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What's in a Grade?
Participants
Jim Steichen Literary Editor of The Declaration, third-year Comparative Literature major.
Jon Mikalson Professor of Classics, Director of the Echols Scholars Program.
Kate Zimmerman Executive Editor Emeritus of The Declaration, fourth-year History and Economics double major.
Melvin Cherno Professor of Technology, Culture, and Communication (Engineering School).
Rebecca Hyman Graduate student in the Department of English.
Duane Gibson third-year Chemistry and Economics double major.
Jon Mikalson: I just haven't heard from anybody in years about anyone grading on a curve in a humanities course. It's just fallen out of the discussion. I taught Greek Civ for many years and it never occurred to me to think about a curve, and I still don't think about how many A's or B's or C's I give. I did a check on my first-year Greek course -- looking at grades from the last 20 years. It's the same material. I mean, Greek has not changed a whole lot over 20 years.
Melvin Cherno: And what did you find?
Mikalson: Without any thought, zero thought on my part about how many A's or B's I was giving out, the mean of the grades I assigned remained about the same. I think there are a lot of hidden factors for grade inflation. You can for example put the drop date for courses later in the semester and that would raise the overall grades. You can do what we did in that course and not make it a year course but make it a semester-by-semester course. It used to be that if you signed up for 101, you had to take 102, and of course that drove down the mean for 102.
Rebecca Hyman: So what are you measuring against if you're not tabulating -- do you just have some kind of internal standard?
Cherno: Case by case ...
Mikalson: I just know how well I want students to know Greek; it's what my expectations are. I think a lot of us now have a very strong distinction between an A and an A minus and a B plus -- it's a significantly different grade between an A and an A minus. But that kind of break there might have been 20 years ago an A to a B plus. When I look at a paper I know whether it's an A minus or a B plus. But with my Greek course it's a very objective thing -- it's more like a biology test so it's easier that way.
Kate Zimmerman: What's been interesting for me being a double major in History and Economics is that the standards for History and the standards for Economics are different. A statistics professor I had graded strictly on a bell-curve, and that meant that only the top ten percent of the class made A's.
Cherno: What were the other distributions?
Zimmerman: I don't remember exactly, but I think it was a bit inflated in the fact that the median grade wasn't a straight C, but more like a B minus or maybe a C plus. So the majority of the students got a B minus, 25 percent got lower, 25 percent got higher.
Cherno: So that kind of curve still does exist.
Mikalson: How does that make a student feel? How does it make you feel to know that that curve exists?
Zimmerman: Well I suppose that if you're a more competitive person, maybe you would respond to it well, you could see yourself being measured against this objective standard and say that you're better than everyone else in the class. For me, as someone who is not that strong in Economics to begin with, I would say that it's hard, because I know I'm being measured against people who are better than me in Economics and I would prefer to be measured against myself.
Cherno: Or the instructor's expectations.
Zimmerman: Right.
Jim Steichen: That raises another question -- something that I'd like to lay on the table. I know that in my experience, I would say that I receive two kinds of grades. I will get a grade that really measures the objective quality of my work -- and I'm talking about papers here -- just looking at how well-argued it is, how focused it is, if it's innovative and well thought out, interesting. I'll get a grade for that and it's usually lower than the other kind of grade -- which I like, not just because I get a better grade but because I think it's fair in a way --and that other kind of grade will say that the instructor knows what I did for this paper, and there's evidence in what I did in the paper that I put a lot into it, that I did a lot of reading, that I put a lot of thought into it. It may be rough around the edges, it may not be something that I would want to publish, but it still shows that you effectively did the assignment, because you spent the time, you put some deep thought into it. So I'm fine getting either kind of grade -- I don't get mad when I get one or the other. But should we narrow it down and tell people that you should be grading the objective quality of a paper or you should give people some leeway and say that "yeah well ..."
Cherno: Do the instructors of those courses give you signals ahead of time which way they're going to be grading or is it just completely arbitrary? Well not "arbitrary" but at least some indication ...
Steichen: I don't think I can initially tell from the class ...
Cherno: But your instructor doesn't typically say, "Even though your papers might be rough around the edges ..."
Steichen: No, because that's a bold statement for an instructor to make, because then they're kind of opening it up for ... bad papers.
Cherno: Well not necessarily ... maybe some rough papers ...
Steichen: The problem is that I always do want to have a good paper. I care about my writing -- I want to be an academic -- so I care about the final product; but at times, under the time constraints of undergraduate life, with extra-curricular activities and five classes that you care equally about, it's nice sometimes when your teacher effectively tells you, "Look, I understand that you don't have time to do five drafts, but I'm going to give you an A minus when you might have gotten a B."
Mikalson: But that gets into very sticky territory, because basically you as an individual are making choices about your extra-curricular activities, and I think for an English faculty member or someone else to say, "Well, because he's doing all these other things, I'll cut him some slack on this paper." I think that kind of holistic approach leads to very mushy grading. You get credit for your extra-curricular activities in other aspects, and that worries me a bit.
Steichen: It's not necessarily directly with extra-curricular activities. What I'm specifically talking about -- I'll give an example. Last semester I wrote a paper on the Shakespeare sonnets for ENGL 381. We had a seven page paper, our final big paper. I got interested in something on the sonnets to the point that I went to my professor instead of my TA and told her about it and I really got into it. So I ended up doing a fair amount of research, a large amount considering the assignment. I read a few books and several articles and things like that. I put in much more effort than I know most students in the class put into theirs. The paper was due on the first day of finals, and I had my Greek test the same day, another paper due the day before, and so I had one night to sit down and write this paper. It wasn't too hard to do since I'd thought through it a lot, but there were some things, like my conclusion went off in a direction opposite from my paper. And my professor told me that -- she gave me a B plus. And I don't begrudge my B plus, but I know that with other considerations I would have had an A on that paper. I had been into her office to talk with her three times, I had the works cited to show the work that I had done, and it's because of instances like that that I think that a "single sanction" grading style might not be the best thing.
Mikalson: Rebecca, could you tell us about how you grade in English, because I think that's one of the great mysteries for a lot of people. There are so many factors involved.
Hyman: There really are, and I have to come clean that I taught Jim in ENGL 382, so I've graded his papers, and I think I fall more into camp A than camp B.
Cherno: Camp A being ...
Hyman: The effort category. Here's the interesting thing. When I was trained as a TA, I came into a little seminar and I was really nervous about taking it because I thought, "Oh I'll have to teach to all the other instructors," and I was sure that's what the course was going to be about. Well it wasn't about pedagogy at all. We were handed the criteria for what an A paper was and spent the entire time grading individually and coming back to the group and asking what grade did you give this paper. So I really got the sense that the English department was very concerned with standardization. Granted this is for composition [ENWR 101] and it's a factory kind of course and they want to make sure that a grade for 101 be fairly set across the different TA's. But what I ended up saying at the end of the time was that I could have a student write a paper for me about opening a can of Campbell's soup and get an A according to the criteria for an A paper: certain organization, certain structure. I said there's no category for ideas. And the person teaching the seminar said, "Oh if you follow this structure you will necessarily have good ideas." I completely disagree with that. What happens in English which I think is very difficult, is that you get students who want an A -- because they're going to law school, because they're going to grad school -- and they pick safe, easy topics. They love it if we give them a choice of questions for an assignment and they pick the easiest ones by far, and they know how to turn out a particular kind of A minus, B plus paper, and they can probably do it in a day or day and a half. Now because of the structure of all the other classes [of ENWR 101] that's fine. If someone wants that kind of question and that's their approach to English, they have the right to have that approach. But as a teacher, I always want the students to push. So if I find a student who's willing to take a risk, and especially break out of the structure of the course, I'm much more concerned with seeing the ideas in rough form than I am in seeing a perfectly executed paper.
Cherno: And as you say, the challenge of the topic is important. When I was a graduate student I was a TA for a philosophy professor who, on final examinations, always used to ask students to make up their own questions. And what he said was that you will be graded on the quality of the question as well as on the quality of the answer. If you give yourself a challenging topic, that should count for something.
Hyman: But then you get into the question of whether the teaching of English at the college level is an exercise in grammatical execution and structure of writing -- because you're going to have to write for the rest of your life -- or if you should be teaching English as a discipline, where you're teaching people to stretch, to think about English in a way that scholars do.
Cherno: But surely there would be those who would say that the former rather than the latter would have to include not just dangling modifiers and things like that, but analytical ability. And if you have something that doesn't require any analytical challenge, how are you stretching your analytical ability ...?
Mikalson: Hasn't this problem been around for as long as English 101 in its various forms over history has been around? I remember as an undergraduate that the TA's got to set their own topics that we would all write our essays on and if you got a disinteresting TA then you got really dreadful writing, of the Campbell's soup kind of question, because they would actually set that kind of question. But it comes down to the objectives of that particular level of writing.
Hyman: You see, I don't think you can become a good analytical thinker unless you push. And even when I teach 101 I'm still pushing ideas. The grammar you can teach to someone. You can say "fix this" or "learn this," but if you have someone who doesn't realize that they don't have an idea yet, they don't know why they believe what they believe, and I think you have a much greater problem.
Mikalson: And you really can't write well if you can't think well. I had a student one time in Greek Civ who came to me and said "How can you give me a C on this? I wrote a five paragraph essay." Looked me right in the eye.
Cherno: "But I followed the format ..."
Mikalson: ... that he'd been taught in high school. I said, "What's a five paragraph essay?"
Hyman: It's a rough transition from high school sometimes.
Mikalson: But say you're dealing with the kind of paper that Jim is doing, on the Shakespeare sonnets, a paper with a thesis. Isn't that a terribly subjective decision? Are the ideas supported well, do I agree with the ideas, do I disagree with the ideas, are they presented in an interesting way, is it a superficial read of it, does it violate the theoretical approach I've been putting forward ... It seems to me that it's a hard call, and it's probably more subject to trends of scholarly interpretation than something like Chemistry or Greek. All of that might contribute to grade inflation as far as why you get higher grade inflation in the humanities than in the hard sciences.
Steichen: Kate, do you find that you get higher grades in History?
Zimmerman: Well, I think I'm better at History than I am at Economics, and my higher grades -- well, they're still not that high -- I don't know whether they're necessarily the result of better work or grade inflation. But I am curious as to whether or not English or History professors feel pressure to give students grades higher than a C. There's kind of the idea, among students definitely, that if you put out a great paper, you're going to get an A. If you put out a bad paper, you're going to get a C. If you put out a middle paper you'll get a B. And D and F are kind of not even ...
Mikalson: You're good if you turn it in. It's like the 200 points on the SAT.
Cherno: Well there's something to that. Of course some of that -- and this gets to the heart of some of the conflict -- is due to the fact that we have so many A students here. I mean it's not very likely, other things being equal, that A students are going to turn out F papers. Unless something's wrong.
Zimmerman: But at the same time, you would find higher grade inflation in nationally known universities probably because they feel pressure to put out students who are appealing to the workforce, get them great jobs: "Oh you graduated with a 3.8 from Harvard; you'll look good on our alumni register."
Cherno: Well there are lots of pressures at work. There are parents calling up saying "Look, I paid my money. This is a very expensive school. I expect my money's worth, and my money's worth means decent grades." There's that very overt pressure. Then there's a different kind of pressure. Everybody says that during the Vietnamese War there was tremendous pressure to keep grades high in order to keep people out of the army. But that's a different kind of pressure ...
Mikalson: That's where people date the beginning of grade inflation. My experience with that is that I never knew of a specific instance when that happened, but it was talked about. I also remember three of my fraternity brothers flunked out during the spring of 1964 and two months later they were drafted. I think it had more to do with the anti-war movement than with faculty members -- it was a general anti-authoritarian spirit in the air. That's part of what grade inflation is. The disinclination of people to judge other people harshly. Some people might say that that's a good sign about society.
Cherno: There's something else closely related to that. There's another kind of pressure, a sort of "Dr. Spock" kind of pressure, that pressure to consider each student on his or her own, in terms of that student's ability, and not simply to have one good answer in your mind that you expect people to come up with. You realize that when you give a grade, you're communicating something to a real, live person. And you have in the back of your mind, "What's the impact on this person?" To what extent do you want to discourage or encourage? Things like that. It's a totally different kind of thing. There's another pressure, and I haven't encountered this personally, and that is pressure from the institution saying, "You'd better damn well not give too many F's because we don't want our reputation to suffer."
Duane Gibson: I think what you were saying earlier about not having a stock idea but considering each person on their own level, if you were to do that that would obviously contribute to grade inflation because if you consider a good student on his ability, and he turns out good work then you give him an A minus or B plus; if you consider a mediocre student and they turn out a mediocre paper, it turns out to be an A minus or a B plus. Without the standardization, then you really get no distribution; and without the distribution, then that's when you get grade inflation. And along with what Kate was saying: if you turn in a good paper you get an A and if you turn in a bad paper you get a C. I mean for a D or F you have to write broken sentences without subject-verb agreement. That's what makes grade inflation more evident in humanities courses than in science courses. Even if you set the curve low in a science course, there's still the possibility that someone could get a D or an F. In my first semester Chemistry course in the Engineering School, 78 and above was an A, and you had to get below a 45 to get an F. Getting below a 45 is hard to do, but it's still possible. It's almost impossible to get an F on a paper but it's still possible to get an F in a science course. That's just because of the objective nature of the grading. I can't think of any instance of anyone I know getting below a B minus on a paper.
Steichen: Kate's raising her hand ...
Zimmerman: My first semester I wrote this ten-page paper for a history class, on the Spanish Civil War. I thought it was the best thing I had ever written. I was so proud of myself. I had just come from high school and I'd never written a ten-page paper before, and he gave it back to me with a D. Of course he gave me the opportunity to rewrite it, and I ended up getting a B in the class, which I appreciated.
Gibson: Did that surprise you to get a paper back with a D on it? I just turned in a paper for my midterm for my comparative politics class. I wrote a paper and it wasn't necessarily stellar, but if I get it back and it has a D minus I can't imagine myself feeling anything but utter despair. It seems like something so unthinkable to even happen.
Mikalson: But this D made an impression on you ...
Zimmerman: In a positive way ...
Mikalson: ... and if it had been a B minus that you then worked up to a B, it wouldn't have made that impression.
Zimmerman: It wouldn't have made that impression, and I probably wouldn't have rewritten the paper. I went in and I discussed it with him, and it was one of the relatively few times when I've been in to discuss something with a professor. I'm a little prejudiced, I guess, because I resent the "Oprah-ization" of America, in the sense that everyone must be non-judgmental, and everyone must feel good. If he gives me a D and he thinks that I deserve it, then I think that's what he should have given me. Of course, at the time I chalked it up to just having been right out of high school. If I got a D now I don't know what I'd do.
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