Taxonomy of grading practices in the University of Puerto Rico at Bayamón, 1995-96 to 2015-16

Faculty members and their corresponding academic fields at the University of Puerto Rico at Bayamón are classified with regard to grading practices over time. Based on the effects on the intercept of the equations that predict the GPA and the proportion of student withdrawals observed in each of the 39,337 courses offered during 41 consecutive terms, faculty members and academic fields are scaled from the easiest to the most difficult. Evidence points to the conclusion that the courses of the most difficult academic fields are offered primarily by the hardest grading faculty members and attended by the most academically able students, while the courses of the easiest academic fields are offered primarily by the easiest grading faculty members and attended by less academically able students. The conclusion of such self-sorting processes is reinforced by evidence from maximum likelihood models demonstrating that the probability that a randomly selected faculty member behaves like a high-grader or a low-grader is highly and significantly related to the cluster of academic fields to which the faculty member belongs. Such a probability is also strongly and significantly influenced by the heterogeneity of student academic ability distribution. Hence, faculty members are very responsive to signals sent by their students’ characteristics. This empirical result deserves further detailed analysis given that it implies a scenario in which faculty members and students engage in a shopping-around process in which both parties free-ride from each other, altering institutional norms and academic standards.

100 years of The Journal of Agriculture of the University of Puerto Rico 1917-2017

Part I - The first 50 years

Casa Klumb: an issue of preservation and education

Early on the morning of November 11, 2020, we woke to news of the “fire that destroyed the Klumb House.” The somber story that detailed the complete erasure of the emblematic structure, under the custody of the administration of the University of Puerto Rico, at the express wish of the architect Henry Klumb, went viral and broke the Internet. The newspaper columns proliferated with a wide range of views on the issue. Leaving the essential question: Why did this happen?

Casa Fullana: a model for modern living in the tropics

Casa Fullana [Fullana House], built in 1955 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, is an exemplary model of Henry Klumb’s (1905-1984) design principles for modern living in the tropics. German architect Henry Klumb conducted a prolific architectural practice in Puerto Rico, producing some of the most iconic examples of tropical modernism in the Caribbean. His work, most notably at the University of Puerto Rico (1946-1966) (UPR) and in landmark projects like the San Martin de Porres Church (1948) in Cataño, constituted a breakthrough in Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Latin American architecture. Anchored in the principles of modern architecture, specifically of an organic architecture put forward by his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), Klumb’s work is deeply rooted in the specificities of the landscape, topography, and climate of Puerto Rico as a tropical island.

First person – Yarira Ortiz-Alvarado

ABSTRACTFirst Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Open, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Yarira Ortiz-Alvarado is first author on ‘Antibiotics in hives and their effects on honeybee physiology and behavioral development’, published in BiO. Yarira is a Research Associate in the lab of Tugrul Giray at the University of Puerto Rico Department of Biology, San Juan, investigating the mechanisms that regulate behavior and development.