I doubt there are many amongst us who have not experienced the following: You are sitting down for a mid-evening meal, or perhaps settling in to watch an hour of television when the phone rings. At the other end of the line is someone calling on behalf of a charity, either one you currently patronize or one seeking your support. You do one of three things: you either agree to increase your support, say you can't give more, or agree to sponsor the new charity.
It may surprise you to know that in some cases, the person you have just dealt with is not necessarily a volunteer calling on behalf of the charity, but rather an employee of a professional fundraising company that will be receiving anywhere from 35 to 80% of your donation.
These startling facts were presented on last night's edition of C.B.C.'s The National in a report by Diana Swain. The value of the report lies not in discouraging us from contributing to worthwhile causes, but rather in allowing us to make better-informed decisions as to where to allot our philanthropic dollars.
The full report, with links to a searchable database breaking down the expenditures of registered charities, can be found on the C.B.C. website
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
The Perennial Problem of Student Cheating
One of the many reasons I am happy to be retired is that I no longer have to spend time tracking down sources in cases of suspected cheating. In my time, it happened periodically, and, as I used to tell my students, I was a pitbull when it came to academic dishonesty. If I suspected it, I would spend however long it took to track it down.
As my career was winding down, academic dishonesty was becoming just another of the many issues that had become 'political', in the sense that administration would have liked to wish the problem away, as parental anger over a student getting zero for cheating often caused them headaches.
A recent story from the Toronto Star is well worth reading, as it examines the problems being confronted at the university level, where cheating seems to have become widespread and relatively sophisticated. I am reproducing the story below:
Student cheaters have plenty of tricks up their sleeves
September 11, 2010
LOUISE BROWN
EDUCATION REPORTER
One panic-stricken student bought an essay for a course, only to leave the credit card bill among the pages when she handed it in.
Another student in an economics exam attracted a bit too much attention by whispering questions up his sleeve, where a forbidden cellphone taped to his arm was transmitting answers from a friend off-site.
Then there were the cheating lovers – literally; two female students unaware they were dating the same sly male classmate who sweet-talked both into writing tests and papers under his name. When love turned sour and the two University of Toronto undergrads discovered the scam, not only did they turn on their ex – they turned him in.
“In the end he faced 67 different charges of academic misconduct and was expelled,” recalled Professor Edith Hillan, the U of T’s vice-provost of faculty and academic life. “It was one of the more egregious examples of academic misconduct we’ve seen.”
As classes start Monday, Canada’s largest university is stepping up its campaign against cheating.
Dramatic displays of dishonesty are on the rise at the U of T, where the highest academic court – which hears only the most severe cases – received 38 new complaints in 2008-9, up from 21 the year before. The surge may partly reflect a larger trend cited recently in the report “Liars, Fraudsters and Cheats” by the Canadian Council on Learning, which found nearly three in four students in this country say they have cheated at least once, thanks to the cut-and-paste wizardry of the web and the trend to file-sharing almost everything.
But the U of T also is becoming more proactive against those who play dirty.
Leading the charge against cheating is the university’s leafy Mississauga campus, where a new full-time honesty watchdog began three summers ago to give instructors in all 15 departments a compulsory crash course in how to discourage, detect and deal with everything from plagiarism to paying for papers.
In the three years since academic affairs officer Lucy Gaspini began the training, campus charges have more than doubled to 388 in 2009-10 from 182 in 2006-7.
“It’s partly because instructors are being more vigilant, but I’m afraid it’s also because students are feeling more pressure to do really, really well now that almost everyone seems to go on to university and there’s real competition to get an edge,” said Gaspini. “We see cases of cheating even in fourth year because they’re battling to get into grad school.”
Often students who are caught tell Gaspini they just forgot to cite their sources; it was midnight, three essays were due and there was the Internet at their fingertips. Some plead too many deadlines and not enough time, the pressure of part-time jobs and financial worries. Others believed shortcuts were the only way to ensure a particular mark they needed.
“If they’d just invest the time doing the work and studying that they do on all these other tactics, they’d be fine,” said Gaspini. She met this fall for the first time with international students to talk about the perils of plagiarism, warning against such popular tricks as using a Morse code-style system of pen clicks to share answers on a multiple-choice test.
“We have a case now where students clicked their pens a certain number of times to indicate the question number, and then clicked again to indicate whether the answer was a, b, c or d,” said Gaspini. “Even if you’re the one giving the answer, you’re providing unauthorized aid to someone else and you’re guilty of academic dishonesty.”
Mississauga’s student council joined the awareness campaign last week by producing student tipsheets about cheating which it tucked into Frosh kits, and plans its first plagiarism workshop for students this fall.
“A lot more grey areas are coming up now. When I sold a text book last year I made a little extra money by throwing in my course notes but what if the person who bought them used them the wrong way?” wondered Grayce Yuen, the student union’s vice-president of university affairs and a co-author of the pamphlet. “I’d be more cautious next time.”
Yet it’s not all grey, stressed Gaspini in a recent workshop for some 10 instructors from the historical studies department. She warned about such tricks as printing notes on the inside of a water-bottle label, or the rim of a ball cap, or even between a student’s fingers.
“One instructor photocopied a student’s hand as evidence of crib notes before they could be washed off,” said Gaspini. Others have been rumoured to jot notes on parts of their bodies too intimate for an instructor to check.
Professor Sarianna Metso recalled marking one essay which footnoted a scholar she knew personally – saying something that simply didn’t sound like him.
“I was surprised, so I pulled my copy of his book off my own shelf and turned to the page cited on the footnote, which didn’t have that passage at all. It turns out all the footnotes were fiction,” she said. “The quotes were just made up off-the-cuff.
“But if you knowingly let an offence pass through your fingers (without discipline), you yourself have committed an academic offence,” she said. “You’re not doing anyone a favour, and the student just thinks they can do it again in another class without penalty.”
Cheating horror stories at U of T
• A tutorial assistant charged three students $1,500 each to slip them the answer sheet when he escorted them to the washroom during the exam. Ruling: suspended for five years.
• A student plagiarized an essay, then forged a doctor’s letter saying he was too sick to hand in a second essay on time. He then plagiarized it and handed it in late, followed by a third plagiarized essay. Ruling: recommended for expulsion.
• After agreeing to write an essay for $120 for a classmate, a student then plagiarized the essay so his customer failed the course. When she tried to get a refund, an ensuing fistfight brought the essay-writer to the attention of the university, which learned he had been selling essays for years. Ruling: suspended for five years.
• One student plagiarized an essay from a website for a course called Philosophy of Language, in the same term as she plagiarized an essay for another course. Essay topic? Artificial Intelligence. Ruling: suspended for three years.
• One student submitted an essay written originally by a professor at Purdue University whose name, sadly, she failed to include on her essay bibliography. Ruling: suspended for two years.
As my career was winding down, academic dishonesty was becoming just another of the many issues that had become 'political', in the sense that administration would have liked to wish the problem away, as parental anger over a student getting zero for cheating often caused them headaches.
A recent story from the Toronto Star is well worth reading, as it examines the problems being confronted at the university level, where cheating seems to have become widespread and relatively sophisticated. I am reproducing the story below:
Student cheaters have plenty of tricks up their sleeves
September 11, 2010
LOUISE BROWN
EDUCATION REPORTER
One panic-stricken student bought an essay for a course, only to leave the credit card bill among the pages when she handed it in.
Another student in an economics exam attracted a bit too much attention by whispering questions up his sleeve, where a forbidden cellphone taped to his arm was transmitting answers from a friend off-site.
Then there were the cheating lovers – literally; two female students unaware they were dating the same sly male classmate who sweet-talked both into writing tests and papers under his name. When love turned sour and the two University of Toronto undergrads discovered the scam, not only did they turn on their ex – they turned him in.
“In the end he faced 67 different charges of academic misconduct and was expelled,” recalled Professor Edith Hillan, the U of T’s vice-provost of faculty and academic life. “It was one of the more egregious examples of academic misconduct we’ve seen.”
As classes start Monday, Canada’s largest university is stepping up its campaign against cheating.
Dramatic displays of dishonesty are on the rise at the U of T, where the highest academic court – which hears only the most severe cases – received 38 new complaints in 2008-9, up from 21 the year before. The surge may partly reflect a larger trend cited recently in the report “Liars, Fraudsters and Cheats” by the Canadian Council on Learning, which found nearly three in four students in this country say they have cheated at least once, thanks to the cut-and-paste wizardry of the web and the trend to file-sharing almost everything.
But the U of T also is becoming more proactive against those who play dirty.
Leading the charge against cheating is the university’s leafy Mississauga campus, where a new full-time honesty watchdog began three summers ago to give instructors in all 15 departments a compulsory crash course in how to discourage, detect and deal with everything from plagiarism to paying for papers.
In the three years since academic affairs officer Lucy Gaspini began the training, campus charges have more than doubled to 388 in 2009-10 from 182 in 2006-7.
“It’s partly because instructors are being more vigilant, but I’m afraid it’s also because students are feeling more pressure to do really, really well now that almost everyone seems to go on to university and there’s real competition to get an edge,” said Gaspini. “We see cases of cheating even in fourth year because they’re battling to get into grad school.”
Often students who are caught tell Gaspini they just forgot to cite their sources; it was midnight, three essays were due and there was the Internet at their fingertips. Some plead too many deadlines and not enough time, the pressure of part-time jobs and financial worries. Others believed shortcuts were the only way to ensure a particular mark they needed.
“If they’d just invest the time doing the work and studying that they do on all these other tactics, they’d be fine,” said Gaspini. She met this fall for the first time with international students to talk about the perils of plagiarism, warning against such popular tricks as using a Morse code-style system of pen clicks to share answers on a multiple-choice test.
“We have a case now where students clicked their pens a certain number of times to indicate the question number, and then clicked again to indicate whether the answer was a, b, c or d,” said Gaspini. “Even if you’re the one giving the answer, you’re providing unauthorized aid to someone else and you’re guilty of academic dishonesty.”
Mississauga’s student council joined the awareness campaign last week by producing student tipsheets about cheating which it tucked into Frosh kits, and plans its first plagiarism workshop for students this fall.
“A lot more grey areas are coming up now. When I sold a text book last year I made a little extra money by throwing in my course notes but what if the person who bought them used them the wrong way?” wondered Grayce Yuen, the student union’s vice-president of university affairs and a co-author of the pamphlet. “I’d be more cautious next time.”
Yet it’s not all grey, stressed Gaspini in a recent workshop for some 10 instructors from the historical studies department. She warned about such tricks as printing notes on the inside of a water-bottle label, or the rim of a ball cap, or even between a student’s fingers.
“One instructor photocopied a student’s hand as evidence of crib notes before they could be washed off,” said Gaspini. Others have been rumoured to jot notes on parts of their bodies too intimate for an instructor to check.
Professor Sarianna Metso recalled marking one essay which footnoted a scholar she knew personally – saying something that simply didn’t sound like him.
“I was surprised, so I pulled my copy of his book off my own shelf and turned to the page cited on the footnote, which didn’t have that passage at all. It turns out all the footnotes were fiction,” she said. “The quotes were just made up off-the-cuff.
“But if you knowingly let an offence pass through your fingers (without discipline), you yourself have committed an academic offence,” she said. “You’re not doing anyone a favour, and the student just thinks they can do it again in another class without penalty.”
Cheating horror stories at U of T
• A tutorial assistant charged three students $1,500 each to slip them the answer sheet when he escorted them to the washroom during the exam. Ruling: suspended for five years.
• A student plagiarized an essay, then forged a doctor’s letter saying he was too sick to hand in a second essay on time. He then plagiarized it and handed it in late, followed by a third plagiarized essay. Ruling: recommended for expulsion.
• After agreeing to write an essay for $120 for a classmate, a student then plagiarized the essay so his customer failed the course. When she tried to get a refund, an ensuing fistfight brought the essay-writer to the attention of the university, which learned he had been selling essays for years. Ruling: suspended for five years.
• One student plagiarized an essay from a website for a course called Philosophy of Language, in the same term as she plagiarized an essay for another course. Essay topic? Artificial Intelligence. Ruling: suspended for three years.
• One student submitted an essay written originally by a professor at Purdue University whose name, sadly, she failed to include on her essay bibliography. Ruling: suspended for two years.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
The Politics of Student Part-Time Work - Part One
Having taught high school for 30 years, one of the issues of interest that I carried over into retirement is whether or not students should work part-time. While students have always worked for any number of reasons, ranging from saving for post-secondary education to purchasing things their parents either wouldn't or couldn't buy for them, over the years it was my perception that the number of hours young people were devoting to their jobs rose significantly. A recent article in the Globe and Mail addressed the problem, and some interesting and startling conclusions were reached.
Jorgen Hansen, an associate professor of economics at Montreal’s Concordia University, used data from Statistics Canada’s Youth in Transition Survey, a survey that follows cohorts of students over a number of years. His conclusion: working part-time hurts grades. The more you work part-time, the greater the harm to grades.
According to Wendy Patton, a dean of the faculty of education at Queensland University at Brisbane, Australia, the upper limit should be 12 hours per week. Other studies showed a deterioration in academic performance commensurate with the number of hours worked.
From my own personal experience, it was not unusual to have some students, usually seniors, working almost the equivalent of full-time jobs, and, of course, their grades, homework completion rates, and assignments all suffered. Plaintively, they would tell me they had to work to save for university; my usual response was that if they continued to put in those kinds of hours, they likely wouldn't be going to university anyway, as they wouldn't have the marks. Such harsh observations generally, of course, fell on deaf ears.
And this is where we come to the political aspect of the equation. For a number of reasons that I will outline in my next post, I strongly believe that government has a role to play in regulating how many hours high school students can work.
Jorgen Hansen, an associate professor of economics at Montreal’s Concordia University, used data from Statistics Canada’s Youth in Transition Survey, a survey that follows cohorts of students over a number of years. His conclusion: working part-time hurts grades. The more you work part-time, the greater the harm to grades.
According to Wendy Patton, a dean of the faculty of education at Queensland University at Brisbane, Australia, the upper limit should be 12 hours per week. Other studies showed a deterioration in academic performance commensurate with the number of hours worked.
From my own personal experience, it was not unusual to have some students, usually seniors, working almost the equivalent of full-time jobs, and, of course, their grades, homework completion rates, and assignments all suffered. Plaintively, they would tell me they had to work to save for university; my usual response was that if they continued to put in those kinds of hours, they likely wouldn't be going to university anyway, as they wouldn't have the marks. Such harsh observations generally, of course, fell on deaf ears.
And this is where we come to the political aspect of the equation. For a number of reasons that I will outline in my next post, I strongly believe that government has a role to play in regulating how many hours high school students can work.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
An Article on Critical Thinking
Allan Levine, a history professor from Manitoba, has written an excellent article on critical thinking in today's Globe. An excerpt from the article offers a clear and concise explanation of the concept, and what its goals are:
“Critical thinking is self-guided, self-disciplined thinking which attempts to reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded way,” explains Linda Elder, an educational psychologist and president of the Foundation for Critical Thinking. “People who think critically consistently attempt to live rationally, reasonably and empathically. They work diligently to develop the intellectual virtues of intellectual integrity, intellectual humility, intellectual civility, intellectual empathy, intellectual sense of justice and confidence in reason.”
Illustrating its importance by examining the current controversy surrounding the building of a mosque a few blocks from the twin towers' terrorist attack, Levine demonstrates that those lofty goals are well-worth striving for throughout our lives, even if complete attainment eludes us.
“Critical thinking is self-guided, self-disciplined thinking which attempts to reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded way,” explains Linda Elder, an educational psychologist and president of the Foundation for Critical Thinking. “People who think critically consistently attempt to live rationally, reasonably and empathically. They work diligently to develop the intellectual virtues of intellectual integrity, intellectual humility, intellectual civility, intellectual empathy, intellectual sense of justice and confidence in reason.”
Illustrating its importance by examining the current controversy surrounding the building of a mosque a few blocks from the twin towers' terrorist attack, Levine demonstrates that those lofty goals are well-worth striving for throughout our lives, even if complete attainment eludes us.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Criticizing the Harper Government Can be Harmful to Career Prospects
I was going to write a post exploring the casualty list of those whose criticisms of specific Harper Government policies have resulted in dismissals, demotions, or resignations, but the Globe and Mail has already done it this morning in its online Political Notebook.
The latest victim is RCMP Marty Cheliak, whose vigorous support of the long gun registry has earned him much praise and recognition amongst police forces across the country but apparently incurred the ire of Harper, who dearly wants to eliminate it, no doubt another sop to his hardcore constituency. While the Government denies any role in the matter, citing it as an RCMP decision, his removal as head of the Canadian Firearms Program, nine months after his appointment, does not pass the smell test and appears to be part of the growing pattern of intolerance of criticism that Mr. Harper is known for.
The official reason for Cheliak's removal? He is not bilingual. Funny, that didn't seem to be an issue until now.
Message received loud and clear, Mr. Harper.
The latest victim is RCMP Marty Cheliak, whose vigorous support of the long gun registry has earned him much praise and recognition amongst police forces across the country but apparently incurred the ire of Harper, who dearly wants to eliminate it, no doubt another sop to his hardcore constituency. While the Government denies any role in the matter, citing it as an RCMP decision, his removal as head of the Canadian Firearms Program, nine months after his appointment, does not pass the smell test and appears to be part of the growing pattern of intolerance of criticism that Mr. Harper is known for.
The official reason for Cheliak's removal? He is not bilingual. Funny, that didn't seem to be an issue until now.
Message received loud and clear, Mr. Harper.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Ontario To Allow Mixed Martial Arts
My son just sent me a link to a story that says the Ontario McGuinty Government has changed its mind and will allow MMA fighting beginning next year. According to Consumer Services Minister Sophia Aggelonitis, regulating MMA is the best way to keep the fighters safe.
Hmm... not to mention the revenue the government will accrue from it and the online gambling it is about to get into as well.
Oh well, bloodsports and gambling may be two effective ways to assuage people should they grow vexed over their increasingly high utility and gasoline bills thanks to the HST, despite the fact that the latter will be applied to these latest questionable and diversionary McGuinty policy decisions.
Hmm... not to mention the revenue the government will accrue from it and the online gambling it is about to get into as well.
Oh well, bloodsports and gambling may be two effective ways to assuage people should they grow vexed over their increasingly high utility and gasoline bills thanks to the HST, despite the fact that the latter will be applied to these latest questionable and diversionary McGuinty policy decisions.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
How Do We Assess Information?
The other day I had an interesting and spirited discussion with a colleague at the food bank where I volunteer. Initially the conversation revolved around the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the possible loss of the team with City Council's decision to proceed with the West Harbour as the site of the new stadium over the objections of team owner Bob Young.
The discussion then progressed to how we evaluate the information we receive. My position, using two illustrations, was and is as follows: Because whatever personal expertise we may possess is usually very limited in scope, it becomes incumbent upon us to be very much influenced by experts in any given field.
Take, for example, the Conservative Government's decision to abandon the mandatory long census form. To be quite honest, the topic of the census, until the controversy erupted, was of no interest to me. The subject of statistics is like a foreign language to me, and seemingly of no pertinence to my life. However, after the almost universal condemnation of the Harper decision by a wealth of experts, critical thinking demands that I accept as true that it is a very bad decision that should be reversed.
We then went on to talk about, and disagree upon, climate change. Her position was that she wants to decide the truth for herself, through research on the Internet. That may well be a sound approach if she has enough time and the ability to evaluate the sources of her information, something that is very hard for a lay person to do on issues with a high degree of technical information.
Nonetheless, I have already accepted the truth of climate change, not just because of the worldwide evidence of something happening at an unprecedented rate of change, but also because, again, the overwhelming majority of experts in the field say that it is essentially indisputable. I italicized the word experts because a favorite ploy of climate change deniers is to have people whose credentials lie elsewhere to call into question the analyses of the real experts, thus sowing doubt amongst the lay people.
In fact, that is the tack regularly employed by Globe and Mail writer Neil Reynolds who, in his last column on climate change, cited the opinion of some environmental economists to support his thesis, and in a previous piece used the 'expertise' of a Nobel Prize-wining physicist.
Bringing these issues into sharp relief is writer Antony black, who had a column in today's Hamilton Spectator. I urge those of you interested in critical thinking to take a few moments to read it, as the evidence he presents to undermine the climate change deniers is quite interesting. I urge those of you interested in critical thinking to take a few moments to read it, as the evidence he presents to undermine the climate change deniers is quite interesting.
The discussion then progressed to how we evaluate the information we receive. My position, using two illustrations, was and is as follows: Because whatever personal expertise we may possess is usually very limited in scope, it becomes incumbent upon us to be very much influenced by experts in any given field.
Take, for example, the Conservative Government's decision to abandon the mandatory long census form. To be quite honest, the topic of the census, until the controversy erupted, was of no interest to me. The subject of statistics is like a foreign language to me, and seemingly of no pertinence to my life. However, after the almost universal condemnation of the Harper decision by a wealth of experts, critical thinking demands that I accept as true that it is a very bad decision that should be reversed.
We then went on to talk about, and disagree upon, climate change. Her position was that she wants to decide the truth for herself, through research on the Internet. That may well be a sound approach if she has enough time and the ability to evaluate the sources of her information, something that is very hard for a lay person to do on issues with a high degree of technical information.
Nonetheless, I have already accepted the truth of climate change, not just because of the worldwide evidence of something happening at an unprecedented rate of change, but also because, again, the overwhelming majority of experts in the field say that it is essentially indisputable. I italicized the word experts because a favorite ploy of climate change deniers is to have people whose credentials lie elsewhere to call into question the analyses of the real experts, thus sowing doubt amongst the lay people.
In fact, that is the tack regularly employed by Globe and Mail writer Neil Reynolds who, in his last column on climate change, cited the opinion of some environmental economists to support his thesis, and in a previous piece used the 'expertise' of a Nobel Prize-wining physicist.
Bringing these issues into sharp relief is writer Antony black, who had a column in today's Hamilton Spectator. I urge those of you interested in critical thinking to take a few moments to read it, as the evidence he presents to undermine the climate change deniers is quite interesting. I urge those of you interested in critical thinking to take a few moments to read it, as the evidence he presents to undermine the climate change deniers is quite interesting.
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