I haven’t taken a class that requires clickers since my freshman year, but this semester has reminded me of this technological farce.
Teachers are wasting their time and students’ money with the student response system, and clickers can’t compensate for teachers’ inability to academically inspire gargantuan classes. However, budget cuts and downplaying of general education classes have forced University students into enourmous class sizes in biology and landscape architecture with anywhere from 300 to 700 students.
Instructing three or four people who don’t care about what you have to say is challenging enough, so imagine 100 times the inattention.
To alleviate the situation, some genius applied the same technology that enables a contestant to “ask the audience” in “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” to the classroom.
For several years, the University has used the clicker response system, but it seems to be as educationally effective as requiring students be drunk enough to drive into a building before entering the classroom. However, clickers have adverse effects besides frustrated teachers and drunk and uneducated students.
The intent of clickers is to encourage student involvement and attendance, but the system is backfiring. If you haven’t taken a class that requires clickers, attend one. You will surely see lack of attendance and attention similar to that of classes that don’t employ the clicker system.
I’m sure there are statistics that can argue my point, but I base this statement on observations in my current clicker class.
In Dodson Auditorium, I sit afloat a cushy seated skiff in the sea of electronic devices, which must be hidden from view because my teacher forbids the use of laptops or cell phones. Of course he misses most of them, but he occasionally catches rule breakers and fusses at them and makes them leave class.
Because general education classes are requirements and not integral parts of degrees, students have no incentive to care about these classes that are taken for an “easy A.” Forcing people to do anything is a path to resentment and ineffectiveness — not education.
Being well-rounded is certainly a desirable goal, and because this is a University and not a conservatory or technical college, gen-ed classes are inevitable. But the value they add to our degree is currently laughable.
Besides being severely ineffective, clickers encourage large numbers of students to violate the Code of Student Conduct.
With an attitude of apathy or distaste toward these unimportant classes, students obviously don’t want to attend the classes with dreadfully boring lectures. However, students risk losing credit to avoid doing something they emotionally associate with punching themselves in the face. So what do they do? They share and trade misery.
If a group develops a rotation of sending a few people with a lot of people’s clickers, no one has to withstand the academic bore more than once or twice a week. Congratulations — you’ve just cheated.
In case you didn’t know, clickers count for credit in a class. So if you answer clicker questions with your friends’ clickers, you’ve been academically dishonest. It seems obvious, but the number of people in my class with three to 10 clickers across their desks indicates
ignorance of or apathy toward the rules.
You can’t really blame them, though. Attendance is the responsibility of students, not teachers. In most classes it’s your choice whether or not you go, and the difficulty of the class determines the harm you endure by missing. Clickers remove this choice, and they drive students to actions they shouldn’t have to take.
In these troubled economic times, clickers cost students $40 more than they should, and they create a worse learning environment than they encourage. The University would be better off without these time and money wasters.
Matt Lousteau is a 21-year-old mechanical engineering senior from LaPlace. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Mlousteau.
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Contact Matt Lousteau at [email protected]