Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service

I&#x27;m appalled that so many other commenters don&#x27;t see an issue with such behavior in class:<p>&gt; number of female students have approached me, noting they are disgusted and uncomfortable with the amount of leching taking place<p>&gt; It&#x27;s also demoralizing several of them, since we routinely have cases where a young man is leading open labs as if they&#x27;re a teacher themselves (in order to &quot;wow&quot; their female classmates, offer &quot;private free tutoring sessions&quot;, etc). Some of the young students in my class take up these offers, and this further demoralizes other female students seeing this happen (i.e. only attractive women being offered tutoring sessions).<p>So suppose you&#x27;re a university student who have a mild preference for this course. Upon hearing of such behavior, you&#x27;d end up avoiding such a class to sidestep such a distraction. Not to mention being distracted with insecurities if you don&#x27;t end up being offered tuition.

I still have clear recollection of the 50:1 men-to-women ratio in my CS2xx classes and higher. Your odds weren&#x27;t good if you were hoping to meet Mrs. Right. I imagine things have gotten better since.<p>Still, seems like a fairly high effort low outcome place to meet someone who is likely not even receptive to advances in that context. Do colleges not offer many other opportunities for people to meet outside of class in 2023?<p>It&#x27;s interesting that one of the highest-voted responses suggests bringing in the ten ton hammer of legal governmental involvement against a bunch of kids trying to score a date. Yikes.

&gt; This might be hard, as no unwanted advances are taking place. We simply have students excelling at the course, and drawing-in a crowd. I should&#x27;ve been more clear with my &quot;leching&quot; comment. Still, it seems harassing in nature.<p>It seems increasingly that society demands a world where dating only happens during designated and approved dating times and venues, and outside those strictly delimited places, men are to behave as eunuchs, and all prospects of romance are to be extinguished.<p>Then wonder why marriage and fertility rates are tanking.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen were doing something similar decades ago. According to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;magazine-35442969" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;magazine-35442969</a> (but well known before that):<p>&gt; Paul Allen, who would later become a co-founder of Microsoft, was a couple of years above Gates at school. Together they fixed the school scheduling software to ensure Gates was the only boy in classes of girls.

Ingenious and hilarious.<p>Trying to shut it down is probably going to create more interest, Streisand effect type thing. I would leave it to burn out on it&#x27;s own. It sounds like a net positive on the whole.<p>Hard to tell if there is really a problem here. &quot;a number of female students&quot; reached out to her with concerns, but &quot;a few fellow profs either find it comical, or are happy that open labs are so full of volunteer tutors&quot; and the boys are leading labs and offering tutoring.<p>Of course there are hidden motives, but it sounds like for the most part everyone is getting something useful out of this.

As much as I disagree with &quot;diversity&quot; pushes, I don&#x27;t see the publication of this data (which the author mentions at least twice) as being really important here. It should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it which classes would fit the description. It seems like the app is somehow a catalyst for coordinated activity at this school (and maybe driven by the data) but realistically you could probably find a speculative &quot;what classes to meet girls in&quot; thread on reddit that would give the same info

If a male engineering student chooses, say, a drama elective in hopes of meeting more women, that&#x27;s fine as long as he takes the class seriously and treats fellow students with respect. He might even learn something. But someone with a strong math background shouldn&#x27;t be allowed in a 100-level math for liberal arts students class, regardless of motive.

I took weightlifting as my PE elective in college, and it was full of young women. I made a comment about this to the instructor one day and he said it&#x27;s always like that. The young ladies sign up for weightlifting because they think it&#x27;s going to be full of buff men but instead it&#x27;s 75% women and the 25% of the class that&#x27;s men are out of shape and taking the class because they want to get fit. Already buff guys just go to the gym and don&#x27;t bother with the class.

I suspect that if you just announced this fact to the women in the class - either officially, if that doesn&#x27;t get you in trouble, or under the table if it would - then the problem would basically solve itself. Certainly no males in the class would be getting dates.

I find the behavior predatory but not to a point that I can complain about without any more detail. If I swap out senior students with complete strangers, then it kind of sounds worse, but that may be an unfair comparison.<p>One thing that I will complain about is the preferential treatment that these seniors are showing. In my opinion, you are in a course to learn and teach (or because you&#x27;re forced to), and these seniors definitely fall in the latter, yet, as teachers, they only help select juniors. This somewhat reveals their intentions and also makes the other juniors uncomfortable.<p>I don&#x27;t see what point the app and diversity data play aside from optimizing for the courses you join and being backstory as to why seniors are joining. You&#x27;re free to stick your head into courses and figure out if there are potential partners there.

Unsettled how many HN readers think this is OK. Please think deeply about this situation, using your systems thinking, to see why this is a really bad trend.<p>It is kind of worse than a single guy joining a yoga class for the same reasons. This is a conspiracy to get lots of men to interfere with the education and success of women to get a date or sex.

Guys being guys trying all the ways to meet girls that are not present in their &quot;engineering majors&quot;. Nothing new here. TBF, somewhat applaud the creativity.<p>At the same time totally understand the unpleasant atmosphere this behavior creates.

For many people, college itself is a dating service.

I find it a little disturbing that the top rated answer that people reached for is to bring in Title IX claiming this is discrimination.

Don&#x27;t let senior level students audit junior level classes? Why are they even there besides the reasons outlined in the problem? This is a problem with the University because they don&#x27;t want to acknowledge a problem. Do they really think that&#x27;s going to last? If it was my daughter who left the class because she was harassed I&#x27;d be very angry.

This is an economics problem and this teacher should work with their Econ department to change the rules for course auditing and increase reputational costs to disincentive this behavior. A few options: 1) Make auditing those classes more expensive by limiting the total number of courses a student can audit, or capping the number of students that can audit those courses. 2) Make auditing a remote-only class option. 3) Give lectures on how to spot this behavior which will make the perpetrators obvious and undesirable. 4)Have a no-dating policy between students within the same class under penalty of failure. 5) Couple course participation with a mandatory internship at a STEM company (something a serious student would want but a time-suck for a fake student).<p>The economics department might enjoy testing these policy changes and could get some papers out of them.<p>(I wish I could have posted on the original site but I need some sort of karma to do that)

It was kinda obvious knowledge back when I was the uni on which courses have higher ratio, that just centralized this knowledge. The professor sounds like total buzzkill, &quot;how dare they use our forced diversity program against us!&quot;

Whether or not this account is mostly true or not, IMO, the most important thing lost in this is that some young adults are reportedly so desperate for a date that they&#x27;ll go to class more often. Think about how stunningly crazy that is. That&#x27;s a clear indicator that something is really broken about society.<p>What is it society that is so backwards right now?<p>IMO, it&#x27;s the bullshit of the last 3 years. If you&#x27;re in college today, either the tail end of your high-school years, or all of your college experience has been ruined by the inhumanly stupid reaction to Covid. This has been one of the worst times in human history for meeting new people with all of the nonsensical Covid rules. How many college campuses have been fully masked up and made normal social engagements a nightmare?<p>There&#x27;s a lot more that can be said, particularly how dating apps screw over average people, but I&#x27;d say that looking at why these young adults seem to be engaging in weird behavior is the most important takeaway.

I&#x27;d guess the people doing this gaming probably think it&#x27;s clever, fun, and fair play (designed by-and-for hormonal college students).<p>Maybe all the school needs, to handle the problem without scandal or lawsuits, is for the students doing it to be called before a dean, who says it&#x27;s disrupting class, and to save the dating efforts for extracurricular environments, not taint the academics.<p>If they don&#x27;t seem to get it, spell out what a scandal they almost caused, but hopefully can be averted, and that the risk to themselves starts with getting suspended&#x2F;expelled, and can get worse for them in the court of public opinion&#x2F;mobbing.<p>That people should keep dating efforts out of workplace dynamics is also a good lesson for those kids to learn in the gentler environment of college&#x2F;university, than to learn a harder way in a company.

Maybe you can call it facemash.com or thefacebook.com. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_Facebook" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_Facebook</a>

This sounds like the college age mischief you read about in the biographies of founders who go on to build multi-billion dollar companies.<p>Ladies, let the sweet engineering student help you with your astronomy homework and buy you a chai latte.<p>The world needs more smart babies.

The only thing this person needs help with is how to laugh at the cleverness here.<p>Doesn&#x27;t this actually push really hard towards a perfect 50&#x2F;50 split of men and women in the classes anyway? Isn&#x27;t that exactly what the professor wants?

This seems like an extremely low yield way to get female attention. A male engineering student would have to take an entire class, study new material, and come up with schemes for seeming like a &quot;chad&quot; for the unlikely chance that the opposite gender will be impressed with him. They could spend that time building cool things. Are people really this desperate?

(Assuming that the story is true, and not trolling.)<p>I&#x27;d guess that the school administrators don&#x27;t want a public scandal for the school, lawsuits for the school (if the people behind it get exposed and harassed), nor individual risk for themselves.<p>But won&#x27;t all of that happen if one of the targeted students goes to complain to a news organization (even the student newspaper), or files a lawsuit for harassment, and it turns out those administrators declined to act after they were alerted to the problem?<p>I&#x27;ve heard of schools gambling like this before, and sometimes it&#x27;s seemed to probably come down to individual risk to administrators (e.g., definitely taking a career hit vs. possibly taking a worse career hit), not thinking of the school, students, or study. As much as we might&#x27;ve been brought up hearing stories of the brilliant, principled, altruistic, fearless professor... sometimes it seems organizational behavior is better explained by assuming the more common human corporate careerists are also involved.

Maybe address the imbalance of men and women in some branches of studies.<p>How are people supposed to meet relevant mates? I mean, they could use an app or social events, but you could raise the same complaints there too.

This smells like a fake story created for trolling purposes.

there is a non zero chance this post is a LARP or if it&#x27;s real then greatly exaggerated. Parts of it don&#x27;t sound right to me. I doubt anyone would keep this gag up throughout the whole semester if it wasn&#x27;t going anywhere the first few days.<p>But the teacher also said there are no unwanted advances happening but referred to it as leching. Then later she described the problem as:<p><i>We simply have students excelling at the course, and drawing-in a crowd.</i><p>The same poster also made some other strange comments.

My university had versions of courses that engineering majors were not allowed to take. Chem 160 for most students, chem 167 for engineers, chem 177 for chemistry majors.

I&#x27;m mostly amazed that they are allowed to audit whatever class they want. I tried to audit a class in college once and the teacher refused. Now maybe that was not within their rights and I just took their word for it, but wow.

The author hints at this problem being more acute within a particular demographic: a “database of courses that are statistically likely to have a large proportion of young women from <i>certain cultural backgrounds</i>”.<p>Some societies put a lot more pressure on young people (usually men) to find a trophy partner. For example groups that consider themselves aristocratic and other forms of more explicit arranged marriages.

One of the reasons people go to college is to find a partner. It’s a good place for meeting new people, and getting a good idea of their personality&#x2F;intelligence.<p>Maybe the college could prioritize students that actually need the class, limit the class size, and not let so many random seniors in.<p>I also think it would be good for us nerds to take a few art classes now and then :)

It is absolutely insane that the professor cannot eject an auditing student from their class. The relevant university is apparently a joke at the expense of fresher student safety.

Sounds like a clear misuse of being able to audit a class.<p>If they&#x27;re actually doing the work, and are meeting people to work with, it doesn&#x27;t matter (edit: see edit at bottom). In any given class, attractive people get more help from peers.<p>Edit: I just realized these are math and science classes for non majors. I thought it would be something like economics or geology or something, where having a STEM background would help but not directly.<p>In this case, this is inappropriate and I don&#x27;t think these students should be taking this class at all.

This feels like a fictional account, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

This reminds me of a pretty crude and unworkable site I launched in college called TheRatio. This was in 2000, before smartphones. The idea was to have people at bars in Manhattan and Brooklyn text a rough male to female ratio they were seeing, which would be aggregated so you could check the website (from your, ahem, computer) for which bars to go to before you went out for the night. I thought it was sort of clever at the time. (It was also just one of my first experiments in learning PHP and SQL). It just seems kind of crass and sophomoric, looking back, and in light of the info-commodification of sexual attraction like HotOrNot and Tinder that were on the horizon. I guess in my defense, I&#x27;d say I literally was a Sophomore, and that&#x27;s what most 21 year old guys are thinking about. And that was for bars. Leveraging university course equality data and making it about classes would have struck me even then as douchey if not nefarious.

A lot of you are okay with this?

The problem is now he(she) won&#x27;t be able to &quot;stop&quot; this at all. The cat is out of the bag, humans accepted a new niche and moved into it. Would banning app or stats make app authors &quot;forget&quot; their already existing data? Of course not. Also this already public data will be a basis of this app for many years in the future, even if zero new data is available. Because courses and gender rates doesn&#x27;t change a lot or quickly. Lawsuits against uni are completely pointless, maybe only as a punishment (debatable due to a disparity in power of single prof and whole uni).<p>The only real solution is now to adapt the course itself, change auditioning rules, change program, have more individual approach to intercept predatory help etc. Basically a ton of more work from the teacher. Unfortunately.

Nobody promised you a rose garden. Life is not fair. Boys will be boys. These phrases became cliches because they are true.<p>The problem will not go on forever, because the men will become bored with it. Unless, of course, their plan is working. In which case, your issue is that you can’t stand the realness of reality.

The cynic in me thinks that the one of the reason for the post is that the instructor has lost control of the class and that showboating is not the only reason. I&#x27;m guessing some of the seniors auditing are better at understanding and explaining the course material than the instructor.

Sounds more like she&#x27;s whining about creative reuse of open data.<p>Most US universities are 60% undergraduate women.<p>She should be glad some men actually want to socialize because US society is pushing most men into feeling &quot;bad&quot; about themselves and saying they&#x27;re &quot;stupid&quot;.<p>Philip Zimbardo wrote several books on the subject &quot;Boy, Interrupted&quot;, &quot;Man, Interrupted&quot;, &quot;Man: Disconnected&quot; and has a TED talk on the subject.<p>If she didn&#x27;t want her university&#x2F;class to be a dating service, she should go teach at nursing homes or become a nun. According to Thomas J. Stanley, a microeconomics wealth researcher, most millionaires met their spouses in college. Where do you think Google&#x27;s founders met their wives, the DMV? No, Stanford parties.

This just sounds awful for all the first years...

Re-read every comment but imagine a Ferengi posted it.<p>I suppose a lil demographically predatory behavior and imbalanced power dynamics are just water under the bridge for some of y&#x27;all.

A lot of questionable defenses in these comments hinging on this phrase from the piece: &quot;no unwanted advances&quot;. Keep in mind this is through the professor&#x27;s viewpoint. I would love some direct testimony from the women students to see if they truly have received ZERO unwanted advances. I find that highly unlikely given that the piece also states that several of them have been demoralized by all of this.

Ok which one of you did this?

I suspect that if the situation in this class became well-known on campus, enrollment of both men and women would increase.<p>Maybe my perception is based on outdated knowledge. My own experience as an undergraduate was two generations ago. What I remember was that choosing classes to increase your chance of meeting good dating material was common with both sexes.

The apologists in these comments for what&#x27;s effectively using educational data as a means to reducing the women in their program as &quot;potential mates&quot; - and making them &quot;disgusted and uncomfortable&quot; in the process! - are really concerning.

People can tsk tsk this, but it&#x27;s damn hard to find a mate if you are not in the top 20% of (straight) men, and basically requires you to be aggressive like this. You may be praised for being a &quot;nice guy&quot; by being passive, but it will not get you dates.

Getting access to real, living, hot college girls in your area is a 100,000,000X user multiplier for whatever you are working on. It&#x27;s literally how &quot;The Facebook&quot; got so much traction at other universities in its very early years.

It sounds like the instructor has no control of the classroom. Even in the face of random attendees, the instructor should have the skills to manage and direct discussion so it benefits the intended participants, no?

This is how Facebook started.

Isn&#x27;t this just marketing for the app? I could be wrong, but this is more than likely someone doing some &#x27;growth hacking&#x27;.<p>I&#x27;m sure people will now go looking for the app.

Based on my engineering school, it&#x27;s literally a joke on bad stereotypes assumed of engineers, and they actually are just there to help teach

Curious how the professor met her husband...?

If you can, have the classes be sex segregated, reducing the incentive for guys to enroll into those classes

this is so contrived and written in dramatising and fuzzy language (&quot;perverted the data&quot;) that to me it&#x27;s pretty obvious that this is a made up story by someone who takes offence in diversity measures.

I&#x27;m quite worried that the sexual motivations of young people being subverted by insincere programs is only going to increase as we become more connected.<p>On Twitter there are a number of male personalities with incredibly toxic tendencies. Andrew Tate and Sneako are topics that draw in an inordinate amount of unnatural attention. Bots or equivalents stalk those keyword names. Mention those male role models, even without a @ mention, and your tweet will be swarmed with responses.<p>I stumbled upon a subreddit called transmaxxing through some Astroturfing on Twitter. It weird, they still talk about women as objects but they also couch the actions under capitalist terms like value, extract, access. It&#x27;s all very concerning and I hope no one falls for the propaganda they are spreading.<p>Sex sells... but I just don&#x27;t know what these people are actually buying.

College is a great place to meet women. This professor needs to lighten up. After all, where does he think all of his students come from? To create future students, services like this are necessary.

saw this on stack earlier, this behavior is predatory and I&#x27;m disappointed that so many fellow readers think this is respectable behavior

Flagging this thread is an example of trying to silence any opposing views or logically examining the actions of the teacher in question.

We need more seggregated colleges.

To all the people decrying unfairness about some students being left out:<p>Now you know what it feels like to be a man.

Ah, the destruction of centuries of academic freedom and open learning in the name of social justice.

If i had to take a wild guess, the professor met her partner in university. I met my girlfriend in university, as well as my parents.

&gt; a number of female students have approached me, noting they are disgusted and uncomfortable with the amount of leching taking place<p>It’s heartening to see that since #metoo, boundaries are being re-established as to where it’s appropriate for men to express interest and when it isn’t. Society used to have clear rules for courtship, and where and when it was okay for men to make romantic overtures and where and when it wasn’t. Men threw out those rules in the 1970s-1990s, but it seems that women have been pretty emphatic recently that new guidelines are in order. They want spaces where they’re not being propositioned by men: class, the office, the gym, etc; where they can focus on other aspects of their lives in peace.

Well, on one hand you have created &quot;damsel in distress&quot; classes for women who should not necessarily be in that field, so that part of the problem. On the other hand, dating is also very necessary and is more important for men and women in the big picture than an average college class. It&#x27;s &quot;How I met my future wife&quot; app, not &quot;How I met my latest one night stand&quot;. Places with concentration of young people should give them more transparent and dignified places to meet, get to know each other and prove their worth as a mate. In this sense, help with studies is a classic part of courting someone and there is nothing wrong with that.

It&#x27;s so weird to see people defend this because this seems like fairly textbook power harassment. If this was to occur at work where some managers were organizing their pods or such so that they&#x27;re the only man in a group of women for the sake of dating it would clearly be seen as a problem.<p>If the story is true, people auditing courses should be treated with a higher level of responsibility. Giving preferential treatment as a result because you want to date them or find them attractive isn&#x27;t the purpose of auditing at all. This isn&#x27;t to say it&#x27;s wrong to potentially date someone while auditing a course, but the intention behind joining in the first place is what matters.

Am I understanding correctly that some students took the publicly published racial&#x2F;gender&#x2F;diversity data for the college and basically made an app advertising &quot;here are all of the women taking college seriously and pursuing STEM courses, so you can maybe find a sugar mama?&quot;<p>Why would a female smart enough to pass college level STEM classes fall for that &quot;bro&quot; logic? How is this successful at all?