UCLA — a University With a Sensitivity to Race realcleareducation.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from realcleareducation.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Almost complete silence from student council on the policy
The student government at the University of Virginia recently decided to hide public access to its video recordings after Young America’s Foundation used footage from a meeting to create a video critical of several members.
The foundation had flagged a student government meeting in November during which its members voted to support the creation of a “strike system” for professors accused of making comments deemed “offensive.”
“For the foreseeable future, and out of caution for the safety and well-being of student council members, general body recordings are temporarily unavailable to the public,” the student council wrote on its website in all-caps.
Examity
Online proctoring has surged during the coronavirus pandemic, and so too have concerns about the practice, in which students take exams under the watchful eyes (human or automated) of third-party programs.
Chief among faculty and student concerns are student privacy and increasing test anxiety via a sense of being surveilled. Pedagogically, some experts also argue that the whole premise of asking students to recall information under pressure without access to their course materials is flawed. This, they say, may only motivate students to game the system, when cheating is what online proctoring services seek to prevent.
Of course, concerns about academic dishonesty are what gave rise to online exam proctoring in the first place. And the switch to rapid remote instruction provides new opportunities and motivations to cheat: everyone is away from campus, under considerable stress.
Must also delete offensive email you receive – immediately
College administrator to lawyer: Draft a policy that I can use against any student or instructor who annoys me.
(20 minutes later)
Lawyer to administrator: You’re gonna love this.
Even by the standards of college speech codes, the University of Colorado-Denver has a mind-numbingly stupid and blatantly unconstitutional policy on email you’re allowed to send through the campus IT system.
The taxpayer-funded university is featured as the Speech Code of the Month by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. It earned a “red light,” the worst rating, in FIRE’s speech code database solely because of the email policy.
By Julia Seymour | The Center Square
It wasn’t long ago that Dartmouth College, an Ivy League institution nestled in Hanover, N.H., was praised for being one of the nation’s top colleges for free speech. In 2011, it held a prestigious “green light” rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and was named one of the seven best schools for free speech.
Dartmouth no longer holds that distinction. This year, it ranked nearly at the bottom (52 of 55) in the 2020 College Free Speech Rankings, which is based on an ambitious survey of nearly 20,000 students jointly conducted by RealClearEducation, FIRE, and research firm College Pulse. It was the lowest ranking Ivy on the list.