by Worth Weller
I have a dirty little secret.
No, it is nothing about my sex life or drinking habits.
It’s a lot more tawdry than that: I’m thrilled when a
student in my class gets a C.
Not that such an occurrence actually happens a lot – I’m
even surprised when a student gets a B – but I am elated to see at least one
middling grade when I export my Blackboard grades to my spreadsheet for double
checking, because otherwise I feel a sense of embarrassment that nearly every student
in the class got an A.
I write this blog post now to reveal this secret shame
because in just a few weeks the halls of my department will be filled with
lecturers and professors dashing from their windowless cubicles to the
department office with reams of smudged papers and worried looks on their
faces, as the almost palpable gloom of the “grading season” takes over in the
final days before administrating class evaluations and turning grades in to the
Registrar.
The gloom, of course, is not just attributable to the
fatigue of grading – it’s also a manifestation of the fear of, of, gasp, no,
not “Jeb!”! It’s much worse than that. It’s the demon that lurks in all our
nightmares: “Grade Inflation!”!
Two recent articles in the mainstream media and twittersphere
have prompted my renewed attention to this reoccurring, primordial scream. The
first, which mysteriously showed up recently in my Twitter feed, is a blog post
by Jason Mittel, media and film critic at Middlebury College. Titled “
Rethinking
Grading: An In-progress Experiment,” Mittel’s blog post describes his
distaste for grading and his fear that grades “often work as an obstruction for
learning, rather than a motivation, reward, or neutral assessment.” I’ll leave
it to you to analyze the article and his remedy, but whether you agree or are
aghast with his solution, (he provides a detailed syllabus), his approach is
particularly thought–provoking and timely now that the
Washington Post just this month came out with a front page article
(above the fold!) dissecting recent trends to the grade curve and in a truly Munchenesque
twist, arguing that grade inflation may not be such a bad thing.
With a title guaranteed to get your attention – “
There’s
nothing wrong with grade inflation: Grades Don’t matter anyway. Here’s why”
– Mark Oppenheimer, director of the Yale Journalism Initiative argues that
employers aren’t looking at grades or GPAs anyhow. In fact, he stipulates that
most students at schools like Yale, Duke and Harvard are going to do A level
work no matter what approach is taken to assessment, as that level of
engagement is what got them into those schools in the first place. “For years,
I feared that a world of only A’s would mean the end of meaningful grades;
today I’m certain of it,” admits Oppenheimer. “But what’s so bad about that?”
he asks.
I don’t have an answer to this question (although both
articles make a good case for the authors’ own answers), but I can describe
here how I’ve learned to quit worrying and love the bomb, so to speak. I grade
with rubrics, which I explain in great detail ahead of each assignment. And I
try to keep these rubrics fairly simple and to the point. Writing assignments
are boiled down to paragraph focus, development and support (all of which imply
a certain degree of critical thinking) along with an introduction that guides
the essay and a conclusion that sums it up. Visual Communications assignments are
slimmed down to technique, clarity and display of content that shows mastery of
the specific concepts. I also don’t spend a lot of time on late penalties (I
teach English, not math) and give students the benefit of the doubt about
family matters, work and illness, until I lose my patience or the semester gets
alarmingly close to the end. (Yes, some students do take advantage, and they
are the ones who wind up with that guilty C!)
If a student shows mastery of the concepts I’ve set out and
clarified for each assignment, if they have spent the time necessary to prove
to me they have reached my own teaching goals, then who am I to say they don’t
deserve an A? So if the vast majority of my students get A’s, I am learning
(finally) to quit second-guessing myself and enjoy the breaks between classes,
feeling good that I have met my own expectations for the semester.
Bibliography
Mittle, Jason. “Rethinking Grading: An In-Progress
Experiment.” Just TV, 16 Feb. 2016.
Web. 6 March 2016.
Oppenheimer, Mark. “There’s nothing wrong with grade
inflation: Grades Don’t matter anyway. Here’s why.” Washington Post 6 March 2016 Web. 6 March 2016.
Worth Weller is a Continuing Lecturer for the Department of
English and Linguistics and also teaches Visual Communications for the
Department of Communication. He has taught face to face and online courses for
IPFW for 16 years.
