Responding
to Entitlement
I concluded my last entry with these questions:
One,
what do such grades actually mean? and,
Two,
what can we assume that students actually learn in such courses?
Of course these are questions which are being asked
widely in our society today. Sadly, most approaches to these questions begin
with negative presumptions that are largely unfounded: the grades mean little, the
students are not learning much and it’s all the teacher’s fault. And there may
be some truth to these presumptions. But the reality is a lot more complex than
that.
The bean counter response to these questions has been to
create assessment programs which, based upon snapshots taken from pre- and
post-tests or embedded questions within a given course, purport to offer
empirical proof of student learning or lack thereof. Clearly such a procedure
creates sets of data that permit anxious bureaucrats a good night sleep.
However, it also provides an incredibly simplistic
picture of student performance which ultimately must be observed over time to
be fully understood. Think of a single still frame from Gone with the Wind, e.g., the burning of Atlanta or Rhett carrying
Scarlett up the stairs. Would we really believe that either of those stills
adequately sums up the entire masterpiece by Selznick? As Einstein put it, “Everything
should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
These assessments are ultimately exercises in
reductionism which, while proving enormously time consuming for instructors
with plates already more than full, ultimately provide them very little worth
knowing in the end. Without a standard curriculum, such assessments essentially
compare apples to oranges. Instructors could well be taking very different
approaches to the same course in adjoining rooms. And when assessments do
become tied to standard curricula, pedagogy almost inevitably becomes reduced
to teaching the tests and student learning is reduced even further to the
perennial question college instructors have endured since the inception of No Child Left Behind: “What’s on the
test?”
About two years ago, I began calculating the time
expenditures required for every class I taught. I had asked myself, “Is it possible
the students are right? Am I giving them too much work?” Realizing that such an
open-ended question could turn largely on preference (there are a number of
students who regularly call their classmates babies for their whining), I
decided to use the only standard in common usage, the Carnegie Unit, as my
basis for comparison.
I assessed the actual prep time demanded by each course,
calculating required reading times at 2 minutes per page (the average high
school speed) while assessing time required for assignments based upon the
averages of what students reported spending on them. In all honesty, I was
quite liberal in my estimates, erring on the high side for each one.
I began posting the prep time required for each class on
the class webcourses site for students to see. One semester I even integrated
the estimated undistracted prep times into the class schedule itself (noting
that the distracted behavior colloquially referred to as “multi-tasking” by
definition adds time to any endeavor undertaken which cannot be counted toward
required prep time). This allowed students to see up front how much a give class' worth of reading and assignments would take them.
Perhaps I was naïve in assuming that if students saw how
little actual time was being demanded of them, with none of the classes
exceeding about 70% of the Carnegie Unit’s 2 hour prep requirement, maybe
they’d stop complaining. But I was wrong. Indeed, the complaints increased.
Clearly, less time for more grade is increasingly seen as an entitlement among many of our
students today.
Giving
up but not giving in….
By last summer, I had pretty much given up. I was
particularly tired of the whining that resulted from students taking the
quizzes adapted from the textbook publisher’s test bank which they inevitably
proclaimed as “too hard” or “tricky.” In response, for the intro humanities
course surveyed above, I created a new series of content quizzes for my online
humanities GEP courses. I give these quizzes strictly to insure that students
actually purchase and read the textbook. Remember, when it’s all about the
grade, unless there are points attached, it just doesn’t happen.
The new quizzes were based on the lowest level of Bloom’s
Taxonomy. Bloom’s system evaluates questions on the cognitive complexity
required to answer them. Level 1 data dump is the lowest level: “What is the structure pictured above? A.
The Washington Monument, B. The Pyramids, C. The Parthenon, D. None of the
Above.” That was the level I chose for my new quizzes.
I wish I could say this solved the problem. For 27% of
the students in the class surveyed above, even Bloom’s Taxonomy Level 1
questions did not insure them at least an A- on their quizzes primarily because
many simply failed to take them. Indeed, if the 20 points of extra credit used
to induce students to take four extra quizzes were actually added to the
possible total points, only four would have managed an A- on the quizzes.
Remember, this is the lowest level of cognitive functioning possible. It’s as
easy as I can make it.
Results were even worse for my efforts to ease the
writing requirement which students regularly rail against as onerous. Gordon
Rule courses require students to produce four intensive writing assignments to
pass the course. Trying to make this as easy as possible, I created three
Discussion assignments, two of them based upon readings linked to the schedule
itself. The assignments included a content quiz on the readings (again, to
insure students actually read them), an original post at the Discussions site
based on a format provided them, and two response posts, one responding to the
original post from a member of one’s group and the other to a student outside
the group.
The most demanding of these assignments required students
to read Elie Wiesel’s Night, a 109
page paperback about the Holocaust (available for .99 online) which would have
taken the slowest reader less than three hours total to read. From the scores
on the prep quiz, it was clear that few had actually had invested the time to read the book with
only four of the 37 students making As and another six scoring a D or failing
completely.
The fourth assignment should also have been the easiest, a Summary
Reflection Paper which required students to critically reflect on three ideas
from the material which had struck them during the term, and to consider how their
understanding of being human had been impacted by the course materials. There
was no additional reading and the answers came from the student’s personal
experience of the course materials.
Clearly, that involves two major presumptions: A) That
students actually read the material, and B) That they actually thought about
what they’d read, two major - and apparently unfounded - presumptions. A mere
four of the 37 made an A on the summary assignment while nine of the 37 ended
up with a D or an F, two because they failed to submit anything at all. That’s
a pretty disheartening result from a semester’s worth of readings and
assignments. Bear in mind the purpose of the Gordon Rule is to assure that our
graduates can write at college level.
Of course, GEP courses have a reputation for
underachievement by students who see them as irrelevant to their majors and
thus unworthy of their time or attention. Perhaps performance by our own majors
would be better.
Encountering
the Humanities is an entry level course for Humanities majors
designed to introduce students to the discipline and to beginning research
methods. This past term the requirements for the course were reduced to two
components. The first was the four research and writing assignments required by
the assessments program. The second was an engagement grade in which students
could earn up to five points each class by showing up on time, remaining the
full period and having prepared the assigned material for the day. How
difficult could that be?
Apparently too difficult for the 79% of the class who
missed more than a week of classes. The class average absence rate was 7.5 classes for the term. That translates
to two and a half weeks (out of 15 total) missed completely. Bear in mind that
this class covers topics ranging from the affirmation of life in the face of
death to the use of film as propaganda during the WWII era to the controversies over publicly funded art such as Robert Maplethorpe’s. I incorporate a lot of film, library tours, group activities and personal reflection assignments. This is hardly a deadly lecture series on Prussian generals in an credit hour factory auditorium.
By the end of the term, absences skyrocketed, chronically late arrivals
increased and the loud sighing to register boredom from unprepared students
grew in velocity. What a joy to teach! (And these are our own majors!) One
wonders what careers will permit such spotty attendance records, rudeness and
disengagement.
Even so, about a third of this class managed to end up with at
least an A-. However, if the 40 points
of extra credit (about one letter grade) had been added into the possible,
there would have been a mere two A- and our would-be majors scoring a C or
lower would have totaled 11/19 (58%), a far cry from the 0% who come into these
classes expecting nothing below a B.
More
work than I’ve ever had to do….
Even with all the eased requirements and all the extra
credit to bribe students to engage all the material and the inflated final
grades to show for it, the whining continues. The most common comment I receive
on my student evaluations every semester is one or more variants of “this is
more work than I’ve had to do in any of my other classes.” Bear in mind that at
most the requirements of any of my
classes are 70% of the Carnegie Unit 2 for 1 prep time requirement. I know
because I’ve actually measured them.
For a long time, I shrugged off these comments with the
assumption that students say this about all their classes. It is the nature of
the beast for students to complain about college workloads. I certainly did my
share of complaining as an undergrad and law student and I expect my students
to do the same. But two events in the past year have made me consider that
perhaps they are telling the truth.
The first was the publication of a national ranking by Newsweek of the “least rigorous
colleges” in America. Lo and behold, UCF was…. Drumroll, please …. Number 1 in
the country! Of course, it would be easy
to attack these rankings on the basis of methodology (students were asked to
rank the difficulties of their course demands). But other factors considered
such as teacher/student ratio are often seen as causally related to a lack of
academic rigor in the scholarship of teaching and learning. UCF has long held
the title of the highest student/teacher ratio in the country. And when the Newsweek ranking is considered together with the fact that UCF has
been ranked in Princeton Review’s top
10 twice in the past five years in the category of “Students say they never
have to study,” the least rigorous title begins to look more possible than not.
The second was the appearance of the dean of the College
of Arts and Humanities at a departmental faculty meeting at the end of the fall
term. He reported that the primary concern of the university and thus the
college had become student credit hours and student graduation rates. Bottom
line: it’s all about numbers and dollars.
Concern for quality has become a quaint notion in the corporate university
with its consumers formerly known as students.
In a time when students increasingly choose their courses
based upon online consumerist rating services (e.g., ratemyprofessor.com) which
penalizes demanding instructors with low “easiness” scores and rewards those
seen as easy As, the scramble for credit hours becomes a real race to the
bottom. And the decision over assigning a student a grade lower than a C in a
course, even with an average of two and a half weeks of missed class, becomes a
moral dilemma in which any semblance of remaining academic integrity is pitted
against pragmatic considerations for the health of one’s job. Being a good
(translation: academically rigorous and demanding) teacher is no longer an
asset; in this brave new world of academia it’s a liability.
So, where is the moral reward?
(Continued)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
If the unexamined life is not worth living,
surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth
holding.
Most
things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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