You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.
Warren Beatty
Silliness and Learning - Can They Happen Simultaneously?
What do cows in Greece say?
A view of school as work. (I believe this is the prevalent view, even today.) The Little Rascals were on TV when I as a kid.
In spite of the prevalent view, might school actually be play some of the time?
The Fun Theory - How hard would it be to design school in this mode?
Your professor when he was in high school, a true math nerd. Play and work were jumbled together.
Down and to the right, the coach of the Math Team and my favorite teacher, Mr. Conrad. With bright kids, really good teachers make the learning a kind of play.
Good Technique for Learning - Mindfulness
There was a slide about optimal technique for learning. Here I want to drop the jargon word - optimal - and simply contrast good technique, which we will call taking a mindful approach, from poor technique, which we we will call taking a mindless approach. A mindful approach does help to build human capital. A mindless approach skims the surface of the subject matter only and produces little real learning.
If it is your habit to be reading regularly non-course books during the semester, I encourage you to make this book one of your choices to read. If not that, consider reading it over the winter break. It's a fairly quick read and will help you reflect about your own approach to learning and what you might do to make your own learning more mindful. In the meantime, you can read this short essay now. It too is by Ellen Langer and gives the highlights of points made in more depth in the book.
Examples:
I teach without lecture notes. I've done that for most of my career. When I did use notes I found I had my head in the paper I was holding so I didn't spend enough time looking at students. It turns out that the the faces of students are pretty revealing about how engaged they are with the discussion and whether they are getting it or not. I also would go way too quickly with the content. To a large extent, students should set the pace of the discussion, and do so with their questions or comments. This is especially true if the subject matter is difficult. But what's difficult for the student might not be difficult for the professor. So more often than most instructors would care to admit, the student gets left in the dust as the professor pushes onward - to no real benefit for anyone. Without the notes I have to reproduce in my head the topic for that class session and there is an element of improvisation in doing so, even when I have a pretty good idea of what we'll be discussing. The improvisation is being mindful, as it is like thinking through the matter anew.
As I've gotten older, I do occasionally forget things and will have a senior moment, now and then. One reason for having the Tag on the class site, Extending the class session online, is to cover things I had forgotten to mention in class. And if it does look like I'm having a senior moment, please be kind. That can be disconcerting and the consequences can linger as a result, even after the senior moment has passed.
Here's a different example, one that students who took an earlier offering of this course told me about, perhaps 7 or 8 years ago. They reported that in many of their classes they didn't need to attend, if they could get the lecture notes from a friend. (So, if I understand this correctly, the friends could divide up who would attend and then share the lecture notes after that.) They said their job was to memorize those notes and then at the exam spit back what was in the notes to answer the questions. The way they described the practice it sounded pretty mindless. Is it something common in courses now?
Is Creativity The Same As Mindful Learning?
Here is Maslow on The Creative Attitude. (You have to be on the campus network for the link to work.) You should be aware that Lincoln, one of our examples in the first class session, was considered a consummate self-actualizer by Maslow. As Maslow argues that self-actualization and creativity are pretty much the same thing, this is an indirect argument that how Lincoln taught himself, reading by the light of the fire, was both a path to self-actualization and to creativity.
And here is a more recent piece by Csikszentmihalyi on The Creative Personality. You might read this to see if it fits you in some respects. Also, you might ask whether you find these descriptions attractive or unattractive. Many of them express the dualism of yin and yang.
We should also reckon with the question of whether creativity is about the process of doing things or if it is about product. Some people are reluctant to consider themselves creative because on the product front they've yet to produce things that others would find creative. There are some quotes from Thomas Edison that are helpful here:
If we think of creativity as the initial spark, typically there must be a lot of follow through to get to an interesting product. The self-actualizer is one who maintains concentration through the entire process. If you can generate the spark, but you have trouble on the persistence that's needed afterwards, note that there is now much discussion of Grit and that it is something that can be acquired, though doing so itself is effortful.
Is Creativity The Same As Mindful Learning?
Here is Maslow on The Creative Attitude. (You have to be on the campus network for the link to work.) You should be aware that Lincoln, one of our examples in the first class session, was considered a consummate self-actualizer by Maslow. As Maslow argues that self-actualization and creativity are pretty much the same thing, this is an indirect argument that how Lincoln taught himself, reading by the light of the fire, was both a path to self-actualization and to creativity.
And here is a more recent piece by Csikszentmihalyi on The Creative Personality. You might read this to see if it fits you in some respects. Also, you might ask whether you find these descriptions attractive or unattractive. Many of them express the dualism of yin and yang.
We should also reckon with the question of whether creativity is about the process of doing things or if it is about product. Some people are reluctant to consider themselves creative because on the product front they've yet to produce things that others would find creative. There are some quotes from Thomas Edison that are helpful here:
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that will not work.
If we think of creativity as the initial spark, typically there must be a lot of follow through to get to an interesting product. The self-actualizer is one who maintains concentration through the entire process. If you can generate the spark, but you have trouble on the persistence that's needed afterwards, note that there is now much discussion of Grit and that it is something that can be acquired, though doing so itself is effortful.
Puzzles for the Economics of Organizations
Your textbook, when we get to it, will articulate something called The Efficiency Principle. Organizations tend to produce the efficient outcome and that is indeed part of their purpose. When we see what evidently looks inefficient, we should wonder whether there is an economics explanation for the inefficiency. In particular, if a big part of the University's job is to encourage deep learning in its students, then how can the practice described above with the lecture notes persist? That is evidently a puzzle.
It turns out that economists have a range of possible explanations for inefficiency. Some we'll cover later in the course. Here I will mention a particular explanation that relies on a notion called "lock-in." The best known paper that discusses the phenomenon is by the Economic Historian Paul David. It is called Clio and the Economics of QWERTY. Although this paper was written for professional economists, it is readable by the lay person and it's actually quite fascinating, in its analysis and in its conclusion. QWERTY was originally efficient. It was designed to slow typists down so the keys wouldn't jam so often. As long as we had manual typewriters, QWERTY probably remained efficient, even with improvements in the mechanisms. Electric typewriters got introduced in the mid to late 1960s. Word processors and personal computers came 10 to 15 years later. There was then no reason to slow down typists. Yet QWERTY persists to this day. Here's a little bit to explain why that is.
People learned touch typing, a skill needed so they could look at their document while they typed, rather than look at the keyboard. The ability to touch type is a kind of specific human capital. It has value in the keyboard layout it was learned and no value whatsoever with a different keyboard layout. So those already knowledgeable about QWERTY wanted their PCs to use it. Likewise, the schools that taught touch typing wanted QWERTY to persist as their training approach was built around the assumption that QWERTY would be the keyboard design.
In other words, lock-in is about interdependencies that end up supporting the status quo, whether it remains efficient or not. The status quo was not always that and when it was new it was designed to solve a then current issue. So it was efficient at gestation and in the aftermath. But if it is persists for a while, because of lock-in, it likely will no longer be efficient. Yet what is better can't be implemented because the lock-in prevents that from happening.
Note that lock-in is quite important in current information technology and all the big IT companies, Facebook and Google are two notable examples, have as their goal to lock users into their online environments. Also note that this is tied to the revenue models that these companies use. Consider two alternatives - (1) users get access to content via subscription to the service or (2) users get access to the content which is ad supported. Alas, the subscription model lost in this competition. The ad-supported model won, giving the providers incentive to cull personal use information, so the ads could be customized. This has led to all sorts of abuse of the information. I'm sure you know of many such examples of this that I won't get into here. The point is that even with all of the bad practices, where the users personal information is at risk, use persists, because the users are locked in.
We might next consider the lecture itself is illustrating a kind of lock-in. Lecture emerged as an adjunct of Gutenberg's printing press (which meant that books need not be hand written). Books, however, were still scarce. So the lecture arose as a way to disseminate information that was in a book to those who didn't have the book. Then those who were taught by lecture and who themselves became teachers would also lecture, because that's the approach they knew. This persists to this day, even though now information is clearly abundant. Indeed, everyone is on information overload. Yet in many disciplines, lecture is the main form of instruction. I do want to note that a lecture format can seem quite similar to a seminar format, if Q&A is allowed throughout and the audience aggressively asks questions. That's the way it is when the audience is itself full of professors and the person presenting is giving a talk on current research. With undergraduates in the audience in a course setting, however, the audience tends to be more passive unless the instructor actively does things to get the students to talk up.
Getting back to our example about the lecture notes as the be all and end all in some courses, others have written about the lock-in in ways that make it seem like a pervasive phenomenon. The paragraphs below are from a paper called What We're Learning About Student Engagement From NSSE: Benchmarks for Effective Educational Practices by George Kuh. (You can access this paper if you are on the campus network.)
People learned touch typing, a skill needed so they could look at their document while they typed, rather than look at the keyboard. The ability to touch type is a kind of specific human capital. It has value in the keyboard layout it was learned and no value whatsoever with a different keyboard layout. So those already knowledgeable about QWERTY wanted their PCs to use it. Likewise, the schools that taught touch typing wanted QWERTY to persist as their training approach was built around the assumption that QWERTY would be the keyboard design.
In other words, lock-in is about interdependencies that end up supporting the status quo, whether it remains efficient or not. The status quo was not always that and when it was new it was designed to solve a then current issue. So it was efficient at gestation and in the aftermath. But if it is persists for a while, because of lock-in, it likely will no longer be efficient. Yet what is better can't be implemented because the lock-in prevents that from happening.
Note that lock-in is quite important in current information technology and all the big IT companies, Facebook and Google are two notable examples, have as their goal to lock users into their online environments. Also note that this is tied to the revenue models that these companies use. Consider two alternatives - (1) users get access to content via subscription to the service or (2) users get access to the content which is ad supported. Alas, the subscription model lost in this competition. The ad-supported model won, giving the providers incentive to cull personal use information, so the ads could be customized. This has led to all sorts of abuse of the information. I'm sure you know of many such examples of this that I won't get into here. The point is that even with all of the bad practices, where the users personal information is at risk, use persists, because the users are locked in.
We might next consider the lecture itself is illustrating a kind of lock-in. Lecture emerged as an adjunct of Gutenberg's printing press (which meant that books need not be hand written). Books, however, were still scarce. So the lecture arose as a way to disseminate information that was in a book to those who didn't have the book. Then those who were taught by lecture and who themselves became teachers would also lecture, because that's the approach they knew. This persists to this day, even though now information is clearly abundant. Indeed, everyone is on information overload. Yet in many disciplines, lecture is the main form of instruction. I do want to note that a lecture format can seem quite similar to a seminar format, if Q&A is allowed throughout and the audience aggressively asks questions. That's the way it is when the audience is itself full of professors and the person presenting is giving a talk on current research. With undergraduates in the audience in a course setting, however, the audience tends to be more passive unless the instructor actively does things to get the students to talk up.
Getting back to our example about the lecture notes as the be all and end all in some courses, others have written about the lock-in in ways that make it seem like a pervasive phenomenon. The paragraphs below are from a paper called What We're Learning About Student Engagement From NSSE: Benchmarks for Effective Educational Practices by George Kuh. (You can access this paper if you are on the campus network.)
The more pages students write, the more pages faculty members have to read and give feedback about. And the more of that we do, the more likely it is that students will make appointments during office hours to talk with us about that feedback. In terms of student engagement, all this is generally positive. But it becomes problematic in terms of allocating time across multiple faculty priorities.
And this brings us to the unseemly bargain, what I call the “disengagement compact”: “I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone.” That is, I won’t make you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I won’t have to grade as many papers or explain why you are not performing well. The existence of this bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many students get decent grades-B’s and sometimes better. There seems to be a breakdown of shared responsibility for learning-on the part of faculty members who allow students to get by with far less than maximal effort, and on the part of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources institutions provide.
To this, I'd add two additional effects that support the lock-in. In the early 2000s, when you were very young, the then President George W. Bush pushed through No Child Left Behind, and "the accountability movement" had its moment in the sun. Standardized testing took on greater importance, as a way to measure whether improvement in the schools was happening, the intended consequence, and students became far more grade conscious as a result, the unintended consequence. The other effect, on the instructor side, is that more and more undergraduate education has the teaching done by non-tenure-track faculty. (We'll talk about why this is in the next class session.) These faculty don't have the job security that those with tenure have and they need the students they teach to give them decent teaching evaluations, so they can keep their jobs. Each of these factors reinforces the disengagement compact.
Before getting to the next item, here are a couple of other ways that lock-in manifests at the university. The first is with regard to the academic calendar. Summer is treated differently than fall or spring. This is because 100+ years ago, when the economy as a whole was largely agrarian, students had to go home to help their families with the planting and with the harvest. Very few, if any, students do that today. Yet we treat the summer session differently and practices have grown around it, such as the internship during the summer, that keeps the summer session as it is, even though it would be more efficient to have three equal terms a year - fall, winter, and summer, and to get students to graduate earlier as a result. The other example is given by a rhyme I wrote some years ago called, The first ten days blues. It's about the add-drop period at the start of the semester, which made sense when we did registration on paper, but doesn't make sense anymore with registration online, yet it persists. I'm also including it to show your professor is a bit over the deep end, but does have a sense of humor. So if you find this one is silly but liked it anyway, then I've hit my mark.
Signaling and GPA
Old TV commercial about Abe Lincoln needing a college degree to get a job.
Michael Spence's article called Job Market Signaling, August 1973, which was a foundational piece in the then new information economics. Spence eventually became a Nobel Prize winner. This paper is one reason why. My guess is that the model itself is too difficult for most students in the class, but reading the introduction of the paper is probably do-able and you might find it interesting.
I will describe the model briefly, but before doing that, what is signaling about? It is helpful to begin with a notion of private information. In a transaction between a buyer and a seller, the seller might have information that that the buyer cares about regarding the quality of what is being sold. If higher quality fetches a higher price, then the seller has incentive to represent the quality as high, regardless of the true quality. But talk is cheap and both the buyer and seller should understand that. So such representations should rightfully be ignored, as with them it is impossible to separate the chaff from the wheat.
Signaling is about taking a costly action that is meant to communicate the private information. The uninformed party (in this case the buyer) makes an inference about the quality based on observing the signal. This works when high quality sellers are willing to incur the cost of the signal, but low quality sellers are not. The signal then serves to separate the types and enable the buyer's inference.
In Spence's model, the students ability is the private information and the signal is getting a college degree (not the GPA, just the degree). At the time the paper was written, the big cost in attending college was the opportunity cost of time for students, who might otherwise work. Nowadays, tuition is probably larger than that opportunity cost, but tuition doesn't differentiate between high ability and low ability students. Getting back to Spence, in his model the high ability students were willing to accept the cost of college if employers would then infer they were high ability, so hire them at a good wage. The low ability students would not. So the college degree worked as a credible way to communicate about the student's ability.
For us, we need to come up with some interpretation of what ability means in this context. And we need to ask whether high ability in school translates to high performance on the job. Ability can mean either something truly innate, for example, some people can separate their middle and fourth fingers in the Vulcan salute (from Star Trek) while others cannot (I'm one of those), and if there are such innate attributes that matter for productivity those are candidates. But ability here could also mean human capital that is acquired prior to attending college. As I write this I'm trying to resist using the word intelligence, though it might be the first thing that pops into your mind reading this. Most measures of intelligence confound innate ability with previously acquired human capital. There is also a school of thought, see Mindset by Carol Dweck, that intelligence can grow as long as the person pursues their own learning to foster such growth. What I want to avoid is any discussion of eugenics, which is out of bounds for our class. Sometimes the mere mention of the word intelligence will do that. So I'm trying to exercise caution here.
Let's turn to the issue of whether high ability in school translates to high ability on the job. If the job is being a professor, then the answer is yes and ditto for being a research scientist at a major corporation. What about other jobs, does the translation work then? The answer is less so, if at all. Here's only one dimension of this to consider. People who are introverts may thrive in a school setting but then not fare well at all in a work setting and vice versa for people who are extroverts. Note that being an introvert and being shy are not the same things, but there is a positive correlation between the two. If oral communication skills are important in the workplace, then shy people will perform less well in that context, at least until they overcome their shyness. Depending on one's major, oral communication skills may not matter much in school.
Now we want to go from the college degree as a signal, meaning the signal is binary, yes or no, to a continuous variable as signal, GPA. Waving our hands, we might now imagine the ability parameter in Spence is continuous, so a higher GPA means high ability. Does that make sense? Let me give a few different examples where it does not. One is the idea of a late bloomer. For a while the student's performance is mediocre. Then the students experiences some life changing event and thereafter performs at a very high level. The GPA, however, reflects an average of both. The flip of this can also happen. A student can have a very high GPA but be going through burnout, at or around the time of graduation. The burnout may be important for how the student will do in the workplace, but it is not captured well in the GPA. Then there is the issue of students experimenting with subjects they have not been exposed to earlier. Curiosity should be rewarded, in general, but taking a course outside of one's field, and lacking the background that others who take the course already have, the grades are apt to be poor in this setting. So high GPA students tend not to experiment in this way. Is that caution something that should be valued in the workplace?
Given these caveats, what is it that GPA signals and why is it that students these days care about it so much? Members of the class might be interested in this Website published by journalism students at the UofI Education On The Line. Because I haven't seen the data they've amassed and am not quite sure of the methodology they've employed in analyzing the data, I don't want to totally embrace their results. Yet what they argue is plausible to me. Grade inflation, measured by the fraction of A grades awarded has been rising and the GPA has become less important for getting a job, though it remains a factor.
When I was a freshman at MIT back in 1972, they had pass-fail grading only, no letter grades for the first year. In one class I took, I had earned enough points that they told me not to take the final. How many of you would prefer that sort of system? MIT went to pass-fail grading for first-year students, I believe, to take some of the stress off. Depression at MIT at that time was a serious issue. They had a high suicide rate. I mention this alternative so you have something else to consider. A quite current piece argues that sort of system will actually encourage more learning.
Wrap Up
Here I want to ask whether the lock-in to a memorizing the lecture notes approach and the GPA as a signal on the job market are two different things or essentially one and the same. Let's pose this question by considering the student's time allocation problem. If time were spent in mindful learning for a class, would that help with getting a good grade in the class or not? Does it matter how much time is put into the mindful learning activity? Might it be that the lock-in is a consequence of students over programming themselves, so in addition to their courses they have a part-time job and xyz extracurricular activities? And, if so, is this itself a consequence of students wanting to pad their resumes? (The economics jargon for this is tyranny of the extensive margin over the intensive margin. If quality of the experience is harder for an outsiders to measure, then make the list of experiences longer, because that can be measured.)
My intent in posing these questions is raise the awareness about the issues with students in the class. Ultimately, students should be in control of their own learning - whether in their courses or in other activities. How does one exercise such control? Trying to answer that question is worth the inquiry.
Before getting to the next item, here are a couple of other ways that lock-in manifests at the university. The first is with regard to the academic calendar. Summer is treated differently than fall or spring. This is because 100+ years ago, when the economy as a whole was largely agrarian, students had to go home to help their families with the planting and with the harvest. Very few, if any, students do that today. Yet we treat the summer session differently and practices have grown around it, such as the internship during the summer, that keeps the summer session as it is, even though it would be more efficient to have three equal terms a year - fall, winter, and summer, and to get students to graduate earlier as a result. The other example is given by a rhyme I wrote some years ago called, The first ten days blues. It's about the add-drop period at the start of the semester, which made sense when we did registration on paper, but doesn't make sense anymore with registration online, yet it persists. I'm also including it to show your professor is a bit over the deep end, but does have a sense of humor. So if you find this one is silly but liked it anyway, then I've hit my mark.
Signaling and GPA
Old TV commercial about Abe Lincoln needing a college degree to get a job.
Michael Spence's article called Job Market Signaling, August 1973, which was a foundational piece in the then new information economics. Spence eventually became a Nobel Prize winner. This paper is one reason why. My guess is that the model itself is too difficult for most students in the class, but reading the introduction of the paper is probably do-able and you might find it interesting.
I will describe the model briefly, but before doing that, what is signaling about? It is helpful to begin with a notion of private information. In a transaction between a buyer and a seller, the seller might have information that that the buyer cares about regarding the quality of what is being sold. If higher quality fetches a higher price, then the seller has incentive to represent the quality as high, regardless of the true quality. But talk is cheap and both the buyer and seller should understand that. So such representations should rightfully be ignored, as with them it is impossible to separate the chaff from the wheat.
Signaling is about taking a costly action that is meant to communicate the private information. The uninformed party (in this case the buyer) makes an inference about the quality based on observing the signal. This works when high quality sellers are willing to incur the cost of the signal, but low quality sellers are not. The signal then serves to separate the types and enable the buyer's inference.
In Spence's model, the students ability is the private information and the signal is getting a college degree (not the GPA, just the degree). At the time the paper was written, the big cost in attending college was the opportunity cost of time for students, who might otherwise work. Nowadays, tuition is probably larger than that opportunity cost, but tuition doesn't differentiate between high ability and low ability students. Getting back to Spence, in his model the high ability students were willing to accept the cost of college if employers would then infer they were high ability, so hire them at a good wage. The low ability students would not. So the college degree worked as a credible way to communicate about the student's ability.
For us, we need to come up with some interpretation of what ability means in this context. And we need to ask whether high ability in school translates to high performance on the job. Ability can mean either something truly innate, for example, some people can separate their middle and fourth fingers in the Vulcan salute (from Star Trek) while others cannot (I'm one of those), and if there are such innate attributes that matter for productivity those are candidates. But ability here could also mean human capital that is acquired prior to attending college. As I write this I'm trying to resist using the word intelligence, though it might be the first thing that pops into your mind reading this. Most measures of intelligence confound innate ability with previously acquired human capital. There is also a school of thought, see Mindset by Carol Dweck, that intelligence can grow as long as the person pursues their own learning to foster such growth. What I want to avoid is any discussion of eugenics, which is out of bounds for our class. Sometimes the mere mention of the word intelligence will do that. So I'm trying to exercise caution here.
Let's turn to the issue of whether high ability in school translates to high ability on the job. If the job is being a professor, then the answer is yes and ditto for being a research scientist at a major corporation. What about other jobs, does the translation work then? The answer is less so, if at all. Here's only one dimension of this to consider. People who are introverts may thrive in a school setting but then not fare well at all in a work setting and vice versa for people who are extroverts. Note that being an introvert and being shy are not the same things, but there is a positive correlation between the two. If oral communication skills are important in the workplace, then shy people will perform less well in that context, at least until they overcome their shyness. Depending on one's major, oral communication skills may not matter much in school.
Now we want to go from the college degree as a signal, meaning the signal is binary, yes or no, to a continuous variable as signal, GPA. Waving our hands, we might now imagine the ability parameter in Spence is continuous, so a higher GPA means high ability. Does that make sense? Let me give a few different examples where it does not. One is the idea of a late bloomer. For a while the student's performance is mediocre. Then the students experiences some life changing event and thereafter performs at a very high level. The GPA, however, reflects an average of both. The flip of this can also happen. A student can have a very high GPA but be going through burnout, at or around the time of graduation. The burnout may be important for how the student will do in the workplace, but it is not captured well in the GPA. Then there is the issue of students experimenting with subjects they have not been exposed to earlier. Curiosity should be rewarded, in general, but taking a course outside of one's field, and lacking the background that others who take the course already have, the grades are apt to be poor in this setting. So high GPA students tend not to experiment in this way. Is that caution something that should be valued in the workplace?
Given these caveats, what is it that GPA signals and why is it that students these days care about it so much? Members of the class might be interested in this Website published by journalism students at the UofI Education On The Line. Because I haven't seen the data they've amassed and am not quite sure of the methodology they've employed in analyzing the data, I don't want to totally embrace their results. Yet what they argue is plausible to me. Grade inflation, measured by the fraction of A grades awarded has been rising and the GPA has become less important for getting a job, though it remains a factor.
When I was a freshman at MIT back in 1972, they had pass-fail grading only, no letter grades for the first year. In one class I took, I had earned enough points that they told me not to take the final. How many of you would prefer that sort of system? MIT went to pass-fail grading for first-year students, I believe, to take some of the stress off. Depression at MIT at that time was a serious issue. They had a high suicide rate. I mention this alternative so you have something else to consider. A quite current piece argues that sort of system will actually encourage more learning.
Wrap Up
Here I want to ask whether the lock-in to a memorizing the lecture notes approach and the GPA as a signal on the job market are two different things or essentially one and the same. Let's pose this question by considering the student's time allocation problem. If time were spent in mindful learning for a class, would that help with getting a good grade in the class or not? Does it matter how much time is put into the mindful learning activity? Might it be that the lock-in is a consequence of students over programming themselves, so in addition to their courses they have a part-time job and xyz extracurricular activities? And, if so, is this itself a consequence of students wanting to pad their resumes? (The economics jargon for this is tyranny of the extensive margin over the intensive margin. If quality of the experience is harder for an outsiders to measure, then make the list of experiences longer, because that can be measured.)
My intent in posing these questions is raise the awareness about the issues with students in the class. Ultimately, students should be in control of their own learning - whether in their courses or in other activities. How does one exercise such control? Trying to answer that question is worth the inquiry.
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