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The concept of car sharing is gaining ground on college campuses in the US, where parking and congestion are among the most problematic issues for administrators. There is a growing group of institutions that are turning to car-sharing companies like Zipcar and Flexcar in an effort to save money, free up parking spaces, and improve community relations by encouraging students and faculty members to leave cars at home.

Grade inflation is among the oldest and thorniest problems in higher education. In 1894 a committee at Harvard University reported that A's and B's were awarded "too readily." But after more than a century of fulmination, there is little agreement on the cause or how to fix it. There is even contentious debate about whether the phenomenon of grade inflation exists at all. It is the question at the center of a new collection of essays, "Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education" (State University of New York Press). Those who believe that grade inflation exists say that when colleges do try to hold grades in check or make professors accountable, they usually fail. In this article, the authors enumerate the reasons for grade inflation and the possible cure for this.

This article talks about a software designed by the University of Phoenix for its business, information-technology, education, and health-care courses. Through the university's "virtual organizations"--online teaching tools designed to simulate the experience of working at a typical corporation, school, or government agency, Phoenix students can tap into a virtual world where each fictional school or corporation comes with detailed, simulated scenarios that employees are likely to encounter in the workplace. The scenarios are not fully interactive virtual worlds like Second Life--they do not provide second-by-second feedback--but they do bring real-world problems to life. For the 345,000 students enrolled in the for-profit university's online or campus-based courses, the virtual schools and businesses function like case studies, in that students use them to diagnose and solve typical problems of organizations. The big difference from textbook-style cases is in the level of realism and interactivity. Phoenix created its first virtual company, Riordan Manufacturing, in 2003, for its business and accounting programs. Since then the virtual world has expanded to eight corporations, four schools, a hospital, and city-government offices. About 500 Phoenix classes--a third of the university's offerings--use the virtual organizations in course assignments. The programs, created in consultation with Phoenix faculty members, are designed to represent typical schools and businesses. The major advantage of the software, say its creators, is that it lets students examine a business or a school at a level of detail that most employees can not.

In this article, the author describes the Mississippi University for Women's studio art course that teaches students the ins and outs of mural making from inception and design to application of the final glaze. While students in other courses may spend the semester working toward a final exam or paper, this four-and-a-half-week summer course culminates in a 12-by-30-foot mural celebrating the history of Columbus' Tombigbee River. Although the students spend several hours a day hanging from scaffolding in the Mississippi summer sun applying paint to the wall of a downtown building, the course is not just about brushwork. The group also pores over old photographs in library and historical-society archives researching minute details of period costume, hairstyles, and the city's layout to ensure accuracy in the mural's scene of steamboats and parasol-toting pedestrians. To give students a taste of the planning, paperwork, and diplomacy that go into large-scale public projects, Alexander Stelioes-Wills, the assistant professor who teaches the course, has them prepare proposals for their own mural projects. Each student is asked to research an area of the city, design a mural that reflects its history, and write a proposal that could persuade a donor, grant-making body, or governmental agency of the mural's desirability. Stelioes-Wills plans to submit the students' proposals to the city's historic-preservation board and hopes that, if one is accepted, the university might build another course around the mural next summer.

This article reports that some graduate programs are switching from comprehensive qualifying exams to portfolios compiled by doctoral candidates. Five years ago the graduate program at the University of Kansas' history department was like many others--filled with small cohorts of anxious, fearful procrastinators. Doctoral students were taking an average of eight or nine years to complete their Ph.D.'s, a length of time that, while not that unusual in academe, was hardly ideal for either the students or the faculty members involved. The written qualifying exams that mark the students' passage from course work to dissertation was identified a bottleneck. The exams, taken in a series of four-hour, in-class sessions or as 24-hour take-home tests, were meant to be completed immediately after finishing the initial course work. But many students were putting them off, sometimes for two or three years. So the professors decided that the exams had to go. In their place, each graduate student in history at Kansas now receives a three-ring binder during orientation. The students are instructed to begin filling it, from the start, with documentation of their intellectual endeavors and professional aspirations. Where the students once spent the first years of their graduate work dreading the comprehensive exams, they now amass a large portfolio of materials that include a dissertation prospectus and a 20-page professional essay that lays out how the candidate's major and minor fields of study relate to each other. The switch to portfolios has made students more focused and better prepared for the research demands of the dissertation. It has also accelerated their progress toward doctorates, with a far larger percentage of students on track to receive their Ph.D.'s within five or six years.

Controversial faculty reassignments and resignations in March have left the Middle East Center at the University of Utah in turmoil. The problems come only a year before the university must reapply for the grant from the U.S. Department of Education that supports the center, which is among the oldest such academic units in the country. The controversy underscores the larger pressures--financial, structural, and political--that affect many area-studies centers supported under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. Those centers must reconcile increasing government mandates and scrutiny with the universities' larger interests and politics. Amid the tumult, however, Michael K. Young, president of the University of Utah, is confident that the university will have its grant renewed.

Entrepreneurial ingenuity and risk taking may seem like traits that can't be taught, but colleges are increasingly attempting to do just that--and they are doing so in nontraditional contexts. Long a staple of business and M.B.A. programs, and of some engineering programs, courses in kick-starting new companies are now taking hold in research universities, at liberal-arts colleges, and in specialized fine-arts institutions. Entrepreneurship is one of the fastest growing subjects in undergraduate curricula, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, in Kansas City, Missouri, which is largely responsible for the discipline's growth. The Kauffman foundation has provided grants to more than 200 colleges and universities to promote entrepreneurship on their campuses, and the foundation regularly sponsors research on entrepreneurship. Since 2003 it has spent $60-million for entrepreneurship classes and coordinated practica at 19 designated Kauffman campuses.

This article reports that a Virginia Tech professor whose wife was among 32 people killed by a student gunman last year will become director of the university's new Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention. Jerzy Nowak will give up his job as chairman of Tech's horticulture department to take the new post on July 1. His wife, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, was a instructor of French whose classroom sustained the most casualties--12 killed and six injured--in the rampage by Seung-Hui Cho, a mentally ill undergraduate. Mr. Nowak, who is 61, led the effort to create the new center following the tragedy. The center will have research and community-outreach components, and it will involve a range of people, from students to faculty members to politicians to community leaders. It will span the applied sciences and the humanities, bringing teams of people together to talk about and carry out violence-prevention strategies. In his new job, Mr. Nowak will bring together people from a variety of fields, something he did in the horticulture department, working with industry and politicians on community development and economic diversification. Furthermore, Frederick A. Winter, a senior program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, has been appointed senior director of advancement and leadership development at the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Starting in July, Mr. Winter will oversee the association's Liberal Education and America's Promise, or LEAP, campaign, which was started in 2005 to promote liberal education. In his new position, he will manage fund raising for the campaign, develop its leadership, and drum up support for liberal education among business and philanthropic leaders.

This article describes the "Physics and Theatre," a seminar developed by Rosa Alejandra Lukaszew. Lukaszew developed this seminar to merge students majoring in theatre and physics and let them find out what they have in common. Lukaszew's seminar aims to integrate these students' different viewpoints through discussions of the role of physics in the theatre, and dramatic presentations of scientific figures and concepts.

This article describes how students at North Central College do-si-doed their way to a deeper understanding of fractals, fractions, and abstract algebra. As part of the college's "Verandah" curriculum, David J. Schmitz, an associate professor of mathematics, led seven undergraduates, mostly math majors and minors, through an adventure in "math in motion"--otherwise known as square dancing. Verandah is the school's interim-term course of study that emphasizes unconventional learning opportunities in informal settings, and during this two-week course, students met for three hours each weekday to practice some combinatorial choreography and discuss the mathematical functions embodied by their fancy footwork. Mr. Schmitz taught the students 100 basic square-dancing calls (including "Swing Through," "Ferris Wheel," and "Courtesy Turn") and the concepts (like "clockwise" or "in reverse") that can be used to modify the moves. During their daily dancing, the group took frequent breaks to ponder the symmetry of the movements, imagine themselves as inputs or outputs in algebraic functions, or calculate the number of possible permutations that would bring the group back to its original formation.

When the University of Southern California announced that it would shutter its tiny German department, the outcry was out of proportion to the handful of faculty members and students directly affected by the move. In addition to students who advertised their dismay on Facebook and faculty members who complained that their efforts to bolster the program came to naught, some outside observers argued that the decision weakened USC's intellectual fabric and its prestige. Administrators at the university cast the decision as a pragmatic response to declining enrollments (USC awarded five undergraduate degrees in German in 2007) and a dwindling staff (only two full-time professors remain).

Many professors do not give much thought to what students take away from their syllabi. Researchers who have formally pondered the question suggest a number of areas for instructors to consider when drafting a document which is described as a contract drafted with "less attention paid to the language" than any other. In a comparison of syllabi with identical requirements, but where one phrased them in negative or "punishing" terms, and the other in positive terms, students said they would be significantly less comfortable approaching the author of the "punishing" syllabus. Another finding was the absence of pronouns in many syllabi: by laying out "You" and "I" sections that enumerate the specific responsibilities of each pronominal party, an instructor can establish authority and designate clear responsibilities. Dates provide a permanent course record and provide successors with a record of pedagogical development. It is also important to understand one's audience and how a syllabus is used. A 1999 study found that students attended most to items like grading policies and the dates of tests and quizzes on syllabi, and paid relatively little attention to academic information such as dishonesty policies, textbook information, and basic course information, and that these tendencies increased throughout a semester.

This article reports that, nearly one year after its release, the report on foreign language and higher education issued by an ad hoc committee of the Modern Language Association (MLA) is still provoking discussion about reforms in the teaching of foreign languages and the role of the association in any revamp. The debate continued at a panel held last week at George Washington University. The session focused on the urgency of transforming foreign-language departments and touched on the profession's response to the Bush administration's push for more teaching of "critical" foreign languages. The committee that produced the report, "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World," was formed as a response to the focus, after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, on a lack of trained linguists and teachers in less commonly taught languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Farsi. National-security experts have unabashedly spoken of the shortfall in qualified teachers and linguists in Arabic and other languages now crucial to military, intelligence, and diplomacy, as a crisis. Yet, according to Karin C. Ryding, a professor of Arabic and linguistics at Georgetown University who was also a member of the MLA's ad hoc committee, language departments in colleges and universities are woefully short of the resources to meet sudden and immense demands.

Course syllabi have long been as varied as the instructors who composed them. Indeed, many faculty members are loath to share them, for fear of intellectual theft. Increasingly the contemporary syllabus is becoming more like a legal document, full of all manner of exhortations, proscriptions, and enunciations of class and institutional policy--often in minute detail that seems more appropriate for a courtroom than a classroom. With its ever-lengthening number of contingency clauses, disclaimers, and provisos, the college syllabus can bear as much resemblance to a prenuptial agreement as it does to an expression of intellectual enterprise. But experts say that when things go wrong in the classroom, fuzzy expectations are almost always to blame. Some teaching experts applaud the thoroughness as a coup for student learning. The comprehensive syllabus, they say, simultaneously protects the professor and prepares students for the demands of the course. Other experts contend that documents bloated with legalese and laundry lists of dos and don'ts have turned the teacher-student relationship into an adversarial one.

Among the 100-odd colleges with academic honor codes, plagiarism-detection services raise a knotty problem: Is software compatible with a system based on trust? The answer frequently devolves to the size and culture of the university. Colleges with traditional student-run honor codes tend to "forefront" trust, emphasizing it above all else. This can be difficult to reconcile with plagiarism-detection software. Other colleges with modified honor codes, jointly administered by faculty and students, may emphasize a system of "relative responsibilities": students are responsible for honesty, and faculty members are obliged to ensure everyone plays fair. In that context, using software as a check may be viewed as both sensible and reasonable. "The Internet has changed everything," says one associate dean, who does not necessarily see a conflict between plagiarism-detection tools and an honor system. If a professor is upfront with students about checking their papers for plagiarism with a software tool, it may not be a presumption of guilt, but trying to let them know they have to be thoughtful about how they are using the Internet. The question currently remains unresolved.

In his 1990 book "Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate", Ernest L. Boyer, who was then president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, analyzed the balance between teaching and research in the scholarly endeavors of that era. His conclusion that the university rewarded research at the expense of teaching set in motion a series of reforms that sought to re-emphasize teaching as an integral component of scholarship. Seventeen years later, the Carnegie Foundation has again found academe lacking. This time, however, higher education's most prominent advocates for teaching and teaching reform say that the research has been overlooked. Carnegie Foundation researchers, under the auspices of the foundation's departing president, Lee S. Shulman, have undertaken a project as ambitious as Mr. Boyer's: to take stock of the state of doctoral education and how it has responded to, or ignored, the challenges of the 21st century. Over a five-year period ending in 2005, the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate monitored 84 Ph.D.-granting departments in six fields--chemistry, education, English, history, mathematics, and neuroscience. The project's researchers tracked the selected programs as they analyzed departmental goals and performance, and made changes to improve their own effectiveness in meeting their goals. The group's findings have been summarized in a 200-page book called "The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century" (Jossey-Bass). The book aspires to be a doctoral education "owner's manual," offering practical suggestions for promoting principles of progressive development, integration, and scholarly collaboration within Ph.D. programs.

Academic Analytics is a for-profit company, owned in part by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, that compiles annual Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index. Its Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index is a ranking of graduate programs at research universities based on what purports to be the first objective measurement of per capita scholarly accomplishment. The concept behind the index is alluringly simple: Take the number of professors in a given program, the number of books and journal articles they have written, the number of times other scholars have cited them, and the awards, honors, and grant dollars they have received, and plug them into a neat algorithm. The number that comes out is the key to how productive, on average, a university department's faculty members are. In this article, the author discusses how some critics object to the way the company collects data. The author also discusses the flaws in the findings of the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index's third annual report.

Since the arrival of RateMyProfessors.com, many a faculty member has wished his students would keep their opinions to themselves. At Brigham Young University, however, the university pays undergrads to give professors a piece of their mind. Each year the university's Students Consulting on Teaching program employs 25 students to observe professors' classroom performance and reflect back to them the view from the students in the seats. The program began in 1991 as a class project in an education course and proved so popular with both faculty members and students that, a year later, it was adopted university-wide. The program now helps about 80 instructors per year fine-tune their teaching, says D. Lynn Sorenson, its director. The Utah university has about 1,300 full-time faculty members. At other colleges, the function of observing and evaluating teaching technique is generally left to experienced professionals. Folks at Brigham Young say student observers are less threatening to faculty members than peer evaluators and provide a perspective that even education specialists canot. "We are experts in what it's like to be a student," says Paul Dixon, a senior who served as the program's student coordinator for the past two years. Many professors, he says, have not been on the receiving end of a lecture for years. "The program answers the question of what it is like to be a student in your class," says Mr. Dixon. "Often the professor finds his or her perception is very different from what it's actually like."

The home-school movement, a once-marginalized segment of the educational community, is all grown up and going off to college. As colleges across the nation report increasing numbers of applications from home-schooled students, policies have been developed to evaluate these candidates. Translating years of independent study into something that resembles a high-school transcript can be tricky for the home-schooled applicant, and even more challenging for the admissions officer assessing it. Without traditional points of comparison, like class ranking and grade-point averages, colleges tend to fall back on standardized-test scores. Many require that home-schoolers take two or more SAT 2 subject tests in addition to an SAT or ACT. The Common Application, a format used by more than 300 colleges, has added a supplement for home-schoolers. Home-schooling guides now offer advice on compiling transcripts and highlighting the advantages of home schooling in application essays, as do independent consultants, who offer the same sort of college counseling available from traditional high-school guidance personnel. Often a late hurdle in the admissions process for home-schooled students is persuading colleges that they have the social smarts to get along with traditionally educated peers, although experts who have tracked home-schoolers' academic and social performance in college have found little difference between their transition and that of their peers. This lingering attitude has prompted one home-schooled student now enrolled in a large urban university communications program to liken the co-op he sometimes attended with a very small, very private school and tell classmates simply "I went to a private school."

Students who attend college part time are at a disadvantage relative to their full-time peers, according to a report released in June by the National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the U.S. Department of Education. The report analyzes data from a 2004 national postsecondary student-aid study to create a profile of part-time undergraduates and determine the relationship between part-time study and college persistence and degree attainment. The researchers found that, even controlling for factors like gender, family income, and educational expectations, part-time students lagged behind full-timers in both areas. According to the report, "Part-Time Undergraduates in Postsecondary Education: 2003-4," 35 percent of undergraduates during the 2003-4 academic year attended college on a part-time basis. Compared with their full-time counterparts, those students tended to be older, financially independent, and first-generation students. They were also more likely to be female, Hispanic, and less academically prepared; to come from low-income families; and to have lower educational expectations than full-time students. In a representative sample of undergraduates who entered college in 1995 and attended exclusively on a part-time basis, only 15 percent had completed a degree or certificate by the end of six years, and none had attained a bachelor's degree. Seventy-three percent had left college without earning a degree, and 46 percent had left within their first year of study.

This article reports on Justin F. Murray and Sarah M. Kinsella, the founders of a Harvard University student group called True Love Revolution that promotes the practical benefits of sexual abstinence until marriage and how Murray and Kinsella look forward to living the message after graduation. These "true love" revolutionaries cast chastity as a practical choice with physical and emotional rewards that is not only a foolproof means of avoiding sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, but also leads to a better romantic life. True Love Revolution has 150 members and is both an activist and support group. It attracts members of various religions as well as agnostic students. The organization stirred controversy at Harvard when on Valentine's Day, it mailed chocolate hearts to all freshman women, along with cards that said, "Why Wait? Because You're Worth It." Campus feminists accused the organization of promoting a patriarchal view of female sexuality. The article notes that many college students are abstaining from sex, citing a 2006 survey by the American College Health Association that found that 29 percent of college students did not engage in sex during the past school year. Abstinence groups like True Love Revolution are a reaction to a campus hookup culture, according to Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University and author of a forthcoming book, "Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus" (New York University Press, 2008).

At a June 2007 forum, Vietnam's president and minister of education outlined an ambitious plan to overhaul their country's troubled educational system, while a panel of American academics and scientists highlighted the importance of higher education to Vietnam's rapidly growing economy and suggested potential models for reform. Two decades after opening up to a free-market economy, Vietnam has one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, yet its universities lag behind those of other developing countries. Only 10 percent of Vietnam's college-age population attends its universities, and its professoriate, most of whose members were trained in Russia or other countries in the former Eastern Bloc, is aging. The country produces 500 new Ph.D. recipients a year, said Mr. Nhan, who hopes by 2020, to bring the country's number of Ph.D.'s to 20,000, half of whom would be trained outside Vietnam. The minister said he anticipated that 2,500 of those new Ph.D.'s would be educated in the United States and would form a core group of faculty members who would lead the country's efforts to create a tiered system of national higher education. At its pinnacle would be a new science-and-technology research university in Hanoi that Mr. Nhan said he hoped would open in 2008. A panel discussion that preceded Mr. Nhan's and President Triet's comments discussed some of the challenges such a plan would involve, including: (1) the importance of creating a merit-based organizational structure that would funnel talent upward within a hierarchical system of research universities developed organically as the outgrowth of social change in Vietnam; (2) the current shortfall of trained workers needed to satisfy the demand created by the country's rapid economic growth; (3) the need to maintain strong relationships with institutions elsewhere, offering salaries that would attract faculty members with international training and (4) the need for institutional autonomy and accountability. Bob Kerrey, president of the New School and a Vietnam War veteran, noted that strong universities sometimes find themselves at odds with their governments. "If you're going to have universities that are top tier," Mr. Kerrey said, "you have to permit critical thinking and dissent."

As seniors throughout the nation prepare to graduate this spring, they are cramming for finals, finishing theses, and saying goodbye to friends. At many colleges, they are also looking forward to participating in graduation rituals--and scrambling to complete lists of things they must do before they leave their campuses behind. These rites of passage involve symbol and metaphor, art and vandalism, sex and nudity. Some are lighthearted, and some are illegal. In this article, "The Chronicle" presents a roundup of graduation traditions both official and unofficial.

John M. McCardell Jr., president emeritus of Middlebury College, is a respected Civil War scholar. His lectures on the Gettysburg Address command large audiences at alumni meetings, and his seminars on the war always attract eager undergraduates. Recently the genteel academic threw himself into another conflict. Call it the Battle of the Binge. McCardell believes that underage drinking is one of the most pernicious problems on college campuses. He also believes that lowering the drinking age to 18 from 21 would significantly reduce the harmful effects of alcohol consumption among students. In January he founded Choose Responsibility, a nonprofit group that seeks to start a grass-roots movement to change drinking-age laws. He proposes giving "drinking licenses" to 18- to 20-year-olds who complete an alcohol-education program, which he compares to driver-education classes. Such a plan, he says, would allow parents and educators to become role models for responsible drinking and to educate young people about the effects of alcohol. If teenagers who violated drinking laws forfeited their eligibility for the drinking license, he says, it would create a strong incentive for them to abide by the law. McCardell says he is prepared to submit his proposition to public scrutiny. In the coming months, he hopes to challenge the notion that cracking down harder on underage drinking is a sound policy for colleges. Reactions and criticisms regarding McCardell's proposal are presented.

Greater numbers of high-school students are taking Advanced Placement (AP) examinations and are faring better on them than in the past, said a report released by the College Board. The board, a nonprofit association, administers 37 AP exams, which allow high-school students to earn college credit or exemption from introductory-level college classes. The tests are graded on a scale of 1 to 5, with 3 the minimum score required to demonstrate college-level competence in a particular subject. The total number of students taking AP exams increased by 9.7 percent in 2006 over the previous year, the board said. It reported that 14.8 percent of the 2.7 million students who graduated from public high schools in 2006 earned AP-exam scores of 3 or higher in high school. That proportion is up from 14.1 percent in 2005 and is considerably higher than in 2000, when 10.2 percent of those graduates had scores of 3 or higher. The report, "Advanced Placement Report to the Nation 2007," also highlights the results of two new studies that linked AP preparation to success in college.

This article describes Hanover College's Early Alert Team, an early-alert program that seeks to identify students' academic, social, or personal troubles as soon as they surface. The team's five members gather information about students from all corners of the campus and then devise strategies to help them. The early-alert system has not only helped administrators identify students' problems before they escalate, but has also allowed the college to collect data on what kind of students tend to leave, and why. Because much of the team's maneuvering takes place behind the scenes, most Hanover students do not know that the program exists. That's how administrators would like to keep it. Officials say that the invisibility of the early-alert network system helps the college nudge students to get the help they need, without stigmatizing them as failures.