Remember the drama around the award ceremony at my university? That whole story about the sweet elderly widow?
As you know, after a protracted struggle, I defeated the administration and forced it to include the widow’s award (and other scholarships) into the second part of the ceremony. Love, peace, butterflies. However, season two of this drama dropped yesterday and it’s a doozy.
From now on, we were told, professors are not going to be allowed to choose the students to award. Students’ names are going to be fed into a database, which will assign a random number to each student. Professors will be choosing whom to award but no longer between Jessica McBride and John Smith. We will be choosing between number 4,583 and number 7,912.
“But why?” I asked, making inhuman efforts to control my temper.
“Because,” I was told, “this will prevent professors from cherry picking which student will receive the award.” Cherry picking. This is the actual word that was used.
“That is the whole point, however,” I responded. “We pick the students who deserve the award based on our interactions with the students and our knowledge of their achievements.”
“Yes,” the administrator said in an accusatory tone. “Precisely! That is what makes the whole process unfair. Under the existing system there are students who have no chance of ever being awarded. We are trying to bring fairness to the process.”
“By turning it into a lottery?” At this point, I most definitely deserved an award for keeping my voice calm and my countenance mostly composed.
“I don’t understand why every professor who is being informed about this important and crucial change is so opposed to fairness,” the administrator pouted.
I am very glad I will no longer be department chair and will not have to find ways to bypass the system in the next award cycle. The next cheer is a wonderful person, a friend and the fellow Conservative. I feel very bad for her because I have no idea how she is going to handle the new process. I keep telling myself, I don’t have to care. I don’t have to care about this any longer. But it’s hard because this is absolute, shameless, ridiculous lunacy.
Clarissa's Blog 
Do I understand correctly that this is an anonymization process? It’s not that the awardee is chosen by lottery, but rather that students’ work is presented under a number rather than a name?
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There is no work. We don’t look at projects or essays. As an example, the award by the elderly widow is for students who do particularly well in our Italian courses. The professor in these courses selects students who are in her course and who are doing great. Under the new system, we will have to select students anonymously from the entire undergraduate student body. Not even among students who are taking Italian! No. We will be selecting among all undergraduates.
I went into the database to try it out and for that Italian award it gave me over 4,000 students to select from. Our Italian 101 course has the enrollment of eleven. Previously I could simply enter their last names into the database and it would dredge up the specific students who were doing well in the Italian course from the mass of 4,000+ students. We’re no longer allowed to do that. Do you understand the degree of my annoyance now?
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How do you maintain your sanity when you’re surrounded by insane people?
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Barely, my dear friend, barely.
The depths of this insanity are so hard to imagine that the previous commenter thought I was objecting to something like entries into an essay competition being anonymized. I don’t blame that commenter for assuming this because what I narrate is so out there that it is definitely impossible for a normal person to understand what I’m saying. It truly beggars belief.
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I see what you mean. I’ve been following you for a long time now and have confidence in your intelligence and integrity, but if I had never heard of you and just stumbled upon this post, I might have thought you were putting us on.
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Right? It’s impossible even to share these stories because people think that I’m inventing them and so many of them are happening almost daily.
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What?
…
I mean… what?
ethyl
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This is an excellent rendering of my initial reaction when I was told about this. I truly thought they could no longer surprise me but they really did. I have not yet plumbed the true depths of this form of insanity.
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Might as well take all alumni donations, and award them by spinning the Wheel Of Departments.
ethyl
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This is very confusing, and I would be annoyed too. Can you nominate only a single student who is then “randomly” selected or does the system do nomination for you and essentially randomly draws awards from an entire student body?
It has become a fashion not to “judge” students, so what you are describing completely fits the pattern. A bunch of graduate programs eliminated all kinds of general and topical GREs several years back as an admission requirement (because of course standardized exams are unfair) and the only thing that is left is their transcript and previous research experience. The grades are also becoming less meaningful from year to year with the grade inflation. Then, when students come to the grad program, there is a lot of resistance to any kind of general testing/proficiency evaluation, and I see weak, under-performing students being passed from year to year and graduating with an underwhelming record depending on who their mentor is. It is frustrating. There are still excellent students getting great education, but it is thanks to their inner drive that they are succeeding, not thanks to the system.
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That’s how it used to be in the past. We would discuss deserving students, make our decision, and I would contact the students and tell them to apply through the system. After which I would award them.
Now it has all changed but the database we are using is very glitchy. For example in the recent award cycle the system gave me the names of thousands of students it deemed potentially deserving of an award. This award, according to the official stipulations, can only be given to students who are in the second year of their teacher education program in Spanish. There is a total of four such students. Somehow I ended up with thousands. However in the previous award cycle I could still see the names so I manually searched through the database and found my deserving students and awarded them.
Now I will no longer be allowed to see their names, only the randomly assigned numbers. So I have no idea how I will be able to find my four students who are actually in the program and who actually can be awarded this specific scholarship in the database. I am really completely stumped but in this situation I have absolutely no idea what to do about this.
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It appears to me that as an end result of this the awards will eventually be eliminated since the donors are going to be unhappy if the awards will not go for the purpose they stipulated in the donation.
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Plus we are legally barred from giving the awards that do not follow the stipulations. These stipulations are devised with the help of lawyers and represent a contract into which the university enters with the donor. I have no idea what the administration is thinking. Maybe I’m being too generous by assuming it is capable of acting on the basis of rational thought.
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