June 09, 2005

• I can't speak as a teacher, but I can speak as a student, one who started his first degree twelve years ago and is currently working on a second. It seems to me that universities in the US are being run more and more like businesses, and so standards are definitely declining. Nearly every instructor I've had this time around has been bending over backward to accommodate the whiny demands of students who are shocked that they're expected to work. A big part of the reason is they're terrified of student evaluations -- the only truly tough instructor I've had at my current school was fired after he taught my class, because of student reviews. He was one of the most brilliant in the department, but he didn't believe in handing students high grades. You had to bust your ass. For that sin, he lost his job. As a student, I may bitch and moan about the workload outside of class if it's tough on me, but I'd much rather have a professor who drills me and makes me work. I'd have more respect, and I'd feel like I was getting my money's worth. So my advice is not to be afraid of high standards. Of course, I'm thirty and interested in getting an education, and it's not my job in question.
• I am in a similar situation, jb. I have taught now for three years, but one or two sections at most, 25-27 students at a time. The first semester is often the hardest for grading, because you want them all to like you, dammit, for the brilliant and caring teacher that you are. What do you teach? Often there are rubrics available within your field--in my case, teaching college writing courses, there are rubrics from other instructors' syllabi that I have read and fit to my personality and style. At the beginning of every semester, I introduce students (or reintroduce students) to the boilerplate that often accompanies an institution's grading rubric, where "C" (or 2.0 at my school) means that the student is average. I try to impress upon them that this is no sin or failiing, and that B/3.0 work is work that is consistently above average, and A/4.0 is exemplary, well thought out and well argued, with few or no mistakes. I have found that it works best to be a hardass at the beginning of the semester--one can always lighten up, but if you start out light, it is hard to regain control if things go awry. But, at 52, 6'6" and 250 lbs, I don't have too much problem establishing my authority. The problem I see most often with my colleagues is that they will set a policy for the class and then agonize when an otherwise good student runs afoul of the rule. I try to remember the goals of the course, my goals for the class/semester, and the students' goals (I have them write a memo to me at the beginning of class to outline their objectives for the class), and then decide based on what will best serve these various interests. I have some resources/rubrics around here if they would be helpful to you.
• I do the same thing; thankfully, as a TA, I had a sort-of rubric. It pretty much outlined that a C minimally answered anything we asked (it was an intro anth course), a B did a good job, and an A answered everything, had examples, and didn't make our eyes bleed. A D left some stuff out, a D- blew, and we weren't allowed to give Fs if it came in on time. I generally gave B+ to people who answered all the parts of the question appropriately (which wasn't hard, but wasn't done, either.) Anthing less than a B+ was grounds for getting on my case for grading them badly until I went over the Prof's grading guidelines. And as far as I can tell, anything less than a B in their final grade meant that they weer going to call mom and dad and have them threaten the head of the department, causing my funding for next year put on hold without telling me anything other than 'someone has a problem, we'll tell you in June if you'll be back next year.' (This was May 2.) So I'm a little bitter. Here's what I tried to do (and apparently wasn't enough:) Sit down with the assignment and the rubric. Outline what the assignment *should* have. This is your B- or C paper. More detail, bump them up. Less, down. Write out specific things they should have; some people assign point values to points mentioned/should be mentioned. I've heard that numeric grades get argued less, so I may be switching to this. I just found out yesterday that the mysterious problem was solved. Talk to your other TAs - do some double-grading, if you have time, where each of you grade a few of the same paper, and then discuss why you gave the grades you did. Talk to the prof and ask her for a rubric, if you're not getting one. ("What do you expect them to have? What's the minimum that's valid? What isn't valid?" and so on.) I got a little help from the instructors community on LJ, but a lot of it does seem to be trial and error.
• Was thinking of posting this, myself. Was a TA in the philosophy dept at my uni here in Canada, and can certainly empathize. Not quite the "business" that it is in the U.S. (and some Cdn uni's) -- this was more to do with grading schemes and disappointed students. As a TA, I was naturally first in line in the appeals process, and I had students turning up to say: "I think that my paper was original, well-written, and lacked any major flaws, so it deserves an A." The problem was that I agreed with them. The uni, however, did not. They tied my professor's hands, and he tied mine. An A, he said, is given out for a truly original work of exceptional merit. Good, original papers are B papers. Boy would those students be in for a shock in law school, where A's are B's and B's are C's... (at my school, enforced 73% average). I mean, really, should we be happy that medical students are getting A's (and later, jobs) by virtue of their high tuition?
• This can be a touchy issue, especially with students acting like they are customers.
• I was told by one professor that the average grade for my class would be about B+ ; another expected that the average would be A-, following the department pattern, but thought that was somewhat grade inflated. I'm a TA at a fairly good university, and I really do have a lot of very good students, much better than where I went to undergrad; the A papers were truly excellent and most of the A- papers quite strong. But I don't have experience with a good range of student papers - I know what I wrote, and what my fiance wrote, but we both got very similar grades. I've never really seen a C paper, identified as such. I don't want to penalise my students by setting an arbitrary average=C if they really are mostly performing above what a C would be at another university. But then again, I don't want to give C work a B, just because the official line is that all students are good students (because they won't all be). And most of all, I want them to graduate knowing history and how to write an essay. That's pretty discipline specific, but it's important. Are there any accepted guidelines for university teachers, that are set by discipline perhaps? I'm in history, if it matters.
• In my department, we somehow got the reputation of being an "easy A." So we're actually encouraged to fight grade inflation. We're expected to have a grade curve where Bs and Cs (mostly Bs) dominate. If our curve is dominated by either failing grades or As, we get in trouble. I enjoy this, and tell my students as much. I pretty much also use the "C is average" speech, but I will admit that in my classes (and my dept as a whole) Bs are the average.
• This is not to say that we're encouraged to "grade things down." We're just encouraged to demand high quality work for As.
• Thank you for posting this, jb. I'm a high-school English teacher and this week I'm finishing up my fifth year in the classroom. As such, let me start by saying (in a snide tone of voice with humorous tongue-in-cheek overtones): Grading one or two classes of 25-27 students is NOT teaching. (I've got 5 of 25, all heavy on polypage writing. The final essay exams are at the moment killing me.) I went to New College in Sarasota, Florida -- a place with no grades. Ideally, I would run my classroom the same way -- I believe grades get in the way of learning more than they help. However, I recognize that grades are a necessity of my situation (2000-pupil HS in a suburb of Madison, WI), and so the biggest challenge is making grades reflect the truth about a student's effort. And ability. And level of work accomplished. This is the real problem for me -- one grade to indicate (at least) three things just doesn't wash. Sadly, as America falls more and more passionately in love with the business model of education, we see grades not as a measure of success, but as a necessity for The Next Step. Thus, 2nd graders must get good grades to make it onto the high track in 3rd grade, and so forth all the way to college. So by the time they get to high school, many kids have become wildly cynical about intellectual honesty, internal motivation, and the distinction between understanding and getting the grade. I'm fascinated by the finding that "grade inflation" (a term I have problems with, see below) is happening most quickly at private schools. This shouldn't surprise me, since it is indicative of how well the parents at such places recognize the economic bounty that grades represent. I suppose "grade inflation" may be a genuine problem, but two MUCH more major problems are: 1) Lack of student motivation. Most of the kids who get low grades are capable of doing better. They just don't care. Teachers and schools need to find out and work to fix the root causes. 2) Lack of genuine learning. I see many students who get good grades, but can't make connections between fairly elementary concepts. This is a larger cultural problem, connected to the anti-intellectual atmosphere in the US, the bedraggled working class, and a dearth of intergenerational communication. I could go on, but instead let me just point people to A Profit Without Honors, a treatise I've written opposing the business model of education. Oh, you asked what advice we have for avoiding grade inflation? Meh. Decide what you want, grade for it, always be open to feedback from others (students included); but never sell out your expectations (seem they high or low compared to others) just because you think you ought to be more in the middle. I've found that -- while they whine about low grades sometimes -- students (a) quickly get over it; (b) often don't even associate their grades with their work [see above]; and (c) many times admit that they deserve a low grade for shoddy work.
• As such, let me start by saying (in a snide tone of voice with humorous tongue-in-cheek overtones): Grading one or two classes of 25-27 students is NOT teaching. I know you're joking, but TAs (at least in the humanities) don't just grade - we also attend lecture, write lesson plans, hold office hours and run sections. We don't always get to teach in what we know (I just got back my evaluations, 1/2 of them complaining I wasn't an expert in the subject, but I didn't have any choice on my assignment), nor are we given any training, not in my department. Heck, I don't even have a desk or locker to keep my things in on campus. Of course, it's not as difficult as teaching highschool. But then again, it is a part-time job, and we're paid accordingly. For the hours we are scheduled, there is a fair bit of work.
• 1) Lack of student motivation. Most of the kids who get low grades are capable of doing better. They just don't care. Teachers and schools need to find out and work to fix the root causes. Do you think that's upon the faculty to do so? Don't get me wrong, the best teachers inspire you and infect you with at least some of their enthusiasm for the topic, but the student has to show up willing to listen for that to happen. Isn't there a line to be drawn, across which you're shooting for edu-tainment to try to wake up those slackjawed students who are showing up to coast their way to a diploma? I wonder sometimes if a fundamental, systematic restructuring wouldn't be beneficial to the US university system. For instance, line up 100 business majors, you might get ten who are honest-to-God interested in a thorough university education (at the schools I've attended, anyway). The others want job training, period, as evidenced by questions like "Why do I have to study philosophy?" But if this were, say, the German educational system, they'd be going to a....Hauptschule, if I remember mein Deutsch correctly. There they'd be getting professional training and not a thorough university education. Then only those who are academically minded would be in a university
• Just by coincidence, I was talking to a woman I know just two hours ago. She was bragging about her daughter who attends high school. She asked me to guess what her GPA was. Knowing how they give above 4.0 now, I guessed 4.3. I was wrong. It was 4.6.
• Grading one or two classes of 25-27 students is NOT teaching. Egads -- oh, this is high school. That is tough (though I'd love to teach a couple of classes at that level, given the right school -- and school board). But at our uni, undergrad philosophy classes were 100-150 students apiece. Psych were closer to 400. And yes, papers. Also what jb said about attendance and teaching.
• The university I went to it was on a nine-point scale. That is, out of nine. Ten is impossible. Except that they give out tens anyway. I think this is the future of grade inflation. They'll have to invent a few letters before A, maybe borrow some characters from Chinese or Arabic so that the mediocre students can all get As.
• What does an A or A- mean, in terms of quality of work? Or a B or a C or D? It means whatever you say it does, which means precious little unless the person reading it knows you, which they don't. They do know, at most, the general reputation of the school. Are there any accepted guidelines for university teachers, that are set by discipline perhaps? Nope. Do what you like. How can you have high standards, without having unreasonable ones? By doing that. Whatever it means to you, based on your experience. If you graduated from the U of T or a school of similarly high caliber and are teaching at a third-tier state university with two compass directions in its name where half or more of your students are the first in their family to ever attend any college in any capacity whatsoever and who work 30+ hours a week, it's probably unfair to grade them in comparison to the grades you or your chums received as undergrads. I know a really good and a really bad paper when I see it, but it's the bordering ones that I agonise over. If you're a TA, you're not paid enough to agonize about anything. Use some arbitrary rule, or go with your gut feeling or a hunch, or something similar. But don't waste time you could spend doing your own work agonizing about what the difference between a C+ and B- ``really'' means -- if you do that, you're just letting your university exploit you. Just take that in-the-middle group and assign them somehow, and be done with it. (This is one reason I'm happy that school where I work now doesn't give plusses and minuses, for the time being anyway)
• Everyone should be graded against each other. If there are 25 people in a class, then the grades should go 1 to 25. It seems we are doing two things in college: getting an education from the particular institution, and battling our peers for higher grades. A ranking system would seem to address that.
• Everyone should be graded against each other. If there are 25 people in a class, then the grades should go 1 to 25. WOW. I just felt the most incredible surge of misplaced anger, bernockle. I do apologize. 4th year honours psych. "Behavioral Pharmacology". Prof walks in and does a quick head count. "Perfect," he says. "The class will be graded as follows. There will be one A+, one A, one B+, one B, one C+, one C, one D and one F." I walked straight out of there, down the hall, and up the stairs to the psych department office to register in something else. But guess what. 4th year requires an honours seminar. You can't drop one and remain in honours, nor take part time. There were only two seminars being offered, and the other one was full. (I got the C+, my lowest mark to date, and it only maimed my career -- never made grad school even though I scored 99th percentile on the subject GRE -- two others -- the D and the F, both used to doing good work and getting good grades -- were finished) Oh, and as for ranking systems, bernockle. My law school (as I said, never made grad school) is one of the last remaining holdouts on this, and it still damages students to this day. Think about it. You've got, say, 300 law school grads in a year. Let's say you do extremely well. You're #35. I mean, that's excellent. But here you are in a job interview, and they're saying: "SO. We have six spots open here. Let me ask you this one thing: why shouldn't we be hiring 34 other people before even considering you?" Disproportional damage by far. No good.
• Your first experience is not a problem when every class does something like that. I am not saying that the lowest people should fail. But if every class graded with a ranking system, then the class that you rank toward the bottom will not be your undoing. As for your second concern, well, I went to law school, too, so I can relate. My school's practice was to fail out ten or so percent of the students after the first year. I disagree with that completely. But I don't mind employers asking why they should not hire the 34 ahead of you in your hypo above. It is up to you to explain why you are better than the other 34 or why choosing someone based strictly on their class rank is completely asinine. I liked the system in law school, and I say that as someone who did not do particularly well in that system. I did not deserve to. As such, I didn't have a shot in hell at the jobs my peers were getting. So I had to hang up the proverbial shingle seven years ago. It has its down times to be sure, but I am pretty happy with where I am.
• Xeny - I'm actually in dort of the opposite situation. I went to a middle tier Canadian school* for undergrad where a lot of the people were the first in their family to university - the finishing average was C+. But I'm at a much more prestigious place as a graduate student, and the undergrad average in my department is said to be A-, which seems really high - B or B+ would be more reasonable (the average student here is better, but not excellent). I'm someone who believes that grades should be somewhat comparable between universities, because they compete for places in graduate school, law school, etc. against people from all over. As it is in the States right now, I think that state schools are marking harder - it's some of the most advantaged kids who are getting the benefit, because everyone assumes an A student in highschool should be an A student in university. And then you get the second whammy of people assuming that because a school is elite, it must be harder - that pisses me off, because I know first hand it isn't. Aside from the fact the cognitive tasks just aren't the same, the students don't necessarily do the work. Sometimes even at the best schools, they lack the skills. I tried to help them, but giving them false marks wouldn't do that. When you give them a C, they realise they need help, and they accept it willingly (and then, like one of my students, go on to write an A paper with what she learned). About ranking: My undergrad university did something very good - it put the average for the class beside your grade. If you got an A- or B+ in a class with a C average, that would be better than an A in a class with an average of A-. It's a simple way to rank without ranking. *York, which is just as good as UofT, or I'll knock you one! :)
• That would be "sort of" in the first line. I don't have a heavy cold (just stupid fingers).
• My opinion is that letter grades are a stupid metric to begin with. Now that 90%-plus students are a penny a dozen (thanks to both immigration and grade inflation), we need to start instituting difficult standardized tests. Make them hard enough that the median score is 50%. They have such things in other countries. My Russian, Indian, Japanese, etc. friends tell me that their college entrance exams or final exam in high school makes students sweat blood. We in the US have the SATs, which are worse than a joke. Is it any wonder that the education system in this country promotes fools and idiots and suppresses the few who shine despite the system?
• Everyone should be graded against each other. If there are 25 people in a class, then the grades should go 1 to 25. Are you considering the implications of such a "system"? You are saying it is simply a race and the position of the finish is all that matters. You are saying that the last place finisher in a race of the world's 25 fastest people is the equivalent to the last place finisher in any other race. Clearly this would be a wildly inaccurate statement. You are ignoring the finishing time on the clock, which should be the real standard of excellence. That's what grades should be. And that's the problem. Grades are more subjective than time.
• we need to start instituting difficult standardized tests I can see three things wrong with this proposition: 1. Inaplicability of standarised tests to some subjects How would one make a standardised test, for example, for history? It would be nearly impossible to do so, as history is a skills based, rather than a knowledge based, discipline. 2. Standarised tests not diagnostic Standardised tests are frequently not diagnostic of true ability. For example, a multi-choise test might pick out people with good memories, but it wouldn't pick out people on their ability to think criticlaly or conduct research. You'd end up selecting the wrong kind of people. By contrast, if you continually assess a student over time and in a wide range of different tasks, you could potentially do much better in assessing their true abilities. 3. Tendency to teach to test Even solving the above problems, there would still, inevitably, develop a systemic tendency to teach to test. For example, in my current university (in the UK) undergrad marks ride almost entirely on their final exams. Accordingly, are expressly forbidden to teach them to be historians. Rather we are told to devote all our time to teaching them how to do well on the exam (which is a very different proposition).
• This just in: Students are now Clients. OMFGWTFBBQ???
• #1 and #2 are debatable points, though I am not the right person to debate them. Even if I grant that Humanities subjects are hard to write tests for, it still leaves the technical subjects (mathematics, the sciences, engineering, economics, languages, computer science, and so on) which can be tested. #3 is not an issue if the test is difficult enough. If the median is going to be 50%, then the candidates scoring the top marks will be the best by any metric. By the way, I think there is a philosophical distinction to be drawn here. You are suggesting that the purpose of education is to determine the "true ability" of every candidate. This is a positive way to look at it, but I think the end products of this evaluation are more or less worthless. Knowledge of the subject is far preferable to any sort of meta-knowledge. My suggestion of difficult final/admission tests is to simply eliminate the vast number of candidates who are no good, because of either a lack of ability or a lack of preparation. It's an inherently negative approach to testing. But, I think at the end of the day the candidate wants to be admitted to the next stage in the process, not learn some opaque number of dubious predictive value. Also, not everyone can be a winner. If a candidate doesn't pass after a few tries, maybe he should consider a different career path, instead of clogging up the already overcrowded classrooms.
• What Dreadnought is saying is that 1. Some disciplines do not have an agreed core body of knowledge. We are both History graduate students; he knows many things I don't, I know things he doesn't. It's impossible for one human mind to know the whole of human history all over the world, and there is no expectation that one would. Standardised tests in History (they do exist, though ETS stopped offering theirs due to lack of interest) only measure a level of knowledge suited to late highschool, if that. If you want to learn something indepth in History, you specialise. 2. General standardized tests do not accurately measure the cognitive skills of tertiary education. SAT marks are associated with only a small level of variance in university grades. So measuring university marks by standardized tests would be very bad. The coginitive skills for many disciplines are writing and thinking, as well as factual knowledge of the subject. As for standardised essay based tests, and they are just as subjective as class grades, only with perhaps a less qualified marker. And for subject based tests, see above. The disciplines suited to standardized subject tests already have them for admittence to graduate school; those that aren't tend not to. Still doesn't help the GPA issue (for scholarships, internships, jobs or admittence to law or medical school). 3. Teaching to the test is very destructive to education, since the purpose of education never has been to pass tests. In history, the knowledge of the subject is not names and dates, but the ability to argue through causes and effects, to think about complex processes and analyse them. Essay based examinations can test some of this, however what Dreadnought is talking about is that is only 1/2 of what history is about. The other parts are learning how to conduct research (primary and secondary) and doing your own historical analysis. I know the exam system he's talking about, and it is excellent at teaching people to write short, eloquent papers on command (very useful if they want to do something like journalism). It is not the best at teaching them to find their own solutions to historical questions, to challenge the secondary sources they read, etc (not so good if they want to do historical research or many other professions that involve research). There are some solutions - you could have senior theses or projects being read by outside faculty, which would help even out differences between universities.
• Ah, perhaps I wasn't sufficiently clear. I am calling for tough standardized tests in school and undergraduate entrances, where the candidate pool is largely undifferentiated. Certainly, at the post-graduate level one needs far more precise and personalized measurements. Anyway, I think the US still has a reasonably good supply of post-graduate applicants. Admission to Ph.D. programs is pretty competitive; in fact, in recent years the subject GREs, at least in my area, have been getting increasingly difficult. Most universities pay equal (or more) attention to recommendations, publications, faculty input, etc. as to GRE scores. By the way, as I said already, for Humanities subjects you and Dreadnought may easily be right that any sort of testing is going to be unsatisfactory. I know next to nothing about admission process in these subjects. Have either of you served in a Ph.D. admissions committee for your respective history departments? What criteria do you use to weed out the unsuitables?
• I would say that meta-knowledge is more important than dry facts in the humanities. Humanities classes teach skill sets along side of the bare facts of the subject. They focus on critical thinking, research skills, writing skills, how to debate, etc. In my classes, I focus on ways to turn my students into people with the ability to think and learn. The subject matter of the class is really, for me, the practice material we're using to learn those skills. At my uni, I was a TA for 6 years. In each of these years, I taught 1-2 sections of about 40 students each a semester. I designed the classes, picked the readings, and led the classes -- no discussion sections here. I did have help and supervision, but it felt very much like being thrown into the deep end to see if I could swim.
• mecurious reminded me of the dated system we had in NZ up until about five years ago. Sixth-Form Certificate (second-to-last year) grades were decided based on the the results from the year before. So in a given subject, if the fifth-form students received, say, 10% As, 50% Bs and the remainder Cs, then that's what was available for the sixth-form students the following year and they were scaled accordingly. The system is actually fair now. Oh, and university entrance was based on Sixth-Form Certificate results. Gar, what a hideous mess. So imagine my annoyance when I scored 98% in my SFC Computer Studies class, and there were no As available.
• Late returning to the thread! (computer mayhem) But if every class graded with a ranking system, then the class that you rank toward the bottom will not be your undoing. Perhaps, but these were all students who did "A" work -- they were smart, they put in the effort, and they were used to being graded as such. This was a driven group. When you have to struggle to decide who presented a better paper, you're splitting fine hairs (well, I'd give Martin an 8.5 out of then, but Sally, an 8.6) and then you force those distinctions into letter grades apart... it just doesn't make sense. A fourth year honours class is NOT a normal distribution. (and neither was this scheme) It is up to you to explain why you are better than the other 34 or why choosing someone based strictly on their class rank is completely asinine. If you've been to law school, then you will be completely familiar with the concept of "prejudicial" versus "probative" value of evidence in court. I don't think I need to say more. I like the ranking-without-ranking, jb. In fact, I can't see how grades are much help to someone looking at the transcript without class averages.