Tom Pepinsky

Category: Teaching

  • Something's Rotten in Exchange Programs with Chinese Universities

    Here are some stylized facts about Chinese universities.

    1. Cheating among students is rampant
    2. Faculty turnover is high
    3. Instructors are overworked
    4. Administration and oversight of teaching and pedagogy is at best weak

    Here are some stylized facts about U.S. higher education

    1. Everyone wants a piece of the China market
    2. Study abroad programs are really popular, especially for “high-achievers”
    3. Academic integrity is taken very seriously, even if it is is difficult to identify violations or to enforce standards of conduct

    Combine these and I think that we have a recipe for disaster in student exchange programs in Chinese universities.

    Without naming names or institutions, let me outline a scenario. A student participates in a study abroad program in which she takes courses for U.S. credit in a Chinese university. She is accused of plagiarism. The Chinese university (a C9 institution) is unable even to identify the instructor, and unwilling to investigate the circumstances surrounding the assignments or any possible violation of academic integrity in this or any other course. Indeed, there isn’t even an internal university mechanism for doing so. The “educational exchange institute” (read: broker that matches U.S. students with Chinese universities for a fee) cannot ascertain anything about the course other than it exists, yet pledges that the course should count for university credit in the U.S.

    If you care at all about academic integrity in U.S. higher education, well, you have lots to worry about. But this scenario should especially bother you. I, for one, do not think that U.S. institutions should award academic credit for any coursework conducted at an institution (in China or anywhere else) that does not even pretend to care that students are actually submitting their own work.

  • The Loneliness of the Long Dissertation Writer

    At this time of year I find myself talking to students considering PhD programs who are interested in my own advice on whether or not pursuing a PhD is a good idea. One question that has come up repeatedly has to do with the psychological challenges of completing a PhD in the social sciences. Specifically, that it’s lonely. One very bright student asked me specifically about this issue last week; she had been told by another of my colleagues that writing a dissertation is a very lonely process. Coincidentally, that night I came across a post by Robert Kelly which makes an identical point in the context of 7 general gripes about being an academic.

    My response to that student was that I don’t think it’s right to say that completing a PhD is lonely. I think that it’s more accurate to describe completing a PhD as intensely personal. That may produce feelings of loneliness, but it need not.

    My own experience was that writing my dissertation (which, at one point, reached 550 manuscript pages…so it was long) was personally challenging because every morning (at 8:30 AM) and evening (at 9PM) I would open up my word processing program and stare at an empty screen with the understanding that after a couple of hours that document needed to have words on it. There was no one else who was going to write them but me.

    …And there was no one else who was going to bug me to write them every day but me.

    …And there was no one else to blame if they weren’t written but me.

    …And at every moment there were plenty of things that seemed more interesting than writing, and no one to tell myself to keep on task but me.

    This was an unpleasant feeling. I managed to get over it, but only after about 3 months of serious writer’s block in which developed an incredibly precise system for organizing notes and did a lot of unnecessary teaching preparation. (I remember this urge to convert my section syllabus from Word into LaTeX. Yes, that was a way to waste time.)

    But at least in my own case, it would be a mistake to call that feeling loneliness. I had plenty of professional interactions with faculty, worked at the Statlab, attended lots of talks, discussed dissertation issues with friends, taught, etc. In most graduate programs, there are plenty of things that you can do to keep yourself active and busy. The problem, in fact, is that there are too many seemingly useful and inherently social things to do that distract you from the task of writing.

    My sense is that in terms of the personal nature of the dissertation, political science tends to be more like the humanities than like economics and psychology, two social science discipline in which co-authoring throughout your graduate career is normal. This is different in some poli sci programs, but these are exceptional cases. My general point is that I wouldn’t worry about loneliness per se, I would worry a lot more about dealing with the more nagging issues of motivation, stamina, self-direction, etc. Conceivably, loneliness is cured by socialization; the others are conditions which have no easy solutions of which I am aware.