Pogrebniak ’14 named Churchill Scholarship winner
Katherine Pogrebniak ’14 was awarded a Churchill Scholarship to study for a master’s degree at the University of Cambridge.
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Katherine Pogrebniak ’14 was awarded a Churchill Scholarship to study for a master’s degree at the University of Cambridge.
Katie Dubbs ’14 and Anastasya Lloyd-Damnjanovic ’14 were awarded Sachs Scholarships. Dubbs received the Sachs Global Scholarship and will spend next year studying in Vienna, Austria, and Lloyd-Damnjanovic won the Sachs Scholarship to study at Worcester College, Oxford.
Members of the faculty discussed the possibility of creating a University-specific alternative to Coursera, as well as the proposed creation of a new committee to oversee the continuation of online courses, on Monday at the December faculty meeting.Philosophy professor Gideon Rosen noted that the University is free to explore options outside of Coursera in order to avoid conflicts of intellectual property, such as whether the material is owned by Coursera, the University or the professors teaching the courses.In one alternative to Coursera, he said, the University can “invest considerable resources in developing [its] own proprietary platform.” He added that some members of the computer science department are interested in helping out.“I must say that developing our own proprietary platform gives me nightmares,” University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 replied.Eisgruber currently sits on Coursera’s board of advisers.The new committee would be called the Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Learning, and it would not only vet the online courses but would also be responsible for monitoring them and their procedures, Rosen explained.The committee could also expand the work of the Faculty Committee on Grading by leading a campus-wide conversation on the most effective methods of assessment, according to documents circulated at the meeting detailing the potential committee’s duties. In October, Eisgruber charged a committee of faculty members with reassessing the University’s grading policy, which currently states that no more than 35 percent of the grades given by any department should be As.The committee would also be responsible for supporting the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning.“One of the things that we’ve seen is an increase in the demand for services at the McGraw Center and some strain on the resources that are available there,” Eisgruber said. “McGraw has no cognate faculty committee helping to guide and support its work, and this committee would serve as valuable partners for McGraw.”The University is not pushing to be a leader in online courses but instead is experimenting with them, Eisgruber noted. In a landscape that is rapidly changing, he said that the University wants to make sure to use technology in a way that is beneficial to the community.Documents circulated after the meeting suggested that the committee may take on other roles, including the implementation of the recommendations reached by the ad hoc committee on socioeconomic diversity, assessing certain questions of the Committee on Discipline’s policy on academic integrity issues and reviewing the new Undergraduate Course Assistant program.The potential committee would consist of 14 members: eight faculty members, the director of the McGraw Center, the director of the Keller Center, the associate director for the Council on Science and Technology, the Dean and Deputy Dean of the College and the associate dean of the Graduate School.
This spring break, eight Princeton students and one faculty member will travel to Urubamba, Peru to bring solar power to two communities in the area. Their trip is a pilot program of the Pace Center for Civic Engagement's formerly active International Service Trips program.
With existing partnerships in Asia—specifically, China — established, expansion of programs in Africaposes the next challenge for the University, Council for International Teaching and Research Director and history professor Jeremy Adelman said at the Council of the Princeton University Community meeting on Monday evening.
The movement to reform the American education system is realizing the opposite of what it intends to do, Diane Ravitch, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education from 1991-93 and New York University research professor, argued in a lecture on Monday evening.The lecture focused on Ravitch’s new book, “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools,” in which she takes issue with several commonly-held ideas regarding public and private schools.Ravitch said that reformers who advocate cutting budgets, closing schools and firing teachers and staff aren’t aware of the consequences of these changes.“The so-called reform movement is failing. Nothing that it does works,” Ravitch said.Reformers think that it would be a good idea to get rid of public schools, but in reality, they are not as big of a problem as they believe, Ravitch said. Test scores and graduation rates are at their highest points in history, while dropout rates are at the lowest that they’ve been, she added.She argued that reformers are not focusing on the real issues: poverty and segregation.“The promise of American education is equality of educational opportunity,” Ravitch explained. In order to improve the performance of black and Hispanic students, she advocates placing a greater focus on creating smaller class sizes, greater economic opportunities and desegregating schools.Ravitch added that reformers are destroying the teaching profession. She cited a statistic that half the teachers in America have less than a year of experience.She also criticized the movement to evaluate and, in some cases, pay teachers based on students’ test scores.“You can’t identify great teachers by student test scores,” Ravitch said, arguing that such test results are invalid and unstable. Throughout her lecture, she emphasized that too great a focus is placed on test scores.According to Ravitch, test scores are only accurate representations of the achievement gap that exists between kids who have more advantages growing up as opposed to those who do not. She called the United States the most over-tested nation in the world.“The purpose of education should not be to raise test scores,” Ravitch said, arguing instead that the purpose ought to be to enable students to make wise decisions as adults.Ravitch denounced a practice she calls “deselection,” which she defined as the idea that the more teachers who are fired, the better the schools will be. Ravitch argued that schools should instead hire teachers carefully and then support and respect their employees.Ravitch also refuted the idea, which she attributed to many members of the reform community, that private schools perform better than public schools. Rather, Ravitch said that private schools focus solely on “risk management.”“If you have a portfolio, you get rid of the losers,” she explained. For reformers, this means closing schools and getting rid of the struggling students.In reality, Ravitch argued, children start life with different advantages and disadvantages.“The achievement gap exists before the first day of school. It starts at home where kids are exposed to different opportunities, vocabulary and learning experiences,” Ravitch said, arguing that it is important to level the playing field for entering students in order to improve their performance.The lecture took place in McCosh 50 and was sponsored by the Walter E. Edge Lecture Series.
A groupof Mathey freshmen enjoyed the last of the season’s locally grown tomatoes and Jersey corn for dinneron Thursday at the home of Master of Mathey College Harriet Flower, just one of many traditional freshman advisee group dinners taking place at residential college masters’ homes this month. While Flower hosts Mathey advisee groups for dinner every year, this year is the first that has featured locally grown food.