Faculty members at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge are seeing red over the administration’s decision to yank a tenured biology professor from the classroom last month for grading too harshly, The Ticker reports. According to the university’s student newspaper, The Daily Reveille, Dominique Homberger, who has taught at the university for nearly three decades, was removed from teaching a Biology 1001 section after giving the second of four exams for the course. Her replacement hiked students’ grades on the first exam 25 percent.
The Louisiana State University chapter of the American Association of University Professors submitted a written complaint to the system president, John V. Lombardi, on Monday, calling Ms. Homberger’s removal and the subsequent changing of student grades a “violation of academic freedom and faculty rights,” the Reveille notes.
Kevin Carman, dean of the College of Basic Sciences, told the student newspaper that his decision to yank Homberger was justified:
“Seventy-five percent of the students were failing, and fewer than 8 percent of students had grade C or better,” Carman said. “The number of students failing the course was out of line with that class in any history. Therefore I took action because I felt it was in the best interest of the students.”
Carman said 27.8 percent of students had dropped the class.
The AAUP—which is already investigating the firing of a former deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center—said it may probe Ms. Homberger’s removal further.
On a related note, if a longtime tenured professor can be removed for awarding low marks to students, it’s no wonder professors like this one, who shared her concern in the Forums about a freshman-comp class in which nearly everyone is failing, are sweating over students’ grades. Imagine the heat this adjunct must be feeling to pass a student who complained to the administration about his or her grade.
Have you ever been pressured to raise students’ grades, and, if so, how did you respond?
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22 Responses to Removal of Professor Causes Furor at Louisiana State U.
camel - April 15, 2010 at 7:06 am
Of course every thing depends on circumstances. but it is up to the professor’s judgement. Why not to wait till the following EXAM.? Why not to disuss the matter between adminstation and professor?Prof.Dr.Kamal Hassan
camel - April 15, 2010 at 7:06 am
Of course every thing depends on circumstances. but it is up to the professor’s judgement. Why not to wait till the following EXAM.? Why not to disuss the matter between adminstation and professor?Prof.Dr.Kamal Hassan
snwiedmann - April 15, 2010 at 7:27 am
Have I ever been pressured to raise students’ grades? Pressured by whom? By my department chair, dean, etc.? No. But that is a very different matter from being beseeched by a student. That happens from time to time. I simply point out that every student in the course has his/her grade calculated in the same manner. If one student’s 87% average can be raised to an “A,” then everyone with an 87 or 88 or 89 would also have to be raised. And I won’t do that. If you are calm in demeanor and give the student a factually-based explanation, things usually go well.
tappat - April 15, 2010 at 7:48 am
Such pressure is the main cause of grade inflation. It is no good to put it on the individual professor, let alone impecunious adjunct instructor. The environment must be such that the instructor of record is the only authority over grades in a given course, with the usual caveats about money and sex in exchange for grades. Even a “bad” professor from whom one gets a “bad” grade can be a very important experience in one’s maturation. But when we have a bureaucratic managerial culture, we cannot have proper grading. Too many smart professors will simply give high grades and communicate true evaluations otherwise. Hasn’t anyone read Kafka, other than as a techincal writer of how to manuals?
newprof17 - April 15, 2010 at 8:42 am
Year 2 on tenure track, I graded undergrad courses using a rough form of a bell curve centered on a B grade, as were a couple of other professors in the Dept. But not all of them. Some graded significantly higher, with a B+ average grade. Disparity of grading led to disparity of outcomes, esp. with multiple profs teaching different sections of the 101 course. The Dept Chair intervened, and suggested to all profs teaching the 101 course that the average grade given out should be a B+ (or as he put it, hand out more As to more students, with the model being the prof with the B+ average grade). The stated goal was to ensure that the students taking the 101 class be retained in the major, and that students in the major should be receiving As. This is a business, after all. After a brief fight, I caved and in future courses raised the grades. Student evals went up, and more students stayed in the major. That’s also when I started to develop plans to leave the Dept. I will be teaching at a different school next year where (perhaps with an excessively optimistic view) I hope there is less focus on the pragmatic aspects of education as a business and more focus on educating as a vocation…or at least a more open environment to discussing the impact of grade expectation and inflation on student attitudes towards learning…
dsarma - April 15, 2010 at 9:26 am
When I was a one year visiting prof at an elite liberal arts college on the east coast, I had a provost tell my chairman to tell me to give a failing senior a passing grade for the class. The provost told my chairman privately that, given the parents had spend 40k/ yr I had to pass him. I got a call from the Registrar stating that she would not change the grade that I was going to give under any circumstances. The provost was getting calls from the student’s parents and I received one at home from the student’s mother. The student flunked, did not graduate, but still showed up at graduation to enlist the support of her/ his peers. It was surprising that the College even allowed him to attend graduation events. But, if you pay 40k/ year then I guess you can pretend… As long as you can prove that the student earned the grade that you give (as per the requirements/ schema outlined in your syll)…
sbaron33 - April 15, 2010 at 10:28 am
When a dean begins to attend every class meeting, reads every paper and exam, and has to justify grades given to each student, then he (in this case) might have some credibility. When a cowboy who doesn’t ride horses and doesn’t clean the stables gets to rate the animals, something is very wrong. But, he has the boots!
vdolgopolov - April 15, 2010 at 11:38 am
Folks – some perspective here! 75% of students failing and 8% having a grade of C or better indicates an unbelievable disconnect on the part of the faculty member, who probably didn’t do a very good job teaching the class and has no idea how to develop assessment instruments! The Dean’s action seems to be entirely justified.
lsuagecon - April 15, 2010 at 11:52 am
Underlying the whole controversy is the fact that the majority of LSU state-based freshman enter the University with a state-sponsored tuition award that requires a continuous 2.5-3.0 gpa in order to be retained (depending on the level of the award). The pressure to give nothing but a C or higher in all undergraduate classes is tremendous, and it comes not just from the students and their families, but also from an administrative/state government perspective that measures the academic quality of institutions by the percentage of entering students that graduate. We are rapidly approaching a time where our higher education system will be distinguishable from diploma mills in name only.
nacrandell - April 15, 2010 at 12:04 pm
The article was vague on the type of tests administered and the subjects/areas covered by the original teacher and the replacement who increased student results by 25%.Was the original test too hard or the replacement test too easy?
landrumkelly - April 15, 2010 at 12:04 pm
LSU has damaged itself beyond belief–and the damage will be lasting if this decision stands.This decision is especially egregious in light of the fact that the professor has taught for decades and is in a better position than anyone else to see if student efforts are dropping.In no case, however, should a professor be fired for his or her grading policy. This was reported to have happened to a chemistry professor at Norfolk State University (whose administrators upheld the decision), but NSU is not LSU, and LSU is apparently not LSU anymore, either.
hmejia - April 15, 2010 at 12:20 pm
The pressure comes from the University income. Students are scarcely at this times; one student less is the diferences between black or red numbers.
johntoradze - April 15, 2010 at 12:39 pm
While the teaching may be substandard, (might be) to raise grades based on the logic presented is asinine. It cuts to the heart of why employers care less and less if someone has a degree at all.
postacademic1 - April 15, 2010 at 2:15 pm
To answer the questions Gabriela posed, sure, students try to pressure instructors to raise their grades, sometimes reasonably, sometimes not. Almost always they accept the grades, then maybe grumble on the course evals and Rate My Professors. The worst that’s ever happened to me was an anonymous email from a student, though I figured out where it came from. This whole situation strikes me as the Rate My Professors mentality run amok.
tuxthepenguin - April 15, 2010 at 3:14 pm
This is not a case of being pressured to raise grades (the few times it’s come up for me, I’ve been pressured to lower grades). There’s something wrong if students in an introductory class are almost all failing, and only 8% have at least a C, unless this was a pretty small class. The dean was right. There’s a difference between judging an individual student to be failing and setting the bar for the entire class at too high a level.
mdanieltex - April 15, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Only 8% making a C or higher seems a little low. It is unfortunate that teachers who give A’s & B’s to 50-100% of the class are much less likely to get complaints than those who maintain high standards. I’m afraid the experiences of newprof17 are much too common. We have changed “average” from a C to a B and “good” from a B to an A. We act like we are afraid of the students.
khung - April 15, 2010 at 7:15 pm
Re: vdolgopolov – April 15, 2010 at 11:38 am said:”Folks – some perspective here!”I applaud the call for some perspective. This is a faculty who has received tenure, and who has been teaching for nearly 3 decades. The article had not mentioned that this faculty has had a history of problematic grading. Absent material for us to evaluate the course content, delivery, and grading matrix, I think the right perspective is to give the faculty the benefit of the doubt that this is not an error. I see no a priori reason to presume that each class must achieve a certain grade – grades are earned, not pre-determined based on proportion.
butteredtoastcat - April 15, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Sorry, but if 75% of the class is failing, that says more about the teaching than about the students. The prof is still tenured and is still doing research, but has been prevented from doing any more damage in the classroom, and that’s a good thing. There comes a point where the right of the students to get a decent education trumps professorial privilege.The article is incomplete, but based on some of the comments from a professorial rating site, the professor in question has a thick accent and is hard to understand, puts the wrong information on quizzes (i.e. different from what she has told the students to study), and gives confusing options to mulitiple choice questions on quizzes and exams. I imagine that many students simply drop the class if they can, and those that can’t end up retaking the course with someone else.
jffoster - April 15, 2010 at 10:47 pm
Bon soir, chers, I’ve just read the article in the “Daily Revile”, as we used to call it, and it doesn’t shed much more light on this than the original news item above does. Unless the national AAUP has information the rest of us don’t, it appears to have shot from the hip yet again. Chers, this is odd. It seems not to have happened with this very senior instructor before, although typically science classes have lower grades, especially on earlier exams in lower division courses. This seems atypical both for the university and apparently for the professor involved. It is possible she got a statistical anomaly near the tail of the normal distribution — i.e. a class predominately of dolts, but that probably oughtn’t be our first resort to an explanation. I suggest we calm down until we can get a clearer picture of what’s gone on. I’m not ready to stop contributing to the Alumni fund of my Alma Mater. Not yet, anyway.
optimysticynic - April 16, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Are we pressured to give good grades? Hell, yes. In my state, public universities have been told explicitly to double the number of graduates by 2020, somehow, some way, they don’t care, just get ‘er done. How is that going to happen? Bigger classes, more passing grades to get ‘em through fast, more waiving of requirements, more transfer credits wink-winked, many work-arounds that are officially not permitted but–special for you–we will permit on an individual basis that then becomes, semester by semester, the unwritten policy. Oh, and we’re admitting more students who are unprepared, unmotivated and have only a vague intention of getting a degree. We, however, care desperately because our jobs and the entire university is on the line. So the student is propped into a standing position over and over, given little nudges, nods and exemptions, and pretty soon, you betcha! Quite a few new stone-dumb “graduates.” Demoralzing for everyone concerned, including the students, especially the good ones. The legislature, however, loves it since they are education-haters anyway and are finally in a position of power to stick it to all them dang teachers that disrespected them in high school…
yvonne18 - April 23, 2010 at 2:52 am
Interestingly, I was criticized, and not “grandfathered,” where other visiting lecturer typers were kept on, bedcause as a creative writing professor, I was and remain uninterested in giving grades. Because c.w. profs didn’t eroticize grades in lieu of commentary and hundreds of hours of one-omn-one tutorials, it was held against me later that I graded too easily. Lots of people who were trained in the old days as creative writing teachers also felt grades were meaninglesss, even though very few people are willing to give 20+ undergrad cw students an hour every fortnight, as I did. Now, I simply bought a mirror and watch myself starve….B.Y.Zynger
yvonne18 - April 23, 2010 at 3:11 am
21. revisited Please disregard my bad typos above due to eye problems!! A little too creative!!