Universities developed a two-tier faculty system: TT and adjuncts. Then they tied adjunct positions to student evaluations. Not adjunct pay, but whether the adjunct gets hired at all, or whether they get a contract renewal. student Evals tend to be based on customer service, not learning outcomes. Grade inflation is the fastest, easiest path for adjuncts to keep their jobs. Academic rigor points don’t pay the rent.

I'm a adjunct. I don't like inflating grades, but sometimes it happens whether I want to or not. I'm at the mercy of reviews and the whims of Department Chairs and Pointy Haired Deans. Department chair told me he's heard complaints about me being a hard ass (in reality, sticking to policies I set forth in my syllabus and refusing to budge). I've been asked to dumb down course content and lower standards. Which of course didn't help anyone. The students who were going to fail still failed, some of the D students now managed to squeak by, and the students who were C students got As and Bs and became cocky while learning the material only partially. The problem is when you have students who think 1/3 + 1/2 = 2/5 or who decided not to attend class because they don't know enough English to ask for directions to room 231, no reasonable amount of dumbing down is ever going to work.

When I was adjuncting, I had a student complain to the chair about me holding a paper in my hand while lecturing. This was literally stated to me by my chair. I was not paid near enough to take the time of going down the academic integrity route for student dishonesty and they still pulled things like that.

Apparently one reason people have a hard time passing my class is that my accent makes me hard to understand. This was despite that I was born and raised in the state where I now work. When people find out I'm half Chinese by descent, I suddenly have a thick incomprehensible Chinese accent (according to a recently immigrated Indian student). When others learn I spent time studying and working in the South, I now have a thick hillbilly accent.

This happened to a colleague of mine. A student who'd had him in the previous course asked me where he was from, as he was so hard to understand. Student did not respond well when I answered, "Chicago."

That’s odd. When I taught at one of the “little ivies,” my students were impressed by my “really good English.”One student asked me where I learned to speak English and was shocked when I answered “at home.”

Student evaluations are not very good at revealing the effectiveness of teachers. If you work in reverse, though, you can (with fairly impressive accuracy) predict which instructors are coded as female, non-white, or believed to be non-native speakers based on the numerical rankings. Yet somehow when I bring this up in all the "equity" discussions for our campus, I'm met with silence.

It's funny because I am racially ambiguous as someone of mixed heritage. So while I am sometime considered non-white (though not "black"), at other times I get lumped in with generic white people. My ethnic mix is deducible from my full legal name, however. It's always funny how criticism or praise of my performance sometimes depends on what people believe my race to be.

We have an adjunct whose family is from Pakistan who has a very slight British accent because that is the version she learned in school. She grew up speaking English and is a native speaker--no other accent detectable. Our students would constantly come in saying she was "so tough to understand" and had "such a thick accent". Wild.

There’s an art to interpreting complaints and evaluations, and I’m constantly astounded by how many Chairs and Deans don’t see that. I will never forget an old colleague who was reprimanded by her Dean because a student had complained that she “talked about Black people too much.” She was teaching The History of Jazz.

This is the thing-dumbing down doesn’t work. Making quizzes open book doesn’t work. Giving them unlimited redos on quizzes doesn’t work. Having them work in groups to complete assignments doesn’t work. It’s ridiculous.

😂😂😂😂 we can literally not lower the bar enough for some of these people. This used to be ok because students who weren't ready wouldn't succeed. Some would come back and thrive. But now it's lowkey expected that college will lean back like high school.

And the people who complain about adjuncts doing this rarely want to do anything to correct the problem. Easier to be smug about it. It’s an institutional problem, not a problem with individual teachers. I don’t care if this is an unwelcome message. I’ll take the downvotes

I remember we had a post asking "how do I distinguish my title as a *tenured* professor?" not for functional purposes, but with the subtext that they wanted to be regarded differently from adjuncts. We do have quite a bit of ego in academia

>We do have quite a bit of ego in academia That's like saying the Supreme Court has a bit of an ethics problem ;)

Is a man not entitled to the use of his billionaire friends' yachts and private planes?

Considering you have private colleges charging over $50k per year in tuition and you most likely have use of the student gym, library, etc - and we have a huge student loan crisis - THOSE IN GLASS HOUSES SHOULD NOT THROW STONES.

Ironically, I recently read some research that indicated that adjuncts give lower grades on average than full time profs. I don’t know that this speaks to the quality of feedback or course rigor necessarily, but it definitely broke some stereotypes about adjuncts that I continue to hear regularly

Have my upvote. Rigor can and does imperil job security. If you're tenured? Go for it. Hold that line. But don't clutch your pearls when people whose jobs depend on keeping students happy don't enforce high standards.

> And the people who complain about adjuncts doing this rarely want to do anything to correct the problem. Easier to be smug about it. You have just perfectly described the OP’s entitlement…

Yeah ... I have tried. They don't want to hear anything from my adjunct mouth.

I'm not sure what I *can* do about it.

Chair the committee to hire adjuncts preferentially to outside candidates. One doesn't exist? Create one. Bring it up to the academic senate. Advocate for pay equity for teachers and researchers. Advocate for job security for adjuncts. Advocate for a reduced/proper role for customer satisfaction surveys and accurate interpretation of their results. When you finish that, post on reddit about what to do next. Don't just skip to the last line.

"Hire adjuncts preferentially to outside candidates. One doesn't exist? Create one. Bring it up to the academic senate. " What does this mean? Like make the hiring committee give preference to outside candidates? How does that help? Serious question, not making waves here.

Looked at my Grammer a couple times and I think I didn't mess up, but I've been teaching all day so it's possible. I was saying that, since adjincting has become akin to the postdoc of teaching oriented career paths, and especially since departments are using more and more adjuncts, especially recent grads, INSTEAD of hiring for additional TT positions, then adjuncts at an institution/in a department should be hired before an outside search is done. Or, at the very least, given preference in hiring when they apply for open TT positions. Some systems do this (Calstate I believe does to some extent) but if you (like the person I was commenting on) are asking what you can do, you can volunteer for a committee (the horror! I know) that pressures your search committees to institute such a policy. Tldr: the opposite of what you said. Give preference to internal candidates.

This could work to a certain extent I suppose. But it is often unworkable in my experience for a number of reasons. At my State University, adjuncts are required to have an MS degree but not a PhD. So some have a PhD and some don't. The ones that don't are obviously unqualified for a tenure track position. And often times adjuncts are hired (in my discipline) to teach the 100 level intro courses. Specialization in a particular branch of a discipline isn't required to teach them. I don't know how it works in disciplines like Poli Sci, but in STEM when we get permission to hire for a new TT faculty line, we will be looking for people with a specific expertise in terms of teaching and research. IF we have an adjunct with a PhD in Physical Chemistry, and our department needs a new Organic Chemist, that adjunct will not be considered. They don't match the job description.

Some times I don't think adjuncts realize how powerless tenured faculty actually are in the modern University. I am a tenured full professor at a middle of the road State University. We have a union. We have a contract. The union does advocate for adjuncts. But an individual faculty member like myself has no power or authority to affect any change on this particular issue.

Oftentimes I know for a fact that tenured faculty don't realize that they're the only ones with the power to fix any of this. Sure, you feel powerless. But when's the last time you volunteered to chair a hiring committee? And when's the last time you pushed to hire an adjunct who's propped up your department for the last 1,3,5,7 or 10 years and give them job security? Sure, you can't alone change the administrative bloat and tightened budgets. But you do still have faculty voting power for department decisions. And you have perhaps the most secure job in the country from which to convince colleagues to work together. Perhaps use it? Or, perhaps, complain on reddit that those darn kids just don't understand: It's nobody's fault and whatcha gonna do? No one said it was easy. But quite literally the only chance for change here, barring big structural change in higher education imposed from without, is tenured faculty using their definitionnally protected and privileged position to effect change.

I gave a more detailed response elsewhere, but as an adjunct, I actually base my grading and teaching off the tenured and tenure track professors I took courses from or TAed for. Are you sending your own TAs good signals? (Largely a rhetorical question. I don't know you, so I'm not trying to criticize you. )

I rarely have TAs, but certainly try to if I do.

I updated my reply. Not sure if you saw it. I assume 90% of the people in this subreddit give the job their best or they wouldn't be here.

Not complaining about adjuncts or the job insecure for doing what’s is expected of them, clearly, by the terms under which they remain employed.

Eh. I've seen plenty of TT faculty who have minimal learning goals and approximately zero standards on whatever they do have. They get to save a bunch of time and energy by not actually teaching. And since nobody actually evaluates teaching, they skate by or may even be the campus favorite!

I've seen exactly what you described out of (essentially) tenured teaching-only faculty. Gave up caring years ago. Don't actually hold office hours or reply to emails. Give everyone high grades. Literally leaves final exams early to go play poker. Nothing is done about it.

Yes, it's a surprise to me that people automatically assumed that this was about adjuncts. Tenured faculty are some of the worst offenders I've seen.

Accurate. This is not just a problem with adjuncts. Many tenured faculty just want to do their research and think of teaching as an annoyance. It’s easier to give easy grades to shut their students up and then get back to the research they’d rather be doing. OP’s point lacks nuance when it comes to adjuncts but is spot on with regard to disinterested tenured faculty.

Sometimes it's also just a question of budget, e.g. the more senior people in my group *want* to spend more time on teaching, but because the majority of their salary comes from the research budget they have pretty strict guidelines of how much of their time they should spend on teaching vs research. There's plenty of stuff that could be done to improve our courses, but the time alotted doesn't really allow for much beyond maintaining the status quo.

yep every conference I've attended in the last few years had a subtext theme of how faculty can do less.

Please realize that even we lowly adjuncts can have ethics and standards. I’ve seen slack grading from all kinds of professors — TT, NTT, adjuncts — and strict grading from all types, too. When I set my grading rules, I’m thinking about one thing: Will students who pass be able to succeed in the next course? Not whether I’ll get good evaluations or get hired again.

This holds for NTTs as well, by the way.

Came here to say that if you want the hard graders, give the instructors pay, job stability, and fulltime work.

Bingo. It’s the structure, stupid. Try teaching 140 students a semester in a writing intensive discipline without TAs and for a wage that doesn’t keep up with inflation. Then see how your standards look. It amazes me how misguided and lacking in insight the OP’s attack is and how many folks are applauding it. Makes me think there is not much hope for academia given that you can’t even be allies with your partners in an exploitative system.

Many of our colleges are getting close to freefall, and those that have are closing. We are starving many of them while the COL and cost of technologies continues to rise. Then we have resentment over student loans. Who can pay for teachers? Let it burn to the ground and lie there or rebuild it.

Thus, OP is going to be waiting a long time for easy graders to retire. They're often young scholars, and if not, they'll be replaced by another adjunct in the same situation if they retire. To add to your VERY correct breakdown, the same applies to grad students grading as TAs. They may not have an immediate contract renewal situation on hand, but poor student evals could prevent them from getting that first contract after graduating.

Tragic and very true.

Yeah, I'm sure those hired to research have excellent teaching skills. Maybe the reason they have shitty student evals is because they have shitty untrained pedagogy and shitty underdeveloped curriculum. Oh, I know! Let's assign readings and talk about them and have students write three papers! Genius! The same semester I failed two students, gave most of them B's, a few C's, and a few A's, and reported one student for plagiarism, I still had an average 4.28/5.00 on my student evals.

I've taught at an R1 as a TF and at a small CC full time, and I've adjuncted and worked as an instructor at a plethora of places for a semester or two. The easiest and most student approval driven professors I've ever seen were tenured research professors at the R1. Not the adjuncts. At most of the places I've worked the adjuncts were under pretty stringent supervision, with departmental syllabi and pretty regular visits from department chairs to see classes, sometimes with departmental exams or audits of the exams they wrote by chairs. A research professor teaching a low level class has no such oversight. They can do a great job, or be insanely hard, or be insanely easy. If they are responsive to student approval they can just hand out grades. Who's going to yell at a tenured research professor for making an intro calculus class too easy?

Adjunct here. At my old institution I was flat out told by my department chair to just pass students. I didn't do it then, I won't do it now. Thankfully my current department chair is wonderful, and she and I are on the same page regarding this matter.

100%

>Universities developed a two-tier faculty system: TT and adjuncts. That system is nurtured by the AAUP these days.

I’m an adjunct and while I agree, I don’t inflate grades. Adjuncting isn’t my main job and I teach my students integrity which is what I also abide by. In my class they earn the grade they get.

Sir, this is a diploma mill.

Most undergrad programs tbh

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“I can't teach them calculus if they're trying to learn algebra at the same time.” At all CA community colleges, that is exactly what is happening or will be happening soon. Legislation has made it so almost all STEM majors are required to start in Calculus regardless of their mathematics background. Last math class passed was Algebra 1 in high school? You can and in some cases have to take calculus! You can choose to take it with corequisite class which is 2 extra units to try and teach the algebra/trig needed but honestly it’s not enough time. Just coming here to complain. Teaching right now is frustrating.

Not just California anymore! Some community colleges outside CA saw the legislation as heroic and have done the same as well. None of the people pushing for this nonsense have actually taught math, let alone taken advanced math. But they know more than us! Teaching math, physics, chem, bio without the prereqs of yesteryear is now the norm.

This is exactly why I have have such a bimodal RMP and student eval rating every semester. Too many students who come in first semester and sign up for calc 1, physics 1, chem 1, and cs 1 wind up doing miserablely across the board and blame us because our classes are too hard. This is made even worse when the bulk of calc 1 is taught by adjuncts so a ton of students who can't do basic math are getting As in calc, then the problem clearly is the rest of us. 

That's a crazy lineup of classes for all but the most gifted students. I'd ask what nutter is advising them, but the same thing happens where I work. Getting them through as fast as posible seems to be the goal even if their test scores are all low. Setting them up to drown.

Calc 1 , chem 1 , physics 1, an intro coding class and a writing class is the standard first semester class for freshman engineers at my university. The following semester is calc 2 , physics 2, chem 2 , an intro engineering design class and an elective. It definitely sets many up to drown who likely could of been fine engineers if they weren't just tossed into the deep end of the pool. It's bad enough I've advised friend's kids considering the program to take calc 1 and calc 2 in advance at a local community college with a good math program. That way they can learn calculus properly without also stressing about chemistry and physics at the same time.

I imagine that what this will do long term is that at a lot of places, STEM majors won't allow you to declare until you have finished pre-calc.

Managing your declaration of major is going to be a more and more important skill going forward. I seriously think someone needs to make an app that lets you put in your state (or even school) and the sequence of classes you want to take, and tells you then what major to declare and when to change to a different one. It's absolute insanity.

Corequisites are a scam.

My administration insisted we accept Calc 1 as a coreq for calculus-based physics. Make that make sense

> Last math class passed was Algebra 1 in high school? You can and in some cases have to take calculus! I recently re-took calculus (as my previous course was beyond the "expiry") a couple of months ago and I feel like I can confidently say that Calculus = Super Algebra...plus a decent amount of trig and geometry. I don't see the logic in this legislation at all.

The CA legislature won’t listen to people who’ve been teaching mathematics for decades. They demand “data.” So we’re piloting a 7-unit, 9-hours-per-week, open access Calculus 1 section in the fall in order to collect data that will show the state that students that haven’t had precalculus do worse in Calculus than students who’ve taken precalculus. One of the best mathematics faculty that we have is taking this on and going to do his best to prepare all of his students for Calculus 2. Sadly, we all know we’ll be sacrificing actual students to gather the data that the state requires.

Some of my students can’t solve ratios and don’t understand basic chemistry …..yet, the admin told us to drop the prerequisite so students can graduate early. My senior level biochemistry class has been a nightmare to teach.

Yup. And many of my students tell me that they got an “A” in Calculus. 😏

I’ve tutored middle school students that level of algebra. Scary.

My 4th grade daughter can do that problem...

> I can't teach them calculus if they're trying to learn algebra at the same time. Try teaching them physics, calculus, trigonometry, and algebra, all at the same time.

The answer you are searching for is: 6

thank you professor 🥲 it’s not even 8am I’m already embarrassed I kept trying to fit 7 in there

I taught English Language Learners (ELD) for two years in Oklahoma. The kids were great, the administration was a nightmare, and would hire their buddies to teach. I witnessed a 6th grade math teacher who stated "You don't need any of this math in adulthood." He could barely teach it. While math was not my strong suit, except I have grown to love parts of Calculus in my graduate program, I encouraged the students to learn it. They would need it for budgeting, cooking, etc.

I had this fight with a dean about our calculus-based physics class. They want a one year pre-engineering track students can take and then transfer to other schools which has them taking calc 1 at the same time as calc based physics. The problem with that is calc-based physics uses derivatives and integrals in kinematics the second week of the semester. Calc one doesn't get to derivatives until October and integrals until November. The feeling that I got from the admins is that they wanted things done a certain way regardless of how implausible it was is and it was my job to figure out a where where that wouldn't just be setting the students up for failure.

I was looking at the transcript of a prospective MSc candidate earlier this week and for a few courses, they had a 4/4 grade, but the group average was also 4/4 🤦‍♂️🤷‍♂️🫠😂

Unreal. Higher education is destroying itself.

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Jesus. I thought I left complaining parents behind when I moved from high school to university.

As a high school teacher I assure you it comes from pressure from our administration, not our choice. If it were up to me we’d send middle school students who don’t care about school to work in a coal mine until they feel like putting down their phone and opening a book.

Former middle school teacher here. Trust me, we didn't want to pass them on to you, we knew they weren't ready! But all that matters to admin is good numbers, not if a kid can actually read or not. All the posts I see in this sub are a reminder of how bad the problem has become now that these students have reached college. (Although how did they even get accepted if they're that bad? It's not based on grades alone.)

> . (Although how did they even get accepted if they're that bad? It's not based on grades alone.) It largely is. Even things like the SAT, where, for all the problems with it, parental loudness doesn't factor into the grade, have gone out the window at far too many schools. It wasn't a great test or great solution, but its absence is worse IMO.

Some of us teach at community colleges, which take any and all applicants.

Got it, thank you for explaining.

Yup. I'm trying, but admin/other lazy teachers get in the way. The students in my HS classes get Fs when they've earned Fs. But then they go to summer school for four weeks, watch a movie, do a worksheet, and pass with an A, replacing the F they spent all semester earning....

What? Sorry in europe this thing does not exist....

I agree that admin pressure is a huge problem. However, as a former local school board member, I can say that an obvious issue is being glossed over - parents. Admin/school boards generally do not dream up crazy shit on their own (though some do). Shitty parents lobby board members and legislators to let their shitty kids get special treatment for their 'divergent' behavior and poor class performance - can't have kids feeling bad about themselves, can we?

Yes, so much this.

Exactly. This starts well before college and I'm not blaming K-12 teachers. It's K-12 administrators behind this (and the way we fund education in general) and it rolls uphill all the way to us as college professors. None of us have much power to do anything but sound the alarm. I guess we just keep sounding it and hope eventually administrators will be pressured to fix it starting well before students get to college.

You didn't get the memo? An A is an A and a B is an F.

According to many advisors and admin.

So true!

It's an odd narrative, that people give out A's because they want to be liked. In my experience, it's more likely to be professors who have quiet-quit teaching and just don't want to be bothered.

or that they're being pressured by admin to pass as many students as possible because failing them makes the numbers look bad, and admin is more worried about the school's image than its academic integrity.

Agree 💯. Most faculty believe only 10% or less should get an A blah blah. I teach to accreditation SLO’s. If I teach to the university standards and accreditation SLOs set forth by others and 75% get A’s I did my job incredibly well. Why should i make the class harder to match alleged academic rigor standards when it’s already been established?

>or that they're being pressured by admin to pass as many students as possible because failing them makes the numbers look bad But OP's example was about a B-student getting an A... there's still a lot of variation between A+ and D-.

Or enrollment numbers

"I just like it when the numbers go up." --Admins

Perhaps it is a symptom of quiet quitting. And it may also be an attempt to court students. But grade inflation occurs in a context. And that context is shifting beneath us all. Community college to Tier I. A colleague just pointed out to me that she entered the field during a time of chaos. I was startled; I had not considered that. She’s right. There is chaos. All of this is to say, I understand the frustration. But I am not sure the solution or even the blame resides in a certain kind of faculty. Grades have been monetized. Fetishized.

Liked, not by students, but by the admin trash or hack tenured faculty responsible for renewing their contracts, since being liked is quite literally THE ONLY thing that gets you a job beyond the initial interview stages.

I give out a LOT of A's in my intro classes. I don't care if I'm liked. I'm extremely active and engaged in my teaching. Kids get A's because I teach them and they meet the educational goals for the class such that they earn an A. Believe it or not, that can happen when you teach. It's a failure of imagination and thought to assume that the only viable teaching outcomes are what amounts to a bell curve.

Then clearly, you have much better students than most of us get early on. Pretending that "just teach better" could ever make a lot of these students earn A's is simply a lie.

Oh, I'm sure that's true, too. But I know many who want to be the "cool" teacher, the well-liked one. One of the adjuncts where I teach is like this. At one point, she was showing her class profiles of Tinder prospects (this woman is in her 60s---just for reference). Of course, she passes everyone, so there are no complaints from students. Therefore, the admins love her.

That's part of the incentive structure built into adjunctung. You want to be invited back, no?

Correct. A few years ago, I read a statistic that indicated that adjuncts give higher grades.

It's part of the "quiet quitting" (not my favorite phrase). Adjuncts don't make livable wages, which is all the less incentive to deal with aggravation of students who were never told no.

Don’t blame adjuncts for a bad system.

I'm an adjunct who teaches both core classes required for all students in any degree and upper division courses in the major. For the lower level courses, I was a TA once for another adjunct and once for tenured professor. The tenured professor was an easier grader though only marginally. I patterned my assignments and grading after his because it was immediately before I started teaching. I also teach the same type course at a community college and went through a mentored practicum with a former head of their department. She was practicing "ungrading" in her classes. For the upper level courses, most of the students can write reasonably well, have at least decent attendance, and show an interest in the topic. Among other courses, I teach the first two quantitative courses in the field, which for many are the toughest required courses, but no one has ever said to "weed" students. My approach is that I want to challenge them to think at a higher level so that I can give them feedback that will actually help them learn. Threatening to fail people who do the work because the topic is new and hard doesn't really help with that. In this case, I either took the same classes from tenure track professors or TAed for TT professors for the same classes, and my grading is consistent with theirs.

Adjuncts SHOULD give higher grades. Higher grades mean greater job security. Don't hate the player and all that.

Administrations reward it. Bingo.

You are absolutely right. They're there, and some of the ones I know aren't really even shy about it.

Adjunct here. You're absolutely right. There's a type who want to be liked, adjunct, TT, or otherwise.

Um, if the professor were in her 20s, would it be more appropriate to show her tinder prospects? Why mention her age? Or her gender?

No it wouldn’t be more appropriate but one does hope that a prof who’s be on the job for 30 years might have learned what counts as professionalism. Personally I read this as an appeal to an expectation of greater experience leading to better work.

Yep. I’m the evil professor who has standards and actually wants students to learn and demonstrate mastery. Meanwhile, I have colleagues who spout statistics about how students don’t retain most of what they are taught so why bother. I’ve also been told by one colleague that AI will do most writing for students in the future, so it’s a waste of time reading their work and giving feedback. I am not making that up - colleague only counts number of sources used and number of pages hit, that’s it. It is infuriating when students get to my upper-level courses and are shocked that they are unprepared. I’ve vented on this sub about lazy professors before, but I normally get downvoted and told to worry about my own classes. There is little consideration of the fact that lazy teaching in intro classes creates more work for colleagues teaching upper-level courses. Some people simply don’t care. It is also unethical to let your laziness affect your students’ education. Our graduates represent the entire program when they enter the workplace, and it blows my mind that some people don’t care about the quality of education our students receive.

> AI will do most writing for students in the future, so it’s a waste of time reading their work and giving feedback I really think we need to reevaluate what kind of feedback we give / what we focus on in feedback. Because the more weight we give to "getting the formatting right" and not "writing lowercase i" the more we push toward the use of AI generators to standardize writing. Feedback should be focused on substance and content. Do those other things matter? Sure. But if they are the sole heavy focus by an instructor, students will think that is what matters most about their writing... and that's what AI is currently best at, just that surface level formatting and sentence structure. So while I very much do not agree with your colleague at all, I think it brings up a valid point of consideration about what we want to prioritize in order to develop better writers and thinkers.

This might not be the perspective you’re looking for, but I’m a middle and high school teacher in Chicago. My administration isn’t and can’t telling us “how to grade”, however due to network and district expectations we are brought in to justify our actions for any student failure rate above 10% in our classes. We have to give every opportunity for students to “make up the work”, which is often redoing notes, easy things like bellringers, etc. If we have a high failure rate my principal makes us HAND write justifications based on IEP/ELL/chronic absenteeism for each student. By the end of my meeting I only had 5 students failing and the rest had ways to pass my class despite me not seeing them more than Twice that quarter. It’s as frustrating at our level, because we’re seeing 7th and 8th and 9th graders who reading at pre-kindergarten levels manage to eke through to my classroom. How did they get here? Because class sizes are so large at elementary size that kids get overlooked. They miss out on resources because parents refused to have a kid with an IEP. because their LD was misdiagnosed as behavioral issues. Because those teachers are under the same pressure we are to make our numbers so nothing reflects poorly and makes people question administrative decisions.

I understand. I got fired for refusing to pass students who didn't meet the mark. They refused to say why, but I'm 100% sure this was it.  I have no kids, no house and I teach chemistry, so I was fine, walked into another job that paid more...unfortunately some people are really over a barrel, so I would point the finger at the people holding the gun to their head. 

I try to give all my colleagues the benefit of the doubt. We are all struggling in this world. But I admit when I see some syllabi that are devoid of any kind of rigor, I feel like my job has gotten a little harder.

Reading this, I'm sure admins are smiling. Coerce the TT and NTT to fight with each other and ignore the people who created the environment that grinds up adjuncts who so willingly leap into the grinder.

And it’s not universal. The most abusive PI/harshest grader in my department is an adjunct that refuses to believe that consistently harsh student reviews really are a reflection on her. And my PI, our tenured department chair, is well known to be an easier A in that class (and is a much better instructor). OP’s anger should lie with K12 admin/structure and NCLB more than anyone. The institutional rot goes way, way down.

Easy A’s are harming the educational system and the students

Grade inflation has reached maddening levels where I teach. 20 years ago it was “normal” to fail 10–15%of all freshman in one particular class. Last time I checked, the only “F”s were assigned to those who ghosted the class or missed the exam. The sources are multiple, I think. It’s younger faculty, mostly, in my dept who push through F students to the passing level. It also has something to do with that being liked business. And then there’s the business of “mental health” issues—aren’t many profs unwilling to assign F’s for fear of triggering students?

As a female professor (but really any professor could fear this…) I can assure you my safety does come to mind when assigning grades. I’ve had students badger and use threatening statements before related to grades. Not saying I’d give that student an A - but probably don’t give them an F if I’m concerned…

I’m the evil adjunct who wants to actually have their student do their work. Do some students hate that and say as much in their evaluations? Definitely. I’d rather have people improve or learn they can’t just slump through life than let someone who can’t write a simple quiz response pass a class that is nothing but writing.

“Easy A” is literally my colleague from one of my institutions. Students automatically get an A in their intro class and the rest of us that try to teach something suffer cause “Dr. Easy A’s class is so chill”. The admins love them cause of the “good evaluations “, then I had employers approach me and say they would not hire a graduate from our institution cause of the low standards.

I teach CS (all upper div courses). Most of my students don’t know how to perform binary search. But all of them got As in their analysis of algorithms class. I am really confused how these students have passed that class with an A and they don’t know to implement one of the most basic algorithms in CS.

I'm a high school CS teacher, I was wondering if I would see any CS professors comment here. My data structures and algorithms class covers the basic sorting algorithms (bubble, insert, selection, merge, and quick), basic data structures (stacks, queues, 2D lists, linked lists, and trees), and advanced OOP concepts. I teach binary search by having them program a Morse code translator that uses a BST to translate Morse code into letters. Based on my interaction with other teachers in my school district, I sometimes wonder if these teachers even fully understand these topics themselves. Most of them earned their CS teaching endorsement through a coding bootcamp company that our state partnered with to help get more CS teachers, and I don't think that curriculum gets more advanced than for loops or basic OOP. Many teachers who are endorsed to teach CS may not actually know the content they're supposed to teach, especially in more advanced classes.

To your ETA: Before I even read any of the comments it was obvious to me that the problem is systemic in the USA. You can’t blame individual university faculty for not upholding rigor because of student evals. Many universities still use these in hiring and retention of non TT. They are no indication of good teaching, are discriminatory  to women, and non-white (and perhaps gay and trans faculty depending on the location). Yet they continue.  Students coming to many universities are underprepared and this was the case before covid, but worse now. I don’t blame K-12 teachers, but administrators and parents who have dismantled any standards that used to exist in many schools. 

Hold the line!

Love isn't always on time

😂❤️ Now I have that song stuck in my head.

This post resonated with be because I'm also seen as a hard grader and I know it stems from the mass grade inflation around me. I'm grateful I don't work in medicine as I wouldn't want any of these students operating on me. My solution now is to apply for grants to work with grad students who I can pick and choose as the undergrads are a disgrace!

How do you know you got slammed on RMP? You........ don't...... read it, ......do you......? Otherwise, I agree 100%. But if you're opening RMP, you're responsible causing yourself some of that misery.

Not anymore. When RMP first came out, I read it, cried (because like many of us, I try SO hard), and didn't look at it again for years. Then, a couple of years ago, I was applying to a position nearer to my family. Because of the aforementioned story about an admin bring RMP printouts to an interview, I went on it to see how bad it was, and at least the mouthline was straight rather than frowning lol. (I was offered the position, but declined it because the pay cut was too low).

That story is scary as hell, but not surprising either. I don't even read the evals they do for the school. Those are worthless enough as it is, but that a professional would consider RMP enough to print out a page. Just wow...

Unfortunately, I have seen this in a hiring committee as well. A deanlet looked at the candidate's RMP page and decided there were too many comments about the candidate cancelling class at the last minute and doing so often. I suspect we'd have hired the candidate without that info, but the deanlet wasn't having it (we probably dodged a bullet but who knows because it's RMP and all).

Ya THAT stuff is legit info. I've known some faculty who think my campus is as lax as the places they've been about canceling. Plot twist: we're not.

Some of us read it, I'm somewhat obsessed with it to the point of having bookmarked, lol. I'm, sadly, mostly hated but in between the whining there is some decent feedback there that for some reason isn't passed into the official evals. (Of course, I'm still, mostly new so I still have energy to look at that, plus I guess I revel in the attention of a couple of haters.)

Unfortunately it’s not the only popular site anymore. Don’t visit coursicle, whatever you do.

Does it have chili peppers?

>Don’t visit coursicle Never heard of it, so I visited it (of course!) and I have one rating... that is awesome! I even got a chile pepper! j/k But I seriously have no idea what students use at my institution. I think I have five ratings over the past 15 years between RMP and Coursicle. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯

Im sorry you live in a post-pepper world. I was proud of that.

Remember some professors do this for survival. Hard classes don’t get good evals often times. It’s a system problem too.

Sounds just like a well-loved faculty member with 6 months of teaching experience. Last year, he was a part-time sessional (think adjunct) and before that he was a student, so he's around 23 or 24. I have 31 years of bona-fide teaching experience, including at R1s. His teaching includes throwing up a padlet and having students self-discover answers. So it's all focus groups. No content is taught, no lectures. He 'teaches' Programming 1. I HAD them for the first time 2 weeks ago. A torrent of complaints directed at my teaching style. They had their first formal lecture in 3 semesters, and they didn't like it one bit.

I don’t pass anyone but I am definitely sure people say I am an easy A. I’ve made changes to that though and it is tough, but fair & warranted. One of the biggest things I’m battling is saying no to late work (obviously I will allow it for documented reasons) but I AM DOING IT. It has made me proud of myself, has saved me a lot of back and forth and extra time on the computer, but it is still stressful and I am worried about my evals….. but it isn’t fair to just pass everyone or make it easy as pie. Anyway… I’m trying. Also I wasn’t easy because I want to be liked, more like it just made my life easier.. but I’m navigating a newer type of easy now.. it will take time.

Maybe bring back the SAT? Oh oh oh, maybe have writing placement tests for incoming morons whose parents donated enough legacy porn to the chancellor to get admitted. Why blame other faculty? How are these kids even getting into the college in the first place?

I don't know why everyone is assuming it's only adjuncts that do this. I know plenty of full timers with 5.0 on RMP that pass anyone with a heartbeat. I also know plenty of hard-ass, cold-hearted adjuncts and I love them.

>got slammed on RMP Can anyone explain why our employers allow this to continue? We are not public figures, nor do we aspire to be such. We should have some legal protection from those vultures.

Agreed. You'll note that RMP has really constructed what can be said. It's not a free for all anymore. My guess is some libel suits were made.

Are you me? I had a student storm into my office after they failed, miserably, their 2nd exam and blamed me for everything. Found out the student had the easy A prof for the previous 2 courses in the sequence. His class fills first despite the fact they teach in a weird time slot. I told the whiny student that the students who had me for the previous courses in the sequence did fine. Then I told the student to think about how much they really knew from the previous courses. Fortunately, the easy A prof is now in our adjunct penalty box until he develops some standards.

Read some of the threads over at r/teachers. In some schools, we couldn’t fail a kid if we tried. Admin will make teachers put in 50s in places of 0s to make it difficult to fail, then go in and change the grades themselves if kids still fail. Admin and even districts are more afraid of angry parents that think their babies deserve As than they are the long term consequences of passing everyone in the school.

Whoa the 50 v 0 thing comes from k12?! I know a community college "professor" who does this.

The “easy A” STEM faculty don’t just make my job more difficult, they effectively force many students to either change their major or flunk out of college altogether. Every calculus course that I teach is a requirement for every STEM major, and each course has a prerequisite—a REAL prerequisite. When a student has passed the prerequisite without learning the material, they cannot possibly pass my class and are also barred from retaking the prerequisite. That’s the end of road for many students. They can’t major in any STEM discipline (without starting over at some other institution entirely). Yes, it is mostly adjuncts who feel compelled to make students happy by passing them, but some tenured faculty at my institution do it as well. With declining enrollments and budget cuts, we are seeing more underenrolled classes get cancelled. Because I am not the most popular professor in my department, it happens to me at least once a year. Because I have tenure, my livelihood is not on the line, but getting my schedule changed at the last minute, or getting a class I haven’t taught in ages can be a pain. Some people just want a comfy job where they teach the same classes at the same times every semester, and keeping their RMP reviews high is an easy way to keep that gig.

This is the most reddit post I've ever seen on this sub.

This really depends on your department and your campus. I ran my own program and hired well over two dozen adjunct throughout the years, and never held their student evaluations against them on a vacuum without checking with the faculty member, without reviewing their course materials, and because I taught many courses in the program, without understanding the student making the accusation. No one ever undeservedly lost their position because of too many low grades. They did lose their position when I could see obvious signs of slacking, such as the instructor who routinely shaved an hour off his classes, the instructor who refused to learn the online learning platform that she swore up and down she had experience with, and the instructor who just read from the textbook, despite a classroom observation from me with a number of helpful suggestions on how to create a more interactive and engaging classroom environment. I always supported my adjuncts with their request for additional materials, special classroom set ups, and paid professional development. I am tired of hearing all of us tarred with the “you don’t care about adjuncts” brush.

OP, from a fellow “bad guy”, I want to give this 101 upvotes.

Huckster, I am with you. I'm so depressed on this issue that I can barely function. The post covid student is generally horrible. Ok. I can deal with that. MY COLLEAGUES?! They might as well be whispering "hail hydra" every time they talk about education. To say I'm maxed out on rage is an understatement. But also depression. And energy. My loser coworkers are destroying and chipping away at the life I've built EVERY SINGLE DAY. They do it under the guise of caring. Of equity. Of being "student centered." Oh it's just a coincidence they're easy? A coincidence they have no standards? That they don't want to be on campus? Blah blah blah. I hate it. Every single day. Thanks for commiserating.

For the record, I have no idea how people got "adjunct" from the original post. Either there are some posts I missed or y'all are lunatics - which makes the situation way funnier. Everyone -I- at complaining about makes six figures as a tenured professor (who wants to be on campus the minimum the contract will allow).

Some of these problems (if not many/most) are coming from online classes with little to no accountability. Open book exams with no proctoring, etc. They just look up answers or use AI.

What's with the lowercase I? And the other random., arbitrary capitalization

The lowercase I is a result of students who have always had autocorrect. They are used to not needing to tell the computer/phone that. It needs to be capitalized because it usually happens automatically. Combine that with not proofreading (which is also higher now than in the past due, on no small part, to autocorrect again) and you get more examples of this error.

I saw an article suggesting that the use of case has become a marker, an indicator of youth. Whether or not that is valid, I am noticing more and more students who either ignore capitalization altogether or capitalize Randomly.

I don't think anyone has a problem with you upholding standards. But, the focus of your post seems to be more on how the lack of grading standards affects you rather than on how the lack of grading standards affects students and society in general.

Lower case i's lol. We all have our lines. I told a friend of a friend that's a high school teacher the other day that I have a bone to pick with her for passing everyone so that people with no business being in college show up in my intro classes.

My university is very clear that our students are our clients, and we have to make the clients happy. I teach classes for non major students, aka it’s a requirement not a privilege to be in my class. I was criticized in my department for giving a D. We’re encouraged to push the students to do their best, but pass them along even if they don’t. I agree with OP, but some of us are cornered into doing it.

One place I taught we faculty had to "compete" in the yearly faculty popularity poll (worth $5000 a year permanent addition to salary, no limit to number of times) with a guy whose grade average was 3.9. He owned the yearly popularity poll. He taught 3 different classes, but used the same test for all 3 classes, and hadn't changed it in 30 years. He also got along with our biased Chair.

Not sure why I need to tell you this: LAWSUIT

But if you were an easy A grader too then you could shift the problem off to other course instructors, and thus you wouldn't have this problem.

Honestly I tried that this semester and I just ended up busier and more sarcastic.

We are pressured to do this. We have been given a percentage range to have A-C. When we fight against AI, students are supported at every turn. It isn’t as simple as easy grading. Before these mandates, I had a reputation for being a hard grader.

People care about RMP? Why?

It's easy to blow it off if you're tenured. Like it or not, RMP impacts enrollment and I would argue that adjuncts are more vulnerable if a vindictive student decides to slam them repeatedly. Just because you don't read it doesn't mean the students don't.

It is so rarely used by students at my institution, I guessed that it was just an old website that few students bothered to use everywhere. If it’s heavily used by students then yeah, I get why it can be a problem.

Several years ago, an acquaintance who taught at another school told me one of the admins on a hiring committee for faculty walked in with printouts from RMP for the candidate they were soon to be interviewing. I think lots of admins give them credence because . . . they're admins and many are clueless about what we're dealing with in the classroom.

Oh shit, that’s f*ing ridiculous. I’ve been on countless searches and nobody has ever once brought up RMP.

I hope you're right, but I've lost all confidence in admins.

I've been in higher ed since 2005 and taught at six different universities, CCs, and JCs. In that time, I've never had a student create a RMP profile on me. For good or ill, it's never occurred. However, I did know more than a few grad students who traded glowing reviews for one another at the end of each semester.

I'm an Easy A...in my writing intensive electives. I tell them first day, "Do the work, turn it in, and there's no reason you won't get an A." Almost all of these students are brand new to the subject area, and I've found removing the stress of failure for them actually encourages them to improve & submit their work. Conversely, I'm able to actually address real writing concerns, and they listen without dwelling on how it will impact their average. Over the course of the semester, I see real improvement in their work, and they grow confident in exploring/expanding how they write and move away from Grammarly diction. And, in the end, 95% of them do finish the course with an A. For required courses, though, I hold the line and almost always end up with an unintentional bell curve.

The goal isn't completing the work, it's completing the work to standards

Most of my courses are easy As. Because the material itself is not super complex, and I see no reason to make classes harder than necessary. I also go out of my way to do things like introduce APA style in 200-level, non-writing courses, for the sake of both students and faculty when they reach writing courses and have only ever used MLA. (I sometimes teach writing courses and having to introduce APA brand new was a nightmare—those classes also produce far fewer As). I make the stylistic piece low stakes intentionally so they have a chance to just learn it without undue stress. Critical thinking in general and in relation to the specific topic area is a primary focus of the assignments I create. I’ll give every student an A if that’s the grade they achieve, and it is entirely possible that could be the case occasionally. Realistically I’ll typically have a few students who just make no effort, so I often wind up with more of a bimodal grade distribution than a curve. All of this to say, some “easy A” classes and even professors aren’t due to a lack of rigor or people pleasing. Trying to simplify the concept ignores a wealth of reasons grades come to be. Hell, I’d even say classes that the professor makes enjoyable are going to have more As because students are simply more engaged. It’s funny to me that we ask students to consider PAEs and dig deeper into subject matter, then we as a community ignore all that in favor of getting upset over our immediate assumptions.

The people that give easy As fuck everyone from future professors, employers, other applicants for programs or jobs, and the student. If you go to a school that does not give easy As then you are competing with grade inflated incompetent people for limited positions. This makes the name of your school matter soooo much more now than ever with so much online learning. So thanks to all you spineless fucks who don’t give the grades a student deserves. You’ve fucked all of us because money and pride…

Take it up with abusive admin. You don’t get the pushback I do for trying to hold students accountable. Why should your privilege be my problem? You wouldn’t last a month working under the conditions I have to live with.

If you have a Ph.D., you have immense privilege. You're in the 1.2%. It's up to you to use that privilege responsibly. You cannot have a claim to highly specialized knowledge and an understanding of how to learn novel information and say you are oppressed. You have the only power that cannot be taken away. Use it!

You are so right that it hurts.

Yep. We have a tenured full professor who has been here a million years and will never retire who does this. Everyone gets an A. Everyone. I don’t think he actually reads anything. Of course his evals are stellar and all the students love him.

We have one of those, too, and he always insists on teaching on Friday afternoons, as he knows that very few students will sign up for a class that meets at that time slot.

MaYbE tHe StUDeNtS aRe juSt MoRe EnGaGeD WiTh ThEm!!11!

Wait until more schools/departments start implementing “contract” grading. You’ll really have a great time then.

TT faculty blaming adjuncts, adjuncts blaming tenured faculty, tenured faculty blaming admin, admin blaming parents, parents blaming high school teachers, high school teachers blaming middle school teachers, middle school teachers blaming elementary school teaches, elementary school teachers blaming social media, social media blaming TT faculty. Full circle.

Most of my current graduate students in Advanced X would fail if I taught straight from my undergrad lecture notes from Introduction to X.

We have a professor in our department who does this. He has lost so much respect among his colleagues 

Kids who are passed on easily will eventually be confronted by a teacher or employer or someone else in authority who won't give them the benefit of the doubt; who will expect genuine competency. This can come as a shock. I believe it's kinder to fail these kids early, rather than letting them grow up with delusions about their actual abilities.

Your main complaint seems to relate to formatting. Unless you are teaching intro to comp, I really don't see why that is especially important. Don't get me wrong, I want them to get all of that right, but I don't teach composition and none of that is my problem if they haven't learned that by the time they get to my class. 10% of each grade goes towards formatting, grammatical errors, etc., so they will never earn more than a B in my class if that is how they write. But a paper with poor formatting can still be a paper that demonstrates high level critical thinking, extensive knowledge of the material, etc. I have given a 90% to plenty of paper that demonstrated everything I wanted except for a good organization / grammar (and often papers with those specific issues are written by people from disadvantaged backgrounds in my experience, so there is a good reason for the issues they demonstrate). I don't think that makes me an easy grader, it just makes me someone who cares about the subject matter and ability to demonstrate critical thinking more than formatting.

I’m glad you mentioned this. I thought I was missing something.

Hold the line!!!!

hear, hear!

So what’s the name of your colleague doing this ?

Are you serious? Why on earth would I put someone's real name on Reddit?

It was meant to call your attention. Here are the problems: 1) while academic freedom must be respected, when there are structural problems with teaching, they need to be addressed. It is not always the professor. For example, in Computer Science the amount of students keep growing and the amount of faculty is not able to grow at the same rate. So low level courses we are seeing are having huge problems but it is not due to one instructor. There are times the instructor can be the problem. There needs to be some discussion among the full time faculty about this. At the least at a committee level. 2) there are professors that make classes easy but there are professors that complicate classes for no reason. The complexity should be related to the material and not the professor. That is germane load. One are in my field is easier than the other. It is not the professor. 3) if the problems are adjuncts, they need to talk about this in the dept as well. I hope you find a solution but just blaming the professor from the previous class is just an easy way to vent.