How can an individual stop the university's standards and quality from deteriorating?

Question

The business school I am currently at faces a very difficult situation. After a scandal involving fraud around the president a few years ago, in combination probably with fallout from the financial crisis and all, our public image is ruined. We have barely enough students applying to the open undergraduate seats, meaning that almost no selection process can take place. As a consequence, students are walking the campus that barely made it through high school and are, by any standards, not fit for academic career, not even undergrad studies.

As a research assistant, I assisted my chair during the previous and current year with a first-year course, aiming to teach foundations of investments, Markovitz framework, CAPM and APT, and the like. Without going into too much detail here, I can say that this course is not a university level course. The exams are advertised to the students as consisting only of questions they know from tutorials with different numbers or asking for a different variable. No out-of-the-box thinking, no mathematical proof or derivation of one of the financial concepts.

This alone would lead to no necessary problems, and perhaps my own perspective is distorted, as I did my undergrad studies in natural science, but there are additional problems.

Every year, less and less students are coming to the professor's lectures. The tutorials from my colleague and me are visited by 2-7 students out of 35. During longer explanations or examples, they often interrupt without respect and ask "is this relevant for the exam?" Students still perform horribly on the exam, but we cater them by adding an offset, based on at most 15% of the students failing the exam (in reality, around 70% fail the first round). With another incredibly generous offset such that no more than 20% of those in the second exam round fail, there is virtually no selection any more, which is horrible, because we are a small private institution and once were one of few leading business schools in the region, which is no longer the case.

My explanation, which I have presented to my boss, is that the students hear from the previous year's students about the generous offset, and that the university does not want to throw out that many students. Based on this rumor, they study less, so that we are forced to give the offset they expect. Why are we forced? Because the professor admits that he will not be able to explain to the university management if they inquire as to why that many students fail. He claims that many colleagues are wondering where many of our students came from, because it certainly does not seem to be high school, and that only the management, which consists of business types, not academics, know the answer. Probably, we are dependent on the cash flow from the students' tuition fees, but this is a short-term solution at an invaluable long-term cost.

I would believe that a rigorous filtering process should be in place, and rather in the second semester than in the fourth or six semester. But compared to other chairs, we already have a rough reputation, and most of the undergrad program consists of electives in fields like marketing, where I have supervised some exams and had to observe that those exams consist almost entirely of reciting definitions and giving examples that were completely mentioned in the learning materials the students had access to. This is absolutely not worthy of a university, but a degree mill instead.

We are now treating students more and more like customers; many of our best colleagues in the examination office have left us during the past year; officially for personal reasons, but I believe that students claiming "I pay a lot of money, I can demand a good grade" might also be a factor.

Nobody wants to fail the students, but instead hopes that other courses will do this uncomfortable job; and my boss and me are often giving grades in the range 3.5-4 for Bachelor Theses, because "even if they pass, they will not have a good career anyway". Another professor in the department replied to this with: "Well, I would not worry, because the employers will realize quickly the quality of these graduates, and put them into some fixed-income positions or similar where they cannot do any damage." However, I already heard first-hand from professionals that there are complete firms out there that do not even invite our students for interviews any more. Since I am not only doing my PhD here, but also have a Master's degree from this place, you can imagine this gives me a funny feeling.

The off-campus behavior and image of our student body in the local community is disastrous. One and a half weeks ago, a student drove drunk and crashed into a fence in the neighboring village (the fact that we are not in a large city does not help). Everyone in the village knows that it was a student (the car is a quite "unique" one), and there was a newspaper article indicating the BAC of the driver. But since there is no official affiliation between the accident and the university, and the newspaper did not mention that the driver was a student, there is nothing that can be done, as my boss, who is also in the judicial board, says. My boss also says that he is involved more and more often in heavier and heavier cases of students that break rules of common sense, morals and even criminal law worldwide during their exchange semesters.

Last week, I had an internship report on my desk, which is really not a piece of work a student should fail. But it should have; the text was full of language mistakes, typos, even spelling (not typing) the place in his address wrong, formatting was bad, and when describing the $\beta$ in CAPM as "the relative volatility of the asset compared to the market", the paper screamed at me "I don't care about this and have no respect for higher education" at such a volume that I gave a failing grade. (This was the second try; the first one was failed deliberately in summer, as the student claimed not to have enough time to work on it anyway.)

Then, after the student calling me frantically and the examination office and the program director contacting me, I gave a passing grade, because I had to admit that some parts of the work were presented, in their unprecedented shallowness, "plausibly", hence ticking off the "plausible presentation" checkbox on the examination sheet and finding good sub-grades for a work that, in its entirety, was not worthy of a sixth semester students. During this process, I was kindly reminded from my boss to "keep in mind that you are ruining his entire career, as he will be ex-matriculated and barred from studying business studies again" - a little too much to not be influenced, I would say in hindsight.

I ended by inviting the student into my office, rubbing every single error in the file into his face, demanding an explanation for the horrendous work, and telling him that only the static examination sheet saved him, while any employer would have fired him on the spot.

The reaction was not understanding at all, and as my colleague pointed out, did not even once say thanks for me taking the extra time to go through the work again, after the failing grade was practically set.

And now, having let the work pass, I think I have become part of the problem. What should I do? How can I prevent myself (and others) from doing what I did, and falling into this abyss?

Answer 1

Oh dear, what a sad story. To address your question, the rot in large institutions usually starts at the top, and it's only the people at the top who have the power to stop it, if anyone does. The key word is leadership, and it sounds like your school has a very poor excuse for one at the moment -- a sad irony, since it's precisely business school types whom you'd expect to have a firm understanding of the principles of leadership and sound management.

As for what you can do, I'm afraid I agree with the other comments and answers: you as a graduate student are simply not in a position to effect change. Your school is poorly run and seems to be stuck in a negative feedback loop of worsening outcomes. If this were a Hollywood movie, you'd use your personal charm and talents to convince a rich patron to buy the school, oust the entire management team and let you run the place yourself, gradually restoring sanity. Sadly, life is not a Hollywood movie. My advice to you is therefore either to "run away," as Massimo Ortolano says, and transfer to a better school if this is at all possible; or to suck it up and hope that you can make it out of there with your degree before things get much worse than they already are. Good luck!

Answer 2

Sad to say, as an individual (moreover a low-level position one, like a graduate student) is very unlikely to make a difference in any reasonable time. Only a concerted effort by faculty and students can make a difference here. And it looks like administration/faculty have all but given up, by what you tell.

An Arab proverb says that reputation grows like a tree, and falls like a fruit.

It is much more likely that your continued stay there ruins your reputation than you making any noticeable difference in the reputation of the school (how many schools are you aware of whose reputation rests on some student?).

Answer 3

Things seem bad and you may have to leave but why not try do something first .The changes needed are obvious to someone outside academia but you must try to get some changes through despite your modest position .You must convince your more senior peers that if nothing is done the whole show will go down the toilet and it will be an academic exercise blaming each other when virtually everybody that worked there are now working twice as long for half the money in the service industry. My father who is a retired known bussiness consultant would say . Do you have a problem ? we know that the answer is yes . Then he would say .If you do nothing will it go away ? We know the answer to this is no .Then he would say .Do you want to put up with it for the next 40 years ?Well the answer to this is NO! .Right you can hopefully call some of your peers to action .Now you with thier co operation can do what has to be done which you already know but I will leave some tips .Dont treat repeats any differently if you dont want your college to be a joke .Make A grades real hard to get while still letting lots of C grades through .This will make employers still have interest .Make your exams 60% parrot and 40% out of the square so plodders will still get a C and clever lazy people will also get a C but to get an A you would have to be clever and dedicated.Put some really easy parts in your exam questions making it really difficult to get an E but also put some real hard parts in so its almost impossible to get an A+ .Now format your entrance exams more like IQ tests so there wont be any really stupid people in the later years .This means that people with degrees from your college will have a minimum IQ even if they get Cs and even if they repeat .I would really like to help you more but my fathers background would be more suitable .