Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

Academic Senate has issued an open letter to those protesting fee hikes (PDF).

We share the anguish over the policies adopted in the face of the state’s abrupt 20% disinvestment in higher education. The budget shortfall wounds the institution and community we cherish. We believe these policies are a regrettable but necessary response to the state’s actions. While we are committed to doing everything we can to mitigate their effects on the most vulnerable populations of
our students and staff, we recognize that many disagree deeply, and that vigorous and vocal protest is an understandable response. The passionate advocacy of students, staff, and faculty for the University and its public mission has been remarkable.

Many of the protest activities were appropriate forms of peaceful advocacy. We are concerned, however, about activities at several campuses that disrupted our educational mission and interfered with the freedom of fellow students, faculty, and staff, to teach, learn, research, and work. We are especially concerned about group protests in which a number of individuals attempted to move past police barricades, physically threaten and throw objects at police, and surround vehicles to trap those within. These activities are unlawful and disrespectful of the rights of others, and they create a serious risk of violence for everyone in the area: police, protestors, and bystanders. A number of injuries, some serious, were sustained last week by both protestors and police officers.

While a number of criticisms may apply to this open letter (it passes the buck to the state, it doesn’t address any of the real issues, etc., etc.), I guess I should be happy that at least “weak-kneed” doesn’t apply this time, as it usually does when UC officials act. At least they are condemning protesters—some of which are not even UC students—who occupy campus buildings and set off fire alarms.

Frankly, if you have ever supported (either in heart or deed) the so-called “strikes” and demonstrations in the past month or two, look at what the protesters have done and ask yourself: who is helping university achieve its missions better, the protesters protesting against the economic reality with no real alternatives of their own, or students, GSIs, and faculty who are continuing to perform their duty amid hardship?

It is time for choosing. Choose to side with the workers, builders, and maintainers of UC’s reputation, not the destroyers.

A report from a nobody claims (via Now! Hampshire)

Franklin was chosen for the report because it has the longest history in the state with a spending cap, said Gottlob, who is the principal of PolEcon Research of Dover and who considers himself a fiscal conservative. The report and its conclusion were meant to be non-political, although he acknowledged that the subject matter is inherently political.

“The expenditure cap in place in Franklin for nearly two decades has clearly resulted in lower levels of local government expenditures than comparable communities in New Hampshire,” the report began, adding that “the lower level of property tax-supported spending in Franklin is largely the result of lower spending on education, in part, because Franklin receives more state education aid per pupil than almost any other city in New Hampshire except Berlin.

How is the quality of education measured in the dollar amount of education spending? If I take a stack of $100 bills and set them on fire, in the name of education, and I make sure that it is entered as education spending in the accounting books, have I benefited the education system, or have I just burned money (and broken federal laws about not burning money)?

The excerpts from this utterly incomprehensible report continues with similar nonsense, such as that tax caps are “a race to the bottom”. I think I like that race to the bottom. As a resident of California, I would hope that Californian legislators would look at the outflow of their population and start offering more competitive local tax rates. I mean, it would be too late for me, but perhaps someone else will decide not to move out of California if the sales tax were, for one, no longer at the level of tithing.

I mean, are you better off with WalMart moving into your town—putting a downward pressure on price of everything—or with Starbucks moving into your town—putting upward pressure on price of coffee and increasing the supply of elitist assholes? How could it be worse for people to keep more of their own money? Are you hurt by the fact that you weren’t robbed at gunpoint today?

For what it’s worth, the residents of city of Franklin also do not comprehend this report:

The people of Franklin, said Merrifield, “are the best judge of the impact of the tax cap and they have lived with this the longest and I think that everybody in our community would say that we’re better off than before we adopted the tax cap.”

He said Franklin voters “have had numerous opportunities to remove the tax cap or alter it to allow for greater spending and the voters have routinely sided with the strictest interpretation. If we were to hold a referendum on this measure today, I would be very surprised to see it overturned.”

Remember this when some other sophist or tax-supported academic tries to tell you that more tax is good: the greatest accomplishments in this country, such as the invention of light bulb and the invention of automobile, happened at a time when there was zero (peacetime) federal income tax and very low local taxes. If we could do that with so little taxes, then less tax cannot possibly be so bad.

While some classes may be closed due to the walkout on Sept. 24 being publicized right now, I have great hopes that classes that actually teach something (i.e. anything but humanities, such as political science or English, really) will go on as if nothing happened. In case my hopes, that reasonable teachers would not participate in a political publicity stunt at the cost of their students, are dashed to bits, I am determined to make sure that my students are not affected, not in my class.

This supposed protest didn’t come up in our weekly Physics 111-BSC GSI meeting, and I hope it never will (because that would indicate that no one plans on skipping work that day). But in case it does, and in case any of the GSIs normally in the lab on Thursdays walk out, I will volunteer to be in the lab.

I know unions don’t like that v-word. People who volunteer don’t make any money and that means they can’t get a piece of the paycheck. Fuck the union. Fuck United Auto Workers Local 2865, a.k.a. the GSI union.

I have tried hard to keep politics out of my classrooms, whether it’s from me (you might have seen that I leave most … inflammatory political posts off this website) or from anyone else. I haven’t had to so far worry about the “anyone else” part, but if you think that I would let anyone harm the learning environment to serve their political cause just because opposing would be unpopular among my peers or because the damned GSI union would be displeased, you would be wrong.

There are only two things, short of me falling deathly ill, that can keep me out of the BSC lab on Thursday, Sept. 24: (1) my fellow GSIs show up to work and I don’t have to do their job for them; (2) none of the students come to the lab due to their enthusiasm with this walkout.

We will see what happens.

On Slashdot:

Coryoth writes “The widely held belief that there is disparity in the innate mathematical abilities of men and women has been steadily whittled down in recent years. The gender gap in basic mathematics skills closed some time ago, and recently the gap in high school mathematics has closed up as well, with as many girls as boys now taking high school calculus.

Oh yes. This is a very good news—that is, the fact that the media is finally acknowledging that gender gap hasn’t existed for years—I would even argue that even at my generation there was no such thing as a “gender gap” that put women at any disadvantage from men. Every opportunity available to a man was available to a woman.

Is it possible that we can now expect some attention on the problem that boys are the ones who seem to be falling behind these days? Is it possible that people will now pay attention to the seeming problem that more boys drop out, more boys get worse grades, and more young men commit crimes? Equality of result is of course not what we should strive at—but at least we should examine if we were all so focused on encouraging women and emphasizing that everything a man can do a woman can … that we neglected boys were being discouraged and neglected.

Because the future of UC Berkeley (and the whole UC system) is in private funding.

In the last 20 years, private gifts, grants and contracts have increasingly accounted for a larger portion of campus revenues. In 1990, private funds accounted for 7.7 percent of total campus funds, a percentage that jumped to 15.8 percent in 2007-08, according to data from the UC Berkeley Campus Budget Office.

And in fact, private funding from willing donors is the only ethical way to fund an education system—if the system isn’t paid for by its direct beneficiaries in its entirety.

As for what they propose to do with tax dollars stolen from the people, I can’t say I agree with their goal.

Yudof said the reduction in the state’s General Fund commitment, which totals almost $800 million for the 2008-09 and 2009-10 fiscal years, would place in jeopardy its historic commitment to provide access to all eligible high school graduates and would force UC to rely more heavily on higher student fees.

Why should UC, as a government institution, actively distort the labor market by giving diplomas those who neither deserve it or want it strongly enough? If there are too many people “eligible” for UC attendance—so many that after accounting for those who go out of state or go to private colleges, UC cannot accept those who want in (if it’s cheap)—then it probably means that the bar for “eligibility” is too low. After all, it’s an arbitrary bar set at an arbitrary percentage of GPA with no mechanism for self-correction. I would say lack of funding should play the role of that self-correcting mechanism. Is there not enough funding to accept expected student enrollment next year? Raise the bar now—so we are not changing the rules in the middle of the game, and we are not over-committing our system to those who shouldn’t have 4-year college education (or at least haven’t proven that the public should fund their education) anyway.

Raise the fees, and in fact, publish fee increase schedule for next 4 years, at a slight overestimation. Those to whom the education is worth it (and cannot pay out of pocket) can take out loans to get the education—their post-graduation salaries would presumably be worth it. If not, then they made stupid choice not dissimilar to running up a credit card debt.

Those to whom the education is not worth it will go into the society and be productive—until they feel that additional formal education is worth it, if ever.

No natural law of society says that every productive person has to have a college degree—in fact, some of the most successful people became successful after dropping out of Ph. D. program or even bachelor’s program.

While I was thinking about my GSI duties for the upcoming 7A midterm, it occurred to me: once a grading rubric with enough detail is written, the grader is nothing more but a set of trained eyes—that is, anyone else with enough competence to spot mistakes and not make his own mistakes will end up assigning, for each exam, the same grade as I do, if we work out of the same grading rubric.

Perhaps this will be … relevant for properly judging the merits of the so-called holistic grading. One of the “merits” of holistic grading, even in the science courses, that I hear is that the resulting grade is more consistent—i.e. two graders grading using holistic grading assign more similar grades than two graders using standard method (i.e. grading by rubric). If there is any basis in this claim (as in, someone did a study and found that), I wonder if that basis is simply that of a bad study, in particular, poor control.

If holistic grading seemed to yield a more consistent grade, that may be more a result of holistic graders having a common guideline (after all, holistic grading does have guidelines, and for essays, “anchor papers”), while the graders-by-rubric did not—at least when we grade midterms, we write our own rubric, often with little central guideline common for all graders.

After all, how could a grading system which basically says, “I’m giving you a 5 because I think you deserve it, and I’m giving you a 3 because I think you deserve that, and no, I don’t need to justify myself to you—my personal judgment is better than any line-by-line justification,” can be more consistent than a grading system that requires that the grader justify every point being taken off?

At the moment, I don’t have the time to look for the actual studies which would either confirm or contradict the above scenario (i.e. the study supporting holistic grading had poor controls … or not), but I should … at some point.

And if this turns out to be true, then, well, the only benefit of holistic grading (at least the way it would be done for classes, with a single grader, i.e. the GSI, using the so-called “holistic grading”, rather than actual two separate readers, like they do for the standardized tests) is that it’s easier. But then, you know, cutting corners when building a dam is also easier. Does that mean the contractors should cut corners?

Professor griping about RateMyProfessor.com says:

This is the time of year when Lucy the Dog must decide whether to dip her paws back into the world of academia.

For two years, I’ve spent September through December teaching Intro to College Writing to incoming freshmen who are none too interested in my thoughts on E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake” or the differences between there, their, and they’re.

And responding to one of the comments …

And yet one student who was in attendance for those statements turned in a stack of unstapled pages. I did not fail her, but I made her take the paper back and get it stapled. I also told her it was ridiculous that she didn’t follow such a basic, clearly-stated instruction.

In her course evaluation, she complained that I’d threatened to fail her just because she didn’t staple a paper.

This is why you write your evaluations in nice, nondescript block letters, preferably written with your nondominant hand (but usually you don’t get enough time to use your nondominant hand, unless you are quite ambidextrous; so, in this case, just use block letters and in the months before, make sure never to use block-letter writing in any of the class work).

Even though your evaluations are supposed to be anonymous, the instructors can tell each student’s handwriting.

Also, leave out any personal details. I’ve been a TA and a tutor, and believe me, when the evaluation gets into enough details, I can guess very easily who wrote it.

What does ‘online study group’ exactly mean?

Study groups may be a virtual trademark of the Ivory Tower – but a virtual study group has been slammed as cheating by Ryerson University.

First-year student Chris Avenir is fighting charges of academic misconduct for helping run an online chemistry study group via Facebook last term, where 146 classmates swapped tips on homework questions that counted for 10 per cent of their mark.

Well, I’ll say this much: in my years of grading upper division physics homework, the homework that looked most like each other (showing various evidences of cheating, to reveal just a few symptoms (since I need to keep a few aces in the sleeve when I grade again), intermediate steps look identical, and unusual choices of variable name is repeated) were of those who were “in a study group”.

I’m not saying everyone in a study group is a cheater, but I am saying that those in a study group has to take extraordinary precaution that they don’t cheat by accident (such as only discussing ideas together and keeping specific implementations secret from each other). Somehow, Facebook doesn’t seem to be a best place to do that.