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Homework answers / question archive / Read the short article below
Read the short article below. Read each question carefully and choose the BEST answer.
The college at which Professor Burke teaches regularly asks students to evaluate faculty teaching performance. The announced purpose of these evaluations is to give information to faculty about their strengths and weaknesses as teachers, and to allow those who make decisions about salary increases and promotions to reward better teachers. Professor Burke, who never does very well on those evaluations, recently wrote the following letter of objection to the college president:
“It has become common practice in many colleges and universities for students to write formal evaluations of their professors and submit these to those who make salary and promotion decisions. Of course we do that here as well. This practice is supposed to provide valuable evidence both to faculty members and to decision makers regarding how well the faculty members are teaching their courses. Despite all that, I believe this practice has so many undesirable consequences that it ought to be abandoned. I grant that those who advocate the use of student opinion surveys as a way of evaluating teaching have laudable goals. However, they have overlooked the disastrous effects which inevitably flow from this practice.
In order for students to learn effectively, two requirements must be met: Students must be informed when they are in error, and they must be challenged to stretch their minds as far as possible. But this requires faculty members to be frank in criticizing student work. It also requires faculty members to set high standards so as to challenge all students to develop fully. Should a faculty member come to fear that being critical toward student work will result loss of salary raises and denial of promotions, that faculty member is not likely to set high standards. These things are exactly what happens when students evaluations are used by colleges to help make salary and promotion decisions. These things are happening here.
It doesn’t take long for a faculty member to discover that many students react negatively to criticism, and that most students feel quite put upon when they are expected really to strive in a course outside of their major fields. True, some students do respond positively to a challenge, and many take criticism well, but what about those who don’t? By not being critical and by having low standards, a faculty member can keep every student happy. By being critical and setting high standards, a faculty member runs the risk of making only a few students happy. There is no payoff for the faculty member in alienating a significant number of those who will be filling out the course evaluation form at the end of the term, when the results of those forms will be considered in future decisions about the faculty member’s career advancement. Several of my colleagues have deliberately lowered their standards in order to curry favor with the
students on these evaluations, and I note they have done far better than I in getting raises in recent years.
Because of these factors, student evaluation of college faculty represents an important pressure to lower academic standards. Such erosion in standards of achievement tends, of course, to promote a general climate of mediocrity in which no one expects of any student anything more than average performance. Students who have the ability to do better than average lose out from this process by not being encouraged to become all they can be. And society simply cannot afford to continue to allow this weakening of our educational system when the crying need is for ever larger numbers of well-trained, well-educated citizens.
Thus, for the benefit of students and society alike, we must stop using student opinion surveys to evaluate college faculty performance for salary and promotion decisions. It would be far better to ask certain selected faculty members to write evaluations of the teaching performance of other faculty members, based on classroom visits. This would avoid the difficulties described above and give us expert, objective opinions about teaching performance, which could be used as evidence for making salary and promotion decisions.
I urge you to take whatever action is necessary to bring about these changes on our campus.”
Which of the following represents the most satisfactory summary of the logical relations between I, II, and III as Burke sees them?
Total Marks for Part A: 7 MARKS
PART B
State whether the Deductive Syllogisms below are:
We do not doubt ourselves.
Therefore, we will not be defeated.
We have gotten what we want.
Therefore our prayers have been answered.
The Senator is not wealthy.
Therefore, the senator is not dishonest.
They do not participate in any contests.
Therefore they are showing off their fortune.
The Democrats were not able to register 30 million voters.
Therefore, the Democrats will not win the elections.
(5 marks)
State whether the Deductive Arguments below are:
The jacket does not fit.
Therefore, do not buy it.
We do not have an uncertainty towards ourselves
Therefore we will not be defeated.
We will turn the balcony lights off
Therefore, the dog will not keep on barking.
Mark does not claim to be my childhood pal.
Therefore he just wants me to do him buy him food.
He is enjoying himself in America.
Therefore he is not at his new corporation.
(5 marks)
Total marks for Part B: 10 MARKS
PART C
Identify the non-arguments below
19. I don’t like going to that night market because the traffic jam is horrendous and the police will always summon those who park illegally.
A. Illustration
B. Explanation
C. Report
D. Belief
20. People are not accustomed to freedom; just look at how many laws were abused in just a span of 1 year. If the authorities were to look at the statistics, then only will the government re-assess their laws.
A. Disjunctive
B. Report
C. Conditional statement
D. Unsupported statement or belief
(3 marks)
Identify the fallacies in the statements below.
21. Two members of my team have become more engaged employees after taking public speaking classes. That proves we should have mandatory public speaking classes for the whole company to improve employee engagement.
22. “Uniforms are required in many public services occupations. Police officers and fire-fighters for example, are required to wear uniforms on the job. Elementary school teachers hold public service positions. Isn’t it reasonable to require them to wear uniforms too?”
A. Inappropriate appeal to authority
B. Weak Analogy
C. Slippery slope
D. Hasty generalization
23. I don't think John would be a good fit to manage this project, because he doesn't have a lot of experience with project management.
John: But you don't have a lot of experience in project management either!
24. “Animal experimentation reduces our respect for life. If we don’t respect life, we are likely to be more and more tolerant of violent acts like war and murder. Soon our society will become a battlefield in which everyone constantly fears for their lives. It will be the end of civilization.
25. Hey, I don’t see what’s wrong with taking a pad of paper or a few computer disks home from the office. I mean, they’ll never be missed by anything. Besides, this company has been underpaying me for years. I do not think that this is a bad idea that you have given me.”
A. Tu Quoque
B. Two wrongs make a right
C. Red Herring
D. Argumentum ad Baculum
(5 marks)
(Total marks for Part C: 8 MARKS)
Part D
You are required to use quotes from the given reading passage. Use a minimum-2 quotes, in your body paragraph essay where necessary. You can either paraphrase or use them as direct quotes. Write a COMPLETE REFERENCE using APA format at the end of your essay.
Topic: Lecturers should focus on the character of students first before subject matter taught
Aside from excelling in academic, fresh graduates have to equip themselves with a set of complementary skills and character to prepare them for the outside world. This being said, there are arguments stating otherwise whereby lecturers should focus on the subject they are supposed to teach and not take character building into account as the main aspect.
REMEMBER! Do not write the above intro in your body paragraphs. Use the article given as your references.
Paragraph 1: Main point & elaboration & Counter-claim & rebuttal and referencing (5marks)
Paragraph 2: Main point & elaboration & Counter-claim & rebuttal and referencing (5 marks)
In-text Citation + Referencing
(5 marks)
(15 marks)
GRAND TOTAL: 40 MARKS
TO BE CONVERTED TO 15%
ARTICLE FOR PART D
THE DISPARITY BETWEEN INTELLECT AND CHARACTER
Over 150 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a lecture at Harvard University, which he ended with the assertion: “Character is higher than intellect”. Even this prominent man of letters was worried (as many other writers and thinkers of succeeding generations would be) about the limits of knowledge and the nature of a college’s mission. The intellect can grow and grow, he knew, in a person who is smug, ungenerous and even cruel. Institutions originally founded to teach their students how to become good and decent, as well as broadly and deeply literate, may abandon the first mission to concentrate on a driven, narrow book learning – a course of study in no way intent on making a connection between ideas and theories on one hand, and on the other, our lives as we actually live them.
Students have their own way of realising and trying to come to terms with the split that Emerson addressed. A few years ago, a sophomore student of mine came to see me in great anguish. She had arrived in Harvard from a middle-class background. She was trying to hard to work her way through college, and in doing so, cleaned the rooms of some of her fellow students. Again and again she encountered classmates who apparently had forgotten the words” please”, “thank you” – no matter how high their Scholastic Assessment Test scores – students who did not hesitate to be rude, crude or even proposition her in a not so subtle manner.
The student had been part of a seminar I teach, which links fiction and poetry to paintings and drawings – the thematic convergence of literary and artistic sensibility in exploring American loneliness, both its social and personal aspects. As she expressed her anger towards me, she soon was sobbing hard. After her sobs quieted, we began to remember the old days of that class. At one point she observed the student who had propositioned her. “that guy gets all A’s. He tells people he is Group 1 of the academic category. I have take two moral reasoning courses with him, and I am sure he’s gotten A’s in both of them. Look at how he behaves with me and I am sure with others.
She stopped for a moment for me to take it all in. I happened to know the young man and could only acknowledge the irony of his behaviour, even as I wasn’t totally surprised by what she explained. But I was at a loss to know what to say to her. A philosophy major, with a strong interest in literature, she had taken a course on the Holocaust and described for me the ironies she also saw in that tragedy- mass murder of unparalleled historical proportion in a
nation hitherto known as one of the most civilized in the world, with a citizenry as well educated as that of any country at the time.
Drawing on her education, the student put before me names such as Martin Heidegget, Carl Jung, Paul De Man, Ezra Pound- brilliant and accomplished men (a philosopher, a psychoanalyst, a literary critic, a poet) who nonetheless had linked themselves with the hate that was Nazism and Fascism during the 1930s. She reminded me of the willingness of the leaders of German and Italian universities to embrace Nazi and Fascist ideas, of the countless doctors and lawyers and judges and journalist and schoolteachers, and yes, even members of the clergy-who were able to accommodate themselves to murderous thugs because the thugs had political power. She pointedly mentioned, too, the Soviet Gulag, that expanse of prisons to which millions of honourable people were sent by Stalin and his brutish accomplices- prisons commonly staffed by psychiatrists quite eager to label those victims of a vicious totalitarian state with an assortment of psychiatric names, then shoot them up with drugs meant to reduce them to zombies.
I tried hard, toward the end of a conversation that lasted almost two hours to salvage something for her, for myself, and not, at least, for a university that I much respect, even as I know its failings, I suggested that if she had learned what she had just shared with me at Harvard- why that was itself a valuable education acquired. She smiled, gave me credit for a “nice try,” but remained unconvinced. Then she put this tough, pointed, unnerving question to me. “I’ve been taking all these philosophy courses and we talk about what’s true, what’s important, what’s good. “Well, how do you teach people how to be good? “And she added: “What’s the point of knowing good, if you don’t keep trying to become a good person”.
I suddenly found myself on the defensive, although all along I had been sympathetic to her, to the indignation she had been directing toward some of her fellow students, and to her critical examination of the limits of abstract knowledge. Schools are schools, colleges are colleges, I averred, a complaisant and smug accommodation in my voice. Thereby I meant to say that our schools and colleges these days don’t take major responsibility for the moral values of their students, but rather assume that their student acquire those values at home, I topped off my surrender to the status quo with a shrug of my shoulders.
To which she responded with an unspoken but barely concealed anger. This she expressed through a knowing look that announced that she’d taken the full moral measure of me.
Suddenly, she was on her feet preparing to leave, I realized that I’d stumbled badly. I wanted to pursue the discussion, applaud her for taking on a large subject in a forthright,
incisive manner and tell her she was right in understanding that moral reasoning is not to be equated with moral conduct. I wanted, really, to explain my shrug- point out that there is only so much that any of us can do to affect others’ behaviour, that institutional life has its own momentum. But she had no interest in that kind of self-justification- as she let me know in an unforgettable as she was departing from my office. “I wonder whether Emerson was just being ‘smart’ in that lecture he gave there. I wonder here if he ever had any ideas about what to do about what was worrying him- or did he think he’d done enough because he’d spelled the problem out to those Harvard professors?”
She was demonstrating that she understood the two levels of irony: One was that the study of philosophy – even moral philosophy or moral reasoning- doesn’t necessarily prompt in either the teacher or the student a determination to act in accordance with moral principles. And, further, a discussion of that very irony can prove equally sterile- again carrying no apparent consequences as far as one’s everyday actions go.
When that student left my office (she would soon Harvard for good), I was exhausted and saddened- and brought up short. All too often those of us who read books or teach don’t think to pose for ourselves the kind of ironic dilemma she had posed to me. How might we teachers encourage our students (encourage ourselves) to take that big step from thought to action, from moral analysis to fulfilled moral commitments? Rather obviously, community service offers us all a chance to put our money where our mouths are; and, of course, such service can enrich our understanding of the disciplines we study. A reading of Invisible Man (literature), Tally’s Corners (sociology & anthropology), or Childhood and Society (psychology and psychoanalysis) takes on a new meaning after some time spent in a ghetto school or a clinic. By the same token, such books can prompt us to think pragmatically about, say, how the wisdom that Ralph Ellison worked into his fiction might shape the way we get along with the children we’re tutoring- affect our attitudes towards them, the things we say and do with them.
Yet I wonder whether classroom discussion, per se, can’t also be of help, the scepticism of my student notwithstanding. She had pushed me hard, and I started referring again and again in my classes on moral introspection to what she had observed and learned, and my students more than got the message. Her moral righteousness, her shrewd eye and ear for hypocrisy hovered on us, made us uneasy, and annoyed us.
She challenged us to prove that what we think intellectually can be connected to our daily deeds. For some of us, the connection was established through community service. But that is not the only possible way. I asked students to write papers that told of particular efforts
to honor through action the high thoughts we were discussing. Thus goaded to a certain self-consciousness. I suppose, students made various efforts. I felt that the best of them were small victories, brief epiphanies that might otherwise have been overlooked, but had great significance for the students in question.
“I thanked someone serving me food in the college cafeteria, and then we got to talking, the first time, “one student wrote. For herm this was a decisive break with her former indifference to others she abstractly regarded as “the people who work on the serving line.” She felt that she had learned something about another’s life and had tried to show respect for that life.
The student who challenged me with her angry melancholy story had pushed me to teach differently. Now, I make an explicit issue of the more than occasional disparity between thinking and doing, and I asked students to consider how we all might bridge that disparity. To be sure the task of connecting that intellect to character is daunting, as Emerson and others well knew, and any one of us can lapse into cynicism, turn the moral challenge of a seminar into yet another moment of opportunism: I’ll get an A this time, by writing a paper cannily extolling myself as a doer of this or that “good deed”!
Still, I know that college administrators and faculty members everywhere are struggling with same issues that I was faced with, and I can testify that many students will respond seriously, in at least small ways, if we make clear that we really believe that the link between moral reasoning and action is important to us. My experience have given me at least a measure of hope that moral reasoning and reflection can somehow be integrated into students’ – and teachers’- lives as they actually live them.
[This passage is taken from Journal: In The Deep Heart’s Core, Volume 16. This was written by Robert Coles. The article in the journal is titled: The Bridge Between. It was published by Harvard University Press, United States of America in 1973]
