Posts

What could we do against academic fraud in university courses?

In my previous blog post , I described how the University of Tartu cheats the state and the society. In brief, the rules of the University and also a law of the country settle that students must be graded according to how their achieved skills match the expected learning outcomes. In an ideal case, the list of expected learning outcomes of every course should define what grade will correspond to which possible sets of achieved skills. Still the authorities of certain institutes of the university (e.g., the Institute of Computer Science where I worked) demand that the lecturers give positive grades to at least a certain percentage of students or even that the distribution of grades be "nice" (whatever it means). The expected learning outcomes are formally fixed by the authorities for every course as officially regulated, but in reality, following these regulations is more or less a spectacle. I have never seen an authority of that institute being worried about the corresponden

On my working experience in the University of Tartu, Estonia

  The Study Regulations of the University of Tartu ( https://www.ut.ee/en/university/documents ) enact grading of students according to their gained learning outcomes (§ 93, 94). I very much like this, in particular because the position of the modern education science also supports this approach (e.g. Biggs, J., Tang, C.: Teaching for Quality Learning at University). This opposes to rank-based grading which means that the teacher must follow a certain distribution of grades predefined in terms of percentages of students taking the course. Rank-based grading is still popular in the world, although criticized by scientists because it implies that the grades a student gets much depend on the skills of other students who took the same courses and cannot be associated to the learning outcomes achieved by that particular person. Grading according to the gained learning outcomes is stated also in the Estonian decree on grading standards in higher education.   The reality unfortunately differ