A Professor at Louisiana State Is Flunked Because of Her Grades
May 16, 2010
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Jackson Hill for The Chronicle Dominique G. Homberger, who has taught at Louisiana State U. at Baton Rouge for 31 years, was abruptly removed from her biology courses. By David Glenn
Zachary Izdepski, a junior who took Biology 1001 with Ms. Homberger, feels she is in the right: "I think the administration made a big mistake with this case." Kevin R. Carman, dean of basic sciences, was alarmed by the extraordinary number of students failing Ms. Homberger's biology class. Ms. Homberger, a tenured professor of biology who has taught at Louisiana State since 1979, was pulled from the class, effective immediately. Her section was turned over to E. William Wischusen, an associate professor who coordinates the department's large lecture courses. A few days later, Mr. Wischusen retroactively raised the grades in Ms. Homberger's section, giving each student a 25-point increase on the first exam, on which they had done so badly. "No one had spoken to me in person about this," she says. "Not the dean, not my department chair." The move has ignited a battle on the campus. Ms. Homberger and her allies say the dean crossed a line by interfering in a classroom. They also say the incident is a symptom of grade inflation, and they worry that the episode will set a terrible precedent. But Mr. Carman and other LSU officials are unapologetic. The grade distribution in Ms. Homberger's section was far out of line with the historical pattern in Biology 1001, they say, and a general-education course for nonmajors is not the place for her particular style of tough love. That's also the view of a few of Ms. Homberger's colleagues and former graduate students, who say her methods are actually rigorous to the point of dysfunction. On an afternoon in late April, a few dozen Biology 1001 students gather outside the lecture hall in advance of class. Timothy Lala, a junior civil-engineering major, says the department was right to remove Ms. Homberger. "It was very tough," he says. "Her tests weren't exactly hard questions. They were just strange. Some of them dealt with things that she'd barely touched on in class." But another student steps in to defend Ms. Homberger. "I learned a lot from her," says Rebecca C. Maggio, a sophomore majoring in graphic design. "She challenged us to study. I don't think she was unreasonable. I'd say she was very, very thorough." Ms. Homberger was teaching the course this semester because the department needed an instructor. For most of her time at Louisiana State, her bread and butter as an undergraduate instructor has been "Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy," an upper-level course; she had not taught a large lecture section since 1995. Students who sign up for Ms. Homberger's anatomy course—in contrast to those who may have wandered into her Biology 1001 section this semester—know exactly what they are getting into. The course has a longstanding reputation for toughness. Of the 21 students who enrolled in anatomy last fall, 13 withdrew. Of the eight who made it to the finish line, three failed, two earned B's, and three earned A's. That has been the typical pattern since 1995, according to university records. But some students, even those who have struggled, love the anatomy course. "The first time I took the class, I had anxiety well into the semester," says Jill Dowling, a graduating senior who failed the course on her first attempt, then tried again and earned a C. Despite this, Ms. Dowling counts the course as one of her best academic experiences. "You learn how to study. You learn how to keep up," she says. Five other veterans of the course gave similarly glowing accounts to The Chronicle. Mr. Wischusen, the course coordinator who took over Ms. Homberger's section in Biology 1001, says he was pleased when Ms. Homberger volunteered to teach it. He says they had productive conversations before the semester began about how she would approach the material. But he became concerned, he says, when he saw the eccentric format of her daily quizzes and her first exam, which was given on February 18. Ms. Homberger was using multiple-choice questions—but instead of the typical four or five possible answers, she used as many as 10. "I thought her questions were far more complicated than was actually necessary," Mr. Wischusen says. He also suggests that she was too concerned with testing students' memory of insignificant details. "Professor Homberger and I disagreed about the relative importance of testing facts versus concepts," he says. "Let's just leave it at that." (Go to this article on chronicle.com for two examples of Ms. Homberger's test questions.) Mr. Wischusen never sat in on Ms. Homberger's class. Nor did any other colleague. That is one of the points that most angers Ms. Homberger—that administrators pulled her from the course without looking directly at her classroom. But the course coordinator began to hear complaints from her students early in the semester. Ms. Homberger's quiz and test questions were too cumbersome, they said—and the questions often dealt with material that had been assigned as reading but never discussed in the classroom. She irked some students because she did not give out detailed study guides for tests, and because she assigned them to read Wikipedia entries on various topics. The Midterm FiascoOn March 12, Mr. Wischusen saw the midterm grades in Ms. Homberger's section. Ten days later, he says, he brought his concerns to Mr. Carman, the dean. "By the time this came to my attention," Mr. Carman says, "there was one week left before the end date for students to withdraw from class. My concern was that there was going to be a large number of additional students leaving." The attrition rate in Biology 1001 at that moment stood at 21.5 percent, up from 15.9 percent 12 days earlier. It is impossible to know how many more students might have exited before the April 1 withdrawal deadline. "If all of our classes had this kind of attrition rate, we would have a very hard time graduating students from LSU," he says. He decided that he had to act. After touching base with the provost and chancellor, he sent Ms. Homberger the e-mail message. Except in cases of gross misconduct, Louisiana State does not have a formal policy for removing instructors from a course midsemester. Mr. Carman does not assert that Ms. Homberger had violated any particular policy, but he says he had the authority to act in order to protect students' interests. In large, multisection lecture courses, individual instructors at Louisiana State appear to have a certain amount of latitude to set their own grading standards, according to a Chronicle analysis of 10 such courses for the period from 2005 to 2009. In economics, all sections of the introductory course have almost identical grade distributions. In a large lecture course in American history, by contrast, there is huge variance. One senior faculty member is stingy with A's, giving them to fewer than 5 percent of his students; one of his colleagues consistently awards 30 percent or more. In any case, every faculty member interviewed for this article said that they knew of no precedents at Louisiana State for disciplining an instructor for grading too harshly. On March 26, the day after she learned she had been pulled, Ms. Homberger met with Mr. Carman in his office. She told him that she had given the department ample warning that she intended to grade the course rigorously. She also noted that attrition rates in some other introductory science courses at Louisiana State routinely exceeded 25 percent. (Those are in courses aimed at science majors, so the analogy to Biology 1001 is not perfect.) In the fall of 2009, three sections of introductory chemistry had withdrawal rates higher than 28 percent. So did four sections of calculus and three sections of introductory economics. Most of all, she argued that her students' grades would have improved. (Their average grade on the second exam, it turned out, was 70. That was 20 points higher than the average on the first exam, but it still left roughly a third of the students on track to fail.) None of that persuaded Mr. Carman. He said his decision was final. Ms. Homberger got on the phone with friends in the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Brooks B. Ellwood, a professor of geology and the chapter president, calls her removal one of the most egregious such episodes he can recall at Louisiana State. If instructors are tacitly pressured not to fail too many students, he says, "the good students won't ever get a fair distribution of grades that reflects their good work. And once it gets out that this is something that administrators can do, students will be quicker to complain." Mr. Ellwood fears this will be the first of many such conflicts. The state of Louisiana is moving toward a system that will allocate funds to public colleges according to their success in improving their retention and graduation rates. Those are worthy goals, Mr. Ellwood says, but they could easily lead to ham-handed efforts to reduce students' failure rates. Ms. Homberger says she has been flooded with supportive messages from around the country; she forwarded a dozen examples to The Chronicle. Finally someone is taking a stand for academic rigor, her correspondents say. Even one of her Biology 1001 students, Zachary Izdepski, a junior majoring in cultural geography, says that "to have professors running scared—it's not a good thing. I think the administration made a big mistake with this case." Unsupportive ColleaguesBut others at Louisiana State say that they aren't entirely surprised. "This talk about 'academic freedom' is nauseating," says James V. Remsen Jr., a professor of biology, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. "It does not apply to what one teaches in core-curriculum courses. LSU students should worship at the altar of Dean Carman." Mr. Remsen says administrators should have stepped in long ago to improve Ms. Homberger's performance. He notes that during her 31 years at Louisiana State, only a single student has completed a doctorate under her supervision, and that only a handful of students have completed master's degrees. All of her other graduate students have dropped out or transferred to different advisers. One student who dropped out is Mr. Remsen's ex-wife, Catherine Cummins, who abandoned hope of completing a doctorate with Ms. Homberger during the late 1980s. (She is one of the students to have completed a master's degree.) Ms. Cummins later earned a doctorate in curriculum and instruction at Louisiana State and now teaches at a laboratory school affiliated with the university. "At one point I really considered Dominique like a sister," she says. "I identified with her feminism and her determination to make it as a woman in science." But she says she became frustrated with Ms. Homberger's methods, both in the laboratory and in her undergraduate courses, where Ms. Cummins sometimes worked as a teaching assistant. "She would assign articles from offprint collections, from Scientific American and other magazines," Ms. Cummins says. "For 18-, 19-year-old kids, these were pretty high-level reading. And then, on her tests, there might be a question about the caption on one of the figures in those articles—something very, very detailed. Students would complain and she would answer, 'Did you have to read that? Well, then, you should know it.'" A second graduate student, a contemporary of Ms. Cummins, gave The Chronicle a similar account. In reply, Ms. Homberger says that she believes she does, in fact, adjust the style and content of her teaching to particular audiences. "There is no denying that some students really dislike my teaching and me as a person," she says. "But others like me very much, and one should always consider the source." As for the paucity of doctorates that have emerged from her lab, Ms. Homberger says there is a long and complex history. In the early 1990s, she says, she was involved in a plagiarism dispute with a former graduate student. A university committee ultimately exonerated her, she says, but ever since then, certain colleagues have discouraged students from studying with her. In any case, she says, the issue is irrelevant to this semester's dispute. "There are plenty of professors who have graduated only one Ph.D. student and can be proud of their accomplishments," she says. "I do not see how this can be construed as a negative." Paradoxically, defending every faculty member's freedom to set his or her own grading policies—a principle that Ms. Homberger asserts—might actually exacerbate the culture of grade inflation that she decries. In a world with complete autonomy in grading, many faculty members might take the easy road and let their grades drift higher. And departments would find it hard to establish norms about what students should learn. Partly because of that paradox, Louisiana State's Faculty Senate has decided to wait until the fall before passing any resolutions related to the Homberger matter. Over the summer, its executive committee plans to draft revisions of the university's formal rules about grading. Among other things, they want to reach a consensus about how much autonomy instructors should have when they teach sections of large introductory courses. Meanwhile, Ms. Homberger awaits the outcome of a grievance she has filed with the university. "I'm doing the right thing," she says. "I can turn around and tell the students that they really should learn, that they really should study. And I think this is an enormous success. But look where it got me." -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Comments "There is no denying that some students really dislike my teaching
and me as a person," she says. "But others like me very much, and one
should always consider the source." The actions on the part of Mr. Carman, the Dean in this case, are appalling. The fact that over 46% of students in her class were receiving passing grades (71 and above) on Exam 2 shows that Prof. Homberger was just a tough teacher. Does that justify pulling a tenure professor out of a course mid-stream? I am sure we all know colleagues that are very tough, hold high standards, are demanding--should we just pull them out of the classroom when their grade distributions drop or differ from their colleagues who inflate grades and are more interested in popularity than academic rigor? And the fact that nobody observed her class? Oh, and heaven forbid that 18 and 19 year olds would be asked to read a popular press magazine as Scientific American! Shocking, Shocking that the administration would put her back in
the large class after 15 years. That was done purposefully. The
administration knew that she would not change her teaching style and
could capitalize on the student compliants in order to remove her. I
imagine she is tenured faculty; so in order to remove her, the
administration needed justification which she provided, although weak.
Politics is politics. Were it not May, I'd swear this story
had to be an April Fool's joke. Sadly, it's for real, as "unreal" as
it sounds. Aside from the administrative intrusion into classroom
affairs, there are statements in the article that are indicative of a
very sad state of affairs in University education at this institution
(and, perhaps many others): If an individual student flunks my class, it is clearly his or her fault. But if the vast majority of my class fails my exams, then it is clearly my fault. All that talk about being tough and having high demands and standards in the classroom is just a cop-out. As the professors, we are responsible for teaching. Ms. Homberger's grade distribution clearly shows that she did not do her job properly. The actions of the Department Chair
and Dean are frightening to another gray haired 30 plus years of
teaching tenured professor. I to consider myself a rigorous professor
that uses the concept approach as apposed to the fact approach, but I
would not volunteer to teach a large section. That the administration
can step in and change the grades of a professor has long been a taboo
under academic freedom. This situation never should have happened. Everything points to a
faculty member who has been in decline for some time: no publications
for seven years, few or no graduate students in her lab, and I would
guess very little sponsored research funding, given those staffing and
productivity rates. Add to these factors an administrator assigning
her to teach a large lecture course that Dr. Homberger has not taught
in fifteen years, a course that fulfills a general education
requirement for nonmajors, and this is a trainwreck in the making. And
the trainwreck is then compounded by the unilateral action of the
administration in removing her from the course without so much as a
conversation on the subject. Three replies to yesterday's comments: Professor in decline? I think it apparent from the example items that the test was designed to fail as many students as possible. Someone with Ms. Homberger's experience must have known how students would perform on items of this kind. What were her motives? she was a terrible instructor. judging from the questions she used to evaluate students, she is obsessed with gotcha questions that reference nothing other than factoids. The contents appeared to be totally devoid of analytics and theory. After completing her course, how would someone benefit? He or she might remember that foxes in captivity have white stars on their foreheads. Who cares? She is absorbed by all of the trees and has totally lost site of the forest. Defenders of this instructor present
a false dichotomy: support dumbing-down tactics and grade-inflation,
or defend tough teaching. However, it is quite possible to be a
rigorous teacher with high expectations and a tough grader, and yet
still design strong and challenging exams. I imagine the majority of
us do this regularly; my tests reward those who demonstrate strong
critical thinking, nuance, innovative reasoning, analytical aptitude,
comprehension, ability to apply and synthesize ideas... Not mere rote
memorization. The huge number of students failing the course indicates that the instructor failed to teach her subject effectively. How to make science accessible to non-majors and the average undergraduate surely deserves further scrutiny. As a chair of a large department, I
have been in the position of leaning on instructors who grade too
hard, as well as some that grade too easily. I would have moved
agressively, if I had an instructor, who had a grade curve as far out
as Prof. Homberger. If the Biology department wants to change their
standards, that is a collective not indivdual decision. People blame immigration, Obama, Bush etc...why America is falling behind...just look at how we treat students going to college. Oh it is too tough...sorry when you get out, life is tough. You earn everything in life. If anything the recent debacle of our economy proves is that we are becoming people of entitlement and not of earners. I wonder where we would be if the generation asked to defend America in the 1940's believed that they were entitled not to fight. This is a joke and it makes LSU look more like a For-Profit than an educational institute of higher learning. When did America become so soft? Is LSU also stepping in to remove all the easy or otherwise crap
professors from their courses? Since this action against Prof
Homberger was generated by student complaints and not by a more
responsible independent audit, I'm guessing not. One of the problems cited for Prof Homberger is that she has only graduated on doctoral student? If you've been paying attention to the debates about the overabundance of doctorates and the resulting difficulty in getting adequate employment for those graduates (a problem in the sciences as well as the humanities), Prof Homberger should be a hero for keeping her finger in the dike. The grades and dropouts are warning signs. But the administrators
-- course coordinator and dean -- seem to me to have been woefully
inept in simple data collection and procedure. The story indicates
that 1) no one observed the classroom; 2) no one spoke with Prof.
Homberger prior to removing her from the course. I work at an insitution where we have a science requisite with
similiar grade distribution. I see students often studying 40 hours
per week for this course, while letting other course work go and still
end up with scores around the mean of 25. There is also some
interesting affects on our higher risk students. The grade distribution in one specific class cannot reasonably be
the measure of a professor's "toughness," or "fairness," or any other
characteristic. It really is possible that a particular class has been
populated by a greater-than-average percentage of unprepared or
unmotivated students. A few years ago I had students "number off" one
through six in order to "randomly" assign them to groups of three and
four for a class exercise. When one of the groups began to work one of
the students declared, "Hey! We're all Hindu!" Upon investigation I
learned that it was apparently true that only Hindus and all of the
Hindus in the class landed in the randomly-assigned group. Over the
past 21 years I have observed that I sometimes have classes in which
the students respond in ways that others in the same course over many
years have not. The comparison with previous and future sections of
the course taught by this and other professors is only reasonable if
repeated and replicated. Folks: Off and on, I've taught large sections of the entry level
American history survey course since 1970. I've had colleagues
teaching the same course whose drop out rate was close to Dr.
Homberger's, and more than half of whose students failed their first
exam. None of these gents were removed from the classroom and
reassigned because of this. There must be a back story here. "Their average grade on the second exam, it turned out, was 70." This brings to mind the story of a friend's son. He graduated as
valedictorian from his high school and went on to Johns Hopkins just
three years ago. When I asked how he was doing during his first
semester, my friend told me her son had been happy to get a C on one
of his first science tests, since most of the students had failed it.
Without any doubt, what she did is much harder than what the rest of professors in that university, or elsewhere, do, when it comes to rigor in student assessment. Scaling of results not only is unfair, but it contributes in increasing of already huge inflation of less and less valued diplomas and college degrees. Scientific American is "pretty high level reading?" The end (formally...) to real standards and real pedagogy...unfortunately, we are all too familiar with the trend. Let me respond in a language the students will perhaps understand: OMG! After looking at the questions it is clear some intervention as
needed - but this was grossly mishandled by the chair and dean. I
personally would love to audit the class - it sounds interesting - but
I think the professor could use some coaching on teaching lower
division gen ed courses. However the failure of the chair, dean or any
other administrator to attend the lectures and offer assistance before
removing the professor from the classroom is clearly a much larger
failure in leadership up the entire ladder. If the course had been
observed, improvement suggestions made in positive manner and the
professor still refused to modify the course, then the removal might
be justified Academe is struggling with their journey from 'we are not a
business' to 'we have a product, consumers, and education is a
business'. According to the chart in the CHE article above, 77.1% of LSU
students recieve a grade of C or better. Grade inflation like this;
well, now that should offend the Dean. If LSU is not careful, its
standards will be as low as schools in the Ivy League. Ah, LSU - Resolved: Wherein the administration of LSU failed to ensure due
process for the faculty member... Whereas the course coordinator acted
outside of his/her authority... Whereas the Chair of the Department
apparently failed to investigate... Whereas the Dean, upon being made
aware of the above failures then failed to... We the faculty members
of the LSU Faculty Senate do hereby call for the resignation of... In sports, if the team doesn't do
well, the coach works to improve performance. If the team continues to
do poorly, the coach is fired. In Academia, the students are blamed
for poor performance(the players) and the faculty member (the coach)
is blameless. Yes, #34, but in sports if an athlete does not perform to the coach's standards the athlete is sent to a minor league. Would you argue for a similar thing in Academia?
Also, #34, would you suggest that only those students who have already demonstrated proficiency in the subject be permitted to take those classes? If I could select only those students with a history of proficiency in the subject and recruit only from among those I've seen "play" well, then I couldn't fail. Instead we take students who don't know the subject, but often don't seem to know that they don't know and are not prepared to learn. What coach would tolerate a player who comes to practice with no intention to put forth the effort to improve? The coach can only produce a winning team when he or she has the ability to remove such players from the team without being blamed for the failure of the players who would not perform. Above, #34 refers to goodeyes. The numbers are changing. Ahh how we faculty types forget so
easliy the days we struggled with learning and horrible teachers. Do
any of us recall the faculty who never should have been let into a
classroom- yes. Do we recall unfair tests and quizes - yes. Do we
recall our thoughts of wanting the teacher gone - yes? Paper Chase
movie Kingsfield anyone? Does anyone know of opinion surveys or research that has been done
soliciting judgments about grade distribution / grade inflation with
the following (or similar) groups delineated among respondents? So let me get this straight: Students and their families are paying
exhorbitant tuitions and racking up many thousands of dollars of debt,
and yet incompetent/ineffective/unresponsive/old/tired/lazy (select
the word of yor choice) faculty members are untouchable. What a tangled web? There are academically challenged students?
There "bad" professors who do not know how to teach and test students?
There ill-prepared administrators who set the institution on fire? This tragic story points to the need
to recognize the special demands in the teaching of non-science
majors. A brilliant scientist, does not necessarily make a good
teacher. It is one thing to teach science majors but it does not
always follow that one can do just as good a job in teaching
non-science majors. Anyone who teaches non- science students, on top
of everything else, has to deal with students who may be indifferent
or even fearful of science. Teach science in exactly the same way by
placing the same demands as if you were teaching science majors and
you cause more damage than good. This is what may have happened in the
case of this story. What is the use of a good grade if the student
ends up hating the very subject for which he/she got an A or a B? With
the right approach we can teach good science to non-science students
successfully. The extra gift such teachers have is the ability to
transform fear or indifference into confidence and an understanding
that brings forth inspiration and awe about nature and the cosmos. At 40: Academically challenged students flunk out. Poor administrators are fired. The only untouchable is the tenured prof. No matter how bad, nothing can be done to them and they know it. What a bunch of babies! Students do NOT need detailed study guides. Study guides are simply a variation of that age old plea: "Tell us what's going to be on the test." Well, college students are (or should be) adults and capable of understanding that ANYTHING and EVERYTHING assigned out of class (technical term for that is HOMEWORK) or covered in class might be on the test. That means ANYTHING and EVERYTHING: lecture, assigned reading, lab. ANYTHING and EVERYTHING. What's with the Wikipedia complaints? Is Wikipedia too hard for them? Carman should be ashamed for rolling over to the lazy students' demands. The fact that there even is such a thing as a biology course for nonscience majors at LSU is a cop out. Biology is biology; the basics are the basics. Let's call the course what it is--biology dumbed down. It makes as much sense as having a course in multiplication for nonmathematics majors. Folks, you've got to learn your multiplication tables whether you are a math major or not. Deal with it. Ms. Homberger's only sin was that she was trying to actually teach some biology to some university students--a course they all signed up for. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this a science class for non science majors? Why grade harshly if it's just a class they are required to take because it's part of gen ed? That's like asking a student who is taking a computer programming class because it's part of the gen ed to write an intricit program when they have absolutely no knowledge of programming whatsoever. I'm sorry but I agree with their desicion to remove her. They aren't science majors, back off! David: Shiksha - acobas - I hate to be the one to break it to you but multiple generations, including many thousands of people the age of these college students ARE out there defending your world right now. One of them happens to be a doctoral student whose studies were interrupted for three deployments. He has two young children. You would do well to pay respect to this generation. I am so tired of the fond hearkening back to the "olden times." Please, you all sound worse than your so-called "coddled" students. Grow up and recognize that you have a job to do. I've done analyses of these types of classes and, again, I hate to break it to you but there are typically no significant differences in student 'types' between sections of the same class. I am uncertain as to why there seems to be this overwhelming negative response to students as well as a completely blind faith in the teaching (or research) capabilities of faculty. Faculty often make poor, snap judgements based on little fact that are clouded by a few negative experiences with students. The lot of you sound exactly like uneducated nits. Go do your jobs. The issue is NOT whether this Professor does/does not have academic
standards that are too high. Rather, the issue is that we are no
longer at the top, but already at the bottom of the slippery slope of
possibilities of administrative interference into the teaching/grading
process if this outrageous decision gets to stand. Perhaps all faculty should copy the protocols of one of my
colleagues: (with apologies for repeating this post from the "Try a Homberger
Test " comments) |
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