It's inevitable that, the more students catch on that B's are the new low, the more fervently they want A's.
As the dual forces of student evaluations and cynical burnout continue to exert upwards pressure on faculty grading practices, wants becomes expects becomes deserves.
Only those few who believe that grades should still mean something, and that they should somehow reward those whose work is truly distinguished, get to see the somersaults that the mediocre majority will turn to argue for A's.
From two of my B+ students (all identifing details removed):
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I am writing to you with concern regarding my grade... I was just wondering what areas you felt I needed to improve on to earn an A because I completed all of my work, papers and participated in class as best as I could have. Is there anything I can do to have my grade reconsidered?
I just checked my final grade online and saw that I got a B+. Can you tell me the breakdown of my grades? Most of my problem sets were V+ [no, they weren't] and I attended every class and tried to participate in lectures. The only reason why I am asking is because I felt confident that I would receive an A in the course.
What surprised me about these two students in particular was that each seemed to be putting in so little effort (as evinced, for example, by their papers--thickets of typos in what looked like stream-of-consciousness keyboarding, printed out and never actually read) that I'd assumed they were at peace with B grades. It never dawned on me that they might be expecting A's.
At least as disturbing is the most likely explanation for this expectation: presumably, all their other professors are giving them A's--along with every other student who shows up and turns things in.
All the worse for those who actually deserve top grades--particularly the left-brained crowd whose greatest strengths are typically more in academics than in extracurriculars and other varieties of resume-stuffing, not to mention career networking, schmoozing, and grade grubbing.
(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)
Have you read Ivory Tower Blues ?
ReplyDeleteIf not you would probably be interested in the authors' observations and analysis. They surveyed numerous faculty at universities in the USA and Canada and found similar patterns of perceived entitlement, student disengagement, and rampant grade inflation.
Of course, this is something you probably have covered in your own blog, but I've never really felt comfortable with clean distinctions between logical/emotional, visual/verbal and all that. Slightly-more-precise Myers-Brigg isn't really scientific either, but it does allow for the introverted to be also intuitive, and all that.
ReplyDeleteBut I do raise an eyebrow at ECs being called "resume-stuffing" -- this from a person who also once thought it excusable that his sole strength was in academia. Maybe I fear what the Ivory Tower does: all talk, and no action.
A teacher who taught at one of the top schools in my birth country (Singapore), and who eventually became disillusioned (if I may take the liberty to interpret his sentiments) with it, did write a few times about how "holistic education" was being "sold".
In departmentalism, it is often assumed that a school needs to be separated into independent fiefdoms (oops, I mean departments) in order to function like a school. It is also assumed that if you get the department chairs in the same room for a few hours (in what is called a school steering committee meeting, or the equivalent), you will get a miraculously holistic transdisciplinary outcome.
That attempts to implement holism / holistic education / etc. often have failed (and witness, writing essays in math class, "high-applicability" in sixth grade math problems, Everyday Math, and so forth), does not mean that the goal itself is misguided, merely the means. That is my real grievance with Reform Math: it sucks miserably, but that doesn't mean the math curriculum of the 1950s, 1920s, 1820s and what have you (excluding the fact that some key theorems weren't discovered then) were the best thing to be had either. I'm not opposed to reforming math, nor am I being a reactionary, seeking /only/ to reverse the reforming of math pedagogy. For it should be well known that in those Good Old Days without all these degenerative movements running about, that only a few percent of people ever graduated college and only a slightly larger minority graduated high school. I have seen a (prodigy) teenage tutor who implemented the "group work" concept quite robustly, at least when he assigned his students (several years younger) extra work on his blog (a way more useful technology than say, SmartBoards), because he expended great effort into soliciting the active participation of his students. Whereas the concept fails miserably if the teacher thinks group work time is a good time to lay back and have a rest and a break.
Coming back to grade compression, I must differ on the idea that it disadvantages those brighter, more determined students because the system penalises the left-brained or the system was designed by right-brainers . Rather, many systems, inherently because of the way they are designed, fail to reward those who put in their best efforts. It also fails to help that outside of math, grading at the high-end becomes quite subjective.
I always tried to craft my essays (or in the case of art, paint/sculpt/draw) like I was genuinely writing an argument to somebody, or if it was more towards the beautiful and elegant than the argument, to impress (as in impressionistic). This is why I hated writing "busywork" essays where I felt I was merely rehearsing something to my teacher, why I always tried to make insights even in biology long-answer responses, and actually write as though I were writing to a friend when I did those Singapore PSLE-format functionals.
The reward I sought? A long fruitful discussion with my teachers. Alas, I rarely had any. The cost? Often, perfectionism came at the price of sometimes late-ness, which meant I frequently missed the deadline for AP Calculus test corrections; got several points off my AP Physics lab (because I wanted to use calculus to point out how the length of the effective magnetised wire wasn't constant because the magnetic field was a circle and not a square, got stuck in methodology, planned to seek out a textbook, put it in the back of my mind and then, forgot about deadlines); I would get a mind block on the "perfect" argument I wanted to articulate, go to something else, and then sleep and realise I hadn't done it.
And of course, I rarely attempted to submit something that wasn't my best, so I didn't know where I could "stop" and still get full marks, without freaking out about being late. I was more familiar with point reductions for not being on time, than point reductions for submitting something that was not my best. I suppose if I did an audit course, I could experiment with grade-payoff as a function of time and attempt to calculate an optimum. But alas, I have digressed too much. But what recognition can be given for students who go the extra mile? Can it be folly to think the recognition can be given numerically? Ah, how I detest those academic departmental awards given solely on the basis of GPA.
"That is my real grievance with Reform Math: it sucks miserably, ..."
ReplyDeleteThat's one of the big issues I have too. Many seem to focus on calculators or long division, but the real problem with curricula like EM is that they are done so poorly. Well, EM is structurally flawed in that it seems to think that mastery can be achieved whenever. They lower expectations and then claim that it produces critical thinking.
The other argument is that "traditionalists" just want what they had when they were growing up. When my son was in pre-school, I remember thinking about the things I didn't like about my (traditional) math education. Then I saw MathLand. My reaction was that they were going in the wrong direction.
Palisadesk--Thanks for the book rec! Definitely something I should read. Will put it on my list.
ReplyDeleteLRG--Didn't mean to imply that all non-left-brainers are necessarily resume-stuffers; just that left-brainers (by my informal definition of who they are) tend not to be. Or that people are necessarily either left-brained or right-brained: for, as you say, there are plenty of intuitive introverts, (or empathetic introverts, or artistic ones; or analytical extroverts, etc, etc).
Back when I taught college math and computer science, I didn't really look at it as grade compression. Then again, I didn't spend enough years teaching to develop a longitudinal opinion compared to average SAT scores. My only calibration had to do with the differences between colleges. I could never teach a course at the same level as the unversity I went to. A part-time teacher got into trouble by making a course too difficult and not giving out any A's.
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