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[macadamia]

I have read a bit in the favourite student email thread and I came upon this post:

My syllabus is now 14 pages long with a checklist of "Things you absolutely positively must know right now!" sheet because of this kind of thinking and an inability to read all the first 13 pages of details in a timely manner

I am quite aware how this thing gets started. I, myself, have been part of the "what I would have liked to know at the beginning of the first semester"-movement who lobbied for hand-outs to beginning students. But from what I see on these boards and elsewhere, this does not go in the right direction.

When I was a student, instructions for signing up for labs would be put on a little piece of paper in the second floor of some building, and I would hear of it by word of mouth. So now, students get good instructions on a website.
When I started to teach, it was understood that answers to questions had to be justified and that it was part of your learning to know what constitutes a good or complete answer. Now, we write a little essay on top of each exam sheet.

But what happens? Students do not fully read or follow the instructions, students complain about losing points even though the grading scheme is transparent and public, students do not talk to each other as much. In short, students do not feel as responsible as when I was a student. And I do think that this is partly due to the fact that they are treated as children who have to have everything organized for them by their teachers.

A 14-page syllabus sounds to me like a legal document to protect against law-suits or higher-ups, like the kind of stuff you do not read when you install a little program. The same kind of feeling may lead to students not reading it.

(Note: Polly_mers post is just the reason for me to finally post about this, I do not think there is anything unusual about her syllabus, I just do not like this trend.)

So, my questions here are:
Do you agree with me or do you find long syllabi useful for the students in the long term?
Furthermore: What do you think can be done to make student feel responsible for their own learning? And what can be done by teachers alone if the system does not care?

[mountainguy]

My syllabi tend to be in the ballpark of 5 or 6 pages: one page for a course description, one page of course policies, one page of assignment information, and a two or three page course schedule. I try to make the course policies stern but elastic--(ie, "All work must be submitted on time to receive credit")--rather than trying to list every single thing I don't want students to do. It's worked well for me, although I realize one has to adjust to the expectations of students and admincritters at a particular school.

Also, I think I may re-institute a syllabus quiz next semester. I hate to do that, but I'm tired of having to answer student questions again and again that are clearly explained in the syllabus.

[anonymath]

My syllabi get longer and longer for two reasons.

1) Required language from school/university - There are at least three pages of required language that everyone in my school must have in their syllabi. This includes the university's academic calendar and disability services notification among other things.

2) CYA issues - At my university, if it's not in the syllabus, it does not exist. Even if you've documented that you told the class the penalty for plagiarism is XYZ on multiple occasions, you have the dates/times you discussed the penalty for plagiarism, and you have another class member as a witness that Dr. Anonymath did discuss the penalty for plagiarism on those dates/times, the Academic Honesty Committee won't allow you to penalize the obviously plagiarizing student if the exact penalty isn't listed in your syllabus. Don't even get me started on the difference between posting "you will fail your first plagiarized assignment" and "you will get a zero on the first plagiarized assignment." That needed to be spelled out in the syllabus too, even though it was discussed thoroughly in class.

To make the students more accountable, it would be nice if the professor's course policies were actually respected (by both student and committee), and a "he said, she said" between a student and their professor automatically sided with the trusted professor rather than the obviously guilty student.

That will never happen at my university.

[csgirl]

I find the length of syllabi these days to be amazing. When I was a university student in the 80's, I never saw a syllabus of more than 2 pages, and most were just 1 page. When I was teaching at a college in the 90's, 2 pages was the norm. I worked in industry for a few years, and just came back to teaching - and wow! The syllabi at my school all seem to be hovering around 6 pages and read like legal contracts.

[rdnttkn]

I still have a number of syllabi from when I was in grad school (early 90s) because I still have my notebooks from the courses I took.  Most are one page but none are more than two.  They are extremely bare bones and there is no mention of things like academic dishonesty statements, etc.

Today I try to keep my syllabi as compact as possible with just the nuts and bolts policies.  At one school I teach at I have it confined to one page (front and back) but at another school, the same syllabus bloats to six total pages because that school has a number of required boilerplate policies and disclosures that must be included in the document.

[bluezebracat]

They read like legal contracts because increasingly, students treat them as such.  

I've also had students, in their written complaints to the department chair, note that they had read the requirements on the syllabus but hadn't understood them till the end of the semester (as in: I knew that we had to do weekly, one page response papers, but I hadn't realized how much work that would be till it was too late to drop the course.)

So even if they read it, they don't get it.

[smokeythebear]

Is this that different than the legalization and over documentation we're encountering everywhere? I don't particularly enjoy having extra pages -- and I wonder if the Env. Sci. people get bothered by the forests being cleared for their syllabi? -- but it doesn't seem that out of step with other parts of society. I guess if everything can come down to legal-style arbitration, then the inevitable result is everything turns into a defensible contract

[fancypants]

My syllabi get longer and longer for two reasons.

1) Required language from school/university - There are at least three pages of required language that everyone in my school must have in their syllabi. This includes the university's academic calendar and disability services notification among other things.

Chime.  There are multiple pages of required language here as well, including several sections that I think are nice to know but would be better stated elsewhere, such as in the course catalog. 

Regarding the CYA issue, I do this too.  While the Admin. at my institution have done a great job backing me up when needed, I don't know that it would have gone so well had I not spelled out everything to the letter in my syllabus.

I've been employing the syllabus quiz (in-class, "open syllabus") in lieu of reading the massive document to them or expecting them to read it on their own, and it's made a fair bit of difference.  When questions come up, I can just tilt my head quizzically and ask "Isn't that in the syllabus?" in my sweetest Southern way, and danged if it doesn't usually get the student to smile and say, "Oh. Yeah."

[polly_mer]

Well, my syllabus for the science for teachers class is now 21 pages (up from the 14 I posted about earlier that Macademia quoted) because those education majors are the ones who will treat it like a legal document.  As Anonymath wrote, I can't just tell the class something even if I do it daily starting from the first day because "It's not in the syllabus so we didn't know."  I'm just too tired to try to make everything be a written, graded assignment so that I can prove they should have known it at some point.

Heaven forbid that I not be explicit on the first day, even though no one will start the big projects until the night before the first draft is due.  An even worse situation is that I might give slightly different wording as clarification to various students off the top of my head during the course of the semester and have to deal with that panic.  So my syllabus (to conform with the university requirements of all major assignments being part of the syllabus handed out no later than the second day of classes) now has almost 8 pages on how to do the final paper including not just the half page of requirements, but also all the picky details that students always ask like the accepted fonts with sizes and margins and the grading rubric tables with exquisite detail of things like the difference between an excellent and a good in the category of organization and clarity.

My syllabus for that class has to be like that as a CYA to address the evaluations that I have been getting about unclear grading and unclear expectations.  Those students want rubrics for everything so I am being student-centered and helping my students by clarifying my expectations.  I expect a few students will be helped by having everything in front of them as a written document from day one.  I expect far more students to not read it even the handy one-page things-you-absolutely-must-know summary that we will go over in class on day 1, whine about the grade they earn, and then pout when I point out the relevant passages that clearly state how that grade was earned.  I also expect a handful of students to play rules lawyer (like the difference between earning a zero on a plagiarized assignment and failing a plagiarized assignment), which is why some of the sections are written as they are after much consultation on wording.

My syllabus for my upper-level physics class is four pages because of all the boilerplate from the student handbook required by the university.  If I had my druthers, I wouldn't hand out a syllabus at all.  I would put my name and contact information on the board, explain that we would be having homework due every Friday (no late work accepted, lowest two dropped), and state that grades are based primarily on three tests and final exam with rounding from the homework, quizzes, and class participation.  However, I cannot do that here because of university rules so the shortest I can manage is four pages.

I have given up on syllabus quizzes because the students just fail them, whine about failing, and it doesn't accomplish anything that I need it to do.

[anonymath]

I also expect a handful of students to play rules lawyer (like the difference between earning a zero on a plagiarized assignment and failing a plagiarized assignment), which is why some of the sections are written as they are after much consultation on wording.

My personal favorite rules lawyer student story:

I had a student who was taking an online course with me who often turned in assignments after they were due. This was my first time teaching an online course, and I didn't know that you could set the assignment tool to not accept assignments after a certain due date/time. So this student kept turning in her assignments late, by about 5 minutes each time. Now, all assignments were due at 11:59pm Sunday night, so I'm sure she was working on them at the last minute, then turning them in late and hoping I wouldn't catch them. In full CYA mode, every time she turned in the assignment late, I emailed her to tell her the assignment was late, so I would be unable to grade it.  My syllabus clearly stated that I would not accept late assignments for any reason. At the end of the semester, after turning in about a third of her assignments late and not receiving credit for them, she filed a grade grievance against me. Her charge?

Even though the syllabus stated when each assignment was due, and even though it stated that late assignments would not be graded, the syllabus never clearly stated that an assignment turned in after the due date was late.

[polly_mer]

Even though the syllabus stated when each assignment was due, and even though it stated that late assignments would not be graded, the syllabus never clearly stated that an assignment turned in after the due date was late.

<chuckle>

That's a new one, Anonymath, now I'm going to have to go check the precise wording in all of my syllabi. I think I avoided using the word "late" in favor of something like "Assignments will not be accepted past the stated deadline for credit.  Verbal announcement in class and time-stamp on electronic submissions through Blackboard are final declarations of deadlines" since I have had discussions about when something was late.  But I will have to double check if the word "late" is used elsewhere with no definition.

[infopri]

Some of you really scare me with your war stories.

Right now, I teach entirely online, but my syllabus wasn't much different when I taught in the classroom.  It was structured exactly the same way and the differences were limited to some of the details.  My current syllabus is 9 1/2 pages, including 2 1/2 pages that consist of the weekly schedule--so, in other words, 7 pages of actual text, of which two paragraphs (about half a page) is university-required boilerplate (about disabilities and academic integrity).  In the 6 1/2 pages that is me talking to the students, I have very little "policy" or "lawyer" language.  The first page and a half generally describes the course and its objectives, followed by 3 1/2 pages describing the format of the course.  In that 3 1/2 pages, I briefly describe each class activity (lectures, each assignment, class discussion, writing assignments, etc.).  Except for the extensive description of my expectations for class discussion, none of this is spelled out in detail; I leave the details about each assignment to separate handouts that I provide at the appropriate times during the semester, when the students should be starting to work on those assignments.  Then I have about three-quarters of a page describing how the course grade is distributed, explaining the late policy (and no-extra-credit policy), making a few more comments about the written assignments, etc.  Again, I don't provide a lot of detail.  Then there's about three-quarters of a page explaining how to communicate with me, especially because my students are distributed around the globe.

The assignment handouts, on the other hand, do provide great amounts of detail, but again these are not "lawyer documents" or "contracts."  They are mostly how-to instructions, content guidelines, and the like.  They're intended to be helpful to the students, rather than serve as defensive weapons against them.  I do have to point to them a lot, but mostly to answer questions as students work on the assignments, not in defense after I've graded them.

I've been using this approach since I started teaching in the early 1990s.  So far, it has worked well for me.  I've never had a grade dispute/appeal, nor any of the other nightmares some of you describe.  Only once have I had students seriously complain about my grading, and it was a particularly whiny bunch with whom I'd had trouble (of all sorts) all semester.  My evaluations--again, leaving out that one whiny bunch--generally are middle-of-the-pack on the numerical items, and overall quite positive on the open-ended items.  So I'm not inclined to make any changes.

[johnr]

Is this that different than the legalization and over documentation we're encountering everywhere? I don't particularly enjoy having extra pages -- and I wonder if the Env. Sci. people get bothered by the forests being cleared for their syllabi?

Envi. Sci. teacher here.  My syllabi are posted online, I don't print them out.

[etoiledemer]

At the end of the semester, after turning in about a third of her assignments late and not receiving credit for them, she filed a grade grievance against me. Her charge?

Even though the syllabus stated when each assignment was due, and even though it stated that late assignments would not be graded, the syllabus never clearly stated that an assignment turned in after the due date was late.

Head. Desk.

Please tell me the administration laughed.

[duchess_of_malfi]

We are in a big push to reduce copying waste across campus.  I cut 5 pages to reduce my syllabus to the essentials last semester, including a list of more detailed policies vailable in a "Course policies" section on Blackboard.  Each policy there  is a separate item for clarity.   I add an index to Blackboard as a permanent announcement, so I expanded that index to make finding information easier.  The syllabus is now 4 pages including the schedule of readings by date and the paper asssignments. It seems to work so far--no changes in level of student questions or problems--so I will probably continue doing it this way unless problems emerge.