Misc. thoughts...

by oviedoirish , Oviedo, Florida, Wednesday, May 20, 2015, 07:34 (3997 days ago) @ HumanRobot

Here at UCF, a full class load for all students is 12 hours. There is an expectation that students have to take summer classes at least one term. Personally, I think this is a BS requirement, allowing faculty to get extra pay by letting them teach in the summer. Anyway, my two kids are currently at UCF (frosh and jr.) and they only take 12 hours per term. I'm perfectly fine with that too. If they don't take any classes in the summer, they will graduate in 5 years. And other than cost, who cares if they finish in 4 or 5 years? So I'm really surprised that ND requires its athletes to take 15 hours, especially when they have 5 years of potential eligibility. That 15-hour requirement needs to change, imo.

I also like the "case management" approach, and the faculty and admin should be doing more to both monitor and help at risk students succeed. When I was a grad student at ND, I was a GTA for an intro psych course that most of the athletes took. I had to turn in weekly progress reports on the athletes to Mike DeCicco's office in the athletic dept. I assume that this monitoring is still being done, but I hope that they can do more, including regular advising/counseling.

Cheating seems to be pretty common everywhere now, but I think a factor is that detection has gotten much better. For example, faculty here use turnitin.com for paper submissions, and this may be a requirement. I just know that almost everyone uses it. In addition, in our college of business, all of the undergraduate core classes have their exams administered in our testing center, where the exams are online. Security is extremely tight in there, and we've evolved to the point where it is really difficult for kids to cheat now (although at first it seemed like we were just keeping one step ahead of them). If some of these kids put in the same effort in their classes that they put into cheating, they would do fine.