High Cost Students

I've been thinking about the 80/20 rule. An online group, about whom I know nothing at all (VentureLine.com) offers this description, of which the last line is the one that is most important to me.

80 - 20 RULE (Pareto Principle/Law) is a general rule of thumb in business that says that 20% of the items produce 80% of the activity, while 20% of the product line produces 80% of the sales, 20 % of the customers generate 80% of the complaints, and so on. In evaluating any business situation, look for the small group which produces the major portion of the transactions you are concerned with. This rule is not exactly accurate, but it reflects a general truth, nothing is evenly distributed.

Certainly it is true that, so far as the experience of teaching students in concerned, the costs are not evenly distributed. So let's say that my usual American government class of 60 or so has a 20% that cause most of the confusion, take most of the in-class organization time, most of the office hours time, etc. That give me 12 high cost students. Let's say four of them are trying to overcome very demanding obstacles of language and culture. Four of them are deeply risk avoidant. Four of them are just lazy. These 12 take up most of the time that would otherwise be spent teaching or working on academic questions during office hours. What to do?

Nothing is to be done about the first group. They need all the help they ask for and don't ask for more than they need. The response I should make to these high cost students is to pay the cost and be glad to have the privilege. The other two groups are a little more complicated.

There are two approaches to the risk avoiders. The first, and probably the preferable, approach is to reassure them. It's not so hard; you understood most of the assignment correctly; this is a mistake from which you can easily recover; you are a smart college-competent student; it'll all make more sense as we go on, and so on. If that works, all is well. If not, the other alternative is to raise the risk of trying to avoid risks. For the students who will try to take up ten minutes of class time making sure that they have done the assignment correctly or have understood the assignment correctly, or who do that same job in 30 minutes of office hours, they need to know that they will be losing points on the assignment by doing that. If there is an uncertainty, say what it is. That's free. If you want me to grade your paper as a preface to your handing it in so I can grade it, that will cost you.

It's crude, but the theory makes sense. If risk is what they are sensitive to, make bad student behavior more risky.

That leaves the remaining four students, the lazy ones. The goal of these students is to get me to do as much of their work as possible. They are confused; they want more specific instructions; perhaps an outline of their papers would help them grasp the assignment. These students hope to leave the office ready write a paper I have just constructed, outlined, and pre-graded. And they themselves have not yet done anything except show up and act helpless. But even in this sorry category, there are different kinds of students. Some of the students who "act lazy" are just doing what they have been taught to do. They have been taught to be helpless and to succeed as students by being parasitic. They need to know that we do it differently here at the university level. Or that, however they do it in the department of your major--that awkward phrasing keeps me from having to choose a poster child--we don't do it that way here in political science.

The remaining two students are accomplished parasites. They know what they are doing. They will take you for your last minute and despise you as a sucker when they leave the office. Your lack of the most basic defenses makes you the sucker in the stories they will tell their friends over a couple of beers that night. And the next night, and the next.

The most appropriate response to these two students, out of the class of 60, is to refuse to be a sucker. Turn the project back on them, so they can begin to learn how to do it. Not clear enough? Write a paper that illustrates your current understanding of the assignment and I will use it to help you move in a more profitable direction? Not specific enough? Let me remind you of the principles we covered; what examples come to your mind as illustrations of that principle? What ways of doing the assignment can profit from those illustrations?

There's no way not to have high cost students, but there are ways of understanding them that allow you to be generous to some, independence-granting to others, and savvy enough not to be a sucker for the remaining ones.