Trust Your Students
An interesting question was posed on Twitter yesterday, by a relatively new Professor, concerning a student who had had a family bereavement and needed to miss a test to go home to the family. What does the Professor do? Now, the hoary old “Death of a grandparent” excuse to get out of doing some assigned work is as old as the hills, and many teachers are quite cynical about this and require everyone to have a medical note as the only way to either be excused or take the test later. And some of the replies to the tweet followed exactly this hard line approach.
But then there was a reply by Terry McGlynn (on Twitter as @Hormiga ), a Professor who writes frequently on teaching and pastoral care of students in his blog from 2014.
His approach and reasoning, which exactly matches mine, was to give students leeway. Drop the lowest mark in a series of tests. Have make-up labs, if one is missed. This gives everyone the chance to miss something because of Life In General, whether it is a genuine family bereavement, or a relationship issue, or an employment issue, or childcare issues. Because everybody has these from time to time, and needs the support of those they work with or work for. And have this policy in your course outline or syllabus, because there are some students who will never, ever, in a million years dream of coming to see their Professor with a personal problem of any description. So give them the reassurance that “It’s okay. Your Prof will support you, and you don’t have to talk to them”. Naturally, it would be nice if they did feel able to come and talk things out, and I do encourage my students to do so, but not all feel comfortable doing so. And that’s okay.
Of course there will be some students who take advantage of these policies, or rather they think they’re taking advantage of this rather relaxed attitude. The reality is, that missing course work should be avoided whenever possible and that by skipping a test or piece of assigned work, they are missing out on a learning opportunity, and in the long run, this will be a disadvantage.
Why did I come to such a conclusion? Well, go back to 1980. I was a first year undergraduate at Bristol University. My dad, who had had a serious stroke two years before, had to go to Court to prevent his business partners from throwing him out of the partnership. The trial date was in university term time, and I had to go to some administrative office in Senate House to ask for time off to go and attend. It was an open plan office, and their opening gambit was “We don’t even approve time off for the death of a grandparent”. Great start. So then I had to blurt out the full, intimate details about my dad, and his condition and the fact that I needed to be there to support him, in front of several complete strangers, most of whom were entirely indifferent. It was a thoroughly horrible experience, and left a mark on me. Fortunately I was sufficiently insistent to get the time off, so off I went off to court on the appointed day. My dad won in court, by the way. Easily.
Now jump forward to 1989. Now I am doing post-doctoral work in Berlin. My dad had another stroke, this time so serious that he doesn’t survive for more than a few days. My boss in Berlin, Professor Alex Bradshaw, someone I hold in the highest possible regard as a scientist and a decent human being, simply said “Take as much time off as you need”. This despite an incredibly hectic and set of experiments scheduled for that part of the year. That’s the difference. I always aspire to emulate that attitude for my students. If they need support, then support will be there.
I have talked to Professors who view all students as potential cheaters, and whenever any new teaching innovation is mentioned, will default to “That makes it too easy for them to cheat” mode. In other words, any innovation that might benefit many students is dismissed because of the antics of a few. In this world view, the only way to test students is to isolate them from each other in an examination room to test their abilities and how much they have learned. I reject that hypothesis. Trusting the students, and being seen to trust the students, is a powerful way to subtly influence them, and get them to do the work you want them to. It’s treating your class as adults. The majority will appreciate it and will benefit from it. There will be a small minority who will try and take advantage, but remember they are really cheating themselves.
I was once able to carry out a student trust exercise, entirely by accident. One of the teaching assistants, having marked a set of 30 tests, gave them back to the students and lost the vital piece of paper where he had written down the results. (If you are a TA, do not do this. Please). So I emailed the students and said “I’m trusting you to email me the mark you got. I’m not going to ask you to bring the papers in for inspection“. So they did. A couple of weeks later, the missing piece of paper showed up in the back of a filing cabinet, with the missing marks written on it. So I checked the responses from the students. Twenty-nine out of thirty had reported honestly, and one had reported an 18/20 grade but actually got 16/20. A 97% honesty rate is pretty good in my view.
So I don’t ask for any notes from a doctor any more. This also takes pressure off the Health System, because doctors have far, far better things to do with their time than write sick notes for people. I teach very large classes, often in the 200–300 student range. It’s very difficult to give students the individual attention they might need, but it is possible to set policies in place which treat them fairly, and as human beings, not as suspicious cheats.
Trust your students.
