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Are your students “back to normal”?

Brian Leiter

The NYT recently ran an op-ed about college students "not being OK" two years into the pandemic.  A colleague elsewhere who sent it to me added this observation:  "In my large required class, teaching was pretty dismal this term: endless absurd excuses, academic integrity issues etc.  Maybe a good discussion topic, when you are blogging more regularly again."

What have readers noticed about their undergraduate students?  I teach almost exclusively graduate students, and have not noticed significant changes (although one third of both my classes this quarter were out with Covid  at one point or another!), but readers are free to comment on their graduate students as well.

 

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40 responses to “Are your students “back to normal”?”

  1. might quit soon

    I don't know if it's due to the pandemic or some other cause, but my students are just as described in the op-ed. It's the worst I've ever seen. Among my intro students, roughly a third either failed or had to be convinced to withdraw. They just don't do the work, despite both lenient deadlines and my being practically begging them to turn things in. And the mindlessness has increased exponentially. By 'mindlessness' I have in mind not stupidity, but just a refusal to think in any form. For example, showing up late 10 or more days and not being aware that they were late.

    Reply
  2. Paul Schofield

    I teach at Bates College (a small liberal arts college with competitive admissions). I don't think the students are doing ok. I sometimes give an assignment and only half to two-thirds turn it in. Some students ask for extensions, but many do not. It's often hard to get students to respond at all when they have missing work. I've had students just disappear and quit answering emails without withdrawing from the course. I've had an issue with so many students asking for extensions that, were I to grant them, I wouldn't be able to get my grading done in time to submit grades. Students make appointments and simply don't show up. All of this has been accompanied by more anxiety around grades than I've ever experienced before–challenging grades, complaints about assignments, desperate pleas for last-minute meetings, etc.

    I am certain there is an increase in mental and emotional health issues among the students. I strongly suspect that this doesn't explain all of it, though. There seems also to have a been a cultural shift that explains some of this. I've found it increasingly difficult to teach well under these conditions, and anecdotally I know a lot of teachers who agree. I don't really know what to do.

    Reply
  3. Anonymous Prof

    I teach a state university in the United States. I have experienced similar issues as others: reduced attendance, lower quality of work, a higher proportion of students simply not turning in work, higher anxiety, etc. That being said, I do not want to overstate the problem. Most of my students are still doing OK; some are still thriving.

    The op-ed in the NYT hypothesizes about students developing poor study habits and losing out on learning during the Spring of 2020 and academic year that followed (2020-21). However, most students in my introductory classes were in high school during that time. So I wonder whether the move to remote learning and possible lowering of academic standards during students' final years of high school has contributed to this. Many students are just not prepared for normal college-level work.

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  4. high school teacher

    I teach at a highly-ranked public high school, and my colleagues and I see similar behavior from students. More and more, students simply neglect to do their work, with no explanation. There is far more absenteeism, and while cheating has always been an issue, students are far more blatant about it than I can ever remember. The administration and counseling department look with increasing disapproval on any sorts of deadlines for work or firm behavioral expectations. You rarely hear anyone suggest that teaching students to meet deadlines and establishing uniform expectations for student behavior might actually help them feel "okay."

    All this is to say that Anonymous Prof is right to suspect a lowering of standards in high school as a cause of the current issues, and that you can expect things to get worse.

    Reply
  5. Justin Kalef

    I taught over five hundred students last year, all in general education courses. I've taught the same courses before. Yes, the students were just as described last year. But, to echo what others above have already said, I have seen trends moving pretty steadily in this direction for about a decade now, little by little.

    No doubt, more students than usual were in crisis or disengaged or depressed during the lockdown, and that explains some part of what's going on. But at most, it served to accelerate some long-term trends. What the writer of the article explains could very well describe my students from five or even ten years ago.

    Here's one memorable exchange I had with a student the semester before the pandemic hit: I assigned quizzes each week, and took steps to make it virtually impossible to pass them if one hadn't done the reading but quite easy to earn a perfect score if one had. This student complained that the quizzes were way too hard. I asked him whether he had done the reading, and he admitted that he hadn't. "But," he continued, "I'm now a senior, and I've never had this problem before." I told him that, unless he got hold of the text and started doing the reading, he should expect to keep failing every single quiz. He ended up doing better, but approached me after class to tell me that, in all his years at university, he had never even got hold of a copy of the textbook except for my course. I asked him how he had passed his courses. And what about the courses he had taken in which all the readings were put online? He said he had never found it necessary to do those readings, either, and that his grades were nonetheless 'pretty good across the board'. I think this speaks volumes about the motivational set many of our students arrive with — and more important, that is cultivated in them by absurdly lax professors and deans. This student took 40 courses, and only _one_ was taught by someone who would fail students who didn't do any readings whatsoever? And it's not as though these students are focusing extra-hard in class to make up for what they're not doing at home. Walk into virtually any undergraduate course, sit in the back row, and watch the screens. Nearly everyone is doing something irrelevant to the course: watching videos, chatting with friends (often on two screens at once!), and so on.

    Unfortunately, the reaction of many deans and professors to the pandemic has apparently been to make the standards even _more_ lax than they already were when this was going on. I have to wonder how much of that explains the drop to even further lows.

    One other factor that deserves mention here, I think, is this new practice students have of making online groups for all the students in their courses on WhatsApp, GroupMe, etc. and then using these for two purposes: 1. Engaging in rampant academic dishonesty on all homework, quizzes, and (if the security is low enough) exams, and 2. Keeping a running commentary going whose purpose is to mock and disparage the professor, often while class is in session. This is a fairly new development, and I suspect that most professors have no idea of the scale and boldness of these cheating factories students are probably setting up in their courses. A good reading on the topic:

    https://crumplab.com/articles/blog/post_994_5_26_22_cheating/index.html?fbclid=IwAR2CO0nAyK3SkZlwk6modrIkqalOFu1BsxuThd9Id0kyxhaiWDj9cma6Vkk

    A possible silver lining to this dark cloud is that, if enough light is cast on what is going on here, we might get our act together and crack down on it before the whole thing falls apart. There are some good solutions available, but at present they face collective action problems.

    Reply
  6. Dean C. Rowan

    I'm a librarian at a law school, hence the students I see generally have the wherewithal to self-select and take the initiative to consult me in the first place. I'd say half the students choose to meet remotely, half in person, but in either case for salutary reasons. The former enjoy the flexibility, the latter the return to normal-ish. While I am aware of a general malaise about the law school–for all I know it's mere projection–I am uniformly impressed with the students with whom I meet. Their eagerness and capacity to learn are, as always, impressive. This goes not only for the law students, but for the small number of undergraduates who seek assistance from the law library. If my experience is typical these days for librarians, then one factor explaining the behaviors observed by teachers, the bridge too far for students during a pandemic, is the expectation of regular attendance.

    Reply
  7. milton

    I teach at a highly ranked university. For the most part, students are "back," and seem more eager than ever to learn. But in addition to the phenomena others have mentioned, I've seen an increase in students going on the offensive when they don't do their work. The way this works, usually, is pretty simple: instead of doing the reading/assignments, come up with a social-justicey rationale for not doing them. (The author's identity, or their other work, is a natural place to build such a rationale.) That way, you can be actually be a *hero* for not doing the work!

    Reply
  8. Samuel Elgin

    I only started teaching during covid – so my comparison to pre-pandemic teaching is limited. However, I think (and really hope) that the current environment is abnormal. I teach large lecture classes, where maybe 1/5 of students enrolled actually show up. The lectures are recorded – so in principle they could be viewed online, but judging by the number of views, many students have stopped engaging with the class entirely. Students have complained about the quantity of reading, which, in my view, is very reasonable (on the order of 20 pages prior to each of two lectures per week). My grades were far more generous during the pandemic than I would ordinarily intend – and I offered many accommodations (such as open note tests) which made the class easier. I've had significant pressure from students to maintain the previous standards and accommodations despite the return to in-person learning. While few students have said this explicitly, my impression is that many think that a situation with minimal learning 'worked' for them during the pandemic (at least for classes that don't bear directly on their careers) – and they don't really see a reason why they should have to start now. I certainly hope that this is unusual, and beyond enforcing standards it's not clear what I can do as an individual professor. If anyone has any recommendations for how to motivate students in this environment it would be much appreciated!

    Reply
  9. Robert A Gressis

    The rationale I've been hearing more of lately for not doing work or not showing up is: mental health. As in, "I'm having a bad mental health day, so I'm not going to make it to class. Please excuse my absence and work requirements." The problem with this, of course, is that I have no idea what the students mean when they talk about "bad mental health"; so, I don't know that I should excuse it. But on the other hand, it feels (to me, at least) too intrusive to pry. I'm really not sure what to do about this.

    The other thing I think I've been seeing, and this is in line with Justin's comment above, is that not only is cheating rampant, but it no longer, for many students, has anything like a moral valence. My students cheerfully tell me that they cheat in other classes, and some have even told me that they cheat in my class (seriously!). I think, to them, cheating at school is like bluffing in poker. If the professor calls you on it, then you lose, but it's not, like, a bad thing. It's just what one does to succeed at school.

    Reply
  10. disgruntled logic TA

    My experience is similar to most of the above commenters, both in the post-lockdown class I taught independently, and as a logic TA this most recent semester. The "mindlessness" described by might quit soon seems, unfortunately, particularly apt; it was particularly glaring when teaching baby logic. Also, one of the starkest differences I've noticed is how many more students are on their phones in the middle of lecture or recitation, without even bothering to hide it. I even noticed students looking at their laptop *with earbuds in their ears* during the Prof's lecture! In this connection, this bit from the op-ed echoes my own experience: "In my classes, it often seemed as if my students thought they were still on Zoom with their cameras off, as if they had muted themselves."

    I'm not sure what to do about all of this. I am teaching a course in the second half of the summer in-person and I am seriously considering having a no-screen policy. I'd never done this in the previous courses I'd taught or in my recitations, but I'm worried all the distractions are destroying many of my students' engagement. I'd be interested to know whether others have instituted such a policy post-lockdown with any success.

    Reply
  11. Aaron Preston

    I teach undergraduates, and have observed the same problems disucssed in the Op-Ed and in the comments above. As others have noted, this is largely continuous with trends that have been developing for a decade or more, but the pandemic and related phenomena seem to have accelerated their development markedly. To give one example, in a required freshman course of 20 students this past spring, more than half were in a near perpetual state of personal and academic crisis, and either unwilling or unable to take advantage of any leniency and help offered to them.

    Reply
  12. Debbie

    I teach at a large public university and I have noticed that more students than usual are not doing the work and/or not showing up to class. But on the whole it's a mixed bag. Last fall, the first time back on campus with full classrooms, my f2f class full of freshmen students was wild. They were chatter boxes and unruly. I was constantly asking them to pay attention, put their masks on, and put their phones away. Some were really struggling with the work and I had quite a few who tested positive for covid and had to attend via Zoom (what a nightmare!). In contrast, my f2f students were excellent with a few exceptions. But there are some students who are really struggling as a result of all of the chaos of the last two years. And as "Anonymous Prof" indicated, many students aren't prepared for college. My heart goes out to these students.

    Reply
  13. nordic

    I am in northern Europe, where covid ended early 😉 I have not seen a big change in the students I teach. They are slightly more inclined to miss lectures, but the quality of student work is still the same. I am generally pleased with what I can get them to learn. The lockdowns here have not been very restrictive.

    Reply
  14. Steven DeLay

    I have to say that in 2018 I was truly shocked to find what I found where I had been hired as a postdoc. At the time, I had spent the previous two years an independent scholar away from university campuses entirely. And prior to that, I had lived a considerable stretch of time as a graduate student, where I only very infrequently interacted with the undergraduates in a classroom setting. So my last sustained stretch with a campus undergraduate community was 2010, when I had finished my own undergraduate work. I remember having the distinct feeling upon setting foot on the campus that the place felt the way a junior high school had when I had been growing up in the nineties. It was the oddest atmosphere–almost like a sleep-away camp or something. It just didn't at all feel the way a serious university community should. A number of the comments in this thread highlight what made me feel the way I did then, and evidently it has only worsened.

    Reply
  15. doris

    I have long had a no screen policy (with exceptions for documented special needs).

    I strongly advice doing this; as I explain to my students, the science suggests it is better for learning outcomes — and also better for the instructor's cardiovascular health.

    There will be some "scofflaws" (probably more in/post pandemic) and you will have to commit to calling them on it — depending on the energy you have for such tedious labor on a given day. There may be some resistance, but you do have leverage here: lots of students will not be pleased that class has ground to a halt because someone will not put away their device.

    Reply
  16. Steven DeLay

    Also, I should add that I think it would be a mistake for anyone to dismiss the kind of concerned comments regarding the state of the students on the basis of such comments supposedly being little more than the impressions of instructors. For what it's worth, I had a number of my top students come to me in office hours to confide that they found the campus environment very dissatisfying. Many of them were contemplating transferring, some did. But it seems to me that the conditions which led them to feel so isolated from their less prepared and less serious peers would have been similar elsewhere too.

    Reply
  17. Midwest prof

    My undergrad students at a midsize Midwest state college seemed grateful to return to face to face instruction. I've never had attendance or device use issues in my classes before and didn't have them this term. (That may be because I have a strict attendance policy which I enforce; also, a strict in-class device use policy stated on my syllabus. Cell phones may not be taken out for any purpose; and I reserve the right to ban laptops and tablets if I see anyone using them for any purpose than to take notes. I find that if I point to this written policy on the first day of class, adding 'You don't want to be the jerk who is responsible for your classmates not being allowed to use their devices', I get good compliance.) At my school there was no mask mandate (idiotic), but I generally had 95+% compliance (though there was always a maskless jerk who insisted on sitting in the front row breathing on me all semester). What I did notice is an uptick in SDS (Student Disability Services) allowing students to ask for suspect 'special accommodations' which I've never heard of before. (As in: I'm allowed to get up and leave class whenever I feel I 'need to'.) Also TONS of students on meds. (I'm sure due to a lot of helicopter parenting.) I agree there is a mental health crisis on our campuses, but I think it's caused by lack of exercise & lack of sleep, but also addiction to social media (all three are related of course). Another factor is the Repug State Legislature hacking away year after year at our budget, which entails that many of my students must work two jobs to pay their (actually very low) tuition.

    Reply
  18. Grad Student

    With all the caution needed, and emphasizing that I'm only in my first year of grad program, I must say that I feel kind of disappointed from the standards of my peers, in line with what people wrote above. I should add perhaps that I'm studying in a top PGR program, so one cannot waive it by saying that I went to a bad grad school. I really don't know if it's related to the pandemic and how the situation here was like a few years ago. I do feel that the fact that I'm older on average than my peers is part of what explains the differences in our perspectives.

    Reply
  19. Mark Engleson

    Accomodations like leaving class do have legitimate justifications. For example, diabetic students may need to take insulin. SDS usually advises blinding faculty to these things. I have recommended to students they are straightforward about issues like this, because, fair or unfair, the reaction here is typical. If the student just tells you, you're going to have a very different attitude– obviously, if I were still in the classroom, I would want a student to attend to this. I understand why SDS offices have their approach, but the student is well-served to approach their professor and give a very concise explanation.

    Reply
  20. Anonymous

    I teach at a midsize, mid-level university in the Midwest. The Op-Ed in the NY Times coincides with my experience, and my colleagues’ experience. Class attendance is poor, whether in face-to-face classes or in Zoom or hybrid classes. Students’ level of interest and engagement is low, irrespective of topic or course level (i.e., upper division students are about as “checked out” as introductory level students). The quality of work, generally, is middling to poor. Requests for accommodations have increased greatly – from a few students per class to at least a third to half of every class. These were trends before Covid and quarantine and have accelerated since Winter/Spring 2020.

    Reply
  21. RecentGrad

    I graduated this year from a competitive national research university and thought it would be helpful to offer a small amount of student perspective. I do not dispute the observations that cheating is up and quality of work is down. But I think this is almost surely a product of the pandemic—not merely an acceleration of a decades long trend. This year, I and my fellow students all noticed that students were dropping out of extracurricular sat a far higher rate than normal. Students simply didn’t have the bandwidth to do anything but the minimum. This was utterly abnormal at my school; students were frequently involved in half a dozen extracurricular each year. I also would emphasize that a large number of my peers had trouble completing assignments despite wanting to do well. Cum laude (and above) students were having trouble writing papers as quickly as they were used to. All of this is to say that I agree with many of the remarks above. However, I doubt student apathy is the root cause.

    Reply
  22. High School Teacher

    I teach at a competitive high school. I'm sorry to say that we just have little incentive to fight a lot of these battles, and we're sending them off to college thinking deadlines are meaningless and respectful, studious behavior is optional. A poll by our school newspaper had 78% admitting to cheating. When I caught two students for cheating last year, and even had a confession from one, the other's parents said we couldn't prove there wasn't hacking involved, and my administration acquiesced. Same goes for extended absences for mental health.

    A silver lining: Their declining mental health and attention spans aside, by the end of the year many of them got the message when you held them to a high standard of academic and personal behavior. You just have to talk to them like they're kindergartners some times. But I have them for 180 classes.

    Reply
  23. Steven Hales

    I teach at a 2nd-tier small state university. Non-compulsory attendance is the worst I have ever seen in my career, at all levels, as is a failure to complete work without even a fig leaf of an excuse. I do think there has been a steady increase over the past several years of both cheating (the earlier analogy to bluffing in poker is apt) and an expectation that faculty will provide an endless supply of crutches: study guides, PowerPoint slides, rubrics, etc. I also think that the pandemic kicked these trends into overdrive. Many of my colleagues here both inside and outside of philosophy have said the same thing.

    Reply
  24. Midwest prof

    In reply to Mark Engleson: These new SDS accommodations seem to be for students who can just report feeling 'stressed'; it's not for a familiar medical reason like a diabetic who may need to pop out of class to check their insulin levels or have a snack (I've had lots of students like that; and as you note, students do usually eventually share their situation once a level of trust is established early on in term, though I don't ask and it's not required of course for them to share such details). What I was commenting on are students who, with the approval of SDS (and evidently, their parents) leave class about 10 minutes in, almost *every day*, and don't return to class, because they are 'feeling anxious'. So 'feeling anxious' in a class is now a medical disability. What I'm concerned about is a kind of creeping 'medicalization' of the undergrad experience. It's true that many of them are anxious; but that is a result of staring into phones for 40+ hrs./week instead of having conversations and looking human beings in the eye or reading or writing or playing or jogging or sleeping (or having sex)! Consequently, they are emotionally immature for their age. When they feel bad, they go to SHS where they are prescribed drugs (if they weren't on them already in HS).

    Reply
  25. Daniel A Kaufman

    This has been my exact experience. Steven nailed it.

    I noticed many of these trends beginning well before Covid, especially the cheating and the expectation of aides of every variety and stripe. The bizarre-and-hard-to-imagine-organic explosion in alleged mental-illness/disorder cases seems to me to have been going on for about five or six years. But Covid made them all much worse.

    The number of my students going through every manner of "identity-issues" has also exploded in the last five or six years or so and also is obviously non-organic. Wildly excessive online life has a good bit to do with all of this, I would suspect. That, and the abdication of authority on the parts of adults, en masse.

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  26. Daniel A Kaufman

    Not only is it not "surely," it is definitely not. The number of professors reporting these trends since *at least* 2016 or so, from every manner of institution is far too large.

    There were two years, well before Covid, when I had so much rampant plagiarizing — just copying stuff word-for-word off of the internet — that if I'd graded honestly, over 50% of the class would have gotten 0's and been reported to the Academic Integrity office. It forced me to completely change my assessment methods. And the "everyone is mentally ill, has a personality disorder, or is ADHD" goes back even longer than that.

    Reply
  27. Anonymous Prof

    I find the armchair diagnosing, etiologizing, and vetting of mental health issues from those who (I assume) have no medical or psychological training to be arrogant and entirely unhelpful.

    Reply
  28. Preston Stovall

    Most of my teaching over the last few years has either been online, or in the Czech Republic. Consequently, I can't speak to how things are on North American campuses in face-to-face teaching. But on the issue of students expecting special dispensations, I've found that students respond well to an up-front and consistent commitment to the policies of the course. I tell students that higher education is, among other things, preparation for entrance into professional life, and that in the professions one must either meet one's deadlines or let one's colleagues down. Consequently, I'm rather lenient with extensions and adjustments if they're suitably requested, and I make whatever allowances are called for by individual cases. But otherwise, I expect them to complete the work on time, and to put the necessary effort in the first time, and I grade pretty harshly, particularly at the start of the term. So long as students understand what the course calls for, and make adjustments according to the feedback they receive, their grades invariably rise in the second half of the term.

    YMMV, of course, but students seem to appreciate this kind of attitude, and I wonder whether we're not doing young people a disservice by acquiescing to the "college is the new junior high" stance. And concerning social media, there's good evidence that the upper-end of social media use is associated with an alarming uptick in self-harm and depression among young people since 2012. A couple of overviews:

    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1diMvsMeRphUH7E6D1d_J7R6WbDdgnzFHDHPx9HXzR5o/edit

    https://ledger.humanetech.com/

    "Public health crisis" may be too strong, but I suspect that educators (across the board) need to give much more attention to pedagogy if this issue is going to be competently addressed.

    Reply
  29. Aaron Preston

    Regarding the onset of these issues, some of them (particularly the rise in mental-heath issues, and higher-ed's overly-accommodating response) were discussed by Lukianoff and Haidt in their _Atlantic_ article "The Coddling of the American Mind" back in 2015, and in their 2018 book of the same name (see esp. chs 7-10). So definitely a pre-pandemic onset, but also definitely a pandemic-induced acceleration/exacerbation of these pre-existing conditions. Additionally, their proposed etiology for this situation (which in my view merits designation as a "public health crisis"), as well as their recommendations for "treatment," are consistent with much that has been said in this thread.

    Reply
  30. Northeast prof

    I teach at a midlevel midsize state university in the Northeast. We went virtual, like everyone else, in March 2020, and we stayed almost wholly virtual through the end of the 20-21 academic year. My experience during that period was as if we were all engaged in a kind of pretense, everyone acting as if the virtual classes were a perfectly adequate substitute for in-person courses. The university wanted to keep charging tuition, the students wanted to get the credential, the faculty wanted to continue to get paid, and so we all pretended that the university was continuing to provide a quality college education, just now virtually. I think a lot of students, particularly those taking out loans and/or working to pay for school, ended up getting very cynical (and understandably so), and cynicism is difficult to give up once you develop it. Why should they show up interested, engaged, and ready to do real work–that is, ready to get an education–when the past couple of years has shown them, they think, that that's not the point? Just go through the motions with a minimum of effort to get what you need (the credential) and get out of there; my understanding is that many of them think (rightly or wrongly) that that's how many of their professors have been approaching online teaching, and when you think this of your professors, it's difficult to sustain the sense that the point of college is to get an education as well as the faith that you might genuinely get something out of college if you showed up interested, engaged, and ready to work.

    Reply
  31. Gary

    Something that I don't think has been mentioned above is the effect of the "no homework" movement of the past few years. I teach at a small, four-year, private university in a major US city. When I mentioned to a colleague who teaches in the school of education at my university that it seemed like my students were less prepared for their courses than four or five years ago, she replied that she thinks the decrease is connected to the "no homework" movement in our city's high schools. (I don't know how widespread this practice is in the rest of the country or world.) The practice of not giving any homework to high school students started in earnest, according to my colleague, four or five years ago, so it's possible that the first-year students we're seeing in college now have gone their entire high school career without being required to do homework. Some of these students simply don't know how to learn outside a classroom since they're not accustomed to having to study and learn on their own without a teacher present. Another colleague who teaches literature and has taught at the high-school level told me that many students come through the "no homework" high schools without having read any novels because any reading that's assigned to students has to be completed in class. If she had wanted to assign a 400-page novel, she had to give up a couple weeks of classroom instruction just so her students would have time to read the book in class, and that wasn't a viable tradeoff. With all this in mind, I plan to talk with students in my first-year classes this fall about why they need to study outside of class, what it means to come to class prepared, how they can do this, etc.

    Reply
  32. Justin Kalef

    This 'no homework' idea is just bizarre. What a revelation, to hear that that's going on!

    It might help explain something I've heard from a couple of students: they expect not to have to do any work on their courses over the weekend (including both Friday and Sunday), especially over a long weekend.

    A couple of further comments on Robert Gressis' post (Number 9 above):

    1. The comment on cheating becoming removed from any stigma or shame seems spot-on to me. I've been struck in recent years not only by how widespread cheating of all sorts is, but how mindlessly and openly it's often done. Such is the harvest we reap from bringing in students from schools whose standards are so poor that students have never done work outside of class (though they have often been given top grades), give the job of orienting new students to administrators with no investment in promoting studiousness and excellence, and then turning academic dishonesty hearings from something to be terrified about into something most cheats will never face and, if they do face it, tend to be given punishments so lenient that it's just the 'cost of doing business'. The result is that professors are left on their own to put the terror back into getting caught cheating. It's not long ago that there used to be a number of silly comedies about students at university trying to avoid getting expelled from school by the dean, sometimes for poor grades. Anyone watching those movies today must wonder what on earth is going on.

    2. I, also, have seen a big spike in the number of students who tell me that they have anxiety, stress, or some such thing, and that they therefore have to miss class. I'm sure that some of them are telling the truth, and that these excuses are sometimes reasonable; but I have little doubt that many of them are completely made up. If students will engage in widespread cheating on homework and exams with no moral qualms, why would they have qualms about lying about psychological problems? It's another case of finding the easiest path to success. My approach to this has been to structure my course in such a way that students get a few free passes built in, whoever they are, with no need for any excuses. When a student sends me an email about some mental health problem, my stock response is something like, "Really sorry to hear you're having a rough time. You know my policy from the syllabus: this will count as one of your free passes. Good luck with everything, and I'll see you when you're back." Once the student's free passes have been exhausted, no further excuses help them at all without a letter from the dean's office. Fortunately, I trust the main dean who looks after these things. If she retires and gets replaced by a pity-oriented dean, I'm not sure what I can do to make my courses fair and rigorous.

    Deans at most colleges and universities seem to have jettisoned their culture of excellence long ago. Now it seems that even the culture of… standards is being replaced by an administrative culture of _pity_, much to the long-term detriment of the students whose short-term happiness these newer administrators seem obsessed with serving. I hope we can help dial this back.

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  33. Canadian Graduate Student

    We haven't really had a fully post-Covid term yet where I teach, but I also haven't noticed a major difference. We were pretty generous during the pandemic, but the students were not unusually lazy or demanding.

    Another comment made me think of this, but I was scrolling through a friend's Tumblr page yesterday, and there was a popular post about how "cheating is not ethically wrong" on the rationale that grades are arbitrary gatekeeping or something. Might speak to some of what is going on for some of you.

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  34. Jason Brennan

    At my classes at Georgetown, the qualify of student work is about the same. In my first-year undergrad class and MBA class I team-taught, engagement was way up. In the other classes, engagement was way down. I make attendance optional in some classes, though I reward attendance. Attendance was down dramatically in the spring after the halfway mark.

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  35. Lawrence Cahoone

    My experience is much like most of the other commentators, although not nearly as awful as some. I would say general laxity increased a notch or two, plus the small number of students having big trouble doubled or tripled. But three other points. First, in addition to student laxity, I saw a serious uptick in the number of students with anxiety, depression, terrible family problems. Not just excuses, but problems I can see from students I know. (One who had written a pretty good, but not very clear, paper burst into tears because I suggested she go to the writing center before turning in her next one. I've had students cry before, but never over something so trivial.) Second, the students have now been trained to excuse themselves from in-person class not only if they test positive, or if they have cold/flu symptoms, but if they have been near anyone who tested positive, and even if they have been near anyone with symptoms who MIGHT test positive. I fear that could mean permanent hybrid teaching. Third, students (and the administration) are getting used to the remote format, with cloud-available recorded classes (hence transcripts, if lousy ones), teaching platforms like Canvas, and expected availability of professors on Zoom anytime. So, while I have always told my students how to calculate their grade from returned work, this semester several repeatedly asked me "what do I need to get on the next paper/exam?" My wife pointed out to me that Canvas calculates that for them (I don't use Canvas). Everything in the environment is telling students that in-person real time listening and speaking, and whatever content is communicated at such times, is not essential to learning (what is essential is online). Many, fortunately, have not gotten the message. But a lot have, usually the ones who can least afford it.

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  36. Thomas Nadelhoffer

    I teach at a state liberal arts college. I have remained online after the pandemic. My classes meet on Zoom, but they can watch the recorded videos as well. I have designed things so that students can complete the course purely synchronously, pure asynchronously, or some combination of the two. I don't take attendance. Instead, I make participation an important part of their grade (30%). I provide them with several ways to participate–asking questions out loud in class, posting comments in the chat during class, or contributing to the course blog. There is no doubt I get far more engagement from students now than I did when my classes were in-person. And since I care more about participation than attendance anyway, this suits me just fine. I also give "48 hour no questions asked" extensions on assignments, a policy which the students don't abuse (that is, the overwhelming majority of students don't request extensions even though I have made it easy to get them). I realize my experience may be atypical.

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  37. Howard B

    I'd speculate that today's students treat grades like shopping- school is more a consumer experience than educational- it's like Amazon and the teachers play the role of the delivery man
    Also, this is my pet theory, everybody practices a kind of narcissism, not in the sense of inflated ego, but in the sense of being the center of their social world- so they don't get other POVs, blame this on smart phones- find a way to treat school like a job, where they are like employees and not customers

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  38. Steven Hales

    I strongly suspect that the variance in responses on this topic tracks the selectivity of the responder's home institution. If you mostly teach bright, driven, resilient students, it's quite a different experience from those of us who don't.

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  39. Steven DeLay

    I think you're probably right that, to some extent, the current overall state of student performance is higher at "elite" institutions than it is elsewhere. Still, I think there has been a marked decline in the quality of such performance over the years, across all institutions.

    For instance, from 2005 to 2010, I was at a solid, but non-prestigious, state university. My fellow philosophy and political science majors were much more serious and committed to their studies than are the students I mostly encountered at my postdoc in 2018. Cheating for us was not at all common, and while there was a sort of cynicism even then, we still cared about learning, not just the grades. Of course, this is anecdotal. That said, in my experience, at least, even among students at a non-elite institution, most of whom were not planning to attend graduate school, and who were deeply immersed in party culture and beach life, there was a dedication back then to learning that I just don't see today, even at "elite" institutions.

    People came to class (though I didn't always!), turned in assignments on time, listened during lecture, asked questions, and didn't complain about the workload. The idea, for example, of students demanding a "study guide" for an exam or a power-point summary of the course contents was unthinkable. Everyone I knew at the time would have been embarrassed to ask the instructor for anything like that. Now, it seems, it's the expectation, to the point that many students are flabbergasted when they encounter an instructor who doesn't provide them with such things.

    These differences, I think, underscore the "consumer" mentality of education that Howard draws attention to above.

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  40. Thomas Nadelhoffer

    Steven Hales,

    I can't speak for anyone else, but I teach at a non-selective state liberal arts college in SC, which has one of the worst public education systems in the US. But like I said, I realize that my experience may not be in line with what most people experience. I do wonder how much of the variance in experiences can be explained by whether professors place a lot of emphasis on attendance (which in turn influences how many excuses they get, etc.).

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