r/Professors

I have a student who is non-traditional and returning to school at a later age. She registered for my async online course after not owning a computer for 20 years. She is completely overwhelmed by the course: Doesn't know how to access email, or how to navigate the course in the LMS, or how to access course meetings. I am practicing patience and compassion because she is very eager and wants to do well. I even set up a weekly meeting with her to check in.

We had a two hour meeting last week where I walked her through the course and she is very hard to keep on track and focused, with multiple interruptions, which leads me to believe something deeper is going on. This morning, I woke up to four separate emails from her-Long, multiple paragraph emails about how she hasn't been able to eat or sleep or spend time with her family because so much of her time is being dedicated to navigating and completing the course. She has had multiple panic attacks due to this. Her family would like her to switch to an in-person section but she doesn't want to because of the commute/campus parking.

We are not even a full week in and I feel like the majority of my time and energy is going to this one student and trying to help her get the hang of it. I want her to be successful in my class, I appreciate her dedication to the course, but I can't keep doing this all semester long.

Any advice?

I noticed that I feel very uncomfortable with students addressing me as “Ms. [name]” and prefer to be addressed as Professor [last name] more.

Before, I didn’t care. After I noticed the treatment/address differs compared to male or white colleagues with same credentials, I changed my mind.

I also get “ma’am” once a while. I have a mixed feeling about it. It either feels they are mocking me as bossy or just a genuine respectful way to address, depending on who, vibes, and how they behave in my class.

I don’t have a PhD (yet), so they can’t call me Dr. LastName, but I have a MA.

A student has said a while ago that she shouldn’t have to call me professor because I don’t have a PhD and continue to call me “Ms. Last Name.” I just let that go but it still bothered me. I don’t believe that’s true in the US how you address to your professors as students.

I’m thinking for now on that I will tell students to call me professor as a form of respect, especially since I’m a WOC

Edit: I’m a PTI but some of my colleagues (with same credentials as mine) are address as professor, I even had a student address me as Ms. while calling a colleague (white male PhD student) professor within the same sentence.

Have a student who has completed all the work for the course on week 1. The only part missing is the replies for the posts because no one else has submitted those. I asked for a meeting, I am going to ask questions about choices in the assignments, but not sure what else. I am sure it is AI, there is no way she read the whole textbook in 4 days, but now to prove it. Any suggestions?

My position puts me in contact with a lot of graduate students. I’m not on their dissertation committees or anything, but I work with them a lot. Over the last couple years, I’m meeting more and more who openly admit to using LLMs to write their dissertations, seminar papers, articles, etc. And I don’t mean the LLMs clean them up. The students plug in what they want to say and then the LLM churns out whole articles or chapters. When I ask whether they disclose this to committees or publishers, I get a lot of hemming and hawing or unconvincing, “Sure,” responses.

If you are someone on here who does this, are you admitting to it? Are your chairs or advisors or publishers cool with it?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02574-6

Throwaway account

This week, we were told the following:

1. Oral exams, proctored exams, and lockdown browsers for exams are no longer allowed in online courses. The rationale given was that they discriminate against the poor, single parents, working students, etc., etc.
2. We were "encouraged" to think twice about using oral exams, paper-only exams, and proctored exams in F2F courses.
3. If we scaffold assignments, students who wish to skip those steps and just turn in a finished product must be allowed to do so without penalty because "not everyone's learning path is the same."
4. Video assignments, such as video discussion boards, are no longer allowed due to server space. Exceptions made only for communications courses.
5. We don't have enough staff for the current demand for proctored exams, and we will not be hiring new staff.

I am too young to retire and too old to switch careers. This sucks.

A lot of folks vent here about toxic colleagues or a toxic department culture but I don't often see any ideas on how the department leaders would address it. What are your thoughts? That is, if you were the one in charge, what would you do?

Good.

(EDIT: "Suspended", likely will be fired I hope...)

I teach into social work. I had a class the other day whereby I got them to watch a 15 minute doco on someone talking about their life story which included substance misuse, homelessness, DFV etc. It is a really raw and powerful story. I then asked my students to use a psychosocial assessment tool I designed to 'assess' this client. I am really wanting to get more into the practical side of SW this trimester with my course and thought this would be a good opportunity for some 'hands-on' experience. Plus, past students were screaming to do more practical social workey things like this.

So, I asked them all to email me their completed assessments afterwards for my feedback. Anyhoo, most of them have used AI - they have fed the transcript from the video into AI and voila - pretty much perfect assessments and many of them exactly the same for all 9 domains. These are future SWs. It made me think that actually this is probably what will be happening with the use of AI in future practice - in fact, you don't even need a SW then - you just need a warm body to click 'Record' and then cut and paste the clients transcript into AI for the assessment. I think this realisation made me kind of sad and to start getting prepared to hang up my work shoes.

The Tuesday after Labor Day is my daughter's first EVER day of school. Unfortunately I have class at 8 am and I'll miss taking her to school on her very first day. I'm planning on telling the department I need an extra hour since it's an important day for my family.

Would this request be scoffed at? Does anyone have experience with such a request?

Some more context: the lecture I'll be missing is team-taught by the director of my area (not the department chair). Basically we're both in the room at the same time, handling different things about the course.

Dual enrollment is a fantastic deal for students. Get 30–40 college credits in high school at a massive discount, show up at a university basically as a sophomore, and graduate in three years.

But for universities? The math doesn’t add up.

We heavily subsidize these credits ($75 per course or in some cases free) while public institutions in the same state compete for high schools because everyone wants the enrollment and credit hours used to divvy up state support. Then those same students arrive on campus needing 30–40 fewer credits.

It’s like an ice cream shop handing out huge free samples, celebrating how many samples it distributed, and then wondering why everyone is ordering smaller cones.

At my university, the Provost’s office is pushing departments hard to expand dual enrollment. I keep asking about the long-term financial consequences for our university. The response is basically a shrug and, “Well, everyone else is doing it.”

We’ve essentially created a system where universities compete to sell their future tuition revenue early and at a huge discount.

And this is happening while universities are already staring at an enrollment cliff and a shrinking pool of traditional students. Students arriving with a year of college completed means fewer credit hours, lower course enrollments, and less tuition revenue.

The defense is that dual enrollment gets more students into college. Maybe. But at least in my state, I haven’t seen evidence that its massive expansion is producing enough new college students to offset the credits we’re giving away to students who were going to college anyway. In fact, the percentage of dual-enrollment students who subsequently attend our state institutions has been declining (they are probably going to higher ranked out of state universities).

Dual enrollment may be great public policy. But aggressively expanding it while complaining about declining enrollment is a little like digging the hole and then acting surprised that you’re underground.

The largest number of Americans born in a single year arrived on campus in the autumn of 2025, and now a falloff is looming. College enrollments are forecast to drop 13% by 2041, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/college-admissions-demographic-cliff-16dec51f?st=1sHT1j&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

This feels silly to post but I’m a new assistant professor this fall semester and I am trying to figure out the norms for what to wear. For context I’m a 30 year old cis female who likes to wear sandals(nice, not flip flops) but multiple faculty have made comments about choosing to not wear open toed shoes to teach. Thoughts on this? Is it that big of a deal?

I've been a professor at my UG institution for 5 years, but spent my time at the law school or on a separate campus. This semester is my first where I'm teaching in a building I took an undergraduate class in, some 17 years ago. It's an interesting form of nostalgia. Anyone else have this happen?

I know this sounds dark, but which institutions do you think will shut down or announce major layoffs this year?

Hello,

My liberal arts department is likely going to be merged with other liberal arts departments in my university. I'm part of a committee looking for numbers of majors and retention rates for other "merged" departments, especially in those institutions similar to mine.

My initial plan is to simply call the chairs of these departments and ask if they would be willing to share this data.

To those who might be familiar: would the sharing of this data be a FERPA violation, or of some other legal issue?

Thank you!

I don’t always feel the need to be responsible for the grades of students, but last semester was a bummer. Students just stopped showing up, and I was left with single digits in terms of who passed. This class (public speaking) usually has a high DFW rate at our college, but still never feels that great. Granted, this particular class was at 7am. (I don’t choose the time, I just go where they tell me).

In this Summer semester, over 75% of the students who started the class, finished it with a passing grade. I’m really crossing my fingers and hoping this is a trend for the coming semester. 🤞🤞

I teach online science courses at a couple of different universities, and lately I find myself wondering whether students are actually doing their own work anymore. It seems like AI is everywhere, and the most frustrating part is that many colleges claim they are going to take a tough stance on inappropriate AI use, but when instructors report obvious cases, there often seems to be very little support.

For example, in an introductory 100-level course I teach, students are given a data table and asked to analyze the data, draw conclusions, and write a simple lab report. It is a straightforward assignment designed to help students understand how to interpret data and become familiar with the basic format of a scientific report. Last week, I had a student submit a report in which they discussed meeting with government officials and industry leaders to gather data and then developing a simulation model to forecast future trends. None of that was part of the assignment. Not even remotely. Again, this is an introductory 100-level course. I reported the situation through the proper academic honesty channels. The response I received from the team at the home office was that, because the student was a first-year student, I should use it as an opportunity to teach them about responsible AI use, but still give them full credit for attempting the assignment.

What exactly is that teaching them?

I also regularly see things that are difficult to explain without some type of outside assistance. Students will complete an entire week's worth of discussion posts - an original post requiring two or more paragraphs, plus two or more peer responses requiring at least a paragraph each - in less than five minutes based on the timestamps. I have also seen students do virtually no work for an entire session and then suddenly complete what appears to be eight weeks' worth of assignments in less than an hour.

I just do not understand why universities are not taking these issues more seriously. I graduated about 20 years ago, and I spent countless hours reading, writing, researching, solving problems, and actually learning the material so I could become competent in my field. That was the point of earning a degree. My concern is that some students today are not learning at all. They are using AI tools to produce the work, submitting it, and moving on without developing the ability to analyze information, solve problems, write effectively, or think independently.

What happens when these students graduate and enter the workforce without the skills their degrees are supposed to represent? At some point, employers are going to realize that a degree does not necessarily mean someone has actually mastered the material. Maybe I am just getting old and yelling at the clouds, but it frustrates me to no end. The most discouraging part is when the misuse is obvious, an instructor follows the proper reporting procedures, and the institution ultimately does little or nothing about it.

I'll get off my soapbox now.