other words, you need a fantastic researcher in that given area to teach the courses. You don't want someone who just read a textbook and is teaching advanced material in a superficial introductory manner.
I disagree. Most of the sciences haven't changed enough to not warrant use of textbooks, or manuals. I would rather have an instructor teaching immunology from an updated textbook or methodology book that was highly competent, than Professor Pantsbutt, Lead Researcher in Cytokine Messaging, who can't look students in the eye.
Research work in college, especially at the undergrad level, is so far beyond irrelevant that it does shame to the word.
It's kids looking up things other people did, and then citing it in a paper that tells the reader nothing. Of all the "research" I did in 6 years of undergrad and post-grad, the only thing I ever learned from it all was how to properly format papers.
Beyond a student's personal development, almost all undergraduate work is useless (the only potential exception is senior project work that needs to be at a publishable level - and many schools and programs don't require that). Graduate level work is very similar, but most students should end up with a thesis capable of being published (it's supposed to be vetted, anyway).
That was not my experience at all. I was doing original research the first semester of my freshman year of college. I actually got to be the first author on that monograph as opposed to a middle author on my senior project because that research was just a small part of a much larger project. Although I did get to spend a summer in Berkeley working at the national laboratory there to take the actual data which was amazing.
You guys obviously picked really crappy labs if you were doing research and it was just copying others work. How did your professors get funding for you to waste time doing that? It can't be common because the funding organizations here in the US do not like paying for people to do things that other people have already done. I really think you guys had exceptionally poor experiences if you were just copying other people's experiments and not doing your own and you shouldn't generalize that to everyone's experience.
If you don't go to a college or university that does research the bulk of your papers will be writing about other people's research. At least from my limited experience with a few schools. Community colleges are especially notorious for that.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Scarily, my community college had more comprehensive classes, professors, and labs than the major university I attend! This is not the way it should be.
Research work in college, especially at the undergrad level, is so far beyond irrelevant that it does shame to the word.
It's kids looking up things other people did, and then citing it in a paper that tells the reader nothing. Of all the "research" I did in 6 years of undergrad and post-grad, the only thing I ever learned from it all was how to properly format papers.
Beyond a student's personal development, almost all undergraduate work is useless (the only potential exception is senior project work that needs to be at a publishable level - and many schools and programs don't require that). Graduate level work is very similar, but most students should end up with a thesis capable of being published (it's supposed to be vetted, anyway).
That was not my experience at all. I was doing original research the first semester of my freshman year of college. I actually got to be the first author on that monograph as opposed to a middle author on my senior project because that research was just a small part of a much larger project. Although I did get to spend a summer in Berkeley working at the national laboratory there to take the actual data which was amazing.
You guys obviously picked really crappy labs if you were doing research and it was just copying others work. How did your professors get funding for you to waste time doing that? It can't be common because the funding organizations here in the US do not like paying for people to do things that other people have already done. I really think you guys had exceptionally poor experiences if you were just copying other people's experiments and not doing your own and you shouldn't generalize that to everyone's experience.
If you don't go to a college or university that does research the bulk of your papers will be writing about other people's research. At least from my limited experience with a few schools. Community colleges are especially notorious for that.
Were they talking about writing papers for class? Why would they call that research? Or a senior research project?
Most the papers I wrote for classes were about stuff that people had already done but they weren't research in any way, just papers.
Kistra on
Animal Crossing: City Folk Lissa in Filmore 3179-9580-0076
Research work in college, especially at the undergrad level, is so far beyond irrelevant that it does shame to the word.
It's kids looking up things other people did, and then citing it in a paper that tells the reader nothing. Of all the "research" I did in 6 years of undergrad and post-grad, the only thing I ever learned from it all was how to properly format papers.
Beyond a student's personal development, almost all undergraduate work is useless (the only potential exception is senior project work that needs to be at a publishable level - and many schools and programs don't require that). Graduate level work is very similar, but most students should end up with a thesis capable of being published (it's supposed to be vetted, anyway).
That was not my experience at all. I was doing original research the first semester of my freshman year of college. I actually got to be the first author on that monograph as opposed to a middle author on my senior project because that research was just a small part of a much larger project. Although I did get to spend a summer in Berkeley working at the national laboratory there to take the actual data which was amazing.
You guys obviously picked really crappy labs if you were doing research and it was just copying others work. How did your professors get funding for you to waste time doing that? It can't be common because the funding organizations here in the US do not like paying for people to do things that other people have already done. I really think you guys had exceptionally poor experiences if you were just copying other people's experiments and not doing your own and you shouldn't generalize that to everyone's experience.
If you don't go to a college or university that does research the bulk of your papers will be writing about other people's research. At least from my limited experience with a few schools. Community colleges are especially notorious for that.
Were they talking about writing papers for class? Why would they call that research? Or a senior research project?
Most the papers I wrote for classes were about stuff that people had already done but they weren't research in any way, just papers.
This might be a distinction between liberal arts research and science research.
All the undergrad students that participate in chem or bio research are doing real research, presenting papers, and maybe getting their names on a few papers if they are competent enough.
Most papers students tend to do in college, at least in Liberal Arts, is just a modified Lit Review. But almost every major will have a research course where students have to do some original research.
Sentry on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
wrote:
When I was a little kid, I always pretended I was the hero,' Skip said.
'Fuck yeah, me too. What little kid ever pretended to be part of the lynch-mob?'
Research work in college, especially at the undergrad level, is so far beyond irrelevant that it does shame to the word.
It's kids looking up things other people did, and then citing it in a paper that tells the reader nothing. Of all the "research" I did in 6 years of undergrad and post-grad, the only thing I ever learned from it all was how to properly format papers.
Beyond a student's personal development, almost all undergraduate work is useless (the only potential exception is senior project work that needs to be at a publishable level - and many schools and programs don't require that). Graduate level work is very similar, but most students should end up with a thesis capable of being published (it's supposed to be vetted, anyway).
That was not my experience at all. I was doing original research the first semester of my freshman year of college. I actually got to be the first author on that monograph as opposed to a middle author on my senior project because that research was just a small part of a much larger project. Although I did get to spend a summer in Berkeley working at the national laboratory there to take the actual data which was amazing.
You guys obviously picked really crappy labs if you were doing research and it was just copying others work. How did your professors get funding for you to waste time doing that? It can't be common because the funding organizations here in the US do not like paying for people to do things that other people have already done. I really think you guys had exceptionally poor experiences if you were just copying other people's experiments and not doing your own and you shouldn't generalize that to everyone's experience.
If you don't go to a college or university that does research the bulk of your papers will be writing about other people's research. At least from my limited experience with a few schools. Community colleges are especially notorious for that.
Were they talking about writing papers for class? Why would they call that research? Or a senior research project?
Most the papers I wrote for classes were about stuff that people had already done but they weren't research in any way, just papers.
Yeah. Pretty much. The only time they were expected to really do research was their senior project. Everything else was just writing papers for class, and most of teachers, in my experience, called that research. I mean, I guess because you don't probably know the information and you have to look it up it is research! What it really means to me is that the teacher is too stupid to teach and thinks independent teaching through reading published articles is the way to do it.
Don't get me wrong that's actually a useful skill in the real world (really useful) but I think unless you're after something specifically there's no point in it. Most people will be able to do research like that when their job is on the line unless they're slow or something.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
My ideal university would hire professors that are fantastic at teaching and professors that are fantastic at research, and never will the two cross.
I have met so many brilliant professors who could barely talk to a student and should never have been put into a classroom.
Putting teaching above research is great for high school or even introductory-level courses at university. But when you get to advanced courses, you need a teacher who understands the material inside and out, who knows what is and is not important to device a syllabus, who knows the material in enough depth to answer all those pesky random student questions, and who is up-to-date to teach the latest information. In other words, you need a fantastic researcher in that given area to teach the courses. You don't want someone who just read a textbook and is teaching advanced material in a superficial introductory manner.
Agree with pretty much everything you said, especially for the upper year courses. After thinking about it some more I do think for some courses at the intro level you could get away with having profs that just teach as that stuff tends to be extremely basic as are the questions students ask.
I always hate getting points taken off for stupid formatting errors. I had a teacher take my paper from an A to a B because my margins were 1.25" instead of 1.0" and my header was incorrect. I didn't realize the default in word 2003 wasnt 1 inch. Its not like it would have made my paper way too short either because it was 12 pages when it needed to be 8-12.
I'm somewhat conflicted on this myself and have a class I'm TAing next semester where the prof is really serious about formatting and proper writing. Analysis is the most important part but after having 2 or 3 students out of 160 in a fourth year class actually follow all the formatting guidelines (with the average missing 3) on their first assignment this semester I think that the only way to get students to learn about the importance of following instructions is to deduct marks. I even had a few with enough balls to get really aggressive in their complaints about comments I left while implying that these guidelines were somehow kept secret from them. They were right in the course outline which is discussed in the first lecture and which everyone has 24 hours access to online :evil:
My ideal university would hire professors that are fantastic at teaching and professors that are fantastic at research, and never will the two cross.
I have met so many brilliant professors who could barely talk to a student and should never have been put into a classroom.
Putting teaching above research is great for high school or even introductory-level courses at university. But when you get to advanced courses, you need a teacher who understands the material inside and out, who knows what is and is not important to device a syllabus, who knows the material in enough depth to answer all those pesky random student questions, and who is up-to-date to teach the latest information. In other words, you need a fantastic researcher in that given area to teach the courses. You don't want someone who just read a textbook and is teaching advanced material in a superficial introductory manner.
Agree with pretty much everything you said, especially for the upper year courses. After thinking about it some more I do think for some courses at the intro level you could get away with having profs that just teach as that stuff tends to be extremely basic as are the questions students ask.
I always hate getting points taken off for stupid formatting errors. I had a teacher take my paper from an A to a B because my margins were 1.25" instead of 1.0" and my header was incorrect. I didn't realize the default in word 2003 wasnt 1 inch. Its not like it would have made my paper way too short either because it was 12 pages when it needed to be 8-12.
I'm somewhat conflicted on this myself and have a class I'm TAing next semester where the prof is really serious about formatting and proper writing. Analysis is the most important part but after having 2 or 3 students out of 160 in a fourth year class actually follow all the formatting guidelines (with the average missing 3) on their first assignment this semester I think that the only way to get students to learn about the importance of following instructions is to deduct marks. I even had a few with enough balls to get really aggressive in their complaints about comments I left while implying that these guidelines were somehow kept secret from them. They were right in the course outline which is discussed in the first lecture and which everyone has 24 hours access to online :evil:
Following directions is useful, but I'm sure you can relate to the frustration of being penalized for arbitrary bullshit when your paper itself is excellent. IMO this sort of formatting restriction should only be restricted to things that actually influence the content of the paper. I had this one professor who would take apart any chart or graph. He'd want the axes a certain way, data point markers a certain way, even the colors chosen. But I had to admit doing it his way would generally result in superior data presentation, Excel 2003 at least certainly defaulted to terrible color choices. It was the same data, but it looked prettier and would survive being photocopied into black and white, etc.
But I had this other professor in a chem lab and that guy can fuck right off. He'd have key phrases that he believed were somehow unacceptable. To this day I can't fathom what's wrong with stating that something was "previously prepared". Even going through your paper with Find you'd sometimes slip up and he'd just murder your grade.
I understand saying "these are the standard formats used, so start using them for everything" but content should always trump margins, headers and whatever else you're nit picking shouldn't drop someone's grades.
I can easily understand the problem with things like "previously prepared" because it is needlessly convoluted and in the world of academia clarity should be key.
Sentry on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
wrote:
When I was a little kid, I always pretended I was the hero,' Skip said.
'Fuck yeah, me too. What little kid ever pretended to be part of the lynch-mob?'
I can easily understand the problem with things like "previously prepared" because it is needlessly convoluted and in the world of academia clarity should be key.
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. :rotate:
Previously prepared is probably like the 479th most convoluted piece of academic text I've read this week.
Seriously? Saying that the previously prepared solution was used is more needlessly convoluted than repeating the paragraph about how you prepared it? It's especially stupid since this kind of thing is commonly done, you describe something once then henceforth refer to it. This sort of nonsense just wastes space.
Your point is also a bit silly since this is the same place you go out of your way to use convoluted third person constructs rather than using a first person pronoun.
Well, I'm not saying that academia follows that pattern. But anyone trying to make academic texts more clear and concise gets a thumbs up in my book.
And of course I was just posting an opinion on a message board, not submitting something for a journal. So I guess my response to your second point is that my clarity doesn't matter one bit.
Sentry on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
wrote:
When I was a little kid, I always pretended I was the hero,' Skip said.
'Fuck yeah, me too. What little kid ever pretended to be part of the lynch-mob?'
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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lonelyahavaCall me Ahava ~~She/Her~~Move to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
Ugh. I had an English Prof at University who would seriously make 20% of the grades on formatting. 1 inch margins, 1.5 spacing, header was to be this, font size 11, etc.
Seriously? Saying that the previously prepared solution was used is more needlessly convoluted than repeating the paragraph about how you prepared it? It's especially stupid since this kind of thing is commonly done, you describe something once then henceforth refer to it. This sort of nonsense just wastes space.
Your point is also a bit silly since this is the same place you go out of your way to use convoluted third person constructs rather than using a first person pronoun.
ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh
yeah you are totally wrong
Methods are very important and I need to be able to know unambiguously that "previously prepared" solution is referring to the 1.23485857575 M EDTA solution and not the .0000000567 nM CuSO4 solution.
Ugh. I had an English Prof at University who would seriously make 20% of the grades on formatting. 1 inch margins, 1.5 spacing, header was to be this, font size 11, etc.
20% of the paper.
Luckily I only had him for the one course.
Jerk.
When I had my first prof like this in university, my first thought was, "Sweet 20% free marks!". And then I realized after several papers, in all fairness to the poster who was complaining about only 3 students getting the formatting right, is just how incredibly easy it was to screw up formatting (Microsoft Word is especially bad for this), even if you're trying your damndest to get it right.
Following directions is useful, but I'm sure you can relate to the frustration of being penalized for arbitrary bullshit when your paper itself is excellent. IMO this sort of formatting restriction should only be restricted to things that actually influence the content of the paper. I had this one professor who would take apart any chart or graph. He'd want the axes a certain way, data point markers a certain way, even the colors chosen. But I had to admit doing it his way would generally result in superior data presentation, Excel 2003 at least certainly defaulted to terrible color choices. It was the same data, but it looked prettier and would survive being photocopied into black and white, etc.
But I had this other professor in a chem lab and that guy can fuck right off. He'd have key phrases that he believed were somehow unacceptable. To this day I can't fathom what's wrong with stating that something was "previously prepared". Even going through your paper with Find you'd sometimes slip up and he'd just murder your grade.
I understand saying "these are the standard formats used, so start using them for everything" but content should always trump margins, headers and whatever else you're nit picking shouldn't drop someone's grades.
Yeah some of what you mentioned is a little asinine for people not planning on doing a doctorate. We were pretty basic with things like font, text size, stated word count, and margins (default for their version of word, only an issue when their diagrams are cut off). The issue was that almost no one in that class had bothered to read the course outline and many of them had no clue about very basic report writing issues that high school students let alone fourth years should know like that diagrams require a title and what an appendix is. A basic level of competence should be expected of students planning to graduate from an institution of higher learning and enter the job market in less than a year.
Ugh. I had an English Prof at University who would seriously make 20% of the grades on formatting. 1 inch margins, 1.5 spacing, header was to be this, font size 11, etc.
20% of the paper.
Luckily I only had him for the one course.
Jerk.
20% is a little much for that but seriously what you listed takes all of 30 seconds to do. Being able to follow basic instructions is a pretty important job skill especially if you don't want every manager at your work to stop by and talk to you about forgetting to put the new cover sheet on your TPS report
Seriously? Saying that the previously prepared solution was used is more needlessly convoluted than repeating the paragraph about how you prepared it? It's especially stupid since this kind of thing is commonly done, you describe something once then henceforth refer to it. This sort of nonsense just wastes space.
Your point is also a bit silly since this is the same place you go out of your way to use convoluted third person constructs rather than using a first person pronoun.
ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh
yeah you are totally wrong
Methods are very important and I need to be able to know unambiguously that "previously prepared" solution is referring to the 1.23485857575 M EDTA solution and not the .0000000567 nM CuSO4 solution.
There was only one solution.
I have never seen anyone actually write something like that over and over again. In MEMS papers at least it'll be described once and then henceforth it's "the substrate" or whatever and you can flip back a page if you have the attention span of a squirrel.
Following directions is useful, but I'm sure you can relate to the frustration of being penalized for arbitrary bullshit when your paper itself is excellent. IMO this sort of formatting restriction should only be restricted to things that actually influence the content of the paper. I had this one professor who would take apart any chart or graph. He'd want the axes a certain way, data point markers a certain way, even the colors chosen. But I had to admit doing it his way would generally result in superior data presentation, Excel 2003 at least certainly defaulted to terrible color choices. It was the same data, but it looked prettier and would survive being photocopied into black and white, etc.
But I had this other professor in a chem lab and that guy can fuck right off. He'd have key phrases that he believed were somehow unacceptable. To this day I can't fathom what's wrong with stating that something was "previously prepared". Even going through your paper with Find you'd sometimes slip up and he'd just murder your grade.
I understand saying "these are the standard formats used, so start using them for everything" but content should always trump margins, headers and whatever else you're nit picking shouldn't drop someone's grades.
Yeah some of what you mentioned is a little asinine for people not planning on doing a doctorate. We were pretty basic with things like font, text size, stated word count, and margins (default for their version of word, only an issue when their diagrams are cut off). The issue was that almost no one in that class had bothered to read the course outline and many of them had no clue about very basic report writing issues that high school students let alone fourth years should know like that diagrams require a title and what an appendix is. A basic level of competence should be expected of students planning to graduate from an institution of higher learning and enter the job market in less than a year.
Ugh. I had an English Prof at University who would seriously make 20% of the grades on formatting. 1 inch margins, 1.5 spacing, header was to be this, font size 11, etc.
20% of the paper.
Luckily I only had him for the one course.
Jerk.
20% is a little much for that but seriously what you listed takes all of 30 seconds to do. Being able to follow basic instructions is a pretty important job skill especially if you don't want every manager at your work to stop by and talk to you about forgetting to put the new cover sheet on your TPS report
I love how that is your evidence, lmfao.
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L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
I'd rather be deducted for formatting than getting a 62% on a paper because I used soliloquies and colloquialisms and had some questionable grammar. Oh, and my point was kinda weak, but mostly my grammer wasn't good. For a history class...
Also, if I were the OP, I would leave it up to the prof, but see if the student in question has any other marks. Maybe she's one of the serial plagiarists that other people have mentioned, and she's using her 'ignorance' to get away with doing that.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is this article, about a guy who writes students' papers for them. It might be worth a read if you have the time. I'd argue that this is easily worse than straight up plagiarizing any day of the week. At least with copying someone else's work and passing it off as your own, you're putting some effort into it, and maybe gleamed a bit of knowledge. I mean, having someone else do your work for you, and putting your name on it, is just awful. I know you can qualify it as plagiarism and such, but it's like a special kind of that, for which I have no term to define.
Are you serious ron? You had poor grammar and a weak paper and you don't think you should lose points for that? Wtf?
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L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
Well, if most of my paper is being marked wrong because of soliloquies and colloquialisms and a few "odd" sentence structures, with only a brief mention of "your argument was weak" at the end, then yes, I don't think I should enough points to take me into "almost failing."
Forgive me for thinking that my paper should have been graded more on the argument rather than the wording used. If there are more red marks marking words or wording than saying anything about the argument, then I'd say you're doing it wrong.
Formatting is such bullshit anyways. I played a trick on them because they requested 12 pt font, with x formatting. So I used all the correct formatting and typed up my page in times new roman in 12 pt. Oh hey that meets the specifications.
But then I got to thinking, times new roman is a true-type font and not fixed width. So I changed it to courier-new and told them I typed up my paper on a word processor and dropped it from 12 pt to 11 pt and it extended it about another 3-4 pages. God bless you, you glorious fixed width fonts.
Plus, fixed width fonts are great for programming.
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not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Here's what I do for formatting. I set up a Word document with all the margins, typefaces, spacing, etc I want. File goes up on the webpage, students download file, and type paper into said document.
The fact that she used citations in parts of the paper she wrote indicates that she knows what plagiarism is.
I think you can make the case for unintentional plagiarism when there is no cite for a reference you have cited properly elsewhere.
It seems to me that here she was hoping her cites elsewhere would help cover up the fact that she copied whole pieces of text verbatim from wikipedia. While the difference in language seems so jarring to you that it suggests she might not have done it intentionally, the simple fact might be that her English is so poor that she does not pick up on it as an issue. Ultimately, the amount of copying you describe is so great, it seems unlikely she could have simply made an honest mistake.
The fact that she used citations in parts of the paper she wrote indicates that she knows what plagiarism is.
I disagree. Citations are commonly a specific part of a paper to be turned in. Sometimes you have to have X citations for a full grade. So whether or not you actually know what citations are for, you'll put them in.
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You know, if one of the professors here made the assertion that they should be able to get away with that sort of thing, they'd be looked on as a complete nutjob, regardless of their research. It just doesn't happen. Similarly, your approach of using TAs for lecturing comes across as fundamentally bizarre. And, well, the absurdity of running a 1700-person paper via such a method seems self-evident, so its not happening anytime soon.
I'm not a professor, I'm a TA. I'm not sure where I mentioned TAs should lecture. Just to be more clear when I said 2 lectures per semester I meant they were responsible for teaching 2 lectures per week per semester. I've only ever seen two areas of deviation with this. 1. Is with accounting professors that don't have doctorates so are hired specifically for teaching with no research. 2. With professors that do 3 lectures in one semester and 1 lecture the second. I'm sure there can be the need for some exceptions to this but 2 and 2 is typical.
On this note, one of the best lecturers I've encountered was also very much a major participant in his field. Some people are good at teaching! Some people find it worthwhile! It doesn't imply all that much about their research.
@Newblar: I realise! I was just running with your examples of time and the North American model in general. Actually, rereading, I suspect I misinterpreted said time.
My favourite prof was also really big on research. Even though I suspect if he had to pick one or the other he would pick research he seemed to genuinely enjoy teaching and has won several teaching awards.
One of the biggest surprises for me was how much emphasis gets placed on the research. Until my second year of undergrad I didn't realize how few classes profs taught and thought they only did a little research during the summer if they got bored on vacation. I also didn't realize that TAs marked pretty much everything.
I have met so many brilliant professors who could barely talk to a student and should never have been put into a classroom.
This.
That was not my experience at all. I was doing original research the first semester of my freshman year of college. I actually got to be the first author on that monograph as opposed to a middle author on my senior project because that research was just a small part of a much larger project. Although I did get to spend a summer in Berkeley working at the national laboratory there to take the actual data which was amazing.
You guys obviously picked really crappy labs if you were doing research and it was just copying others work. How did your professors get funding for you to waste time doing that? It can't be common because the funding organizations here in the US do not like paying for people to do things that other people have already done. I really think you guys had exceptionally poor experiences if you were just copying other people's experiments and not doing your own and you shouldn't generalize that to everyone's experience.
I always hate getting points taken off for stupid formatting errors. I had a teacher take my paper from an A to a B because my margins were 1.25" instead of 1.0" and my header was incorrect. I didn't realize the default in word 2003 wasnt 1 inch. Its not like it would have made my paper way too short either because it was 12 pages when it needed to be 8-12.
If you don't go to a college or university that does research the bulk of your papers will be writing about other people's research. At least from my limited experience with a few schools. Community colleges are especially notorious for that.
Were they talking about writing papers for class? Why would they call that research? Or a senior research project?
Most the papers I wrote for classes were about stuff that people had already done but they weren't research in any way, just papers.
All the undergrad students that participate in chem or bio research are doing real research, presenting papers, and maybe getting their names on a few papers if they are competent enough.
Yeah. Pretty much. The only time they were expected to really do research was their senior project. Everything else was just writing papers for class, and most of teachers, in my experience, called that research. I mean, I guess because you don't probably know the information and you have to look it up it is research! What it really means to me is that the teacher is too stupid to teach and thinks independent teaching through reading published articles is the way to do it.
Don't get me wrong that's actually a useful skill in the real world (really useful) but I think unless you're after something specifically there's no point in it. Most people will be able to do research like that when their job is on the line unless they're slow or something.
Agree with pretty much everything you said, especially for the upper year courses. After thinking about it some more I do think for some courses at the intro level you could get away with having profs that just teach as that stuff tends to be extremely basic as are the questions students ask.
I'm somewhat conflicted on this myself and have a class I'm TAing next semester where the prof is really serious about formatting and proper writing. Analysis is the most important part but after having 2 or 3 students out of 160 in a fourth year class actually follow all the formatting guidelines (with the average missing 3) on their first assignment this semester I think that the only way to get students to learn about the importance of following instructions is to deduct marks. I even had a few with enough balls to get really aggressive in their complaints about comments I left while implying that these guidelines were somehow kept secret from them. They were right in the course outline which is discussed in the first lecture and which everyone has 24 hours access to online :evil:
Following directions is useful, but I'm sure you can relate to the frustration of being penalized for arbitrary bullshit when your paper itself is excellent. IMO this sort of formatting restriction should only be restricted to things that actually influence the content of the paper. I had this one professor who would take apart any chart or graph. He'd want the axes a certain way, data point markers a certain way, even the colors chosen. But I had to admit doing it his way would generally result in superior data presentation, Excel 2003 at least certainly defaulted to terrible color choices. It was the same data, but it looked prettier and would survive being photocopied into black and white, etc.
But I had this other professor in a chem lab and that guy can fuck right off. He'd have key phrases that he believed were somehow unacceptable. To this day I can't fathom what's wrong with stating that something was "previously prepared". Even going through your paper with Find you'd sometimes slip up and he'd just murder your grade.
I understand saying "these are the standard formats used, so start using them for everything" but content should always trump margins, headers and whatever else you're nit picking shouldn't drop someone's grades.
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. :rotate:
Previously prepared is probably like the 479th most convoluted piece of academic text I've read this week.
Your point is also a bit silly since this is the same place you go out of your way to use convoluted third person constructs rather than using a first person pronoun.
And of course I was just posting an opinion on a message board, not submitting something for a journal. So I guess my response to your second point is that my clarity doesn't matter one bit.
20% of the paper.
Luckily I only had him for the one course.
Jerk.
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
God that was an ugly mess.
yeah you are totally wrong
Methods are very important and I need to be able to know unambiguously that "previously prepared" solution is referring to the 1.23485857575 M EDTA solution and not the .0000000567 nM CuSO4 solution.
When I had my first prof like this in university, my first thought was, "Sweet 20% free marks!". And then I realized after several papers, in all fairness to the poster who was complaining about only 3 students getting the formatting right, is just how incredibly easy it was to screw up formatting (Microsoft Word is especially bad for this), even if you're trying your damndest to get it right.
Yeah some of what you mentioned is a little asinine for people not planning on doing a doctorate. We were pretty basic with things like font, text size, stated word count, and margins (default for their version of word, only an issue when their diagrams are cut off). The issue was that almost no one in that class had bothered to read the course outline and many of them had no clue about very basic report writing issues that high school students let alone fourth years should know like that diagrams require a title and what an appendix is. A basic level of competence should be expected of students planning to graduate from an institution of higher learning and enter the job market in less than a year.
20% is a little much for that but seriously what you listed takes all of 30 seconds to do. Being able to follow basic instructions is a pretty important job skill especially if you don't want every manager at your work to stop by and talk to you about forgetting to put the new cover sheet on your TPS report
There was only one solution.
I have never seen anyone actually write something like that over and over again. In MEMS papers at least it'll be described once and then henceforth it's "the substrate" or whatever and you can flip back a page if you have the attention span of a squirrel.
I love how that is your evidence, lmfao.
Also, if I were the OP, I would leave it up to the prof, but see if the student in question has any other marks. Maybe she's one of the serial plagiarists that other people have mentioned, and she's using her 'ignorance' to get away with doing that.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is this article, about a guy who writes students' papers for them. It might be worth a read if you have the time. I'd argue that this is easily worse than straight up plagiarizing any day of the week. At least with copying someone else's work and passing it off as your own, you're putting some effort into it, and maybe gleamed a bit of knowledge. I mean, having someone else do your work for you, and putting your name on it, is just awful. I know you can qualify it as plagiarism and such, but it's like a special kind of that, for which I have no term to define.
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/
Forgive me for thinking that my paper should have been graded more on the argument rather than the wording used. If there are more red marks marking words or wording than saying anything about the argument, then I'd say you're doing it wrong.
But then I got to thinking, times new roman is a true-type font and not fixed width. So I changed it to courier-new and told them I typed up my paper on a word processor and dropped it from 12 pt to 11 pt and it extended it about another 3-4 pages. God bless you, you glorious fixed width fonts.
Plus, fixed width fonts are great for programming.
I think you can make the case for unintentional plagiarism when there is no cite for a reference you have cited properly elsewhere.
It seems to me that here she was hoping her cites elsewhere would help cover up the fact that she copied whole pieces of text verbatim from wikipedia. While the difference in language seems so jarring to you that it suggests she might not have done it intentionally, the simple fact might be that her English is so poor that she does not pick up on it as an issue. Ultimately, the amount of copying you describe is so great, it seems unlikely she could have simply made an honest mistake.
I disagree. Citations are commonly a specific part of a paper to be turned in. Sometimes you have to have X citations for a full grade. So whether or not you actually know what citations are for, you'll put them in.