“As China’s economy recovers, employers are competing to hire low-skilled workers, but many of China’s best and brightest, its college graduates, are facing a long stretch of unemployment.”

Read more at The New York Times

When applying to VIA, I listed this as a future concern that Vietnam would one day face. China’s economic growth in low-skill labor markets and education were impressive, but where were the high-skill jobs that students were training for? I argued that the education of students was far outpacing the actual growth of white-collar jobs by merely comparing graduation numbers to the number of jobs available. Vietnam, I believed, would be heading in the same direction.

“Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.

But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers’ instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn’t have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems. As Lemov drove from Syracuse back to his home in Albany, he tried to figure out what he could do to help. He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.”

Read more at The New York Times

That clears up everything…

Originally found this gem in The Chronicle. Digitizing out of print books and making them available on the web- which will win? Utilitarianism or Kantian Ethics?

“An associate professor at a Chinese university has been punished after students reported finding an online test, from another college, that matched an open-book exam in his course.”

Read more at The Chronicle

Students were able to find a test online that was near identical to the exam they were about to take when they entered class. This lead to complaints from students to the administration. For many students, this would be the equivalent to finding gold. The comments to the article offer a good back and forth on on plagiarism by students. The question I want to ask is, “Is this plagiarism?”

Many courses are now shared through opencourseware, including exams. Even if it is not, a lot of courses are developed off of another. I know that when developing courses, I take this route- researching what’s available, how instructors are teaching an idea, which books are being used, etc. I do, however, change or add to it to account for my knowledge and professional experience. In the extreme case of finding a website that has “everything”, I contact the professor and link to it, giving credit in the course syllabus and on the course webpage where appropriate. Some professors want acknowledgement for their work at every instance, and some don’t.

Another scenario that one often finds is that textbook makers provide quizzes and exams. What if the instructor chooses to simply use only these exams, and the students find the same exams online?

I’m curious to know the original professor’s stance on someone else using his self-created exam in their class. If he or she deems it okay, what of the plagiarism claim? And the punishment?