How to Reduce Academic Dishonesty

This morning, I was on a syndicated Canadian radio show to comment about the now well-publicized company that writes college admissions essays, term papers, and theses for students.

The existence of such companies is, alas, not surprising, especially as times get ever tougher, because many people will do what's expedient to get into a good school, get good grades, land a job etc.

That, of course, is why ethically challenged people hire resume writers--to deceive employers into thinking the candidate writes, thinks, and organizes better than s/he, in fact, does. (If that's not the reason, as some resume writers have argued in response to a previous post, then why don't candidates add "This resume was written by Mary Jones, a professional resume writer?" Why don't resume writers, ever eager to get more clients, insist that candidates do so?

In this post, I propose solutions:

To reduce academic dishonesty, if professors made term papers, theses, etc. of greater learning value to the students, many more students would write them rather than pay someone else to write them in their name. After all, few students hire others to do their fieldwork or internship. For example, rather than asking students to write about the significance of the doppelganger in 18th century literature, why not ask them to interview ten people about how they managed to use their liberal arts education to improve their lives?"

Speaking of academic fraud, I know two people who went to Yale Law School. Both got in dishonestly. One wrote an admission essay claiming her father was a terrible sexist pig and she had to fight to conquer that. In fact, her father was a full-fledged feminist. The other student claimed to be Native American, when in fact, she was not.

Here's an approach to improving societal ethics more broadly: Have a K-16 ethics curriculum filled with simulations of real-life ethical dilemmas. That curriculum would also teach the primacy of teaching the students' children that the cosmically ethical choice is always wiser than expediency. And that that must not only be preached but practiced. If a parent preaches ethics but to get a discount, tells a restaurant cashier the child is 12 rather than the true 13, the kid gets the message that expediency trumps ethics.

Of course, colleges have filled even k-12 curriculum with so much arcana that professors deem essential (from the Peloponnesian Wars to quadratic equations), that there's no room in the curriculum. So let's wrest curriculum selection from those trivia-obsessed research professors and replace them with successful people from all walks of life, from ethical businesspeople to social workers, scientists to blue-collar workers.

We'd have a more ethical and better world.

A Good Question About ObamaCare

My wife forwarded this to me.

Let me get this straight . . . .

We're going to be "gifted" with a health care
plan we are forced to purchase and
fined if we don't,

which purportedly covers at least
ten million more people,
without adding a single new doctor,
but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents,

written by a committee whose chairman
says he doesn't understand it,

passed by a Congress that didn't read it but
exempted themselves from it,

and signed by a President who smokes,

with funding administered by a treasury chief who
didn't pay his taxes,

for which we'll be taxed for four years before any
benefits take effect,

by a government which has
already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare,

all to be overseen by a surgeon general
who is obese,

and financed by a country that's broke!

'What could
possibly go wrong?'

Another Example of Illegals Unfairly Benefiting at the Expense of Legal Residents

The ACLU proudly announced today that, thanks to the their efforts, California Supreme Court has ruled that illegals are eligible for in-state tuition at California public (taxpayer-funded) universities.

Great. So now, illegals admitted to Berkeley pay less than those who are legal residents of Arizona. And, of course, with universities' reverse discrimination admissions policies (the so-called "comprehensive admission criteria,") on average, those illegals get in with lower test scores and lower grades, resulting in many more qualified legal applicants being rejected. And illegal students, again at taxpayer expense, use far more than average amount of student services, creating shortages of advising, counseling, tutoring, etc., for legal residents. Despite all that, illegals' graduation rate is far lower than for legal residents--meaning that the taxpayers' investment in them did not pay off in their being professionals, let alone better professionals than if legal residents were admitted. Is this justice?

On Career Counseling and College Counseling

This morning, I was interviewed for an article or series on my thoughts related to career and college counseling. Here are a few ideas you might find helpful:

• Hiring a resume writer is no more ethical than a high school student hiring a professional to write his or her college application essay. Imagine you were looking to hire someone, even if it was a job working with their hands. Wouldn't you appreciate being able to judge how well the applicants organize their thoughts? When an applicant hires a resume writer, s/he gets an unfair advantage--the employer sees the resume writer's thinking and communication skills, not the applicant's. Resume writing is an unethical profession.
• It's far more valid to pick a career or job based on its meeting your career's non-negotiables (e.g., primarily using words, working at home, non-profit work, whatever) than by trying to come up with some career that matches your skills, interests, values, etc. An attempt at the latter usually fails for a variety of reasons (I've written about them HERE,) whereas the former succeeds far more often.
• High school counselors and college admissions people would be far more ethical if they stopped pushing nearly every inquirer to go to college. (They feel particular pressure to do so for "underrepresented" minorities.) Instead, using success-rate statistics as available, they should help the student decide whether s/he'd most likely be successful and happy at a four-year college (which by the way, usually takes much more than four years,) two-year college transfer program, short-term community college training program, apprenticeship, on-the-job learning, or self-employment.
• Career counselors would add far more value if they did not focus on helping people find a career or land a job. Instead, they should focus on helping people succeed in the current job, and learn how to be master users of Google--a window to so much information--if you know how to time-effectively access it.
  

The College Report Card: Key to higher ed accountability

If we require each drug to submit mountains of data to the FDA, if we require each food item to list how much protein, calcium, etc it contains, if we require each tire to have a tread life, traction, and temperature rating molded into its sidewall, shouldn't we require each institution of higher education to post, linked-to from its home page, a College Report Card that presented this information?:

(This version regards bachelor's-degree institutions but, of course, could be adapted to Associate and graduate degree programs, as well as disaggregated for transfer students.)

• Freshman-to-senior average growth in critical thinking, writing, quantitative reasoning, etc. (disaggregated by high school record)

(For you statisticians out there, a variable consisting of pre-post growth embeds significant error variance, but with the large N and that variable being only one of a number of indices of college quality, the wisdom of including a measure of growth outweighs the disadvantage of a large confidence interval. And if that argument is deemed inadequate, a reasonable proxy would be to use senior scores adjusted for high school weighted GPA and SAT score.)

• The results of a recent student satisfaction survey
• Four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates (disaggregated by high school record)
• The percentage of graduates professionally employed, including average salary. (disaggregated by high school record and by major)
• The accreditation team's most recent report on the college.

The first institution to voluntarily post such a College Report Card would get free PR from the media far more valuable than the fortunes that the institution spends on marketing to attract students.

I know that some readers of this blog are senior college administrators. If you're one, should you advocate for your institution being that first one to post such a College Report Card?

If you don't do it voluntarily, I predict that in light of the growing groundswell of articles questioning higher education's value as well as of the integrity of colleges' admissions operations, the federal government will mandate that you issue an independently audited report card. To encourage that, I have meetings scheduled with two potentially sympathetic legislators.

FreedomCare: How I'd Do Health Care Reform

I believe that the following simple plan would be infinitely more helpful to patients than ObamaCare and challenge you to make a legitimate case why I'm wrong:

1. Per the post I just wrote, make health care provider training shorter and more practical. That would improve quality while reducing cost and increasing supply of providers.

2. Except for the truly indigent and for catastrophic health care, health care would be paid directly by the consumer. If consumers had most of the money at stake, 300 million Americans would be exerting the power of the invisible free hand of the market to drive down costs and improve quality. The good quality, cost-effective providers would succeed, the bad ones driven out of business.

3. To ensure that those consumers had the information needed to make smart choices of health care providers and procedures, there would be outstanding, easily accessible consumer information on all licensed doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc: for example, patient satisfaction (disaggregated by condition,) the provider's risk-adjusted success rates for different procedures, etc.

So what do you think of this plan?

Doctor, Dentist, Nurse Training Should Be Shorter, More Practical

Training for health care providers is long and arduous...and unnecessary. I've spoken with many top health care providers (including top doctors at UCSF) and many admit that they'd be better trained in far less time if instead of the endless theory- and arcana-filled program, all that was required was a one to two year program in diagnosis and treatment of the most common situations, training in how to use medical information software to help with non-standard situations, plus guidance, of course, on when to seek help from a specialist.

That approach to training would not only be less expensive, time consuming, and painful, it would also increase the number of providers. That would lower their salaries and in turn our health care costs. It would also help accommodate the large number of additional people who will be getting health care under ObamaCare.

Why did the status quo of absurdly long, arduous training come into being? Do health care trainers let alone their students really believe, for example, that a physician needs organic chemistry, calculus, physics, four years of extremely demanding medical school, 100-hour-per-week internships, plus two-to-four-year residencies? The reasons for the unnecessarily demanding programs are:

• Universities like the tuition that come from longer training programs
  
• The programs are developed by university professors, an anomalous group of people who just love academic learning, arcana, and learning for learning's sake. So they believe, for example, that it would be nice for registered nurses to take a year of inorganic chemistry.
  
• The professional associations for doctors, nurses, dentists, physical therapists, etc., favor longer training because their profession obtains more prestige. And any added requirements don't apply to existing members--they get grandfathered in, so those associations' leaders, who make the decision to require the additional training, reap the prestige benefits without having to put in any more work.

I've written other pieces asserting that higher education is America's most overrated product. This is merely one more example.