Demotivating Experience
During my undergraduate degree, I took a class on Socio-cultural Linguistics. The class was held in a large lecture hall that could seat a few hundred students. I found the topic interesting, especially the parts about how language choices and traditions both reflected and reinforced ways of thinking. Throughout the course, however, I began to notice a pattern: on days when there wasn’t an in-class assignment or test, the lecture hall would be essentially empty, with only myself and a few other students in the room — perhaps 10 people total. On days when there was a test, the lecture hall was almost overflowing with people and it was hard to find a seat. Additionally, while I studied intensely to try and get the best possible score on the tests, I would sometimes miss a point here or there on the largely multiple choice question tests. This didn’t bother me too much, until I found out that most of the class received perfect scores on the tests, because it was well known that the professor rarely changed his tests from year to year. In fact, during those crowded test days, I began to notice students passing around old tests in order to fill out the current test. During the mid-course evaluations, I wrote a comment explaining to the professor that most of the class was cheating, but the comment apparently had no effect. I finished the rest of the course and found parts of it valuable, but never took another linguistics course, deciding that if that professor didn’t care much about his topic, they why should I?
Looking back, the professor may not have cared about the rampant cheating because it was in an introductory class; rationalizing that students who cared to learn the material would, while those who just wanted to pass would also get what they wanted. That doesn’t excuse his behavior, however. Perhaps I should be focused more on what I actually learned from the course, but I find it easy to be distracted and frustrated that the grade I received was lower than many of the students who never bothered to show up or try to learn much from the class. I would have preferred that the grades actually reflect the amount of study and effort each student put into the course. Especially after I pointed out the cheating, it would have been nice to see action from the professor or university that validated some of my concerns, such as changing the test version or having more in-class exercises assigned.