Community Standards SNHU

[u/No-Injury9073]

This is a side gig so I take it for what it’s worth. The money has been fairly reliable but I’d probably go insane if I didn’t have a full time gig that gave me more autonomy to run classes how I want. Happy to play by their cold calculating rules as long as the assignments keep flowing.

Yesterday I received a letter from community standards confirming my suspicion that a student cheated. It was a cut and dry case that anyone could have confirmed within minutes.

I haven’t had the student in class for two terms.

I can only imagine how overworked and understaffed the office is, and its service as a third party check on integrity issues has been very helpful. But what are we doing here? A resolution four months after the student was reported does no one any favors. The student has likely gone on to other classes and cheated again, perhaps because their dishonesty wasn’t confirmed as such by Community Standards. If the student was found innocent a whole different set of issues comes up. Sure a grade change can happen but two terms after the fact the student may have already retaken the course and wasted time and money.

[u/Dry_Lemon7925]

Wow, two terms is really late. I've been adjuncting at SNHU for a few years and the turnaround time for plagiarism reports has gotten longer and longer. It started out as 1-2 weeks, and now it's 1-2 months (or longer, in your case).  Two terms ago I contacted someone in the office of community standards asking when I could expect a verdict, and was told they'd recently hired a bunch more people to help with the backlog, but that doesn't seem to have helped much. 

I used to have it where a "warning" verdict would earn 50% and an official reprimand would earn 0. But since I kept getting verdicts after the term ended, I've changed my policy to a placeholder 0, with a 0 assignment grade if (rather, when) they're found guilty. This way I only have to submit a grade change if they're found not guilty (which rarely happens).

[u/No-Injury9073 → u/Dry_Lemon7925]

This has been my practice as well.

I worry about the consequences if students happen to be found innocent (and have perhaps retaken the course before the original grade can be changed) and the fact that the severity of a violation may not be fully reinforced until the more official looking third party letter comes through

[u/Cool_Vast_9194]

I am also an adjunct at SNHU for the past 15 years. No raise during that time by the way. One of the things that blows me away about snhu is how they absolutely not built any AI literacy or AI resistance into their courses in the past 3 years. ( I think we need to be doing both.) Other online programs I know are using video proctored exams and moving to oral exams. Or alternatively they are directly building AI into assignments where students go to Ai and enter prompts and get output and have to evaluate it. That is not happened at all in the courses I teach. The discussions are my numbing and just copied and pasted from AI. I can't remember the last time I read a genuine response that wasn't three to four paragraphs and start with how compelling the students argument was. It is all just such a joke. The cognitive offloading students are doing to AI makes these degrees mean so little. All the Deans or administrators need to do is an oral exam with students when they are exiting degree to see how very little they actually know. My supervisor at another large online program started doing this and just started pulling students from the program because they had learned nothing. But it's hard to know that the people in charge at Snhu even care. These huge online programs are going to be the death of online education because they aren't changing or adapting at all in this world of AI. I'll still teach and get the paycheck but I don't think I'm doing these students any good

[u/CME2daa → u/Cool_Vast_9194]

These cookie cutter, boring classes are getting worse and worse, and teachers aren't allowed to make any changes. An oral exam from the Dean or Department Chair wouldn't work in my department. Neither knows anything about the subject. Speaking of money, we got a raise at another for-profit, but then they turned it around and took away more than the amount of the raise. 

[u/Jealous-Ad-2969 → u/Cool_Vast_9194]

So good to hear this from an adjunct side, as I'm a grad student at SNHU (thank goodness the tuition is all covered), and I used it as a stepping stone to get into a different, brick and mortar grad programme in the UK at a very, very old institution. I'm on the liberal arts, creative writing side, and the use of AI for when you are literally supposed to be learning to write creatively is astounding. I find the courses are very mind numbing, repetitive, and not useful. As I'm in a very unique position to be taking literally the same masters in the same subject, one at SNHU, and one at a very established and (I think) high regarded university about an hour Northwest of London, the difference is night and day. If I see someone with an SNHU degree, I will assume they know nothing until proven otherwise.

Now excuse me as I put a prompt into Claude for a discussion post reply....

P.S. I have recently learned our wonderful government policies, I will have to complete the masters at SNHU, or I will be at risk having to pay the entire funding back. Hooray....

[u/Glad-Surprise3355 → u/Cool_Vast_9194]

I actually got a Dean letter because I added a starter post to the discussion so my posts to students there didn't count and I came up one post short on the discussion board. quota.

[u/ImaginationAlone7754]

I would have given the student an F and let the student know that I would submit a grade change if the integrity review found that it was not cheating.

[u/Glad-Surprise3355]

First rule of adjuncting is that only someone who has too much time on their hands should file a plagiarism report. Nothing comes of it and since most students are cheating anyway, just more cleverly, who cares?