“Venetia Orcutt, GWU med school professor, quits after complaints of no-show class”

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She was assigned to teach a class in “evidence-based medicine”! (link from my usual news source).

I wonder what was in the syllabus? If anyone has a copy, feel free to send to me and I will post it here.

My favorite part of the story, though, is this:

Almost all physician assistant students refused to comment to a reporter Tuesday, saying they’d been told by the department not to talk to media.

Talk about obedience to authority! They’re studying in a program that offers nonexistent courses, but then they follow the department’s gag order.

20 thoughts on ““Venetia Orcutt, GWU med school professor, quits after complaints of no-show class””

  2. Considering that the article is about the students complaining that their teacher didn’t do work, and that their complaints resulted in the teacher being fired, I think that your comment about “obedience to authority” is somewhat undeserved.

      • If you were those students (whether you had filed a complaint or not) would you want stories that raise obvious questions about the quality of your educational experience to pop up when someone googles you? I think they made a reasonable choice.

        • Maybe. In any case, I don’t agree with the department’s decision to tell students not to talk with the media. In general, I don’t see what’s gained by secrecy in such settings.

          That said, I was once asked by a reporter about a colleague who had an annoying habit of not showing up to class. I told the reporter the story, then asked for it not to be printed. Why? I didn’t want to get sued.

        • Actually, if the university was still investigating in good faith, telling students not to talk to press is not such a bad idea, although in this case it likely doesn’t matter, given that she had already resigned.

          1) University misconduct rules normally have clauses about attempts to keep complainant identities confidential to the extent possible.
          Suppose A, B and C complained. Reporter finds A, at some point asks them if it was just A, or were there others?
          What are chances someone unused to dealing with press might just blurt out the names? Non-zero [I’ve known CEOs who made their PR people very nervous, and we certainly see politicians sometimes say things they shouldn’t.] Now, suppose there are reprisals against one or more of the named students.

          2) Misconduct rules also usually talk about repair of reputation if unjustly accused, and if there is a legitimate investigation still ongoing, it’s probably better to not be talking to the press. Of course, if there school had been breaking its own rules, stonewalling and keeping the prof there, at some point students talking to the press might be necessary.

          At the risk of returning to another topic, here’s an example of a lawyer and his client who might have done better with “no comment,” often the best choice in fluid situations.

  4. I just love the term “evidence-based medicine” because it so clearly evokes a contrast with an alternative not based on evidence.

    I’m very surprised GWU gave the students credit (the refund’s not so surprising). I can’t believe it got so far before anyone complained. But I can see why the students wouldn’t want to be linked to a story about how they got credit for a class they didn’t take!

    When I was an undergrad at Michigan State in the early 1980s, I and a bunch of students complained to our department head that our math logic teacher was skipping classes, oddly giving the same introductory lecture every other class, and spent the rest of the time mumbling about ultrafilters (a rather advanced topic for intro math logic). The department head said there was nothing he could do because the other faculty would complain if the incompetent/irresponsible teacher was allowed out of teaching. It’s partly a result of both tenure (making it hard to fire the incompetent), but mostly about just not caring about teaching in the first place. The best teacher I ever had in math wasn’t given tenure.

    When I was a professor, I was constantly told to spend less time on teaching and instead focus on research. It’s one of the reasons I cite for no longer being a professor.

    I’ve been shocked that the standard at Columbia seems to be to not grade student’s homework. That was the most valuable thing I got as an undergrad and grad student. I always graded homework in my classes (when I didn’t have a TA). My wife took intro math stats at Columbia and a matrix algebra class through Barnard in the past five years. Both classes collected homework, returned it with a check mark, but didn’t even attempt to mark whether answers were correct or not, much less provide feedback on where the student went wrong.

    • Ouch! I always intend to grade the homeworks, but once the semester starts rolling, I don’t always get around to doing it. I remember in grad school how puzzled I was when I first found out that my prof wasn’t grading the homeworks I was turning in. I was so used to my homework being graded that I had no idea what was going on.

      • Homework should be graded, otherwise what is the point? It’s feedback to the student.

        But the question is whether the grade in the HW should be used as part of the course grade. I know that Herman Rubin was against that. I’m ambiguous. But at least I make it clear to the students how the HW grade will be used (if at all) in the course grade.

        I grade my own homework. In my current reincarnation (after retirement) I teach small courses when I do teach, and don’t have a TA anyway so it’s my responsibility.

        • A course in which the homework isn’t graded???!

          This is definitely not what happens here at U of Toronto, in any department I know of. The closest I’ve heard of (and experienced elsewhere as an undergrad a few times) is a random subset of the questions being graded.

          I’m not even sure what it means. Here, a course would typically have something like 30% of the final mark determined by homework. How would you assign a final mark if you don’t grade it?

          Of course, instructors sometimes make up non-credit practice problems. And it’s not expected that the instructor will grade them, though they would often be willing to answer questions about whether a student’s solution is correct. Is that what people are talking about here?

        • Radford:

          I don’t know how they do it in Canada, but in the U.S. we pretty much only give A’s and B’s in graduate courses, at least in the statistics department. It’s possible to give a student a course grade based on homework completion, without actually grading the homework. I’m not saying this is a good idea, but it gets done!

        • Radford:

          When I was an MBA student at your current university, I was in a course of a faculty member that was upset with the dean and leaving.

          Marking scheme – everyone got a B+ except for two randomly drawn students who got an A- or B.

          No assignments,exams, no marking of anything.

          The strangest thing was that most students came prepared and enjoyed the course.

          Still use what I learned in that course (no nothing about spelling or gremir)

          p.s. they went off to make another university’s MBA program successfull

  5. I probably don’t understand, because my best guess makes this morally outrageous.

    Can someone get a “B” without anyone evaluating their work ever? If not, I’ve misunderstood and apologize for my foolishness. But if so, is there any third party (an employer perhaps?) who – to even the slightest degree – references these grades; and if there is why isn’t this plain fraud? (And if there is no such third party at all, isn’t it plain dishonest to the student to assign such grades – and thus implicitly pretend to the student that there is someone who would give a xxxx about them? Why not just give “attended” grade.).

    I doubt things are really as you say (or as _I_ think you are saying) they are. Because this sounds like a moral line most people I know would just not step across.

    • For PhD students, no one cares what grades you got in your classes, they are effectively A,B,C meaning Pass, Barely Pass, No pass. The grade in PhD level courses tends to be determined by your performance on either a final exam or a final project, typically involving a presentation to the class of some work you’ve done on a topic related to the course which is usually also related to your thesis topic in some way.

      The true measure of a PhD student’s success is their publication record and dissertation. If they have several peer reviewed papers and can write a dissertation describing original work done on their chosen topic, and they can answer intelligent questions about that topic, then they’ve been successful. Forcing them to spend time cranking out the answers to significant numbers of textbook homework problems is a waste of their time when they could instead be picking and choosing some important topics from the class to apply to research related to their dissertation topic.

      I daresay that more than about 8 courses that even HAVE homework is a waste of a PhD students time. If they’re doing a good job, they have hard problems in original research to sort out instead of textbook problems with known answers.

      As for Masters students, it varies a lot based on type of masters program and the field of study. Many Masters programs are essentially trade-schools designed to teach some work related skills (Business, Engineering, Education, etc) whereas other masters programs are essentially prep-schools for PhD programs (physics, biology, chemistry, and other hard sciences, Econ, etc).

  6. Asking the students not to comment to the press can be reasonable – as a faculty member at an Oxford College I was given a similar request – there may not have been given the actual account of the decision and what went into it… (and law suits)

  7. Only A’s and B’s for graduate courses… ? Because everyone is just smrt enough or hard working enough?

    I remember that I considered applying to a US graduate school. To get highest honors t my school you needed to get an average of 8 (out of 10) and a thesis of 8 or higher. If you asked for translated transcript then the administration would give a transcript and an 8 would be converted to a B.

    According to the administration about 5% of the graduating students have highest honors which could in principle be a record of only B’s. I remember showing my record to a (foreign) teacher who replied: “So you have no straight A record? That will make it hard to get in at a US grad school.”
    I responded: “Yeah, I got only a B in your class, but I remember that I got the highest mark in your class along with xxx. So B was the highest mark anyone obtained in your class.”
    *Silence*

    It did not turn out to be of any importance since I never applied for the US. But it amazes how much grading practices can differ.
    No judgement about what is best though.

    • At my graduate program, homework grades existed but were marginally relevant in most classes. The instructing professor would grade the final / project, which was difficult in spots to sort everyone out. If you got “lucky” and got a grade you didn’t deserve here and there, you would be crushed in the prelim / qualifying exams. If you somehow evaded detection there, you would fail to produce dissertation-quality work and just not graduate until you gave up and left. The cranky+smart+tenured professors would come to your presentations and defense (attempt) to let your advisor know what they thought of your work.

  8. The UK tradition is pretty light on grading and homework in general, basing grades on final exams.

    The problem with grading homework that counts as part of a final grade is cheating. Especially in large required classes. At least in the US. It’s driving many of the profs I know absolutely crazy. There’s a whole industry of tools to spot cheating, too.

    When I was a professor, I let my (mainly graduate) students collaborate on homework and turn it in as a group if they wanted — the only requirement was that they cite their sources.

    Here’s a key to translating American grad school to high school grades: A to A, A- to B, B+ to C, B,B- to D, everything else failing. It’s really not worth being much more fine-grained. We required a B+ average and a C was failing for a grad student.

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