Miwa's reading Notes #6

Readings of this week covers a wide variety of topics, and I especially interested in two topics: preventive measures for academic honesty and grading practices.

                                 

Academic Honesty

My question is to what extent instructors need to take preventive measures for academic honesty. I am very surprised at Lang’s (2008, p. 196-200) discussion that almost all students may cheat. If it is the fact, we need to take a lot of preventive measures. I understand that basic measures need to be taken such as information about academic integrity in the syllabus (Davis, 2009, p. 346) It will certainly increase the instructor’s workload and I wonder if it is the right way to spend the time.

Another concerning is that the excessive efforts to prevent cheating may also affect sound trust relationships between the instructor and students. We may give negative effect on some students who have never considered cheating. Therefore, it may be important to explain rationale for each preventive measures to indicate learning effectiveness. Davis introduced many effective ways for academic honesty in Chapter 38, but I believe that the measures are supposed to be taken for helping students learn better, rather than for academic honesty.    

Grading Practices

I am facing several challenges in grading. First, I am not sure how to balance emphasis on grades (Davis, 2009, p. 43). I usually make efforts not to get students attention to grades so much, but they simply care about them too much (or almost care about grades only without consider what they learn). Many of them are concerned how to earn points only, without considering how to learn effecitvely.

Another problem is that students don’t try to understand the grading policy before complaining about it. This problem is related to minimizing students’ complaints about grades and I am taking many of the strategies introduced by Davis (2009, p. 410-413), but I am still facing this problem continuously.  I am repeating “as stated in the syllabus” and “as announced on Blackboard” too many times to respond to students’ complains. Also, I wonder if making my students easily challenge me may derived from my credibility as an international students. If that is the reason to lead student to easily challenge to me, I am seeking the way to make up for the disadvantage.