Job Discussion Forums

[John Hall]

Are you afraid that you may be in trouble with your boss or in jeopardy of losing your job if you fail certain students? Does your school have a policy, written or unwritten, that customer satisfaction--that the customer gets what the customer wants--is the most important thing? And if this situation applies to your school, do you feel that this practice prevents your school from being a "real" school?

I am very fortunate to be working at a university where this is not a problem. Students can and do fail English courses here, if their work is not up to snuff. However, this is not usually the way things are at most private universities in Costa Rica (and also I suspect in many other parts of Latin America). I know, because I once got fired from one such university, without much explanation. As best as I was ever to figure it out, I got fired because certain students did not like the way that I was going to evaluate them (on the basis of their actual competence in English).

[naturegirl321]

I work at two places. In the first place, it's a rich school with AD, A, B and C. If a student gets a B, it's school policy that they can do it over again so they pass. So it'�s almost impossible to fail. HOwever, that being said, grades are weighted, so I had students with 8 As and 2 Bs and they got an overall B, so that means they fail. But, if they do better next semester, get this, they change the first semester's B to an A. Yep, they re-print the entire report card.
My policy is that they CANNOT redo anything. They have a week to do a writing and hand something it done sloppy and on the bus, they have a C and they sign a paper saying that they understand their grade and can't redo it. Why shoudl I have to re grade something and work harder because the studetn's lazy?
Needless to say, I'm not the most popular teacher at the school

However, at the uni where I work, we'�re encouraged to fail students. I mean that we're supposed to make it difficult to pass, so that people come out of the programme can actually use English.

[jillford64]

Nope, I'm not afraid to. Management doesn't want students moving ahead to the next level if they didn't master the grammar/vocabulary of the level they are in. They have to get an overall grade of 80% to pass. If a student fails, they can retake the class at a discounted price. If a student get the 80% but you still feel like they are a little weak in some areas, you can pass a student but on the condition that they have to sit through the class again before moving ahead to the next level. They get an even bigger discount for sitting through a class and they also don't have to retake the exams since they already passed them once.

[John Hall]

bump

[MELEE]

Nope not at all. But then my students are not the customers, they are the product. And anyways, I don't fail them, they fail themselves.

I have my semester report right here and in my 5 o'clock class only 4 of 18 students pass. There is a second chance exam, which is typical of the Mexican educational system, but if they don't get busy studying, most of the 14 who have to take it will fail again.

[John Hall]

[ls650]

At my previous chain school in Asia, there was some pressure to pass up all students. If we failed a student the DOS or the school manager wanted to know the details for each student.

At this university, the administration have made it very clear that if a student is not ready to go to the next level, he/she should definitely not be passed up. I have one class this semester that I've just finished grading: five out of 15 have failed. There's a huge gap between them and the other students. From marking the exams I can see that they didn't study key points. They aren't ready and as MELEE wrote, they've failed themselves.

[dribom]

Hey. I just finished a year of teaching at a public community college type institution in Ecuador with branches in the capitol and all the bigger towns-cities.

My local director actually attempted to secretly give certificates to all the students that I failed! Dios!

He didn't get away with it though because (in accordance with central command in Quito) I had to firm all of the certificates. Woops!

I think these things happen because education in much of Latin American (and it's worse in Ecuador than in other places) is so privatized - it really is thought of as a product (even more so than in the States!) You buy the school. You buy your way into college. You buy your way out of the army. You buy the grades. And what matters isn't that people can speak English, it's that they have a certificate to show.

But if your institution is legit (which mine really is) there will always be a higher authority you can appeal to - i.e. Quito central command, which doesn't let the provinces get away with this kind of shit.

As for lazy irresponsible students - Indeed! You wouldn't believe how absolutely freaking shocked they are when I refuse to take plagiarized papers (I recognize there is a culture gap going on here, but the truth is they get busted in the universities big time so they need to learn ESPECIALLY if they want to study in the US where this is seen as immoral and grounds for expulsion at good institutions).

Anyways - some excuses I have gotten include,

But it's just one sentence/paragraph/page.

But it's correct.

But I asked him if I could copy.

Oh you silly silly Ecua kids.

[naturegirl321]

[Justin Trullinger]

Heard all those excuses, and many, many, more.

Another bane of my existence it the computer translator programs that are available.

Students deny having ever used them, but are at a loss to explain why proper nouns have been translated in the most improbably fashions. (My favourite is when "Quito," the city where I live, is translated as "I remove." )

Another question- when confronted by students who are clearly failing, have you ever been offered a bribe?


All the best,
Justin

[MELEE]

Okay this doesn't have to do with students and failing, but I just have to share this really funny translation software story.
My big boss, the second highest administrator of our university is listed on the school's webpage as a contact for hiring as he hires all the professors except for the English teachers. We get to hire them ourselves. So once he recieve a CV from an English teacher, he wrote a short reply and which he CCed to me. I was impressed with the letter he wrote as he can barely speak English, until he got to the part where he told the perspective teacher that he had passed her CV on to the director of the groins department!?!?!?!?! WTH??
Turns out he used a computer translator.
groin is ingle in Spanish, the pural of which is ingles. So, if you don't put the accent on ingl�s the computer will read it as ingles or a very low frequency word--groins!
Imagine the sentence, "Domino ingles 100%"

[Justin Trullinger]

In my absence, my former administrative assistant wrote a letter to a prospective teacher which she signed "The assistant of the director of the groins." That little accent mark makes all the difference...



Justin

[dribom]

The big problem is Wikipedia. It�s all from Wikipedia - which just happens to be the easiest thing to search for proof.

I do make my students write their essays in class so we can work on structure � in LA there is no such thing as a topic sentence. What happens is then I ask them to take the FINISHED products home to type up and polish and the next day I get back papers that are three times as long randomly interspersed with selections from Wikipedia. Hilariously, they fail outright then because they didn�t follow the format: one page, five paragraphs.

It�s the Ecua teachers that grade on page length. Here social studies/humanities is seen as a joke so they don�t think writing is a skill like math. I have a student who was encouraged to concentrate in the social studies track program at their high school by the guidance councilor because he scored low on an IQ test.

Of course, again, this wouldn�t be a problem except that where I live there�s a very international feel and many of these kids expect to one day work at least in cooperation with North American businesses/institutions, where you need more than a binder with two hundred random documents to demonstrate your worth.

[John Hall]

A student of mine just recently submitted an assignment that was extremely well-done, but not in any way relevant to the task that she had been assigned. I took the first seven or eight words of the assignment and Googled them, and "voil�," there it was.

At my university, students have been expelled for cheating. The university sees itself as a training ground for students to become employees of such multinationals in Costa Rica as Hewlett-Packard, Maersk, Sykes, Alienware, IBM, and Intel, among others.

[naturegirl321]

What about quantity over quality? THe more you write, the better your grade.