It's Sunday and I'm grading again. Looking back at past posts, I see that I've been here before.
This one and this one stand out for me in particular. I seem to be in much the same place today. Spinning wheels, circle of life, etc.
All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All grading and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
This idea is almost tempting at the end of semester with term papers piling up...
Corporations have taken advantage of outsourcing for decades; the process lowers costs and often allows services to be provided which could not be otherwise accommodated. Now some university faculty believe the same principle can be applied to the task of grading papers written by undergraduates. The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail. The company advertises that its graders hold advanced degrees and can quickly turn around assignments with sophisticated commentary...
There's a very nice article over at Inside Higher Ed on the problems of upping the GPA requirements for admission to certain majors beyond the GPA requirements for graduation:
This an area of academic discrimination that is increasingly important to resist. Often its source lies in a self-aggrandizing desire to see our own fields has the hardest, best, or most demanding coupled with a, perhaps understandable but still unjustifiable, desire to teach only the best and brightest students with the most time to devote to our subjects. Even where admission to programs needs to be restricted simply because there are not enough classes to meet the student demand, a lottery might be a much better way to apportion those scare seats rather than setting ever higher GPA requirements.Progression requirements produce what a colleague calls “academic boat people,” because these students drift from major to major even though they meet, and often exceed, the university’s general 2.0 GPA standard for continued enrollment. What are we to do with these students? What are we to tell parents when they complain that their child has a 2.4 GPA and yet cannot gain admittance into any of three preferred majors? Who should teach these students, and help them graduate? At my university such students become “undeclared majors,” and are transferred automatically into the College of Arts and Sciences. Do deans of the other colleges send flowers and chocolates in thanks of such generosity?
More important, who are these students? Last November I spied one of them late one evening at the local Sam’s Club. She was a decent writer in my upper-division course, but consistently earned C grades, and contributed very little to class discussions. She was at work, of course, and her lapel button held a photograph of her infant daughter. She greeted me kindly, and noted that she worked full time, was a new mother, and that soon she would finish the research paper for my course. At once my assumptions about her ability changed; suddenly her course grade reflected the complexity of life, and was no longer a simple metric of future success. Much the same happened months later when I encountered another student in a restaurant. He too earned a C from me, and as we conversed he noted that he worked more than 40 hours a week while enrolled in my course. He attended my 8 o’clock class, went straight to work, and then returned to campus for a class at night. As a progression requirement pusher I failed to incorporate the reality of these students into our department’s standards.
To be sure there are many students who do not work late, do not face double days with families, and who simply do not apply themselves in courses. This does not justify progression requirements, even though the goal of excluding just such students motivated my own jump into rule making. And herein lies the problem: progression requirements are exclusionary. They keep people from pursuing their particular academic goals. They prevent students from specializing in a field of particular interest to them. Yes, budget constraints mean that universities sometimes cannot meet the demand for programs. But often such issues are absent, and yet progression requirements remain. Take it from a former progression requirement pusher: Such exclusion, as well meaning as it may be, prevents universities from fulfilling the call to educate our citizens. As such they should be eliminated when possible, reduced when feasible, and abandoned as a means of determining in advance who will and will not be successful in life.
Here is a wonderful end-of-the-semester video by jreeve. It was left as a comment on a post below on tattoos, but it's just too good not to share. I hope one day I'm this cool in class.
Minutemen, Corona.
The people will survive
In their environment
The dirt, scarcity, and the emptiness
Of our South
The injustice of our greed
The practice we inherit
The dirt, scarcity and the emptiness
Of our South
There on the beach
I could see it in her eyes
I only had a Corona
Five cent deposit
Tenured Radical's recent post on "What if Everyone Got an A?" reminded me of a passage I enjoy from Ursula K. Le Guin's novel, The Dispossessed.
In a section describing the disorientation of Shevek, a visiting professor from the anarchist moon Anarres who finds himself teaching physics to elite students on the capitalist world of Urras, Le Guin writes:
They were superbly trained these students. Their minds were fine, keen, ready. When they weren't working, they rested. They were not blunted and distracted by a dozen other obligations. They never fell asleep in class because they were tired from having worked on rotational duty the day before. Their society maintained them in complete freedom from want, distractions, and cares.In the past, I've used this passage in class to engage students about the purpose of grades and grading. Sometimes I ask the students who the grades for? My favorite answer is the one that asserts that grades are for the professors – as if I'm saving them up to make a quilt or something. Students are usually fairly clear that the grades aren't simply for them – a courtesy we offer at the end of every semester like an after dinner mint. They aren't allowed to decline their grades. The suspicion that grades and degrees aren't really for the benefit of either the faculty or the students, but are more likely for the benefit of future employers who will be the end consumers of their college transcripts, is an uncomfortable one for most students and for many faculty too. I've certainly come to resent spending my weekends grading papers just to make hiring decisions easier for some distant personnel department. I'm not opposed to writing, assignments, feedback, or even competition in the service of learning and education. I just think it's unlikely that grades serve any of those functions very well.
What they were free to do, however, was another question. It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative.
He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand. At first he refused to give any tests or grades, but this upset the University administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about questions but to write down the answers they had learned. And some of them objected strongly to his giving everyone the same mark. How could the diligent students be distinguished from the dull ones? What was the good in working hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one might as well do nothing.
"Well, of course," Shevek said, troubled. "If you do not want to do the work, you should not do it." (127-128)
If you ever find yourself needing to curve grades on a 100 point scale sometime, try this method:
Take the square root of the original grade and then multiply it by 10.
It's a wonderfully elegant curve. It's simple and fast to do. It adds the most the lowest scores. It adds a modest bump to high scores. No grade ever goes above 100. And the rank ordering of the grades never changes, that is, a lower grade never gets curved above a higher grade. Plus, if you still don't like the average, you can repeat the curve as many times as you like until you get the average you like. Try it.
