TEACHSOC: about low grades

[Jack Estes]

I'm baffled. We were informed the other day that intro to sociology classes at our college (a 2-year school with 19,000 students) have the highest failure rate among social science classes, maybe the highest in the college. The dean suggested that we hold workshops for all students who are signed up to help prepare them for the classes. The workshops would be during the week prior to the beginning of classes and would be led by sociology faculty (at 60% of our "hourly" rate, since this wouldn't be "teaching"). You can imagine that we're pretty pissed and skeptical, mostly convinced that the students who would be failing are not the ones who would attend such a workshop. But we're also curious. Why are our classes experiencing such high failure rates? Why are ours higher than others (especially history, political science, psychology, anthro, etc.)? And how might we address this? Or should we address it? The dean said if we didn't want to do the workshops, that's fine, but what OTHER suggestions would we have?   Any help here? Ideas? I don't think our standards are any higher than other social science professors' standards, in general. We have a large group - including a dozen adjuncts - but so do psych and history. I've been teaching for 35 years and I still feel as though I fail if a student earns a failing grade. So probably I'm taking this personally.   Still, I'm baffled.   Jack Estes BMCC/CUNY NYC --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Teaching Sociology" group. To post to this group, send email to teachsoc@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/teachsoc -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---