I had a student sit in my office this afternoon for forty minutes to contest a grade on a mid-term paper. He earned a C minus. The prose was an absolute trainwreck, contradictory arguments on every page, and the conclusion flatly disagreed with his introduction.

so he pulls up the Canvas rubric on his tablet, taps the screen with his pen, and looks at me like I am the one failing basic math.

"Professor, I don't understand. The rubric says the paper needs to be between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred words. My paper is fourteen hundred and twenty words. The rubric says three peer-reviewed sources. I have three. The rubric says double-spaced APA format. I used APA format."

I took a breath. I tried to explain that hitting mechanical formatting requirements is the bare minimum ticket to enter the arena. I told him his actual ideas were completely disjointed and that his central argument was not COHERENT.

He stared at me blankly and replied: "Okay, but nowhere on the rubric does it say my argument has to be convincing. It just says present a thesis."

He genuinely believed that writing a paper is like assembling an IKEA bookshelf. You screw in bolt A, slide in shelf B, hit the word count, and that automatically entitles you to a ninety-five percent. Its like critical thinking has been entirely replaced by compliance checklists.

How do you teach someone who views thinking as a bureaucratic technicality?

I genuinely do not know how to handle this situation.

This semester I have been dealing with a plague of hushed whispers the second I turn around. It comes with the territory whatever whatever.

But I have one student in particular who does this every fucking time.

I see him on his phone while he’s supposed to be working.

Me: “Hey man, do you mind puttin that away? Cool, thanks.”

I turn around and he whispers some shit under his breath about me. This time he got a bit bold and just straight up whispered “….fuck you….” He made sure the girl who sits in front of him heard. She laughs.

This past time I snapped, turned back around, and said, “dude, you gotta not talk shit about me the second I start to walk away.”

“I WASNNNTTUHHHHHH” in that iconic Gen-Z way of showing exasperation by trailing off your words into a grunt.

I stared at him for a moment, truly not sure what to do about this. In what fucking universe do behavioral problems need to be on the radar of a university professor? Sir, you’re a grown man.

So, I ask you all, please, what in the hell do you do about these underdeveloped little shits?

Accidentally of course

52 students in attendance by the way. Spirituality and Art for my Gen Ed students…..

“Jesus on the c*ck”

I mean that’s a tough one to live down…

The worst part is I giggled and immediately said “fuck” under my breath and not a single smirk, laugh or snort from my students.

Good thing I’m out of town for the rest of the week.

Asking for a friend Et al.

You teach a class in which knowing how to do a particular computation is essential.

In a class that is a prerequisite for your class, they teach students how to do this computation.

You remind the students every day in class that the NEED to know how to do this kind of computation.

You assign homework sets (with solutions) in which students practice carrying out this computation.

You do endless examples in class and provide examples in your course notes of how to perform these computations.

And, on the midterm, 90% of your students can't do this kind of computation.

Like, WTF?! What else can I do or say to help these students learn?!

Seriously, the current generation of undergrads is cooked. They have no hope.

I teach in psychology, and so this situation might be specific to this and related disciplines. But, I was wondering how others might handle the sort of question in the title.

My answer is generally pretty much just nope see the syllabus, but I do always feel the compulsion to tell them this sort of approach is not likely to make for recommendations, among other things.

I suspect though, instead of hearing that as well-meaning advice, it’ll be integrated as chastising them for prioritizing the clearly more difficult subject in their mind. Do others try to socialize or provide advice on this topic, and if so, how’d it go?

I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor at a regional state university with a heavy focus on teaching and advising. I love my job! Working with undergrad students, and pursuing my own scholarly agenda was the dream coming out of my PhD (and I am incredibly fortunate!)… but today was just one of those days where I am left staring at the wall wondering what is going on.

I have been in higher ed for a while now, but this semester in particular, the level of student apathy feels unprecedentedly high and honestly depressing. Case in point: we had a major exam today across 2 course sections (about 80 students total), and 15% of the class simply did not show up. There was no advance email, no medical excuse, and no follow-up note afterwards. It was just a straight up no-show for a zero on a major assessment.

The same pattern is playing out in academic advising. Our institution requires students to meet with their advisor at least once per term to discuss registration and remove their hold. I send out a self-booking link so students can pick any time that fits their personal schedule. Multiple students go out of their way to pick a slot and then completely blow it off. There is no heads-up, no rebooking, and no apology, just total MIA after choosing the time slot themselves.

Our leadership frequently celebrates recent enrollment growth. However, I worry that pushing for higher headcounts means admitting students who are fundamentally unprepared for the independence and responsibility of higher education. It feels like the system is setting them up for failure, not to mention the financial burden they are taking on just to ghost their own classes.

I know the classic professor-ism is, “You can’t care more than them”, but I am struggling with how to balance empathy with accountability without burning myself out or becoming overly cynical.

Appreciate any advice, solidarity, or sanity checks!

Having students submit responses along the lines of... well I wasnt able to do the actual assignment you asked me to do... and instead submit a two-page stream of consciousness on whatever. Failing these fools. I literally gave them class time off to do the assignment.

every semester i think oh wow, things are going really well! my students are so engaged! this is the best semester yet! then the end of october hits and students stop coming, don't turn assignments in, and things just faceplant. i do have an attendance policy but that doesn't seem to help at all.

i dread going to teach because the energy is so low and it feels pointless to be there. honestly i just wish i could cancel the rest of the semester! is it just me?? how do you make it through the end of semester slog?

National science team wants a location to meet. My campus is not widely known outside the general region (we're barely R1). They have two facilities they are desperately trying to get use of. I manage to convince the science team to give us a shot and to use both facilities. The day people are scheduled to meet some low level admin tells the entire organizing group of this meeting they won't be allowed in the building of facility #1 if some form she sent 24 hours before isn't signed, a form that it turns out has to be looked at by lawyers. The manager of facility #2 wants me to design the entire "tour" of the facility, even tho I have little knowledge of the facility, and this manager does these tours regularly. This could bring national attention to our campus and instead everyone affiliated with the process has done their best to do as little work as possible. I've opted to not involve our campus upper admin or our press office, so I'll enjoy the meeting with my colleagues quietly and never try to do anything like this again.

/rant

What if--and this is a big what if--we stopped with the grades and instead at the end of the term issued student evaluations. Kind of like uber reviews where both the driver *and* the passenger get reviews. We evaluate ethics, engagement, effort, as well as knowledge or skill mastery. I am just so over the grade grubbing and the AI outsourcing. Wouldn't employers and grad school much prefer this info to GPA that they know is just AI. Wouldn't work for big classes unless you had TAs, but this system we have just isn't sustainable.

I still enforce deadlines, but for the past year, 3/4s of my students have failed for not turning in most of their work on time or at all. It’s not even a performance issue. It’s a not doing anything on time or at all issue. This is not sustainable. Even failing is not enough to motivate them to turn in work on time or at all.

Granted they still need your permission to add the class, but my goodness I didn't even know this was a thing and I keep getting request to add my class even though we are already half way in. Maybe I am being too harsh, but also I don't have the bandwidth to help a student catch up multiple weeks worth of work. The answer is no.

I teach online async history courses. I had come up with methods/strategies to counter, discourage, and penalize AI abuse - primarily by requiring students to quote complete sentences and passages from their sources in support of their claims/arguments. This worked partly most existing AI models defer to copyright laws and can only quote abbreviated sentences even when source documents are uploaded.

However, it seems the latest AI models can now quote complete sentences from sources when PDFs or journal articles are uploaded.

What else can I do? At a lost right now.

I’m a relatively new college instructor teaching a class of mostly freshmen at 8:30 in the morning. I understand it’s early and students are probably tired, so I really try to be patient and understanding.
I’m pretty laid-back with my students. I don’t randomly call on them, and even when I notice students wearing headphones or not paying attention, I usually let it go. I try to be respectful and create a comfortable classroom environment.

However, lately I’ve been getting frustrated with the lack of participation and communication. Today, I was trying to organize an in-class activity and asked two students a simple question. They just stared at me without responding. I asked again, and when they still didn’t respond, I said something along the lines of, “Why are you not responding?” I wasn’t yelling, but I could tell I sounded irritated.

I feel like I give my students a lot of grace, but sometimes I don’t feel like I receive that same respect back. I don’t want to come across as mean or intimidating, but I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a response when I’m directly speaking to someone.

Now I’m overthinking the interaction and worrying about my student evaluations. I genuinely care about being a good instructor, and I don’t want moments of frustration to affect how students view me.
Does anyone else experience this, especially with freshmen or early morning classes? How do you handle situations where students just stare at you without responding? Am I overthinking how this might affect my evaluations?

I was proofreading my journal manuscript which is scheduled to go to print next year a few moments ago. While I was doing it on Google Docs, I kept receiving automated messages from Grammarly: "This sentence feels a bit clunky. Change 'I examine X and Y and argue Z' to 'I examine X and Y, arguing Z."

I shrugged and clicked "Yes" because that's just a simple syntactic change to improve clarity.

But just before I was ready to submit the manuscript to my publisher, I was bombarded again by Grammarly: "This sentence - 'I examine X and Y, arguing Z' - feels 20% AI-generated! Wanna know why? Subscribe to Grammarly Pro NOW and avoid plagiarism!"

I was like WTF, that's bullshit and I know what I'm writing.

Now I seem to understand why students always feel manipulated by tech and tech firms.

Anyone else feeling the same? I feel like there's a difference between using AI editors to help people catch typos and correct obvious grammar mistakes and using AI to manipulate people into paid subscriptions.

I have a student with autism who has weaponized accommodations in the most egregious way to commit academic dishonesty.

This student will go as far as using AI to submit fake handwritten documents and lab data. As the accommodations have instructed me, I give them multiple chances to revise their work and twice the time to do so but they keep sending me the same AI-generated mess. Then they ghost when I say show me this page in your actual lab notebook. This is just plain ole academic dishonesty and just awful to see. I do suspect that the student has a learning disability but that doesn’t stop someone from having integrity.

Has anyone witnessed students weaponizing accommodations? How did you handle it?

Hi,

Because of AI, I am moving more student work to in-class time. Nothing else works, and I need to make sure students are learning some foundational skills. The problem is, at my university attendance has long been seem as optional. I don't want to tell students who have missed class to just do the work on their own time because then no one will show! But scheduling makeup time to do the work is a nightmare, especially since I am a program director and have to go to a lot of meetings. And I have a family and a long commute so I can't stay into the evening to accommodate students who did not show to class. Giving them a 0 is a non-starter - they would run screaming to the dean.

Anyone just do the sage on the stage anymore with no pp? It’s exhausting to make them for my thrice a week 1.5 lecture. I really hate doing it. Any alternatives that my fellow professors have tried?

TT. Phd. Medical field. I want to leave academia. I don't want to work as a physician.

What is the best website to look for a job in industry or an adm job in an university?

I have been only using LinkedIn so far.

Thank you

TT here. Im on top of all my courses and grading, papers have been published, and I’m not behind on anything major. But my to do list is very long. Simultaneously I’m quite tired from non stop long hours since many weeks.

What do you do at your desk if you are just too tired to be productive on a particular day?

I normally just push through but I think if I never take a break I’ll burn out badly which has happened before.

I have been sharing a set of Duke blue PhD regalia with my husband, as we both graduated the same year, which we take turns using when we have a graduating students. In a few years, my daughter will be graduating with her MD-PhD from Pitt, where we are both professors. They will allow more than one faculty to conduct her hooding. As we are close to retirement, it would not make a lot of sense to buy a second set at this point. If anyone knows of someone that may let me borrow or buy a used set, I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you. Charleen

Is anyone else getting flooded with emails about canceling class Thanksgiving week?

My university has officially made the Wednesday before Thanksgiving a “non-teaching day,” and now I’m being hit with numerous emails asking if I'm canceling class on Monday, too. I teach the first classes of the day on MWF, and with only one week left after the break, we have too much material to skip. Plus, my syllabus has stated we're meeting since day one.

So I wonder: Are other instructors actually canceling their classes, moving class online, or shifting to asynchronous work that they assume students will actually do over the break? It feels like a bit of a paradox—we collectively lament the decline in student engagement and willingness to do the work, yet the pressure to cancel or assign "independent holiday assignments" is very real. Do our scheduling choices inadvertently feed into that engagement problem, or are students just planning to take off early regardless and hoping a preemptive inquiry will help them avoid being penalized? I'm curious how others handle this week.