Dear All,
some years ago I read about an interesting approach to this problem. The academic would give two marks for each assignment. One mark (usually lower) would be their academic appraisal of the assignment; the second mark (usually higher) would be what they called the system mark.
They considered that other universities were bumping marks up and hence giving advantage in GPAs to their own students so how could they justify "diminishing" their students' future prospects in a corrupted system? (Notice the problem of neutral plural pronouns being used alongside neutral singular pronouns - we need a solution?)
I use a variation of this. I establish assignments that give a true indication of a student's abilities (benchmarking) but these tests are only worth a tiny amount. This way students can be failed in the assignment and yet they are still able to achieve an overall outcome not that different to their other courses where no benchmarking occurs.
This has worked well over many years. Lots of tears and long conversations but then things settled down.
Recently, the tears have elevated to formal complaints, by aggrieved students, to deans of students and heads of learning and teaching centres. The fact that you have never failed any course in your life is an indication that you should be awarded a PhD, right now, they seem to be arguing?
Apparently I should NOT be testing the abilities of students based on their existing ability. This is NOT fair (whatever FAIR means?). When I point out that I have moved the student results upward, across the semester, by 25% (from the benchmark test), there are dumb looks in the room. "What, you mean you can actually determine that you have improved the quality of work by 25%? Goodness, you should be getting a special medal rather than a sausage up the nose."
How can I have appeared to have achieved a 25% improvement? Simple: I have merely got the attention of the better students in the class. They understand that in my classes they are expected to work and that they will be acknowledged for their abilities and provoked into stretching their brains. Some students like being smart and like being rewarded for being smart with the demands of more difficult work. Some students want to know where they fit in the world. Some students like being in my classes.
The tests that I use (in professional writing classes) involve nested concepts. You can sequence various sub-aspects in various way, but the hierarchy becomes determinate. For example, Public Interest trumps Law - Law trumps Personal Ethics (ETHICS re-emerge in Public Interest) and this Case Study has it all but that Case Study only has secondary qualities (even if that are more immediately attractive to Twitter folks).
Students that fail usually fail to provide even a Wikipedia account of any of the key concepts - what is a concept? Some give me pictures and brown smudges at very high resolution.
Another one that I came up with this last semester (in a creativity course) involved the use of geometry to establish a new measuring system: your own foot as the new universal measure. This involves basic maths at about year 7/8 level. For example, how to use a compass to divide a line. The tricky part came in establishing inches which involves dividing the line using some variation of a parallelogram. Yes, I know you can factor 12 in various ways and yes you can fold paper etc.
This was the first part of the task - actually doing the making of a new foot ruler without using an existing ruler. A set of students threw their hands in the air at this point - they declared that they hated maths, that the task has nothing to do with creativity and I was pretty much a monster.
The second part involved the rhetorical aspects of communicating this task to Year 7/8 students by accounting for the Practical aspects (part one), the Historical, Analytical and Theoretical aspects (part two). Why 12?
At this point many students started to fall over. They could NOT see the world in a de-centred way. Piaget suggests that a 12 year old can do this quite well. I am still getting hate mail from un-de-cenetred students. Yes, the work improved by around 25% over the semester but so did the insults.
When will the system come crashing down on me?
cheers from 35 degrees (Celsius).
keith
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7332452/The-university-professor-who-stood-up-against-dumbing-down-of-degrees.html
An interesting article. It would be even more interesting to know enough about the specifics to get to deeper questions about "standards" and "quality."
Gunnar Swanson
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