Dartmouth academic scandal involves athletes

Rather ironic it occurred in a class admittedly designed by the professor to be a "success" for athletes in a subject with "Ethics" in the title. Comments to the article are worthwhile.

[thedartmouth.com]

Can somebody eplain to me what a clicker is in this context and how it works in a testing situation?

Call it "intellectual curiosity"

i thought they got clicks the clicked answers back like 3 buttons on a, b, c, like a game controller.. and the device was linked to server to gather the answers they clicked..

uppr is correct; as a pedagogical tool clickers help get reticent students to engage/volunteer. The collective answers to a question can also help direct discussion, i.e., did lots get it wrong and if so what wrong answer did they choose. If an open-ended or opinion-soliciting question, responses can direct follow up analysis.

Using clickers to take attendance where attendance is part of student grades is idiotic, IMO. It's like asking a 6 year old, "Did you brush your teeth?" Of course the kid who didn't brush and hates brushing is going to answer yes to get out of doing what he doesn't want to do. So with taking turns being the one to take friends' clickers to class so everyone gets credit for being there when they would rather be somewhere else. Laziness on the part of the instructor: s/he should be working a little harder to make class engaging so students want to come. Or making it harder for students who choose not to attend class to get good grades in the class by, perhaps, testing them on material that is taught in class. If you are going to all the trouble to integrate clickers into your teaching it should be easy to then test on understanding of the concepts the clickers helped to teach.

dag14
Using clickers to take attendance where attendance is part of student grades is idiotic, IMO.

Grading attendance in the first place is the clearest sign of a pointless curriculum, a useless or boring professor, or poor standards. No department with any self-respect would permit it.

I agree completely.

You can use the clickers to take attendance, but that's not what happened to lead to the scandal, if I'm reading these stories correctly. You can give each student an individual code that they have to enter to answer questions you project on the board in front of the room. Teachers can then give quizzes have students answer with the clickers, since if they're the clickers I'm familiar with, you can get a spreadsheet with everyone's individual score on it and match the codes up with the student's names. What happened at Dartmouth, I believe, is students who weren't sure of the answers gave their clickers to students sitting near them who did know the answers. Those students presumably used their own clickers to answer the questions and then used the clickers their classmates gave them to answer the questions for them. When the professor also collected some questions he had students write the answers for, that's when he noticed some discrepancies. None of the stories I've read have clearly explained this, so I'm just making an educated guess.
You can also use the clickers in the anonymous mode to find out how much the class knows collectively.

i thought the main issue was they handed out X number of tests and got Y number of answers. its not clear who was actually there or not though

As a faculty member familiar with the technology but who doesn't use it, from reading the articles about the incident I am going to guess that the instructor noticed more clicker responses than bodies in his class and therefore did the hard copy quiz to verify that there was a discrepancy and to identify who was absent.

dag14
As a faculty member familiar with the technology but who doesn't use it, from reading the articles about the incident I am going to guess that the instructor noticed more clicker responses than bodies in his class and therefore did the hard copy quiz to verify that there was a discrepancy and to identify who was absent.

This sounds right to me. The article was confusing as written but is consistent with this explanation.

Kyle Rose

dag14
Using clickers to take attendance where attendance is part of student grades is idiotic, IMO.

Grading attendance in the first place is the clearest sign of a pointless curriculum, a useless or boring professor, or poor standards. No department with any self-respect would permit it.

I actually had two classes with mandatory attendance.

The first was a required zero-credit guest-lecturer course in my major, which actually was pretty much a pointless curriculum.

The other was the Hotel School's "winetasting" course for non-majors - a very popular course with a limited class size. Attendance was mandatory as a "reminder" that you were being given a special opportunity.

The only class where I would agree that attendance makes sense is the guest-lecturer scenario. You get someone to volunteer to come lecture and no one comes to listen....embarrassing for the host professor/department and embarrassing for the speaker who then won't come back or give money or do whatever it is Cornell also wants from him/her.

I don't remember whether they took attendance in Wines when I was enrolled but then it was my favorite class that semester. It was like getting credit for happy hour.

Mandatory attendance is fine in classes where classroom interaction is important to the class, particularly small sections or Socratic classes. If you think college is more than getting drunk and filling a resume, go to class.*

* I may or may not have consistently lived this advice.

ugarte
Mandatory attendance is fine in classes where classroom interaction is important to the class, particularly small sections or Socratic classes. If you think college is more than getting drunk and filling a resume, go to class.*

* I may or may not have consistently lived this advice.

My standard line (with a ring of truth): I'd skip more class, but I really need the sleep.