Speaking Truth to Power, a white paper

Found this on the Web recently and thought I would share:

http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/focusareas/business/truth-to-power.html

Enjoy.

Certification, certification everywhere! This reputation stuff is important

I just got back from the Financial Education Association meeting in Savannah, and it seems that everyone is interested in our old friend certification.  NASBA Center for Public Trust offers an ethics certification for students, and Bloomberg is now offering the Bloomberg Aptitude Test or BAT on top of their terminal certifications.  Finally, the CFA Institute is now offering back office and CFA support workers a certification (the Claritas Program) that includes an ethics component.

Now why would all of this external certification be so important all of a sudden?  Could it be the growth in online education?

By the way, if you want to take the BAT online (it's open to anyone, worldwide), it will be proctored.  Thanks for playing!

Followup:  We offered BAT on campus for the first time on 4/17/15.  Congrats to the folks who came out to campus to take the test.

Ben Nunnally talks about the recent merger "boom" and how it happens

My friend and mentor Professor Ben Nunnally (of UNC-Charlotte) talks with a local TV personality about the mergers that are happening right now.

http://andrewsoresentwc.tumblr.com/

Letter in The Wall Street Journal today

[This is eerily similar, but not exactly the same as, my letter that appears in The Wall Street Journal, page A16, September 9, 2014]

Online University Education Grows, With Some Bumps

I wish John B. Taylor's view of online instruction could be taken as a model for moving forward in Web education, but I don't think much of what he discovered applies to the vision of online instruction held by administrators at some smaller universities ("A New Twist in Online Learning at Stanford," op-ed, Sept. 2).

Our department began offering both graduate and undergraduate students the opportunity to earn finance degrees online several years ago. Now most of our students take both types of courses simultaneously to finish their programs of study in a timely fashion. Dr. Taylor mentions that he made videos of his lectures and then handed them over to "producers" to mix in other content. At our university the "producer" role is limited to fighting fires due to understaffing, and faculty are left to do things on their own (if we get the time to do them at all). We discovered too late that a good number of our students couldn't take more than one online class per semester because they were in the U.S. on student visas. All students in online courses receive the same credit as traditional students, with the result being that the reputations of both modalities are commingled in the minds of students, employers, alumni, faculty and administrators. In our experience it seems that none of those constituencies take online course work as seriously as traditional instruction.

Finally, our business school went through accreditation review in 2013 and the online courses created the biggest issue for us.

Timothy B. Michael, Ph.D.

University of Houston - Clear Lake

[end quote]


Boy howdy the phone has been busy today.

I've received some questions from folks today asking why I didn't mention proctoring in my letter.  Well, I DID mention proctoring, but it was edited out.  So I've taken the opportunity to mention the fact that we weren't allowed to proctor in the online comments section.  I also mentioned the class size issue in a separate comment.  For those of you with subscriptions, I recommend reading the comments and/or adding your own perspective.

Dilbert's creator thinks the government should create an "investing pyramid" similar to the "food pyramid"

Yeah, because that Food Pyramid has worked so well...

Hey, he has a degree in economics, people, and he's not afraid to use it...

Seriously, though, he may be on to something.  Certainly people need to understand that passive investing remains a pretty good choice, if not perfect by any means.  But does the government need to remind folks of this?  Perhaps they could subsidize and update of "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" or write a Cliff Notes version for the masses.  Burton Malkiel told us about how the market worked more than 40 years ago, and yet so many people still miss out.

Good thing for financial advisors, not so much for investors (unless they're paying for piece of mind, which I imagine that many are).  Scott Adams suggests that financial advisors be required to disclose that their services have been proven scientifically unnecessary, but that has been understood for a while I think.  Perhaps researchers should go back to trying to understand why people invest in the first place.

I'm not an investment advisor, but it seems to me that paying for investment advice in this day and age is kinda iffy. Even sketchy, perhaps.

The Success that is Houston (and Texas) in today's WSJ

WSJ has an op-ed today that outlines how and why Houston (and Texas) has outpaced the rest of the country in terms of growth, prosperity, etc. for the last two dozen years or so.  I remind my students of this all the time, so I'm glad to see it in print yet again.

We currently live in the most successful economy within the most successful state in the union right now.  The only real competition is DC, and we all know where THAT economic "growth" comes from.  I know this sounds like John Kerry's dreaded "exceptionalism" but the numbers are what they are - Houston's been pretty successful, and there's more success to come as the energy industry ramps things up over the next five years.

I sure wish the authors would come back and look at some of the hair-brained things that Houston city government has done in the past 10 years, just for a sense of contrast.  The light rail fiasco comes to mind as a great example of how to NOT do things.

Can flipping the classroom help students learn? Sure...

Just found this Slate article on classroom flipping.

If by "flipping the classroom" you mean "requiring students to actually come to class prepared," then the answer is a resounding "yes."  If you mean "take all of the rigor out of the class and turn it into in-class group projects" then probably "no."

Rasmussen: Only 20% of likely voters think global warming debate is over

Drudge today has a link to a Rasmussen poll showing that the overwhelming majority of likely voters think that the global warming debate isn't over yet.  Better yet, they have a link to the questions so you can see that it wasn't done in some heavy-handed and sneaky way.

John Cochrane on the failure of macroeconomics, Paul Krugman's fallacy

There's a great piece in today's WSJ, but of course it's behind a paywall.  So here's an article that discusses it, with liberal quotes:

http://uneasymoney.com/2014/07/02/john-cochrane-on-the-failure-of-macroeconomics/

The best line is a reminder of how blinded some people can be when it serves their politics.  Cochrane points out that even the great Paul Krugman has squinted under the lights of his high ideals:

"Paul Krugman writes that even the "broken windows fallacy ceases to be a fallacy," because replacing windows "can stimulate spending and raise employment."

Uh, the fallacy of the broken window is about how spending "government" money is supposed to be a stimulus of some sort.  So Krugman actually asserts that it's a matter of scale?  What?  That must be drastically out of context, right?

Here's the full quote, and it doesn't help his case:

"This puts us in a world of topsy-turvy, in which many of the usual rules of economics cease to hold. Thrift leads to lower investment; wage cuts reduce employment; even higher productivity can be a bad thing. And the broken windows fallacy ceases to be a fallacy: something that forces firms to replace capital, even if that something seemingly makes them poorer, can stimulate spending and raise employment."

It just makes it even clearer that Krugman doesn't understand the fallacy, or perhaps how to use analogy.  The fallacy itself doesn't suggest that the window needs replacing in the first place, but that the window was working perfectly and then was broken, needing replacing.  It's the assertion that government spending is somehow separate from the private economy that's the fallacy - money spent to repair the window wouldn't have been used for any other investment.  Of course replacing capital can help the economy, but only if it actually needs replacing.  That's the breakdown I think.

No, Dr. Krugman, the fallacy of the broken windows is just that, and it doesn't change by scale or by how hard we wish it to change.  In this case the window seems to broken enough to give a distorted view of reality.

The myth of the 97%

I think it was Joseph Goebbels who said something like "a lie repeated becomes the truth."  He wasn't the first I'm sure.

The latest reminder of the truth of this statement is the '97% of the world's scientists tell us this is urgent" on global warming.  That would seem to put me in the minority of scientists.  But the Wall Street Journal today has an editorial that explains it.

I wouldn't want to spoil it for ya, but it ain't really 97% of scientists.  Far from it.  Unless they are political scientists.

Online proctoring and cheating at UH Clear Lake: What really happened.

I've heard so many different stories  about what happened last fall that I thought I should set things straight.  There have been plenty of outright "official" lies told about me and others or I wouldn't bother writing this.

This isn't about student dishonesty - that could happen at ANY school, and it does.  I believe that the overwhelming majority of students at UHCL try to be honest - they're the ones I want to see protected, along with the alums (reputation).  The trouble at UHCL happened because university and college administrators conspired to keep faculty from proctoring in online classes in order to try to artificially boost enrollment in the short term.

What follows is exactly what happened, regardless of the rumors flying around out there.

In finance we had been on the front lines of the academic honesty problem for several years already.  (This isn't news for those of you who follow this blog.)  Dr. Williams was going nuts trying to take away the unfair advantage that some students had in her classes: she had had students sitting in Neumann Library taking tests together, having "house parties" to take tests, taking turns passing and failing from one test to the next, passing info around, etc.  She even had a couple of students get together so that one student could use the IP from free coffee house wi-fi while the other used the IP of the burger joint next door (these folks worked several problems the same wrong, obscure way, and turned the exams in within a few moments of each other - our data folks dragged their feet and stopped handing out BlackBoard IP addresses after that).  I had had multiple students copy from Wikipedia into my essay questions, cut-and-paste from prepared documents on tests, and cut-and-paste from test bank solutions that they had obtained online (fortunately I had changed the questions, but they didn't notice that part).  I had students resubmit essays by other students from earlier semesters.  Something had to be done to change the culture of academic integrity at UHCL, and nobody in the administration was being supportive, even after years of effort on the part of me and a few others.

It simply isn't fair to honest students to let dishonest students have an unfair advantage (see our paper about it here).  Fairness here is called "student equity" and it has a big impact on outcomes and student morale. And faculty morale, it seems.  In fact, there's a phenomenon I call "defensive cheating" or cheating by otherwise honest and competent students who would suffer a huge welfare loss due to the rampant cheating of others.  I've seen plenty of honest students tempted to cheat over the past 10 years because their GPA was hurt when they didn't cheat and others in the class did.

The Visit

My remarks to the AACSB visit team in October 2013 came after several years of work on my part to establish a protocol for proctoring of tests in online classes.  Hell, I was just trying to get permission to proctor tests in my online courses, to have some control over the test material and outcomes.  The administrative team at UHCL had been standing deliberately in the way of that control for years.

During their meeting with tenured faculty, I told the visit team that several faculty had documented issues with cheating in online classes on this campus, and that we had been systematically prevented from proctoring by our department chair (at the time), who then became our associate dean, by the dean of BUS, and by the provost's office according to the definition of "online programs" as interpreted by Enrollment Management.  I told them that I was on the university committee tasked with finding a solution, and that the committee was a sham, just a stalling tactic that had persisted for more than two years without any results.  Finally, I said that as an engaged and responsible faculty member I had no confidence that there would be either a BUS or university proctoring pilot or viable solution once the visit team left campus and turned in its report.

[Sidebar:  I will maintain that the only reason we had a pilot study in place was because there was an accreditation visit on the way, but that's just my opinion.  Our pilot study was using university funds to pay for proctoring for students enrolled in online courses, and we had been told that the nebulous "System legal" had said that students couldn't be asked to pay for their own proctoring services online and that we couldn't ask them to come to campus.  How would that arrangement ever be allowed to continue or grow past the pilot stage?]

As we were telling the BUS team this stuff in our meeting, a couple of accounting faculty members were evidently telling the accounting team the same kind of thing in a separate meeting - that they had also been prevented from proctoring in online courses on orders from folks at the highest levels of the university.  

Immediately after meeting with faculty the visit team(s) met with two groups of students, undergrads and grad students, and the grad students complained about both face-to-face and online cheating, and the lack of proctoring.

Let me be very clear here:  I had no role in picking the grad students who talked to the visit team, or in prepping them or telling them what to say.  I've been told that this rumor is out there, and that it's being spread by senior leadership - it's not true.  From what I understand the job of picking students was left to the accounting chair, and she ended up with the leadership of various student organizations in that bunch of grad students.  Those students told the visit team what concerned them, without any input from me or any other faculty member that I know of.  [If I had thought of it, I would certainly take credit for it.  But I didn't think of it.  I haven't needed to connive, scheme or exaggerate when talking about academic integrity issues, unlike my opposition.]

The day after the visit I asked the dean, in writing, for a copy of the visit team's preliminary letter (which is usually provided before they leave campus).  I was told that it wasn't available yet, which appears to be true.  I later asked for copies of what the school had received, via the Public Information Act, and was told that the school wasn't required to make that public.  In February 2014 I found out that the Texas Attorney General's office had denied a UH System request to keep the visit letter private and the AG required UH System to send it to me.  Later that month the dean was nice enough to simply hand out the team's "revised" audit letter, the version that had all kinds of gory, specific details about what the visit team had learned while they were here.  The second one seemed much more direct to me.

The dean held a faculty meeting on November 1st to tell us all that the news was really bad, and that the team was concerned about cheating, and that we were in big trouble.  He also told us that the president and provost "did not hold the School of Business without blame," and that if enrollment went down then there could be jobs lost, etc.  He stormed out of that meeting without taking any questions.

Denial, it seems, isn't just a river in Egypt. It's clear, too, that the Kubler-Ross model was just getting warmed up with these guys.

At the December faculty meeting, the dean announced that all 63 online courses starting Spring 2014 would be proctored, and that students would be required to come to campus or use ProctorU.com at their own expense.  We'd have an honor pledge (a rehash of the existing UHCL language) and a "retreat" where we came up with ideas about academic integrity, etc.

Every hurdle we (the faculty) had faced for more than 4 years was swept away in 7-10 business days after a threatened negative audit report.  All the hurdles at the UH System legal level, if they had every really existed, disappear almost overnight.  It was amazing.  Poof.

Now we're proctoring, and the school is on "continuing review" with AACSB to make sure we iron some things out.  It didn't have to be this way, but the administration's lack of action (and deep denial) led us to this point.

It should be noted that I and others have been "punished" for being vocal about this, mainly through eliminating our committee assignments and/or reducing our annual review scores for last year.  That's the cost I guess.  Leadership isn't cheap or pretty.

Oh, and we still don't have a "hotline" for the anonymous reporting of academic integrity issues, although that's clearly an ethical best practice. It was recommended by faculty at the "retreat" but the dean has refused to do it, saying at our last faculty meeting that the "hotline" was his number.  Okay then.

That's the short version, and the outcome.  The rest of the story is below - this outcome was a long time coming.

The Details

In the summer of 2009, I was told via email from my then unit chair that Deans Council had voted to require all online classes to be tested online, and that any form of proctoring, even at remote sites, would be considered a "face-to-face" requirement.  Over the next few years, I and other faculty in the unit prosecuted more than several cases of plagiarism, collaboration, cheating or attempted cheating during online exams.  We took many measures (clamping down on test windows, etc.) in order to prevent cheating.  In general, our measures made it very difficult for both us and the honest students every semester.

Finance put its BS and MS programs online in 2009, as I recall, at the request of the provost's office and enrollment management.  Note that in order to abide by Enrollment Management's edict about "no proctoring" the finance undergrad program was forced to change its curriculum to go fully online - we had to add a new pseudo-Intermediate Accounting class that would be taught online and could only be taken by our majors.  This new class would NOT serve as a prereq for Intermediate Accounting II.  One of the most unique things about our majors had been, to that point, that they had to take Intermediate Accounting, and most took Intermediate II as well.  After the change we had two distinct groups of students - those who HAD taken a F2F Intermediate class and those who had taken the online substitute course. (Or, those who understood accounting and those who really didn't.)  The accounting unit (rightly so) would not teach Intermediate Accounting in an online format because it would hurt their accounting-only students when they applied to take the CPA exam.  That reason, and because the university would not let accounting proctor in online classes.  (This ultimately led to the former department chair resigning and being replaced by the current chair, too.)

In January 2012 I asked students in one of my classes to either come to campus or go to an off-campus proctor (approved in advance by me).  When my dean found out he told me to change this syllabus as it was against "university policy."  I changed it (my biggest mistake in all of this).  

Our SACS 10-year visit was that semester, and the week before the site visit the Office of Online Programs decided to host a sudden Friday session on the proctoring of online courses and invited ProctorU.com to give faculty and other interested parties a presentation.  This session was announced on either Wednesday or Thursday before that Friday session.

The SACS team had sent a list of questions that it wanted answered during the site visit, and it seemed that the nature and quantity of online course proctoring at UHCL suddenly seemed important to them.  Therefore, a session was laid on to show that we were appropriately concerned here, as well.

I attended the Friday session, and a ProctorU rep came online and demonstrated the product.  I asked my former chair and now associate dean (who was there) why we were having this session when university policy prohibited proctoring in online courses.  I was told to consult my dean before adding proctoring to my online classes for the summer.  

 

My dean confirmed early the next week via return email that there was in fact still a university policy that prevented me from proctoring in my summer classes.  The SACS visit was across that Wednesday, which was also the day that the revised online policy (Policy 10.6) containing the definitions and catalog descriptions of "online" courses was going to be brought before faculty senate.*

I argued in senate that the course definitions were unnecessary because of the existing "no proctoring" policy confirmed the day before by my dean.  I also argued that the "no proctoring" policy should be part of the university's online policy in the faculty handbook.

In faculty senate that day the provost publicly denied that there was a university policy that stopped us from proctoring in online classes, and said that it was a matter of whether a class was designated as "online" or not, or perhaps whether the class was part of an "online program."  We in senate had already heard from Enrollment Management several times during the earlier debate over the online policy that classes in "online programs" had to be tested only via BlackBoard because they were advertised as being "fully online."  The provost later that week or the next confirmed at the separate BUS faculty meeting that he and the dean had been told by UH System lawyers that there was a "truth in advertising" issue and therefore we couldn't proctor tests in "online programs."  My dean said then, at that meeting, in front of everyone, that he couldn't stop us from proctoring in our classes, but that he would "prefer" that we didn't.

At some point along the way I had discovered the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board listing of state laws covering "Distance Education."  That includes Rule 4.262.6 that says (in part)

(6) The instructor of record shall bear responsibility for the delivery of instruction and for evaluation of student progress.  [Link]

That's a hard one to argue with.  (However, #2 under that rule says that online courses must be subject to the same standards as on-campus classes, and UHCL still has a separate QA process for online courses.  So "the law" applies differently for different things, I guess.)

After the online policy passed in senate, the provost prompted faculty senate to convene a special ad hoc committee on online academic integrity and proctoring at the university level.  The committee was chaired by someone who was, to put it politely, trying to earn political points with the provost.  The committee was staffed with a few faculty (me included) plus someone from HR, someone from the Dean of Students' office, someone from Enrollment Management, someone from the Office of Online Programs, and a couple of folks from University Computing.  A couple of students were put on there too, for good measure.  As might be expected, the committee met a few times over a two-plus-year period and never came up with anything.  At the last meeting in September of 2013 the subject turned to the question of why we couldn't include the newly-funded Testing Center to help with some of the testing of online students.  At that meeting we were told by the chair that UH System lawyers were still struggling with the idea of allowing us to have pilot studies in some of our classes.

Knowing that an accreditation visit was due for the Fall of 2013, the BUS dean allowed a handful of faculty to use ProctorU.com in pilot studies beginning in Spring of 2013.  The pilot study was tightly controlled by the provost's office, with the provost "allowing" us to offer on-campus sessions for those who wanted them and then having us pay for ProctorU.com service for students who couldn't come to campus.  Obviously, having the School of Business pay for proctoring in online classes was not going to be a viable long-term solution, but I'll argue that it wasn't supposed to be - there was no intention of letting proctoring continue.  I'll venture that the plan was to let the visit pass and then suddenly declare that it wasn't important.  That, or let the visit pass and then have the university committee impose some half-hearted "solution" that the provost's office would back.

In the meantime, the online policy in its necessary form passed through shared governance.  That policy contains a link to a Web page that lists course modality descriptions - that link was made necessary to support the continuing fiction (the "Big Lie") that online classes (or classes in "online programs") can't be proctored because they are 100% online.

That linked page is here (at least for now), downloaded 5/10/14:

http://prtl.uhcl.edu/portal/page/portal/PRV/OnlinePrograms/Online_Programs/FacultyResources1 

None of that material ever went through shared governance.  Those definitions (and catalog descriptions of modalities and OPALS) were created by the provost's office, and all of this was done in order to maintain the creative fiction of enrollment management that online classes can't require proctoring of any kind without the permission of enrollment management.

The table is reproduced here in case it should disappear in the future:

The online course instruction and delivery modes, as classified in PeopleSoft, are listed in the table below.

Delivery Mode	Instruction Mode	Online Course Description
Fully Online	WW	All class instruction and course requirements are available online. No Face to Face is required.
	WR	All instruction is online BUT expect limited mandatory Face to Face sessions, such as orientation, exams, or presentations.
Partially Online	WE	Online delivery is substituted for 50% or more of scheduled course materials.
	WP	Online delivery is substituted for less than 50% of scheduled course meetings.
Face to Face with Web Shell	WS	100% of meetings are Face to Face with supplemental material online. This mode is not considered to be an online course.
	P	100% of meetings are Face to Face. This mode is not considered to be an online course.

Although we were not allowed to use the "WR" designation in past years, in Spring 2014 the School of Business changed its delivery mode to "WR" in all online classes.  That semester we had 63 online sections.  Of course we didn't proctor in all of those classes - some professors just changed their assignments so that they weren't "exams" anymore and called them something else.  Those professors continue to give tests in BlackBoard without proctoring - but that's their prerogative to do so.  See the link above - it says "instructor of record"...

It's also my prerogative to proctor in my online classes.  

As of December 2013 School of Business has a proctoring policy in place.  Students can come to campus on a Saturday (scheduled) or they can pay for ProctorU themselves.  We also allow them to use NCTA testing centers, just not the one at UHCL.

The university-level ad hoc committee on proctoring has yet to get UH System lawyers to approve a pilot program for testing proctoring solutions at the university level.  As of May 2014 the faculty senate president is "reauthorizing" the proctoring committee, whatever that means, even though it's never been "reauthorized" before.

The net result is that the administration and faculty are now paying attention to the academic integrity issues that arise with online programs (after just 10+ years).  It was a long time coming, and only a failure in leadership on the part of many individuals got us to this point.  I was simply not willing to let it continue to be a failure in leadership on my part.

Update:  I forgot to mention this part, but UHCL used to have an active Teaching-Learning Enhancement Center (TLEC) that hosted guest speakers and discussions between faculty members every year.  This center has been dismantled by the current provost, pending "reorganization" next year with the now-familiar committee and perhaps a staff member to organize and coordinate things.  That was the only formal outlet on campus for faculty to get together and talk about solutions for cheating, online cheating, and plagiarism.  In fact we did just that over the past few years: Dr. Williams and I presented a very popular paper on online cheating in April of 2011, and several other faculty members held forth on online instruction and cheating just last year.  That paper is available online here.  Is it any surprise TLEC was eliminated?

The Lesson Here

As my students know:  Reputation is everything.  That idea won a Nobel Prize a few years ago.  And our reputation was being sold down the river because of a few myopic administrative types who didn't have to deal with the long-term fallout of their decisions.  Shame on them.

My official email address is michael at uhcl.edu .  I can also be reached at tbmichael at gmail.com . Comments welcomed.

=======================================================================

* The SACS visit schedule that was sent out to several faculty chairs on the day of the meeting changed the time such that those folks didn't get to meet with the SACS team.

How are UHCL students different? Here's one way...

In today's Wall Street Journal (page A11) Bret Stephens bemoans the shallow intellect of the graduating class of 2014.  He describes the class based on the actions of the activists at several colleges, such as Dartmouth, who really showed their tails over the last few months, mainly by protesting graduation speakers but also by asking for stupid and self-centered social welfare "solutions" on campuses.

I'll agree with him that there's something to this whole Millennial phenomenon.  He had previously described the Class of 2012 as displaying an "inverse relationship between that class's self-regard and its command of basic facts."  I've met a few of those folks in the past 10 years, not just in 2012.  Stephens goes on to point out that "at least the pretense of knowledgeability was important" to the 2012 bunch.  "For the class of 2014, it seems that inviolable ignorance is the only true bliss."  The guy has a way with words...

So back to the topic of this post:  How are UHCL grads NOT like other students?  Maturity, among other things.  When I talk to employers and alums, though, it's the "M-word" that stands out.

Not age.  Sure, some of our students are older.  But that's not always linked to maturity.  I've had plenty of students fresh out of community college who know what's what.  It seems that adversity in life can be known to cause one to strengthen oneself.  Or something like that.

Want an example?  One of my students just graduated Sunday with honors, her name was the first one read by the dean.  She's been taking classes at night and online and managing two little kids at home while her husband worked extra to support them and help her finish school.  She'll have trouble finding a job because they can only afford one car right now.  I can tell you without question that this young lady knows more about life and responsibility right now than any 10 students coming out of "traditional" university programs.  She picked finance as a major BECAUSE it was hard, and because she wanted a reputation to rely on when she graduated.

Is this student a customer? (That's the OTHER raging debate in higher ed - How we must treat our students as customers...)  Yes, she IS a customer.  Her opportunity cost is huge.  She's poured her soul into learning as much as humanly possible in her time at UHCL.  The other customers (employers, society at large) should be tickled to death to help her get her career started when she's ready.  She's a perfect example of why your college professors worked so hard to help you learn as much as you could.

Are all students customers?  Nope.  The ones that want to learn just enough to get a grade, who want to barely pass, to gripe their way through and try to free ride in groups instead of taking personal responsibility?  Those folks aren't customers.  Not for me at least.  My customers are past employers, the future employers and the alums who've already graduated, the hard working students, and society (the state of Texas).  Those folks pay me to make sure that the slackers have to learn something to get a decent grade.

So, Mr. Stephens, I'll challenge you on your generalization, but I'll agree that a good number of precious snowflakes in the Class of 2014 deserve your criticism.  The good news is that the excellent students will stand out by comparison in the "real world."  Thank goodness for markets.

Local Gamestop announces Job Fair, 5/8/14

Our local Gamestop stores are holding a Job Fair on Thursday May 22 at the Gulf Freeway South and Pasadena (Southmore) locations between 11 AM and 5 PM.  They are looking for district managers, store managers, assistant store managers and entry-level management.  If you're interested, send a resume to this email address:

JOESANDOVAL@GAMESTOP.COM  (there might be a period between the first and last name, I can't tell from the pic I took).

Also, you should come with a completed application and a hard copy of your resume.

Now before you say "Ah, retail..." you should recognize that some of the best opportunities for new job seekers come from retail.  And food service.  And some of the best money for young job seekers comes from taking a retail management path early in their careers.  We've had plenty of UHCL grads come from these industries and go back into them to make an even bigger name for themselves.  So no elitism, OK.  Retail is a great way to make a living.

Plus...how cool would it be to work at a freakin' GAME STORE?

Poison Pills get a booster shot, 5/8/14

A Delaware court ruling has clarified that state's poison pills to allow company's to distinguish new investors based on their intent.  A WSJ article today has the details.  Investors that file an SEC Form 13D indicating that they seek to increase their stake in the firm can be restricted from purchasing more than a 10% stake.  Those investors who've filed a Form 13G which indicates a passive interest can be allowed to purchase or hold more stock by the firm.

Finance Intern position at Oiltanking, 050614

I got an email from Maegan Lee in UHCL Career Services today announcing a finance intern position at Oiltanking.  Please follow the links if you're interested - the job description follows (I have to cut and paste it too, so please forgive the formatting).

Good Morning,

Oiltanking is looking to immediately hire a Finance Intern for this summer. Please see attached job description for more information. If you are interested in this position please apply online at https://home.eease.adp.com/recruit/?id=9143261  and email your resume to clint.mcglynn@oiltanking.com.

Sincerely,

Maegan Lee

Coodinator of Recruiting & Employer Relations

Career & Counseling Services

University of Houston-Clear Lake

Phone: 281-283-2594

Email: LeeM@uhcl.edu

The translated text of the job description is here:

Job Title:	Finance Intern	Job Classification:	Hourly
Department/Group:	Accounting/Finance	Location:	Houston, TX
Position/Classification	Full-Time / Summer 2014	Pay:	$17 / hr

SUMMARY:

Working with the 'C-level' executives of our company, the Finance Intern will prepare presentations for senior management, the Board of Directors, and outside investors, perform competitor analysis, help coordinate North America budgeting activities, and perform ad-hoc analysis. In addition, individual will assist in our capital transactions and M&A activities by modeling and performing due diligence for various projects under analysis. The candidate will have a demonstrated ability to analyze data and be able to present findings to the Company's highest managerial levels. The candidate must have a high level of maturity and ability to interact with 'C-level' executives.

responsibilities:

·          Prepare presentations for senior management, the Board of Directors, and outside investors

·          Perform competitor analysis

·          Coordinate North America budgeting activities

·          Perform ad-hoc analysis

·          Assist in capital transactions and M&A

·          Other projects

Minimum Requirements:

·          Accomplished educational background; pursuing finance or economics degree

·          3.5 minimum GPA

Skills:

·  Quantitative and analytical skills, attention to detail and written/oral communication skills

·       High degree of self-motivation, a positive attitude, and a strong desire to be successful

·          Comprehensive understanding of a variety of the field's concepts, practices, and procedures.

·          Superior communication and presentation skills

·     Critical Thinking - Using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems.

·          Excellent judgment and decision making; considering the relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one. The ability to forecast when making decisions is VERY imperative.

·       Must possess active listening within the department and team; giving full attention to what other people are saying, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, and not interrupting at inappropriate times.

Attributes:

·          Dynamic personality and character.

·          Strong written and oral comprehension as well as oral expression.

·        Technical review capability and problem sensitivity; the ability to tell when something is wrong or is likely to go wrong. It does not involve solving the problem, only recognizing there is a problem

·       Deductive Reasoning - The ability to apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense.

·    Inductive Reasoning - The ability to combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions (includes finding a relationship among seemingly unrelated events).

·          Ability to build relationships

·          Committed team player

Schedule:

·          Summer 2014 – (June 2, 2014 – August “flexible”)

·          Part-Time ≤40 hours/week

Apply at: https://home.eease.adp.com/recruit/?id=9143261