Formation Continue du Supérieur

By KW. The first assignment of the semester always generates cries of dismay.  I use the full range of numbers available to me in my grading rubric and most students earn scores that, if they were correlated to a conventional letter grading scale, would end up being a high D or low C.  "Pay no attention to what the letter grade would be!" I exhort them.  "The grading rubric is a guide to help you build on your strengths and recognize your weaknesses--it's a tool, not a label of your worth as a student and human being.  Let the numbers guide you as you rewrite the paper, and you'll do much better on the next version." More...

By Bardiac. As most semesters approach, I get several emailed questions asking (politely) if I'm okay with students using e texts in my classes.  This is especially common with Shakespeare.
I hate them using etexts for Shakespeare.
First, they want to use the totally free etexts, which seem based on 19th century editions (they're free because they're long out of copyright).  But they don't really get any information about the 19th century editions, which often come with no glossing, no line numbers, and editing choices that made sense in the 19th century, but which are very different from the choices editors make now.
So there's always that delay of a few seconds while the etext folks try to figure out where we are based on asking someone to read them a line. More...

By Bob Samuels. In response to state budget cuts for higher education and new laws regulating the selling of academic patents, universities since 1980 have increased their spending on research.  Although many people believe that research brings extra revenue to these institutions, a recent study reveals how research activities rarely cover their true costs. In “Understandingthe high Cost of Success in University Research,"Karen Holbrook and Paul Sanberg show how in the case of two university systems, “the findings demonstrated that 40 cents was spent from university funds for each one dollar of external funding received.” If we apply this same math to the University of California’s research budget of $5.2 billion, we can assume that UC had to find an additional $2 billion from other sources to make up for the additional costs. More...

By Chad Orzel. As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about liberal education and the failure modes thereof, I thought I should try to do something constructive and make suggestions regarding how you might go about a “poetry for physicists” kind of thing. After all, one of the things I find intensely frustrating about a lot of “crisis in ____” discussions is the lack of specific suggestions, so throwing out a “here’s a problem, good luck with that” post would be suboptimal behavior on my part. This required some reflection on the question of just what I got out of my “liberal arts” classes back in the day– what ideas and skills I picked up that I find useful today. More...