I talk a lot of smack about the teaching staff at ITT, so much so that some people may be reading this blog and thinking that I am bending the truth. I also firmly believe in giving people another chance, if only to watch them fail miserably again.
Let's have a test!
The Idea:
Will one of the self proclaimed best teachers at ITT accurately grade writing assignments worth 55% of my total grade?
The Setup:
I am taking environmental issues and we have a choice of writing assignment for our grades. We can either answer all the questions at the end of each chapter, or write a summary report of the chapter in our own words.
I tried one of each and handed them both in a few weeks ago.
Behind the Scenes:
Here is where it gets fun as I dabble a bit in psychology.
Paper 1
For the first paper I chose to do all the questions, but there is a catch. I purposely didn't write the questions with the answers, thus forcing the teacher to have the questions handy himself in order to grade my answers. Just for added spice I also completely ignored a few of the questions and made up a totally random answer, and I copy pasted one of them as the answer for another question.
Paper 2
For the second paper I did a chapter summary in my own words. This actually proved to be more time consuming since I had to go through more of the chapter to get the gist of the sections. I turned in a summary that was about 500 words, and liberally sprinkled with filler. The question being will the teacher actually take the time to read through all of these summary paragraphs for multiple students and notice my filler?
The Result:
Paper 1 got me an 85%
Paper 2 got me a 60%
At a glance it would seem that I got "caught" half assing the second paper, and I suppose on some level that's true. But here is the kicker! I got a 60% on the second paper purely based on it being too short. The only feedback on the page simply states that it's impossible to give a good summary using the amount of space I did. So he didn't even read it, he just gave me some generic low grade based on the length of the paper, even though I had to learn more of the chapter to write the summary.
As further proof, look at the first paper. You know... the one that has copy/pasted answers for multiple questions and made up responses that don't match the questions. It is extremely obvious this teacher is not "grading" anything. He is casually skimming papers looking for glaring errors, and handing out generic grades based on the appearance of completeness. Per his note, I got an 85% on the paper because I didn't write the questions with the answers.
Some examples:
Question 7 - Compare and contrast anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and and ecocentrism.
Answer - The preservation ethic has less to do with change, and more to do with wanting to keep things closer to what they have been.
Question 9 - Describe Aldo Leopold's land ethic. How did Leopold define the "community" to which ethical standards should be applied.
Answer - A land ethic is a code of ethics used when you are going to make changes to the land. Tree huggers love land ethics.
Just reading it again now makes me laugh. A land ethic is a code of ethics about land... That's worth an 85%! lolz.
How are students supposed to learn anything with that kind of laziness in the teaching staff? If the teachers don't even pretend to care about the work, how can you expect students to care about it?
Not only that, but ITT has been taken to court before for exactly this same issue. Schools have been accused of artificially increasing student grades with this method because it gives them larger government checks to have students with good grades.
I briefly taught one course at ITT Tech during the summer. I knew it wasn't the most prestigious school going into it, but I had no idea what a scam it was until a few weeks in. I could go on for a long time about all of the things wrong with this place, but in the end it's just a degree mill. All they're concerned about is making it look enough like a school to trick some poor students into coughing up outrageous sums of loan money, which they will never be able to pay back.
To defend the instructors, I will say that we got paid very little. We have no control over the outrageous amount of homework that is given, often in the form of worksheets covering very basic content, and are also given many trivial yet time consuming tasks. In the end the pay doesn't justify how much time is spent on each course. Furthermore, the pay definitely doesn't justify how much time would be spent actually preparing for class well, let alone spending time to actually read the homework. I skimmed most homework and gave points if the assignment looked like the student spent time on it.
Where I taught instructors were paid $1600 per course. When I calculated the hourly wage, it was about $8/hr. That's with me not spending much time preparing for class and breezing through grading. I should have gotten a job at Wal-Mart instead. For comparison, at the real colleges where I teach I get paid around $4,000 - $6,000 per course, depending on if it's 3 or 4 credits. Because I have a good deal of control over the material, and don't have to do a billion trivial things, I am able to spend the majority of my time preparing for class. In the end I work a lot less hours and am able to create a better course.
So if you want to know where the money is going it isn't into students' education. My advice: go to a public school where a 2 yr degree should run you less than $8,000 and the courses will be legitimate. Don't waste $40,000 on a piece of paper that doesn't mean anything.
I couldn't agree more, and having spoken with other teachers that seems to be the norm at the school I was at as well. My only question would be around the compensation. $1600 is the going rate I've heard as well, which sounds low until you see how little time teachers put in.
On average my teachers rarely taught a class for longer then 2 hours, and never the 4 hours students pay for. Most followed the above method of grading which I can't imagine takes much time. Two hours per class, 10 classes... That puts the hourly rate around $80/hr before you calculate in prep time, grading, etc.
Maybe I am missing some part of the equation, but that doesn't sound so bad for a part time job. Maybe its ignorance on my part too, but I simply don't see any teacher I had spending much, if any time grading things. Certainly not the 200 hours it would take for your rate to be $8/hr.
No problem. Let me clarify the variables taken into account. From what I remember, the course ran about 12 weeks, at 4 hours per week. I can't speak for other instructors, but I always used the entire time period. (Even though I hated that place, I do believe in finishing what I started.) Beyond that there are an insane number of "little things" that we were required to do. I'll estimate things on the low side, so we can get an idea of what the maximum hourly rate would be.
First, we had to call students that failed to show up and pressure them into attending class. My class started with around 35 students, and only half would show up on a regular basis, which lead to a lot of calling time. Not only that, but ITT-tech then makes us enter in this information into a local system accessible only through their computers. We'd have to enter in each attempt at contact, then if we made contact we'd have to describe what happened and fill in a lot of "basic information" boxes. The real killer is the "basic information" boxes, like what your position at ITT-tech was or the class the student was in, doesn't stay filled in for each student. Thus, you have to reenter it in each time, and it isn't as simple as just typing it in. You had to enter in an alpha-numeric code for each thing. Altogether, if you just put in the bare-minimum to get by so that the dean wouldn't hassle you, was about 3 hrs per week.
Secondly, there was some amount of prep time. You'll probably recall that some of your classes had an insane number of worksheets for students to complete. Well getting those worksheets printed off and organized takes some time when you've gotta print off around 20 pages of busy work per student. Besides getting the worksheets in order, I did skim the material we were covering and make a very basic lesson plan to get through the 4 hrs. So I'd tack on another 2 hrs per week for this. For a class at a real college I usually spend about 2 hrs preparing for a class that's 50 min long, so you can see the difference.
Third, ITT-Tech is very big on meaningless paper work, which isn't surprising after what they put their students through. Let me describe one example of many. We have to enter in attendance every week, and one week I forgot to enter it in. I figured this wouldn't be a big deal since I could just enter it in next time. Most colleges don't take attendance, so it seemed unnecessary anyway. Well, I was wrong. Big time. Turns out that after a week we aren't allowed to make changes to the online attendance. To fix this, the dean of this particular branch printed out an attendance change sheet for me to complete for each student. Again, I had to enter in a lot of basic info. that is the same on each sheet, and then sign the bottom to verify that each student was indeed in class that day. So there's a 2 hr task that should never have had to be completed. Oh, and if you think that's the end of that matter it wasn't. Some students were automatically dropped from the class because it was their third absence. As a result, there was yet more paperwork to do to reinstate these students into the class. Let me stress one more time that this is only one example of how ITT-tech forces trivial tasks on their instructors, which takes away from valuable prep time for class.
Fourth, even though I skimmed through the homework, there is so much homework to skim through that it still takes a good chunk of time. I can't imagine how long it would take to actually grade that stuff. For the class I taught, there was a sizable packet of worksheets each week to be completed for homework. (This isn't counting the in-class activity worksheets.) On average each packet probably had 10-12 pages to grade per student. Take that times 20 students (the avg number that showed up throughout the course), and you've got over 200 pages to skim through. Bigger things like essays I just glanced at to see if it looked correct, but other things, like multiple choice sections, I did read to make sure everyone was graded the same. Overall that's probably 2-3 more hrs per week depending on how large the packet was. Oh yeah, there were weekly math quizzes given too. Tack those on, and you've easily got 4 hrs per week.
Fifth, there were mandatory unpaid meetings that we had to attend about 3 times per quarter to discuss I don't know what. Faculty concerns and basic news/announcements I guess. Nothing that important because I don't remember. It was supposed to be like a faculty meeting at a real college, except most of the topics we discussed seemed even more pointless than at those meetings. Lets see...One time the dean was on us about looking good when the accreditation people cam. I can somewhat understand that, but considering the accreditation isn't real to begin with it is a little silly.
Anyway, lets add up those numbers and see where we're at. These are the hourly totals per week: 1) Class time - 4 hrs, 2) Calling students - 3 hrs, 3) Prep time - 2 hrs, and 4) Grading - 4 hrs. That's 13 hrs/week times 12 weeks, which totals 156 hrs. Tack on an extra 6 hrs for the mandatory but unpaid meetings and another 10 hrs for trivial tasks and that's 172 hrs at $1600. Hence, the hourly rate is about $1600/172hrs = $9.30/hr. Before taxes are taken out of course, and remember this estimate is toward the maximum end of the range. While that may not seem that bad, it isn't enough to pay the bills. Since my one quarter of hell at ITT-tech, I've had the privilege of working full time at real colleges, which pay me about $50,000 per year for someone who's relatively new to teaching. Plus health, dental, and life insurance. Per 4 credit class that's about $6000, and it is so much nicer. I get to make the lesson plans, decide on how to set up the homework, quizzes, and tests. Overall it's a heck of a lot less work, the students get a much better course, and I get a livable wage. Not only that, but with yearly raises, I'll be sitting at $70,000/yr in 12 years. At ITT-tech, few instructors are full time, and the ones that are have to put in well over 40 hrs per week, for maybe $20,000 a year. While many do not have Master's degrees, for the ones that do that's an insult to their education.
Anyway, that's all I have for now. Just noticed you had a post about paying off your student loans, which looks interesting.
Hey John,
Thanks for taking the time to respond. A lot of what you are saying is quite familiar to me. I had pretty good relationships with the good teachers at my school, and most had similar complaints.
I will say that while I know teachers were supposed to do a lot of what you are talking about, most simply didn't. Maybe your schools Dean was more of a hard ass about it, but I was one of those students that showed up one out of three classes and NEVER got called. I also rarely received anything that needed to be turned back in. A couple of teachers were bigger on this than other, and certain classes certainly required more worksheets, but on the whole very few teachers asked for anything back. When they did, I rarely saw the paper again, but did notice it magically turned into a 100% at a random time before grades were final. Also as noted before, I never had a teacher that taught for 4 hours, never in four years. Some taught as little as 30 minutes, most slapped together around 2 hours worth, very rarely more. Some of the true gems use this time to make the worksheets you mentioned earlier, while we sat around twiddling our thumbs.
So my specific issue with the teachers I had is that they skimped on everything. I certainly see more clearly now the potential for hours being sucked away, but I think the majority of teachers work around that and in actuality do very little. Either way, it's pretty funny that both teachers and students are far better going to a regular college.
Lol. I totally agree. The only winners at ITT-Tech are the people on top raking in all the money.
The only class I taught there was that Problem Solving one, and they had pretty strict guidelines on the work handed out. Overall the branch I dealt with was pretty strict. I'm not surprised that at less strict branches instructors got away with teaching so little.
Just thinking about how that place takes advantage of so many people makes me angry. Many of the students don't have much money to begin with. Tack on a $40,000 loan, and with the compound interest they'll never be able to pay it back. ITT-Tech is not only stealing from them, it's ruining their lives at the same time.
Yeah in some ways it's even worse because a lot of students in my school used their GI Bill to pay for class. So the government is out all that money.