Job Discussion Forums

[NeilSD]

Can anyone offer any insight into why such a low proportion of students are male? I've seen figures of as low as 10%, at least at the college/university level.

[veiledsentiments]

It depends on where you are. If you are talking about the smaller rural colleges, they are predominantly female because many families find it difficult to allow their girls to leave home to study - even to go to Muscat.

Also, these same families may be able to afford to pay tuition for one or two of the sons, so they may be sent to private colleges in Muscat.

I can just speculate on why there are more females at SQU than males. The best and brightest boys may get to go abroad, but there is the fact that more girls do well on the entrance exams. This is common around the Gulf. My Kuwaiti males told me in complete seriousness that girls are just smarter!! But, I think it is more a reflection of the girls will just work harder for many cultural reasons.

[manoflettersk466]

That makes me smile..........I asked my male students in Salalah why the girls usually did better on the tests etc........to which they replied with utter seriousness: "Teacher they cheat, it is well known, they all cheat!"

[veiledsentiments]

Well those boys would certainly know all about cheating, don't they.

Seriously though... in all of the many cheating episodes that I was involved in, it was always boys.

Perhaps the girls are just better at cheating?

I think the truth of the matter is that the girls that don't have the brains or motivation to study drop out and marry with the families blessing... whereas the boys have to stay and keep trying whether they want to or not.

VS

[kuberkat]

Ah, thank you for mentioning cheating... it may mean I'm not the only one who is amazed at the unflinching attempts at intellectual kleptomania.

Students in the English Department, who have been exposed to stringent standards by international teachers, are much less likely than those in other departments to try cheating. I was absoluetly stumped when I walked into an Arabic department exam to find students actually conversing with exam papers in front of them. The invigilators spend the entire session seated and often engaged in reading or grading. This is an awfully tempting situation for an insecure student.

Not to get too off-topic here, but the new cheating, even in our department, seems to be plagiarism. Due to the lack of actual books in the rural colleges, students rely heavily on internet resources. This is fine, except that a great many assignments received by my senior colleagues, are undisguised copy and paste mash-ups. Yes. Thank goodness I teach Speaking.

[Gordon]

[Duffy]

Ah, but when I have confronted male or female students with the fact that they were cheating, I received the same reply from each sex. With a very hurt expression they would say,"But teacher I not cheating, I only helping my friend"!

Duffy

[veiledsentiments]

Having taught both academic business courses and writing, I have waaaay too much experience dealing with the rampant cheating. The life saver in my academic course was a test bank that allowed me to randomize the questions and have as many forms of the exam as I wished. It only took one exam for the chronic cheaters to fail miserably while the friend they copied from aced it. Accounting was easy to control as long as you stayed awake during the invigilation. Too many steps to copy.

In writing, of course, it was the plagiarism problem. With essay classes, I just made them write the first draft in class or in my office. Any miraculous improvements in the subsequent drafts triggered their having to reproduce it in my office with only the previous draft. It took much more work on my part, but it only took a semester or two before I had the reputation of enforcing honesty.

This was more difficult in classes that require longer papers and sourcing. And don't you just love how they will deny everything with the evidence right in front of them? My favorite story is from a fellow teacher of the "Comp 2" or "writing research papers" course. The student was too lazy to even cut and paste... the paper still had the internet source pages listed at the top and bottom of the page from printing directly from the website. You could go right to the page on the net... and not only did she still strongly deny it, she tried to fight it through administration. She lost... and failed the course.

I was fortunate to always have an administration that did not pass students after I had given them failing grades.

VS

[kuberkat]

Good one, Gordon. Ventriloquism hasn't been a problem, though "prepared" speaking topics do occasionally smack of liberal borrowing. A little gentle post-speech interrogation (ooh! strong word!) usually absolves the innocent and nails the guilty. No one expects the Spanish inquisition. (No matter how many times it comes around.)

Despite the hard work and reluctant tyranny it requires initially, consistent consequences for plagiarism (as for cheating) really can steer students in the direction of thorough research that is properly referenced in original work. Like VS I have noticed that instructors with consistent standards are not approached for haggling in the perceived pedagogical souq. Unfortunately many students do not smell the unethical rat and need a more concrete incentive do do their own work.

What would be really, really nice in an ideal world is having authorities that consider original work to be more important than letting the institution look good, but that is a long way off in many cases.

[veiledsentiments]

[Neil McBeath]

It isn't just students in Oman who plagiaise. There is a so-called Curiculum Development Cell operating in the Capital Area which has spent the last six years assiduously cutting and pasting from commercially available textbooks - a practice not only unethical, but also in direct contravention of the Omani laws on copyright.

When confronted with evidence of this, the response of the Cell was to shoot the messenger.

[veiledsentiments]

That's not plagiarism, that's copyright infringement...

It's only plagiarism if they sell the texts claiming that the cutter/pasters were the authors.

VS

[Stephen Jones]

[Neil McBeath]

"Plagiarism" or "infringement of copyright", either way it's unethical, and illegal under Omani law.

The cutters and pasters aren't selling their "work", but the agency they work for is printing off large print runs and distributing the texts to personnel who are unaware of its dubious origin.

Co-incidentally, some of it comes from Streamline. There's the story about the man who takes time off work to go to a football match, and his boss sees him on TV, and the story about the man who smuggled lorries across a frontier.

The problem is that the cutter and pasters have ignored the fact that neither story is very relevant to the Omani situation, and they've cut out a lot of the better backup and reinforcement exercises.

[veiledsentiments]

I remember the year that I was teaching summer school... and only the director and 2 of us teachers were there. Two weeks before the semester was to begin, he discovered that Admin had neglected to order the textbooks for the next academic year. Sorry ... put forms in drawer... forgot about it. Absolutely no chance to get anything until January at the earliest... this was pre-internet, slow boat systems of the past.

This necessitated a rapid collection of blank copies of the texts in question, (rummaging through teacher's desks to find clean copies) running over to the institution's printing department and groveling to the powers there to do us class sets... now... not at the end of the printing queue. We did full sets of all our texts for all the students - cover to cover. Of course this was a couple years before Oman signed on to the international agreements, so it was not yet "illegal" in Oman, but we all rather cringed at how unethical it was. Given that the other option was no texts at all, we got over it.

VS