There is a nother factor worth mentioning in the admissions piece - the proababilistic accuracy in admissions alongside massive increases in the number of applications students send out. The first admissions criteria is basically the ability to succeed at the institution academically. It used to be typically applied to a handful, maybe 10 max, universities. Now it is not uncommon to hear from students they applied to 40 or 50. In 2017, my university got 31k applications and accepted 7.4k students. In 2025 those numbers were 68k and 8.5k - the number of acceptances were up 20%, the applications were up 115%. If you assume admissions process has a 95% accuracy, that predicts a huge increase in 'false positives' dropping from 85% of students we expect to be 'correctly' prepared to 74%.
Add to that that the quality of math learning outcomes and math learning in K-12 has gone WAY down. I point this squarely at 2 factors - No child left behind and the rejection of the common core because parents no lnoger felthtey understood the math their kids were learning. (and teachers did not understand math well enough to teach it well as a conceptual matter).
Even if they are getting the grades and even getting the test scores, they increasingly undersstand very little. They are not prepared for understnading they are prepared for question answering. Even in advnaced classes I see students actively reject learning and understanding for just answering - answering is the point they have learned. Right answers are the point, the only point.
A colleague and I were recently talking about what they see their middle nad high schoolers being taught in math classes. They termed it 'calculation as a defense against analysis'
SATs might help some but they aren't the problem they are a stop gap. K-12 (and by extension college) have so heavily sought to (poorly) quantify every aspect of experience to evalute people that they have stripped any meaning from the process. The problem is nothing has useful predictive value anymore in a process that is oversaturated by a 115% increase in the number of decisions an admissions office has to make. Its a math problem more than a cultural or standards problem.
I'm with you and have said this a long time. We* are responsible for the government that acts in our name and we should bear the costs of its abuse. The Sheriff did not have the power of arrest that he abused here when we has a regular citizen. We gave him that power and we are responsible for its misuse. That is not to say the Sheriff should not be punished and our criminal laws and criminal system are woefully inadequate for a myriad of reasons at punishing abuse. There is a term for what the Sheriff did - kidnapping. That is never gonna happen, but the civil litigation and damages is rightly against Sheriff Nick Weems not Nick Weems.
* We does not mean everyon every time - it means the people from whom an official vests their power.
It seems like some better basic metrics should be made front and center with PRs in this day and age. Yes AI is the driving force behind the current crop of problems but there are other issues. Yes it’s accessible if you go look but the point is people don’t have time.
the rate of comits/PRs total
The rate of PRs to repos they don’t own
The reject rate of PRs
The number of ban
An estimated “AI” or bot score or status flag
There are a few better attempts at GitHub metrics calculators but I have not seen any that move beyond the paradigm of more vomits is default assumed good. It’s time to foreground quality not just quantity. The GitHub “4 kpis” are entirely action oriented.
At least in my state the actually high risk portion of their job…dealing with traffic collisions on the highway…is being outsourced to non police “hero units”
Tells me we can change what police are and aren’t responsible for, and it is telling which ones they want to drop and which ones they don’t.
Incidentally, that's a big part of the argument behind "defund the police" (which is poorly named, at best). Instead of having police do everything, almost none of which they have any training in, and making any situation potentially lethal just by virtue of them having guns, there should be specialized units for their various responsibilities.
Where I live this has also created a secondary debate. Due to union laws, when these jobs are handed off to non-police, the municipality must still pay the prevailing wage, aka what the cops were getting paid.
Here it's required to have a police detail at every road based construction site. They get paid overtime to sit there playing candy crush in case maybe something happens requiring them to direct traffic. So it seems like a win-win to replace them with citizen flaggers as it'd remove the cops from that role but also drastically lower cost to the city. But no, it'd mean taking what should be a minimum wage job and paying someone $50-100+/hr to do it.
And then the secondary debate is that some people see this as a bad thing and others see it as a good thing.
Because faculty didn’t want to do it anymore. They want it handled by others but also they want oversight and veto power but also they don’t want to be bothered. But it better always work, and if they make a mistake the software is broken because don’t tell them it’s a user error they used to write Fortran.
As a faculty member at a large university…I have a deep respect for the impossible job of university IT departments.
We originally rolled our on LMS decades ago. When we switched to canvas we kept the home brew running for five years past its expiration date because faculty refused to remove their files. Finally each one was manually moved by IT for the recalcitrant old faculty.
It is kind of funny when these LMS tools with 100+ functions are being used for little more than what email, a grades spreadsheet, and maybe a shared drive would do. University might even ask for the final grades in spreadsheet format by the end of the term anyhow, so data goes into the LMS just to come back out again.
Well, whatever the large and small things they do are that aren't bound within I described, no one really articulates what they really are. I mean there's like wiki functionality built in. A whole forum system built in. That isn't necessary for education. It is an extra song and dance we might play just because we can, shoehorning some lesson into having to use the forum system or make some dumb wiki page instead of a good old fashioned essay or in class discussion, which no one had a problem with and still doesn't have a problem with. I remember there being like multiple different ways one could go about copying content from one course to another. And that was sort of indicative of the whole software suite. Just keep adding functionality. Never mind if it is redundant. Pure bloatware. A dozen ways to do the basic thing. No one sits there and cuts features because the incentives are the opposite with this software. If canvas can do 105 things, blackboard wants to show the software purchasers at the school they can do 106 things. Doesn't matter if no one uses 103 of them. Doesn't matter that no one even gets trained in how to use these 105 functions.
I used to work in academia and am now an LMS admin (in private industry). I've interviewed for LMS admin positions at educational institutions and each time I've ended up walking away. The questions I was asked at the last interview revealed what a ridiculously unplanned, spiraling mess their system was and that I would have no agency over it. No, thanks. And it was clear the reason for this was faculty recalcitrance and an inability to tell them no. Each one wanted a special plugin/special way of doing things, causing a giant mess of insecure bloat, and a fair amount of interview questions always amount to 'how do you wheedle faculty into doing things/placate their egos to keep things running?'
I'm not a rockstar candidate either: I'm a disabled, geographically-constrained, self-taught(ish) sort-of techie. The disability means I have substantial holes in my resume/work history, etc. I don't have a CS degree or any kind of formal IT education. If people at my level of knowledge are looking at these jobs and passing because they're not worth it, I can't imagine the actual pool of people who get hired is great.
LMS admins in particular are going to be harder to find/retain because we tend to have options we can jump to that would be less onerous than doing LMS admin for a dumpster fire. I could go straight IT or full Instructional Design, for example.
In private industry, I can tell people to kick rocks if they want to do something that the system doesn't support/is a really bad idea. And if I can't, I'm not held responsible for the consequences.
our instance went from [insert hacker leet text] to "down for scheduled maintenance" and myself and other faculty are just having the darkest humor about this.
It is absolute chaos at my institution. This is the last day of finals and grades are due Monday morning. Most faculty are spending today, tomorrow, and through the weekend finalizing grades.
What we don't have access to includes:
* Already graded work
* Ungraded work
* overall adn assignment grades
* lists of students and student emails from the course
* messages from students that are often sent through gradescope
Add to that that the quality of math learning outcomes and math learning in K-12 has gone WAY down. I point this squarely at 2 factors - No child left behind and the rejection of the common core because parents no lnoger felthtey understood the math their kids were learning. (and teachers did not understand math well enough to teach it well as a conceptual matter).
Even if they are getting the grades and even getting the test scores, they increasingly undersstand very little. They are not prepared for understnading they are prepared for question answering. Even in advnaced classes I see students actively reject learning and understanding for just answering - answering is the point they have learned. Right answers are the point, the only point.
A colleague and I were recently talking about what they see their middle nad high schoolers being taught in math classes. They termed it 'calculation as a defense against analysis'
SATs might help some but they aren't the problem they are a stop gap. K-12 (and by extension college) have so heavily sought to (poorly) quantify every aspect of experience to evalute people that they have stripped any meaning from the process. The problem is nothing has useful predictive value anymore in a process that is oversaturated by a 115% increase in the number of decisions an admissions office has to make. Its a math problem more than a cultural or standards problem.
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