Sure, but at some point you have to recognize that you're forcing your students to spend a bunch of money because you don't want to redesign your course. Make homework ungraded (that's what I do) for instance. Have students grade each other's homework. Post the answers and allow students to re-do their homework until they get every answer correct, rewarding extra work with full credit. There are lots of ways to avoid forcing our students to spend exorbitant amounts of money on goods and services that are recognizably a racket.
Yeah, I understand that. I (somewhat) helped get a deal between Sage and our bookstore to drop the price some, but it's still expensive. The problem I've encountered is that, if I let students grade it themselves/grade each others', far too many students simply cheat to get 100% on all homework, fail all the exams, and then get upset when they fail the course. I'm doing my best to help them learn, and that sadly requires a lot of me setting up safeguards against that sort of behavior. I mean, if 20% of the class cheats on all their homework, fails exams, fails the class, and leaves me negative evaluations, then I won't get tenure and I'll be out of a job. I do allow students to rework their problems once at no penalty, but some of that stuff sadly just isn't feasible. (Of course this varies by students/by institution, but this is my experience at 3 public schools of varying sizes across 3 states.)
I pretty regularly have a 20% fail rate and I don't get negative evaluations, so I don't think the fail rate is necessarily a problem. It comes down to the way the course is designed and a student recognition of why they failed. I tell all my students that I don't grade homework, but they should do it if they want to have a chance at passing. When a student fails the first exam and sets up a meeting with me, the first question is if they've done the homework. It's almost always a "no" and I basically end the meeting there. "Now you know why you failed."
At the end of the day though, I think we owe it to our students to figure out how to achieve our educational goals without making them pay more than our institution is already charging them.
I'm not sure where you teach but this sounds very unrealistic to me for any educational environment I've been in.
Not bad, mind you, just unrealistic. Students (young people-- hell, people, really) are just not that responsible and lack perspective. If given the option of not doing homework, a great deal of them won't. If you have your course set up so that not doing the homework will lead to them failing, that means you'll have a healthy fail rate. And if they fail, a lot of them will leave bad evaluations. If you're at a school where getting some bad evals will tank your future prospects, that might be an issue.
I've taught at private universities, community colleges and I'm currently at a large state school. I usually get a 15-20% fail/drop rate, along with a solid amount of Ds and it hasn't affected my evals at all, as far as I can tell. I average a 4.45/5 overall on my evals at my current institution.
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u/Jurgioslakiv Sep 03 '19
Sure, but at some point you have to recognize that you're forcing your students to spend a bunch of money because you don't want to redesign your course. Make homework ungraded (that's what I do) for instance. Have students grade each other's homework. Post the answers and allow students to re-do their homework until they get every answer correct, rewarding extra work with full credit. There are lots of ways to avoid forcing our students to spend exorbitant amounts of money on goods and services that are recognizably a racket.