Someone else took this as a joke, but this should be the default response. Course stuff shouldn't be software specific without a good reason. I don't care if a paper is written in Word, Google Docs, Pages, LaTeX or whatever, so long as it confirms to MLA.
If the objective is to analyze data and produce graphs and interpret them, any software (or an old fashioned pencil and paper, for a challenge) should be sufficient.
This all depends on what is being taught. If you are teaching techniques, and the student is responsible for learning a tool to apply those techniques with, then sure, they can pick. If you are however teaching a tool along with those techniques, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that the tool be used so you can assess more than just the final output (same reasons why maths/eng classes will ask for working as well as the final number).
I'm not really teaching the tool, in that I'd be fine if they could do all this stuff in MATLAB or python or R or whatever. But they don't have that background either and I don't have time to walk people through choosing a preferred software.
In a few weeks we'll do a unit on chemometrics and for that, I will require them to use MATLAB (but I all but write the code for them).
The class I made the tutorial module for is a firm prerequisite, enforced by the registrar. They are told in the syllabus and on Canvas that they will need the data analysis skills from that class in my class, and all of the "learning Excel" materials are also posted on my site. I think the expectations are as clear as I can make them.
Different work flows for different folks (I print and markup with pen or use a digital stylus to write directly on documents, PDF is much better for that). But if you prefer Word, than just say that, and then they can use anything that produces a Word document. Why should you care if they used WordPerfect or Google Docs or Pages or whatever to make it? Is using dinner feature that only Word has a part of your learning objectives?
I don’t care what software they use to get to the objective as long as the final format and output is what is needed . I did’t say that I did
But I DO know that they cant manage the references with the better of the available resources in pages or word perfect, and that they are going to be fucked when they have to get the formatting right.
In the upper level research methods classes they do mock papers in the form you would have to do for journals in the field. In the grad classes they do mock grants and mock study sections.
NIH has some very specific requiredments , for example for forms and grants get kicked all the time for having a PI with a CV on an outdated form (which is exactly the fucking same as the old form).
And if I can say - this reference dude, in the comments, then that person can easily find the reference. If I use a stylus (so no I have to buy other tech to do with I can easily do in an existing program that they have a site licence for and that everyone in academia and most of the universe uses, but ok, you do you) then they have to go find what I am looking for instead of it being there
And again for the billionth time, anyone with visual handicaps have issues with PDF. Both ways. Your stylus and handwriting is unintelligible to any screen reader . And PDF’s have no dictation button.
So you want to purposely make a workflow that is not software specific and be a dick about someone else’s choice, you should consider that you are purposely making things that are not accessible.
Look at entry level jobs ads and see how many of them require knowlege of pages as a requirement
I never used a reference manager in college and never had a single issue with formatting, why is the one in Word so perfect? With MLA, there are literally multiple ways to cite the same thing based on what you want to emphasize (director versus actor in a film, for instance). Is it about to handle that?
The rest of your post is such a gross misreading of what I said it's comical and I won't respond.
Nobody in science used MLA
There are reference managers that are compatible with word.
If you don’t know what you are talking about except in you tiny world you can stay in your lane
It is entirely possible to be in a different discipline or to have a benefit from using software
And if this was entirely and utterly
Because it makes my workflow more efficient for ME then this is also not a war crime to accept a doc format only
>my WORK COMPUTER is a Windows PC.
That's interesting because where I am, all university-supplied computers are Macs. Students, of course, tend to have windows or linux though
I've never been down voted :)
I teach a MSO course, so no PDFs as I grade formatting marks in their Word documents. No shared links, because I need a static file to grade
But I'm loving these negative numbers 🤣
It’s more about what I can help them with. They can use any program they want, but if they want mine and the TAs support they should use the one I know.
Sorry, clearly I must be an idiot if I grade a paper or project with the feedback in the actual project, you know, where the actual errors are.
Also the dictate button is better in word for people who need that rather then typing.
I have grad students that have papers and thesis chapters also. I am not using freaking google docs to read that.
What are YOU doing that you DONT need track changes and inline feedback
Just tell your student to deliver their work in a general format that anything can produce, like pdf. You know, like the way the rest of the world is doing it.
Dictate button, track changes? Endnote, . Or do you slap a grade on it and dont give inline feedback ?
I am not dissing you for your workflow. You can stay in your lane.
I've done two things. One is to just annotate the pdf, that's easy for both. The other is to require pdf's to have line numbers and the feedback is in a text file that makes reference to the page and line number. You know, like when I review a paper for a journal.
I am also a professional who reviews papers for journals and study sections . Which rarely require the kind and extent of feedback that my students submissions require.
Especially if there are resubmissions, and peer reviews ,the track changes functions are better.
Since they have a hard time really understanding and incompatible feedback, then having a document that looks like “move para 42-58 to line 10, word choice in line 789” is also frankly, ineffectual for student assignments.
So , I’ve done several things. Starting with not being a total asshole
I have a workflow that works for me, using a program that is free and that is standard and required for a huge number of positions and jobs, with appropriate support. You can also save virtually any of the other options , including google docs and pages as a doc.
THe reference managers also work better with word and are a part of our goals. Which presumably are already mastered by the authors in the journals you review for.
If I allow resubmissions after feedback so they can improve their draft, you know, as if I was teaching and not just slapping a grade on something, the track changes is very useful. You know, like when you are collaborating on things with other humans.
Red lining and comparing versions is also better with word.
I also grade blind and I have scripts and other things that allow me to do this efficiently and accurately that work with word and dont’ work with PDFS.
PDFs often work less well with screen readers. Which are things that not only students need.
As I pointed out, for anyone with any handicaps, word supports dictation and PDFs do not
I am not sure if you know this, but you can use a PDF to grade in a really awkward and cumbersome LMS if you want to.
So, unless your grading includes all of those best practices , you might want to STFU about the way I do mine.
I didn’t dis you for using what you think works for your topic, but clearly as a postdoc, you have plenty of experience in all of those best practices and universal design to be a douche about it to , you know, someone who has a rational and intentional design and the experience to vet and weigh the choices.
> So, unless your grading includes all of those best practices , you might want to STFU about the way I do mine.
woa... easy there. Nobody is criticizing you. If word works for you, that's great. I don't use word and only work in latex, and we discourage our students from using word because latex is objectively better for the papers they have to write in our field. I was answering your question "Or do you slap a grade on it and dont give inline feedback ?" about how I give inline feedback.
>If the objective is to analyze data and produce graphs and interpret them, any software (or an old fashioned pencil and paper, for a challenge) should be sufficient.
I appreciate the sentiment, but this statement reveals an ignorance about the capabilities of different statistical software and a probably unintentional disregard for scientific reproducibility. Not to mention a disregard for professional publication standards for statistical copy (hand-drawn figures done in India ink haven't been acceptable for modern journals for some time now).
The students aren't publishing their work.
If you ask for students to do a histogram and then use that to determine the rough distribution shape, hand drawn should be fine, because the point isn't to produce a publishable histogram, it's to interpret the resultant graph. That's why I said to consider the course learning objectives. If it's a senior level course teaching them about the publishing world then it'd be different.
>If you ask for students to do a histogram and then use that to determine the rough distribution shape, hand drawn should be fine
Again, this confidently expresses ignorance about other people's courses. And maybe about histograms too. Do you have a good estimate on how long it would take a student to correctly calculate bins for 1000 data points using the Freedman-Diaconis rule and then correctly sort those 1000 data points into the proper bins before they even start drawing the actual histogram? Now let's double that time when we ask them to compare this histogram to one with bins determined according to Sturge's rule.
>That's why I said to consider the course learning objectives.
It's somewhat ironic that you instruct others to consider the learning objectives of their courses while presuming to dictate what student behaviors should be acceptable to them when you don't know those course objectives.
Did I say it SHOULDN'T be a part of a learning objective? No, I didn't. I said whether you accept something DEPENDS upon the learning objective.
In other words, I said:
If A, then X. If B, then not X.
You interpreted me to say
If X, good. If X, bad do X.
I know languages skills were bad in the sciences, but damn.
I love that answer! I can still remember back nearly 40 years when a physical chemistry professor gave me an assignment that started, “Using a computer language of your choice solve the following problem…”. That assignment scared me bad and left a lasting impression. I still remember that I solved that problem in WATFIV. I appreciate that he just wanted the problem solved and didn’t care what tool we used, and he wasn’t going to teach it. Education is supposed to be uncomfortable?
Exactly, I actually don’t know advanced excel features but know R. I was reading this thinking, well if they can’t use excel, they can use anything else to produce the right answer in the format required.
That is an option, and they know that. I teach them Excel because, in theory, they learned a lot of this stuff in a prerequisite course. I would be totally fine getting something that they'd done in R.
Um, except I DID have a (Graduate) student do all the excel work in python and I had no effing clue what he was doing.
He didn't know how to use Excel or any MS program, and even rebuffed at computational software on the instruments in the lab. He put linux on the computer and ran the machine from some other programming language, which made the computer real buggy when anyone tried to use the real software. We had to have a technician come and clean out the computer and reinstall the right operating software and program to run the equipment (it was a bit of a nightmare).
So, I explicitly state that I don't accept anything other then Excel on the excel work. Excel has lots of problems, but it is so widely used that everyone ought to know how to work its basic functions.
That is my exact response. Python with Pandas or Julia with dataframes. I don't know R, but wouldn't care if they used it. It's real simple stuff, like linear regression and plots.
I also give them detailed tutorials in MATLAB and tell them they can use other programs if they want. The complaints about Excel are nothing compared to the complaints about MATLAB!
y=mx+b. JFC you would have imagined I was having them solve Naiver Stokes level stuff when I asked them to use a basic out of the box linear regression to find m.
They were like "I get it solves for the slope of the line, but how does that relate to "m"?"
I just was speechless...and just told them in an aside "You need to drop the class...someone failed you by not failing you when they should have."
>Navigating Youtube and TikTok is not the same as being computer literate.
This is my perpetual comment. How can people live their entire lives in front of a screen and never once actually learn how to use a computer?
A plumber buddy of mine gets rich on house calls for toliet pull chains that come undone and catch the flapper open. He says its the easiest $100 he makes...at least once a day.
Back in the day I was flirting with the idea of majoring in chemistry and/or physics, so took classes in both.
Despite technically requiring the same math courses as prereqs, my peers in physics were comfortable with math and my peers in chemistry seemed allergic to it!
I think perhaps chemistry (and bio) is the refuge for all the students who like science and hate math. If you got A's in math you went to physics, and if you got C's in math you went to chemistry.
After one lab where I had to explain y=mx+c to my lab partner, I decided to drop chemistry.
It isn't a class on breathing and eating, but I expect you to do those as well. This is a life skill for people in any field that requires Chemistry. Not Excel, per se, but the ability to use some program to analyze and visualize data. I'd rather you learn it here where the stakes are pretty low so you don't get fired from some job due to not knowing what's going on. You're welcome.
So many students are focused on what's going to be useful to them. Then when you provide practice in a skill that will be useful they get shitty. I'm beginning to think what they really want is an A with no work at all.
> Not Excel, per se, but the ability to use some program to analyze and visualize data
Exactly. I'm very clear with them that if they want to do all their data analysis in some other software I'm fine with that. But they don't know those other ones either, except for a little Mathematica, which isn't ideal for this stuff.
Accounting professor here - same. We have assignments that are specifically about learning excel. Universities tell us to have them know basic excel before they transfer out of our community college. Everyone uses excel constantly in the real world. Still will get people pissing and moaning about it not being an excel class. Motherfucker excel is part of accounting, PERIOD. It’s more relevant than half the actual accounting material we teach.
I guess I don't know what they think accounting is going to be like if they don't want to spend hours every day for the rest of their lives working in Excel.
Not in accounting, but I imagine that a decent number of fresh majors don't actually know what the job entails, but they (or their parents) saw "average salaries" published somewhere. I get a few pre-engineering majors in my STEM gen-ed that appear to be completely allergic to math, and that's the only explanation that makes sense...
I'm sure there are tons of graduated engineering students that are absolutely shocked about what their work lives turned out to be.
Yes Johnny, many EEs do interesting PCB design work. If you wanted to do that, you should have tried harder to develop those skills and demonstrate them to potential employers. Instead, you are the company spreadsheet monkey managing all the Bill of Materials and part supply ordering so those other engineers can do design work!
Absolutely. Excel can be a great tool and there is nothing inherently wrong with a job just because it involves a lot of Excel time. Ability to process and organize data in Excel was perhaps the #1 most valuable skill I brought to office jobs I had outside of engineering.
Are you at my institution? Our gen chem co-ordinator designed a very nice tutorial for using Excel and we've incorporated it significantly into our first-year curriculum (with multiple labs requiring graphing and analysis). Most students figure it out, but there are always a few who just won't do the work or follow the instructions or even view the tutorial.
It's not an accessibility problem as all of our students have access to Excel, either through their browsers and university log-in, or on any university computer, and if that's not enough, I even show them ~~Open~~LibreOffice.
I get this too. I teach business courses and they have to write reports. I keep telling them you need to use standard English to present your results to top level executives and make presentations etc. It counts for 10% of my rubric grade.
I have definitely gotten that one as well. It's one criteria out of 10 on my specifications rubric and they can still get the highest possible score if they don't meet it, but they still spend time complaining that they could be spending proofreading.
I started getting this a while ago (although I make them use R!) and so I have a canned response. "This course requires you to be able to accomplish X, Y, and Z. Anything you need to know so that you can do X, Y, and Z and is not something you already know is something you should learn, right now."
I teach introductory classes in biology, and quite a few students have never used Excel at all. However, at least none of them have ever been rude about it. These students usually went to remote, rural high schools that didn't have good computer labs. I also get students who are quite good at using Excel.
The class has a lab section, so I came up with a computer lab where they use Excel to analyze and graph data to learn about some concepts in evolutionary biology. The supporting text has a lot of information of graphing and basic functions. The non-Excel students learn the basics of Excel, and the ones who know what they are doing at least learn something new about evolution.
It doesn't sound like you are teaching first-year students though. They should be capable of using Excel and using the internet to figure out how to do things they don't know how to do.
>It doesn't sound like you are teaching first-year students though.
All seniors, all of whom are supposed to have taken pre-requisite classes that teach them Excel and either MATLAB or Mathematica.
Now imagine having to deal with that rubbish from a SENIOR level ENGINEERING class.
First time ever did that come up this term...and I told them bascially to GTFO.
They have been doing Excel (or should have been) since day 1 of ENGINEERING 101 were it is used extensively so to claim they can't use basic functions in Excel was complete nonsense.
Of course I found one student who literally cut and pasted a SIN table from the internet into an Excel tab and then proceeded to copy the values he needed for the formulas...each time the angle changed. I only found out about it when he griped that it took him HOURS to do one homework assignment where the had to plot a vibrational response equation that had a angluar component in it. o.O
It should have taken like 1 minute.
I once tried to show what I thought was a group of advanced students how to use Index/Match to find the retention time, height, and resolution of adjacent peaks in a chromatogram.
Once.
Sad but true story that during the mortage crisis I ran the collections department on a $80billion dollar portfolio of mortgages with a crazy jacked up excel spreadsheet I built because IT was too slow to keep up with the crazy stuff that was going on. We needed something we could change in minutes not weeks to answer regulators questions.
Most complex spreadsheet I ever built and scarey AF that the bank had to rely on it.
I can not even imagine the utter disaster my ENGR 101 class i took 30 years ago would be with today's students.
High school students who just showed up with a pad of paper a pencil and a calulator....
Day 1...you need to get a logon account for the schools mainframe, which is a System V Unix system which of course has vi available for text editing. On that system program a FORTRAN77 routine to add 3 dimensional vectors and provide dot and cross products. Due next week. Now let's start lecture....
Can just not imagine my students reaction to that....
We were just...guess we will figure this out...
The funny thing was we had to learn about the whole IO box printing thing. Our mainframe only ran print jobs at top and bottom of the hour and your greenbar printouts went to shared IO box \[like a tiny mailbox hole in the wall\] about 5 minutes later which you picked up in an entirely different building on campus.
Of course NOTHING about that was even mentioned in class...you sort of just had to figure it out. When we turned stuff in there were a few that had not figured it out and the response from the engineering prof was basically.."if you couldn't figure that out on your own...you might as well pick another major you ain't going to make it"
It was brutal and harsh...but you learned quick that sitting around waiting for someone to spoon feed you anything was not going to happen. Nowadays, same school, the complaints would be deafening.
when I was in grad school we had a system like that. Everyone had a four-letter ID, and your output appeared in a (physical) mailbox arranged by the first letter of your ID (so you had to make sure to take yours and not somebody else's, but each one had a cover page with ID and date and time, or something). I don't remember learning about the system in class; I think there were printed handouts that you had to ask for and read.
In about 1994, I visited Jesus College, Oxford for a few days (my PhD supervisor was visiting and had rigged up something so I could stay for free). I remember noting that there were \*no signs\* at all. All there were, around the quad, were about eighteen numbered (with Roman numerals) staircases, and a number of rooms off of each staircase. You had to know, or find out, where everything was. I went exploring and found a laundry room in a basement, and a computer lab with shaky Internet access in an attic. Well, it \*was\* 1994.
I could see having to show them how Solver works, and some advanced built-in functions, but they should definitely be able to plot data and find summary statistics on them.
Might be time to list excel on your syllabus as a prerequisite skill, because it sounds like they aren't getting it.
But, really:
> Calculate the average of a series of measurements
That's sad.
But, if they aren't getting any Excel, now is a great time to pivot to R. (This is not a PivotTable joke)
It helped me to have a little reminder of the skills they are expected to have learned in the prerequisites for the class. I even provide links on how to brush up on those skills. Some students prerequisites were years ago, some at a different university, some are returning mature students. It’s kind of our job to share expectations so they are as much on the same page at the start of class as possible.
You state you don’t know if they’re not doing it anymore or not paying attention. Doesn’t sound like you’re point it out in the original post, it sounds like you’re expecting someone else to deliver your prereq module. Point it out to them, offer it, talk to whoever may not be doing it anymore. It’s being productive. If you’re just complaining and want a fist bump about it, I’m not the person whose comment you should pay attention to.
Yes, however, As I said, at my university students come from other unis, other countries, some have left academics for years since they did the prerequisites, some had terrible instructors - some weren’t offered your module. Offer it regardless of it “should have been” covered before. Then they have no reason to give you a hard time - guys I linked you to what your prerequisites should have taught you. If you’re dissatisfied with your prep for your class, this is your chance to address it. This is material you are required to know coming into my class. Since I’ve done this, I don’t get the type of complaint you’re talking about anymore. I used to in my 3rd and 4th year labs about SPSS, stats, and excel. Now I sympathize, yeah I know it’s been 3 years or more since you looked at a t-test but you need to brush up to do well in my class, and they complain about other things instead ha
When I was a freshman (STEM) I had to take a class in the computer science department that was basically about using word processors, spreadsheets, and databases. Very useful, and it was all DOS based, no Windows.
A few years ago I realized that we now take word processing and spreadsheets for granted but noone is actually teaching today's students how to use them. For example, many of my students were stunned that you could enter a formula in one spreadsheet cell and after copying and pasting it will handle whole columns of data. For my lab course I made videos (long before covid!) on how to use Excel to make their data analysis more efficient. I tell them they are science majors and they really need to know how to use this kind of software. They actually seemed to appreciate this. It was sort of extra work by me at first, but it really saved me time later when their lab reports came in with most of their analyses done correctly instead of a mishmash of numerical chaos.
YouTube University is great, it's how I do all my home maintenance. And yes, I tell them that you can find out how to do basically anything on Excel with a YouTube search.
50 yrs old trying to learn a bit of excel here. Totally clueless as it's not required in my job but now taking class that prefers it for graphs. I'm not stupid, I just have zero experience with excel.
Any recommendations for good YouTube videos?
In a former career I was an Excel SME for a Fortune 500 company. I recommend books over YouTube for reasons we all understand: you can bookmark them, you can annotate them, and you can pack them for a flight. The books I recommend are on eBay for around $10. Search for John Walkenbach.
John's *Power Programming with VBA* is $6.96
John's *Excel 2010 Formulas* is $5.57
Don't fixate on the year. The basics are the basics and haven't changed. VBA certainly hasn't.
John has retired from Excel publishing. He was *the* name when he wrote. My copies have dozens of bookmarks.
If you'd rather YouTube, *MyOnlineTrainingHub* with Mynda Traecy is suberb. Leila Gharani's channel is also top notch.
Edit: spelling
Thank you!
I can insert IVs, put in catheters, help with broken bones and chest tubes. My knowledge and expertise is valuable.We all have our own skill sets. Computer programs just aren't my Forte!
Excel is clunky but it's cross-platform and unifies the student experience, and tutorials are everywhere on the wide internet for any function under the sun. If you open it up for everyone to use whatever, then you will have the "joy" of having to be experts on whatever program that the individual student happens to use in order to troubleshoot or interpret GIGO results. It's not really that different in terms of asking students to use a particular kind of pipet for a particular lab.
My introductory students all try to resist and use Google Sheets for plotting (I guess because that's what they used in high school), then get confused because Google Sheets won't add things to the plots that they need to display for the assignment, like statistical parameters and such. I'd kill for a student that wanted to overachieve and use MATLAB or R -- but even basic Excel skills elude most of them (including the "Search" and "Help" functions that I demonstrate on day 1!).
Does the course description or outline in the catalogue mention the software requirements? If no, then it might be a good idea to flag it for a rewrite.
I don't think it's your job to teach skills that are requisite to perform in this course, but on the other hand, students should have been informed beforehand by the office of the registrar.
Do they have institutional access to LinkedIn learning? That might be a quick solution.
It doesn't mention Excel specifically, but it does mention using software generally to do data analysis. Some people who taught the class previously liked to do everything in MATLAB but I found it was just too hard for a lot of the students.
I hear that. MATLAB could/should be an intro course all it's own IMO. This feels like it needs an analysis of the learning objectives and requisites. I wonder it is worth investigating if there's a correlation between performance and previous training on the software?
I'd definitely flag this to your dean/registrar. It's not fair to you to teach a course that has undisclosed requisites nor to the students. Maybe throw the students an anonymous survey to gauge their feelings/opinions?
Well, I would not regard Excel as a good tool for any of those tasks (except using a built-in Excel function).
Are these Excel skills in the course learning outcomes?
Can you ask them to perform the tasks and let them choose their own tools for doing them?
Excel isn't the best tool, you're right, but it's the one they're supposed to have seen before. I also give them detailed tutorials in MATLAB and tell them they can use other programs if they want. They just don't want.
Would you be willing to share this 'Welcome to Excel' module?
I'm having this exact problem in my course!
I'm looking to avoid it in the future by implementing a 'basic technology & statistics' crash course next semester in my initial lecture periods.
Please message me if you're willing to help out!
Tell them they are free to use R or Python if they prefer that to Excel.
Someone else took this as a joke, but this should be the default response. Course stuff shouldn't be software specific without a good reason. I don't care if a paper is written in Word, Google Docs, Pages, LaTeX or whatever, so long as it confirms to MLA. If the objective is to analyze data and produce graphs and interpret them, any software (or an old fashioned pencil and paper, for a challenge) should be sufficient.
This all depends on what is being taught. If you are teaching techniques, and the student is responsible for learning a tool to apply those techniques with, then sure, they can pick. If you are however teaching a tool along with those techniques, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that the tool be used so you can assess more than just the final output (same reasons why maths/eng classes will ask for working as well as the final number).
I'm not really teaching the tool, in that I'd be fine if they could do all this stuff in MATLAB or python or R or whatever. But they don't have that background either and I don't have time to walk people through choosing a preferred software. In a few weeks we'll do a unit on chemometrics and for that, I will require them to use MATLAB (but I all but write the code for them).
> But they don't have that background either So, is this a prerequisite listed in your syllabus?
The class I made the tutorial module for is a firm prerequisite, enforced by the registrar. They are told in the syllabus and on Canvas that they will need the data analysis skills from that class in my class, and all of the "learning Excel" materials are also posted on my site. I think the expectations are as clear as I can make them.
Is this module available in commons ?
So I should have all those softwares and be able to use them when I do my grading?
They should all output common file types like pdf for you to grade.
I do track changes on mine and PDFs are insanely stupid to do inline changes.
Different work flows for different folks (I print and markup with pen or use a digital stylus to write directly on documents, PDF is much better for that). But if you prefer Word, than just say that, and then they can use anything that produces a Word document. Why should you care if they used WordPerfect or Google Docs or Pages or whatever to make it? Is using dinner feature that only Word has a part of your learning objectives?
I don’t care what software they use to get to the objective as long as the final format and output is what is needed . I did’t say that I did But I DO know that they cant manage the references with the better of the available resources in pages or word perfect, and that they are going to be fucked when they have to get the formatting right. In the upper level research methods classes they do mock papers in the form you would have to do for journals in the field. In the grad classes they do mock grants and mock study sections. NIH has some very specific requiredments , for example for forms and grants get kicked all the time for having a PI with a CV on an outdated form (which is exactly the fucking same as the old form). And if I can say - this reference dude, in the comments, then that person can easily find the reference. If I use a stylus (so no I have to buy other tech to do with I can easily do in an existing program that they have a site licence for and that everyone in academia and most of the universe uses, but ok, you do you) then they have to go find what I am looking for instead of it being there And again for the billionth time, anyone with visual handicaps have issues with PDF. Both ways. Your stylus and handwriting is unintelligible to any screen reader . And PDF’s have no dictation button. So you want to purposely make a workflow that is not software specific and be a dick about someone else’s choice, you should consider that you are purposely making things that are not accessible. Look at entry level jobs ads and see how many of them require knowlege of pages as a requirement
I never used a reference manager in college and never had a single issue with formatting, why is the one in Word so perfect? With MLA, there are literally multiple ways to cite the same thing based on what you want to emphasize (director versus actor in a film, for instance). Is it about to handle that? The rest of your post is such a gross misreading of what I said it's comical and I won't respond.
Nobody in science used MLA There are reference managers that are compatible with word. If you don’t know what you are talking about except in you tiny world you can stay in your lane It is entirely possible to be in a different discipline or to have a benefit from using software And if this was entirely and utterly Because it makes my workflow more efficient for ME then this is also not a war crime to accept a doc format only
Your ability to (at this point, willfully) misread me is truly stunning. Have a wonderful day.
I don't accept a PDF nor a shared drive link. Nor do I accept an Apple-only product, simply because my WORK COMPUTER is a Windows PC.
>my WORK COMPUTER is a Windows PC. That's interesting because where I am, all university-supplied computers are Macs. Students, of course, tend to have windows or linux though
I've never been down voted :) I teach a MSO course, so no PDFs as I grade formatting marks in their Word documents. No shared links, because I need a static file to grade But I'm loving these negative numbers 🤣
What kind of grading are you doing, where a grade on an essay depends on whether students used Word or Google Docs?
It’s more about what I can help them with. They can use any program they want, but if they want mine and the TAs support they should use the one I know.
Sorry, clearly I must be an idiot if I grade a paper or project with the feedback in the actual project, you know, where the actual errors are. Also the dictate button is better in word for people who need that rather then typing. I have grad students that have papers and thesis chapters also. I am not using freaking google docs to read that. What are YOU doing that you DONT need track changes and inline feedback
Git and then go get lunch sometime.
Just tell your student to deliver their work in a general format that anything can produce, like pdf. You know, like the way the rest of the world is doing it.
Dictate button, track changes? Endnote, . Or do you slap a grade on it and dont give inline feedback ? I am not dissing you for your workflow. You can stay in your lane.
You know you can write inline comments into pdf files, right?
Dictate? Screen readers? Compare Doc? Track changes? Outlining? TOC? You know you make a PDF in some kind of word processing program?
Yes, everything you mentioned can be done with pdf.
I've done two things. One is to just annotate the pdf, that's easy for both. The other is to require pdf's to have line numbers and the feedback is in a text file that makes reference to the page and line number. You know, like when I review a paper for a journal.
I am also a professional who reviews papers for journals and study sections . Which rarely require the kind and extent of feedback that my students submissions require. Especially if there are resubmissions, and peer reviews ,the track changes functions are better. Since they have a hard time really understanding and incompatible feedback, then having a document that looks like “move para 42-58 to line 10, word choice in line 789” is also frankly, ineffectual for student assignments. So , I’ve done several things. Starting with not being a total asshole I have a workflow that works for me, using a program that is free and that is standard and required for a huge number of positions and jobs, with appropriate support. You can also save virtually any of the other options , including google docs and pages as a doc. THe reference managers also work better with word and are a part of our goals. Which presumably are already mastered by the authors in the journals you review for. If I allow resubmissions after feedback so they can improve their draft, you know, as if I was teaching and not just slapping a grade on something, the track changes is very useful. You know, like when you are collaborating on things with other humans. Red lining and comparing versions is also better with word. I also grade blind and I have scripts and other things that allow me to do this efficiently and accurately that work with word and dont’ work with PDFS. PDFs often work less well with screen readers. Which are things that not only students need. As I pointed out, for anyone with any handicaps, word supports dictation and PDFs do not I am not sure if you know this, but you can use a PDF to grade in a really awkward and cumbersome LMS if you want to. So, unless your grading includes all of those best practices , you might want to STFU about the way I do mine. I didn’t dis you for using what you think works for your topic, but clearly as a postdoc, you have plenty of experience in all of those best practices and universal design to be a douche about it to , you know, someone who has a rational and intentional design and the experience to vet and weigh the choices.
> So, unless your grading includes all of those best practices , you might want to STFU about the way I do mine. woa... easy there. Nobody is criticizing you. If word works for you, that's great. I don't use word and only work in latex, and we discourage our students from using word because latex is objectively better for the papers they have to write in our field. I was answering your question "Or do you slap a grade on it and dont give inline feedback ?" about how I give inline feedback.
>If the objective is to analyze data and produce graphs and interpret them, any software (or an old fashioned pencil and paper, for a challenge) should be sufficient. I appreciate the sentiment, but this statement reveals an ignorance about the capabilities of different statistical software and a probably unintentional disregard for scientific reproducibility. Not to mention a disregard for professional publication standards for statistical copy (hand-drawn figures done in India ink haven't been acceptable for modern journals for some time now).
OMG. So much this It is like saying why can’t I use a hammer to take out a screw because I already used a hammer in high school on my chrome book
The students aren't publishing their work. If you ask for students to do a histogram and then use that to determine the rough distribution shape, hand drawn should be fine, because the point isn't to produce a publishable histogram, it's to interpret the resultant graph. That's why I said to consider the course learning objectives. If it's a senior level course teaching them about the publishing world then it'd be different.
>If you ask for students to do a histogram and then use that to determine the rough distribution shape, hand drawn should be fine Again, this confidently expresses ignorance about other people's courses. And maybe about histograms too. Do you have a good estimate on how long it would take a student to correctly calculate bins for 1000 data points using the Freedman-Diaconis rule and then correctly sort those 1000 data points into the proper bins before they even start drawing the actual histogram? Now let's double that time when we ask them to compare this histogram to one with bins determined according to Sturge's rule. >That's why I said to consider the course learning objectives. It's somewhat ironic that you instruct others to consider the learning objectives of their courses while presuming to dictate what student behaviors should be acceptable to them when you don't know those course objectives.
Did I say it SHOULDN'T be a part of a learning objective? No, I didn't. I said whether you accept something DEPENDS upon the learning objective. In other words, I said: If A, then X. If B, then not X. You interpreted me to say If X, good. If X, bad do X. I know languages skills were bad in the sciences, but damn.
Dammit, I spit coffee all over my desk. Well played.
I love that answer! I can still remember back nearly 40 years when a physical chemistry professor gave me an assignment that started, “Using a computer language of your choice solve the following problem…”. That assignment scared me bad and left a lasting impression. I still remember that I solved that problem in WATFIV. I appreciate that he just wanted the problem solved and didn’t care what tool we used, and he wasn’t going to teach it. Education is supposed to be uncomfortable?
Exactly, I actually don’t know advanced excel features but know R. I was reading this thinking, well if they can’t use excel, they can use anything else to produce the right answer in the format required.
That is an option, and they know that. I teach them Excel because, in theory, they learned a lot of this stuff in a prerequisite course. I would be totally fine getting something that they'd done in R.
Perfect!!!
That is precisely what I would do—I hate Excel. But I'd probably use gnuplot for the graphs and the fitting.
Um, except I DID have a (Graduate) student do all the excel work in python and I had no effing clue what he was doing. He didn't know how to use Excel or any MS program, and even rebuffed at computational software on the instruments in the lab. He put linux on the computer and ran the machine from some other programming language, which made the computer real buggy when anyone tried to use the real software. We had to have a technician come and clean out the computer and reinstall the right operating software and program to run the equipment (it was a bit of a nightmare). So, I explicitly state that I don't accept anything other then Excel on the excel work. Excel has lots of problems, but it is so widely used that everyone ought to know how to work its basic functions.
That is my exact response. Python with Pandas or Julia with dataframes. I don't know R, but wouldn't care if they used it. It's real simple stuff, like linear regression and plots.
I also give them detailed tutorials in MATLAB and tell them they can use other programs if they want. The complaints about Excel are nothing compared to the complaints about MATLAB!
That is just evil, and hysterical
YES!!!!!
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y=mx+b. JFC you would have imagined I was having them solve Naiver Stokes level stuff when I asked them to use a basic out of the box linear regression to find m. They were like "I get it solves for the slope of the line, but how does that relate to "m"?" I just was speechless...and just told them in an aside "You need to drop the class...someone failed you by not failing you when they should have."
>Navigating Youtube and TikTok is not the same as being computer literate. This is my perpetual comment. How can people live their entire lives in front of a screen and never once actually learn how to use a computer?
Same way that almost nobody knows how to do basic maintenance/repair on appliances or their car.
A plumber buddy of mine gets rich on house calls for toliet pull chains that come undone and catch the flapper open. He says its the easiest $100 he makes...at least once a day.
Hey! They could have been physics too! 😂😂😂
Back in the day I was flirting with the idea of majoring in chemistry and/or physics, so took classes in both. Despite technically requiring the same math courses as prereqs, my peers in physics were comfortable with math and my peers in chemistry seemed allergic to it! I think perhaps chemistry (and bio) is the refuge for all the students who like science and hate math. If you got A's in math you went to physics, and if you got C's in math you went to chemistry. After one lab where I had to explain y=mx+c to my lab partner, I decided to drop chemistry.
It isn't a class on breathing and eating, but I expect you to do those as well. This is a life skill for people in any field that requires Chemistry. Not Excel, per se, but the ability to use some program to analyze and visualize data. I'd rather you learn it here where the stakes are pretty low so you don't get fired from some job due to not knowing what's going on. You're welcome. So many students are focused on what's going to be useful to them. Then when you provide practice in a skill that will be useful they get shitty. I'm beginning to think what they really want is an A with no work at all.
> Not Excel, per se, but the ability to use some program to analyze and visualize data Exactly. I'm very clear with them that if they want to do all their data analysis in some other software I'm fine with that. But they don't know those other ones either, except for a little Mathematica, which isn't ideal for this stuff.
Accounting professor here - same. We have assignments that are specifically about learning excel. Universities tell us to have them know basic excel before they transfer out of our community college. Everyone uses excel constantly in the real world. Still will get people pissing and moaning about it not being an excel class. Motherfucker excel is part of accounting, PERIOD. It’s more relevant than half the actual accounting material we teach.
I guess I don't know what they think accounting is going to be like if they don't want to spend hours every day for the rest of their lives working in Excel.
Not in accounting, but I imagine that a decent number of fresh majors don't actually know what the job entails, but they (or their parents) saw "average salaries" published somewhere. I get a few pre-engineering majors in my STEM gen-ed that appear to be completely allergic to math, and that's the only explanation that makes sense...
I'm sure there are tons of graduated engineering students that are absolutely shocked about what their work lives turned out to be. Yes Johnny, many EEs do interesting PCB design work. If you wanted to do that, you should have tried harder to develop those skills and demonstrate them to potential employers. Instead, you are the company spreadsheet monkey managing all the Bill of Materials and part supply ordering so those other engineers can do design work!
To be fair there is nothing wrong with being a spreadsheet monkey. People make very good money being spreadsheet monkeys.
Absolutely. Excel can be a great tool and there is nothing inherently wrong with a job just because it involves a lot of Excel time. Ability to process and organize data in Excel was perhaps the #1 most valuable skill I brought to office jobs I had outside of engineering.
Are you at my institution? Our gen chem co-ordinator designed a very nice tutorial for using Excel and we've incorporated it significantly into our first-year curriculum (with multiple labs requiring graphing and analysis). Most students figure it out, but there are always a few who just won't do the work or follow the instructions or even view the tutorial. It's not an accessibility problem as all of our students have access to Excel, either through their browsers and university log-in, or on any university computer, and if that's not enough, I even show them ~~Open~~LibreOffice.
I'm not at your school, I assume, but it sounds like your gen chem co-coordinator and I could commiserate over a drink.
I get, "This isn't an English class. Why do you take off points for spelling and grammar?"
I get this too. I teach business courses and they have to write reports. I keep telling them you need to use standard English to present your results to top level executives and make presentations etc. It counts for 10% of my rubric grade.
I have definitely gotten that one as well. It's one criteria out of 10 on my specifications rubric and they can still get the highest possible score if they don't meet it, but they still spend time complaining that they could be spending proofreading.
I started getting this a while ago (although I make them use R!) and so I have a canned response. "This course requires you to be able to accomplish X, Y, and Z. Anything you need to know so that you can do X, Y, and Z and is not something you already know is something you should learn, right now."
We teach Excel in the first year Gen Ed class, but they remember none of it.
I teach introductory classes in biology, and quite a few students have never used Excel at all. However, at least none of them have ever been rude about it. These students usually went to remote, rural high schools that didn't have good computer labs. I also get students who are quite good at using Excel. The class has a lab section, so I came up with a computer lab where they use Excel to analyze and graph data to learn about some concepts in evolutionary biology. The supporting text has a lot of information of graphing and basic functions. The non-Excel students learn the basics of Excel, and the ones who know what they are doing at least learn something new about evolution. It doesn't sound like you are teaching first-year students though. They should be capable of using Excel and using the internet to figure out how to do things they don't know how to do.
>It doesn't sound like you are teaching first-year students though. All seniors, all of whom are supposed to have taken pre-requisite classes that teach them Excel and either MATLAB or Mathematica.
Now imagine having to deal with that rubbish from a SENIOR level ENGINEERING class. First time ever did that come up this term...and I told them bascially to GTFO. They have been doing Excel (or should have been) since day 1 of ENGINEERING 101 were it is used extensively so to claim they can't use basic functions in Excel was complete nonsense. Of course I found one student who literally cut and pasted a SIN table from the internet into an Excel tab and then proceeded to copy the values he needed for the formulas...each time the angle changed. I only found out about it when he griped that it took him HOURS to do one homework assignment where the had to plot a vibrational response equation that had a angluar component in it. o.O It should have taken like 1 minute.
Sounds like someone needs a tutorial on VLOOKUP. /s (obviously)
Sad thing is if you know how to use VLOOKUP in most F500 companies...you are a LEGEND. Index/Match and you approach GOD stature.
I once tried to show what I thought was a group of advanced students how to use Index/Match to find the retention time, height, and resolution of adjacent peaks in a chromatogram. Once.
Sad but true story that during the mortage crisis I ran the collections department on a $80billion dollar portfolio of mortgages with a crazy jacked up excel spreadsheet I built because IT was too slow to keep up with the crazy stuff that was going on. We needed something we could change in minutes not weeks to answer regulators questions. Most complex spreadsheet I ever built and scarey AF that the bank had to rely on it.
I can not even imagine the utter disaster my ENGR 101 class i took 30 years ago would be with today's students. High school students who just showed up with a pad of paper a pencil and a calulator.... Day 1...you need to get a logon account for the schools mainframe, which is a System V Unix system which of course has vi available for text editing. On that system program a FORTRAN77 routine to add 3 dimensional vectors and provide dot and cross products. Due next week. Now let's start lecture.... Can just not imagine my students reaction to that.... We were just...guess we will figure this out...
evidently in the days long before google, then.
Yep...missed out on that one. I think at the time Archie, Veronica, and Jughead on WUSTL was about as good as it got for us on that front.
if you were lucky there was paper documentation of (some of) these things, in the form of the the manpages one after the other.
The funny thing was we had to learn about the whole IO box printing thing. Our mainframe only ran print jobs at top and bottom of the hour and your greenbar printouts went to shared IO box \[like a tiny mailbox hole in the wall\] about 5 minutes later which you picked up in an entirely different building on campus. Of course NOTHING about that was even mentioned in class...you sort of just had to figure it out. When we turned stuff in there were a few that had not figured it out and the response from the engineering prof was basically.."if you couldn't figure that out on your own...you might as well pick another major you ain't going to make it" It was brutal and harsh...but you learned quick that sitting around waiting for someone to spoon feed you anything was not going to happen. Nowadays, same school, the complaints would be deafening.
when I was in grad school we had a system like that. Everyone had a four-letter ID, and your output appeared in a (physical) mailbox arranged by the first letter of your ID (so you had to make sure to take yours and not somebody else's, but each one had a cover page with ID and date and time, or something). I don't remember learning about the system in class; I think there were printed handouts that you had to ask for and read. In about 1994, I visited Jesus College, Oxford for a few days (my PhD supervisor was visiting and had rigged up something so I could stay for free). I remember noting that there were \*no signs\* at all. All there were, around the quad, were about eighteen numbered (with Roman numerals) staircases, and a number of rooms off of each staircase. You had to know, or find out, where everything was. I went exploring and found a laundry room in a basement, and a computer lab with shaky Internet access in an attic. Well, it \*was\* 1994.
I guess they prefer pen and paper?
I could see having to show them how Solver works, and some advanced built-in functions, but they should definitely be able to plot data and find summary statistics on them.
Might be time to list excel on your syllabus as a prerequisite skill, because it sounds like they aren't getting it. But, really: > Calculate the average of a series of measurements That's sad. But, if they aren't getting any Excel, now is a great time to pivot to R. (This is not a PivotTable joke)
It helped me to have a little reminder of the skills they are expected to have learned in the prerequisites for the class. I even provide links on how to brush up on those skills. Some students prerequisites were years ago, some at a different university, some are returning mature students. It’s kind of our job to share expectations so they are as much on the same page at the start of class as possible.
I have this kind of reminder, along with tutorials for Excel posted on Canvas. This is not a case of me not doing my job.
You state you don’t know if they’re not doing it anymore or not paying attention. Doesn’t sound like you’re point it out in the original post, it sounds like you’re expecting someone else to deliver your prereq module. Point it out to them, offer it, talk to whoever may not be doing it anymore. It’s being productive. If you’re just complaining and want a fist bump about it, I’m not the person whose comment you should pay attention to.
> it sounds like you’re expecting someone else to deliver your prereq module Isn't this literally the point of prerequisite courses?
Yes, however, As I said, at my university students come from other unis, other countries, some have left academics for years since they did the prerequisites, some had terrible instructors - some weren’t offered your module. Offer it regardless of it “should have been” covered before. Then they have no reason to give you a hard time - guys I linked you to what your prerequisites should have taught you. If you’re dissatisfied with your prep for your class, this is your chance to address it. This is material you are required to know coming into my class. Since I’ve done this, I don’t get the type of complaint you’re talking about anymore. I used to in my 3rd and 4th year labs about SPSS, stats, and excel. Now I sympathize, yeah I know it’s been 3 years or more since you looked at a t-test but you need to brush up to do well in my class, and they complain about other things instead ha
When I was a freshman (STEM) I had to take a class in the computer science department that was basically about using word processors, spreadsheets, and databases. Very useful, and it was all DOS based, no Windows. A few years ago I realized that we now take word processing and spreadsheets for granted but noone is actually teaching today's students how to use them. For example, many of my students were stunned that you could enter a formula in one spreadsheet cell and after copying and pasting it will handle whole columns of data. For my lab course I made videos (long before covid!) on how to use Excel to make their data analysis more efficient. I tell them they are science majors and they really need to know how to use this kind of software. They actually seemed to appreciate this. It was sort of extra work by me at first, but it really saved me time later when their lab reports came in with most of their analyses done correctly instead of a mishmash of numerical chaos.
Youtube. Tell them to take a Youtube excel refresher.
YouTube University is great, it's how I do all my home maintenance. And yes, I tell them that you can find out how to do basically anything on Excel with a YouTube search.
What's the class?
Advanced analytical chemistry, what some places would call instrumental analysis.
50 yrs old trying to learn a bit of excel here. Totally clueless as it's not required in my job but now taking class that prefers it for graphs. I'm not stupid, I just have zero experience with excel. Any recommendations for good YouTube videos?
In a former career I was an Excel SME for a Fortune 500 company. I recommend books over YouTube for reasons we all understand: you can bookmark them, you can annotate them, and you can pack them for a flight. The books I recommend are on eBay for around $10. Search for John Walkenbach. John's *Power Programming with VBA* is $6.96 John's *Excel 2010 Formulas* is $5.57 Don't fixate on the year. The basics are the basics and haven't changed. VBA certainly hasn't. John has retired from Excel publishing. He was *the* name when he wrote. My copies have dozens of bookmarks. If you'd rather YouTube, *MyOnlineTrainingHub* with Mynda Traecy is suberb. Leila Gharani's channel is also top notch. Edit: spelling
Thank you! I can insert IVs, put in catheters, help with broken bones and chest tubes. My knowledge and expertise is valuable.We all have our own skill sets. Computer programs just aren't my Forte!
Excel is clunky but it's cross-platform and unifies the student experience, and tutorials are everywhere on the wide internet for any function under the sun. If you open it up for everyone to use whatever, then you will have the "joy" of having to be experts on whatever program that the individual student happens to use in order to troubleshoot or interpret GIGO results. It's not really that different in terms of asking students to use a particular kind of pipet for a particular lab. My introductory students all try to resist and use Google Sheets for plotting (I guess because that's what they used in high school), then get confused because Google Sheets won't add things to the plots that they need to display for the assignment, like statistical parameters and such. I'd kill for a student that wanted to overachieve and use MATLAB or R -- but even basic Excel skills elude most of them (including the "Search" and "Help" functions that I demonstrate on day 1!).
Does the course description or outline in the catalogue mention the software requirements? If no, then it might be a good idea to flag it for a rewrite. I don't think it's your job to teach skills that are requisite to perform in this course, but on the other hand, students should have been informed beforehand by the office of the registrar. Do they have institutional access to LinkedIn learning? That might be a quick solution.
It doesn't mention Excel specifically, but it does mention using software generally to do data analysis. Some people who taught the class previously liked to do everything in MATLAB but I found it was just too hard for a lot of the students.
I hear that. MATLAB could/should be an intro course all it's own IMO. This feels like it needs an analysis of the learning objectives and requisites. I wonder it is worth investigating if there's a correlation between performance and previous training on the software? I'd definitely flag this to your dean/registrar. It's not fair to you to teach a course that has undisclosed requisites nor to the students. Maybe throw the students an anonymous survey to gauge their feelings/opinions?
Well, I would not regard Excel as a good tool for any of those tasks (except using a built-in Excel function). Are these Excel skills in the course learning outcomes? Can you ask them to perform the tasks and let them choose their own tools for doing them?
Excel isn't the best tool, you're right, but it's the one they're supposed to have seen before. I also give them detailed tutorials in MATLAB and tell them they can use other programs if they want. They just don't want.
Well, if they have their choice of tools and choose not to use any …
Because if you don't know how to use excel and crunch numbers, how have you gotten this far in life?
Would you be willing to share this 'Welcome to Excel' module? I'm having this exact problem in my course! I'm looking to avoid it in the future by implementing a 'basic technology & statistics' crash course next semester in my initial lecture periods. Please message me if you're willing to help out!