GoKawiilhttps://preview.redd.it/wjdh492taj0h1.png?width=500&format=png&auto=webp&s=a806aa3c558ed58e50f0fceaafd363e535de3553
full email below. this man is NOT okay and i've never respected anyone more
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Dear Students,
As before, I have received too many emails to be able to reply to them all individually, so I will try to address the most common issues here.
I can confirm that the Box folder has been working correctly and is accessible. You do need to log in using your U of I account. In the past when students have had issues logging into websites using their university account, tech services has given this suggestion: "Try using an incognito/private browser window and deleting all cookies, history, and cache data. If you're on mac please clear all university passwords from keychain access."
If you have a flight scheduled, I recommend that you take it. The university may say that we are "postponing" the exams, but this is not accurate. Final exams cannot be postponed, because there is a limited amount of time before the end of the term, and there are already other final exams scheduled during that time. Beyond that, we all have plans. Flights, internships, jobs, and other summer plans do not wait for the provost's approval, any more than the changing of the seasons does. "Wait until Sunday" is an easy thing for one person to say, but we all have lives to live. No matter what the university decides on Sunday, I cannot require you to be physically present on campus past the originally scheduled exam date. Whatever solution I am allowed to implement, it will account for this.
The provost's order to instructors is as follows: "All exams, assessments, and related instructional activities are postponed without exception. Individual instructors may not proceed independently or create alternate arrangements. The campus directives apply to all classes, and compliance is expected across the board." This means that no exams may be given on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, regardless of the format or modality of the exam, and regardless of whether the course even uses Canvas. This includes exams that were scheduled to be taken at DRES TAC. I have read your emails, and I understand that you have your time at DRES TAC reserved, and you are ready to take the exam. That is not unique to students registered with DRES.
This is a broader issue, which a large number of you noticed. As one student put it bluntly: "Hackers aren't stopping us from taking the exam, the provost is." That is an astute observation. We are present and ready. The exams are printed. Our classroom is waiting. Clearly, hackers are not the reason we are unable to take the exam today.
There is a good economics lesson here. In Lesson 2 I described the mistaken belief that order is created through central planning, and the reality that central planning often instead leads to chaos. What we are facing right now is the ordinary problem of scarcity: we have limited resources (including time), and we need to allocate them. Clearly there are some classes that are directly affected by the Canvas hack, such as those that administer their exams online through the Canvas system itself. But it is equally clear that there are some classes that are not directly affected, such as ours, which could have held their exams without any significant issues. If faculty had been left free to make the best decisions given the specific circumstances of their own courses, most of the exams that were scheduled for today and tomorrow could have proceeded, unhindered by the hacks. This would contain the harm to a smaller fraction of classes and exams, making it much easier to allocate the limited resources available to address issues specific to those courses. Instead, all exams were prohibited. Now we have a campus filled with students ready to take their exams, faculty ready to deliver them, and a long list of empty, unused classrooms, while we all wait for the central planner to make the next decision. Since there is no central decision that can eliminate scarcity, the inevitable result is that on Sunday we will be told to find some alternate means of assessment, and each instructor will be left to scramble to find an ad hoc solution. This, after having been prohibited from using the natural and obvious solutions in front of us today. As is so often the case, centralization in the name of "consistency"--no matter how well-intentioned--leads to more chaos and more injustice.
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