SUSAN D. BLUM
  • Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • Books
  • Selected Publications
  • Good Learning
  • Events
  • Media

The School Game

9/30/2012

1 Comment

 
We can keep calling for morality, but just as arguments to share the ball don’t make any sense in football, the stakes of the education game compel students and faculty and administrators to compete win in the perceived zero-sum game.

Also published in Huffington Post
Cheating in high school! Cheating in college! College rankings! Get your news here….It’s all about school as game. And there are a lot of losers in this game—including some of the winners.

Some moments provide a nice ironic juxtaposition of stories that illuminate each other. The Stuyvesant High School story about how these privileged students—privileged at least because they attend New York City’s most highly regarded public high school—make decisions about when to cheat contains the obvious truth that students and the faculty and administrators share the goal of getting the students into elite colleges. Anthropologist Peter Demerath showed that this is common in schools where the dominant groups is privileged. Everyone wins—in the college admissions game—if the students succeed, even if it means ignoring the glut of extra credit points, the inflated grade-point averages, the brown-nosing, and the rampant cheating.

Then we have college admissions.

US News and World Report, that middling publication, saved its life by focusing on its college rankings. In turn, colleges and universities change their practices to move up in the rankings, for instance, by limiting class sizes to the exact numbers USNWR uses to determine “small” and “large classes,” or by marketing themselves to greater numbers of students in order to reject more of them, boosting their “selectivity” rate and then moving up. Still, as Joe Nocera notes, the rankings don’t reveal many surprises, as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia retain their premier positions.

Though US readers may not follow this, a new higher education arms race is emerging internationally as well, with QS rankings challenging Times Higher Education rankings and Academic Ranking of World Universities, done by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, vying for primacy. Around the world, universities desperately invest in the areas most likely to affect their rankings, trumpeting successes and berating failures.

US rankings, world rankings: what happens in those universities?

Here we have the Harvard Cheating Scandal from the previous month, with 125 students charged with having collaborated unlawfully on a take-home exam.

In my research on college cheating and plagiarism (and truth and deception) in the US and in China, I have found both the scandals and the reactions to them instructive.

In the United States public attention has focused on student cheating and professional writers’ plagiarism. We worry about whether our students have done their own work and produced original works. We worry about the “culture of cheating” spilling from academe into business and public life, or the reverse.

In China the focus is more about faculty misdeeds. In fact China is so concerned about academic misconduct that in March 2012 the Ministry of Education issued guidelines and laws about it. There is to be no more fraudulent data, no more misrepresentation of academic credentials, no more recycling of publications, no more admissions missteps, no more simply paying journals and editors to get articles published. The threatened punishment is severe.

Yet despite the jeremiads, the threats, the hand-wringing, the attempt to infuse morality, such as through Honor Codes, the pull to cut corners remains, because at all levels of schooling many of the participants regard it all as a game.

If administrators are trying to improve in the rankings at any cost, if professors are trying to increase the number of publications by hook or by crook, if admissions counselors in complicity with parents go to any means to help students connive to look good for admission to the most selective colleges, if the first question everyone always asks is about rankings, grades, scores, numbers of publications—in short if the question is always about the externals and never about that mushy middle we could call learning—then there would be no reason, no incentive (using economists’ lingo), no motivation (psychologists’), no model for a focus on the substance.

We can keep calling for morality, but just as arguments to share the ball don’t make any sense in football, the stakes of the education game compel students and faculty and administrators to compete win in the perceived zero-sum game.

There are other ways to look at school, education, but those ways are quieter and harder to measure, as we know from the high-stakes testing conversation that was so evident in the Chicago Teachers’ Strike.

If school is a game, then gaming the system is a rational outcome.

But of course it is also deplorable. Even the winners in the game are losers in the real enterprise, which is learning and teaching for successful and meaningful living.
1 Comment
https://vidmate.onl/download/ link
3/11/2022 10:13:53 am

ks for sharing the article, and more importantly, your personal experie dxcsd nce minzxc xzc dfully using our emotions as data about our inn. er state and knowing when it’s better to de-escalate by taking a time out are great tools. Appreciate you reading and sharing your story since I can certainly relate and I think others can to

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    May 2021
    March 2021
    August 2019
    August 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    August 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    November 2013
    October 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012

    Categories

    All
    6-4
    Academic Freedom
    Adhd
    Affect
    Agency
    Anthropology
    Anthropology Of Education
    Anti-intellectualism
    Arne Duncan
    Art
    Assessment
    Atlanta Teaching Scandal
    Attention
    Authentic Assessment
    Authenticity
    Authorship
    Badges
    Banking Model
    Barack Obama Election
    Bilingualism
    Blum
    Catfish
    Censorship
    Cheating
    Chen Guangchen
    Childhood
    China
    China Bashing
    College
    College Admissions
    College Football
    Commencement
    Communication
    Competition
    Confucius Institutes
    Con Games
    Corruption
    Cost Of College
    Costs Of College
    Covid-19
    Creativity
    Credentials
    Credits
    Critical Anthropology Of Education
    Cs Peirce
    Cultural Literacy
    Culture Of College
    Culture Of Poverty
    Curiosity
    Deception
    Decline In Reading
    Deep Learning
    Delayed Gratification
    Design Thinking
    Education
    Engagement
    Equality
    Ethics
    Evolution
    Exchange Value
    Executive Function
    Extrinsic Motivation
    Families
    Feminist Pedagogy
    Football
    Freedom
    Friday Classes
    Game Of School
    Gaming
    Gaokao
    Garden
    Gender
    Gender Ratio
    Goals Of College
    Goals Of Education
    Grades
    Grading
    Graduation
    Higher Education
    High School
    High Stakes Testing
    High-stakes Testing
    Homeschooling
    Hong Kong
    Honor Codes
    Human Nature
    Humor
    Inequality
    Intellectual Property
    Intelligence
    Intrinsic Motivation
    Jacques Dubochet
    Joshua Wong Hong Kong
    June 4
    June Fourth
    Language
    Language Gap
    Learning
    Linguistic Anthropology
    Literacy
    Literature
    Lying
    Malala
    Marx
    Meaning
    Medicalization
    Mental Illness
    Meritocracy
    Metaphor
    Money
    Mooc
    Moocs
    Morality
    Motivation
    Mo Yan
    Multilingualism
    Multimodality
    Music
    Neurobiology
    New Media
    New Year Resolutions
    Nobel Peace Prize
    Nobel Prize
    No Child Left Behind
    Notre Dame
    Nyu
    Occupy
    Pandemic Pedagogy
    Paolo Freire
    Pedagogy
    Permaculture
    Plagiarism
    Play
    Pleasure
    Politics
    Praise
    Procrastination
    Questions
    Race To The Top
    Rand Paul
    Reading
    Reading Habits
    Return On Investment
    Sat Test
    School
    Schooling
    Self-censorship
    Semiotics
    Sign
    Sociality
    Socialization
    Soft Power
    Steven Mosher
    Student Centered Learning
    Student-centered Learning
    Student Revolutions
    Students
    Supersign
    Symbol
    Teaching
    Technophilia
    Technophobia
    Teenagers
    Term Paper Mills
    Testing
    Tiananmen
    Transcript
    Truth
    Unessay
    Ungrading
    Unschooling
    Use Value
    Verbal Play
    Wellbeing
    Wicked Problems
    William Ayers
    Writing
    Youth

    RSS Feed

​SusanBlum.com by Susan D. Blum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • Books
  • Selected Publications
  • Good Learning
  • Events
  • Media