Donald Rumsfeld used to say, as an ironic criticism (I think) of Washington, “If you can’t fix the problem, make it bigger.” But taken another way, it’s fundamentally sound advice. The students are not the problem. The teachers are not the problem. The details of who gets what grade? Ok, a problem in that one scheme might be worse than another. But the system? Problem.
Below is some stuff from an interview of one of Deming’s followers. (Unfortunately, imo anyway, they were not always good at communicating their ideas. Deming in particular, at least by the time he’d become known in the US, was a crotchety old man. That was funny at times. I mean, humiliating the CEOs of major corporations is never not going to be great, but it wasn’t helpful when he was talking to more sympathetic audiences.)
Summary
Okay, with that brief glimpse of profound knowledge, I’d like to ask you a few questions about particular practices. For example, Deming says that it is counterproductive to evaluate individual workers using a formal appraisal system. That must mean that for schools, the common practice of continually grading students is a mistake. If that is true, what should teachers be doing instead?
Educators can answer that for themselves by asking what is the aim of their system. If the aim is for only some kids to get good grades, it creates a win-lose situation. And what’s interesting with win-lose is that no matter who “wins,” there must be losers, so we all lose. Dr. Deming’s Point Number 8 is: Drive out fear, create trust, create a climate for innovation. Well, grading drives in fear, creates an environment in which losers are being constantly identified. And even the students with the A+ grades are being told that their value, their importance, is in how they are ranked, not in who they are. If the aim of the system is to create joy in learning, then all students should win.
But what is the alternative to grading?
Today, the grading approach is much like the old industry technique of inspection at the end of the line—product inspection. Dr. Deming warns of the dangers of dependence on inspection.
The alternative is to focus on process. How can we improve the learning process? Information on student progress, understanding wide normal variation, can help improve the process. Students can be very helpful in collecting this data, perhaps by keeping control charts on their own progress. But be aware that anytime data are used to control, motivate, reward, threaten, or judge people, they will be very biased and invalid.
I don’t see any difference between this attitude and the situation that happens literally every semester, which is a student coming to me after final grades are in and saying: “I will lose my scholarship/not graduate/be kicked out if I don’t get a B in your class. So can you change my grade from a C to a B?”
This is the official guidance I got:
There have been many requests from students to instructors and TAs requesting 1) curves applied to the class not apply to them, 2) that the extra credit/bonus work that they did be either removed or not counted in their grades or 3) that their grades simply be adjusted into the D+ and D range so as to receive an Emergency Pass instead of a letter grade. As the instructor of record in a course, it is your prerogative and responsibility to establish a fair and consistent grading system and to abide by it.
We have asked you to be very accommodating to the myriad challenges that the pandemic and distance learning have created for our students and I very much appreciate those efforts. However, these requests for gaming the system create an ethical dilemma between accommodations and academic integrity and equity in grading. I would ask of you to be mindful of the grading system utilized across your class and to uniformly apply the same standards to all students.
It has been brought to my attention that TAs may be experiencing high levels of stress from the messages they are receiving from students. If you have TAs, please reach out to them to help manage the requests they are receiving.
Should the issue of scholarships come up (e.g. maintaining a certain GPA to keep one), you can encourage students to reach out to financial aid and petition for an exception there if they don’t quite meet the requirements. Financial aid does have limited flexibility in addressing these issues.
[For the record, I haven’t been approached by any student asking to change their grade to a D. But if I was, I would say no.]
If I were a teacher/professor this would be the semester I’d say yes to those people and sleep soundly. Absolutely nothing about the last two semesters should be held against anyone. Normally you’re right and people deserve the grades they got… but this is not normal and you need to adjust when reality shifts, especially when it’s temporary and potentially very major.
You never know what happened in a students personal life in any semester, but this semester every single person in every single class you taught had major disruptions happen. The kind that normally happen to less than 10% of students in any given semester. Additionally some of those students had other bad stuff happen as well, and that is multiplicative usually not additive.
Bottom line I think it’s pretty clear you’re focusing on some abstract principle over just trying to figure out what the decent thing to do is, and that’s a pretty good way to fuck up and hurt people who really didn’t need or deserve to be hurt.
You’re doing fine. I’m doing the same thing in my classes. I wouldn’t take these hot takes very seriously, no matter how confidently they are expressed.
I would argue the worst place to get a reality check on this would be other people in the academy. Particularly when it comes to how to treat students like human beings. You guys culture fetishizes a complete lack of accountability for the value for time/money you’re providing to students and are totally out of touch with reality lol.
I’ve never met a group of people less self critical about the value they are providing customers than your industry and it isn’t close… And I worked for cable companies for a couple years.
Ok bud. Please put me back on ignore.
Dude I don’t stamp pieces of paper that are 90% signalling and 10% substance for a living. You guys aren’t special and you aren’t particularly wise. At best you’re narrow subject matter experts who luckboxed into being the right age for tenure to still be a thing.
How about you assholes show some humility and recognize how utterly worthless at teaching most of your peers are. The egos on you guys are WILDLY out of line with both your societal worth and the actual real world accuracy of your usually at least several years out of date expertise.
If you can’t clearly see that academia needs a massive rework you’re a card carrying part of the problem.
So yeah when a pandemic happens pass anyone who demonstrated any effort at all and leave their scholarships the fuck alone. You have the power to not be a narcissistic piece of shit. Use it.
My god. Who hurt you?
I’m not a university professor but I’m close with someone who teaches engineering classes at one. I just talked about this issue with them. Their policy the last couple of semesters was the students are allowed to see their grade and change it to P/F within like 5 days after it posts and the P or F doesn’t factor into your semester or overall GPA. However if you change it to P/F for a major specific class you have to retake the class since it’s required you get an actual grade for your major engineering classes. This seems like a solid plan.
The policy that Spidercrab has to deal with doesn’t seem well thought out. There’s not much difference between a D+ and C-. The student clearly didn’t get the material if they got either grade. To give special treatment to the D+ student and not to the C- student doesn’t seem equitable. They didn’t have a strong opinion about lowering a grade if a student requested but said they likely wouldn’t.
An entire academic career that in the end was a complete waste of time and that’s despite having the kind of career that needs a degree to enter.
Basically nothing I learned in college had any relevance to the real world, and that experience is totally normal. This is despite my working in a market and going to college for econ lol.
I’ve also watched everyone I know interact with academia and it’s just hazing dude. You guys feel awfully comfortable judging people for people who hand wave away any and all criticism because checks notes this is how you trained scribes hundreds of years ago.
College is very expensive, very time consuming, and at the end all you get is the ability to signal that you’re the kind of person who will check boxes and jump through hoops for years. Then you arrive in the real world and find out they didn’t make you even learn anything useful lol. But by then you’ve spent at least five figures and four years of your life on it and you had to have it to even be lower middle class.
It’s a nice racket you guys have over there but morally superior to working at the corporate offices of an mlm it is not. Have fun writing very important bullshit that can’t be replicated because you basically fabricated it for an audience of eleven and fucking your grad students.
But obviously this shit had value because you are good at it because you’re a very special boy/girl who isn’t just a massively privileged most likely white person with time to burn who was addicted to getting gold stars for completing totally arbitrary tasks and then ran good and got tenure.
And I couldn’t possibly have enough lols for you if you’re an adjunct. If you got a doctorate to work twice as hard as me doing work that customers will pay 2-3x what customers pay for my work for 1/4 or less of the money and no future prospects that’s called stockholm syndrome lol.
Well that escalated.
Have you not interacted with B.S. before? This is his thing, confidently being wrong about everything. A professor made him feel small 20 years ago and he’s held onto this inferiority complex ever since.
poster heal thyself
I think I might be coming at this from a slightly different angle from everyone else. I think that in normal times any student should have the ability to request a lower grade than they received and get that grade. So, let’s work out what should happen in normal times first and tackle COVID times later.
Here is how I interpret that:
-The can request a lower letter grade, so if they earn a B, then can request anything from B- to F and I would give it to them .
-What it doesn’t mean is that they can change the course to pass/fail* and get a pass. That’s not an option. If they signed up for the course for normal credit, then they can willingly request a lower letter grade. However, they cannot request that the course become pass/fail and then ask for a pass.
*I don’t know if your university had pass/fail during normal times, but mine did. You could take any course as pass fail if you specified before mid semester. Once you take this option, you can’t change it back. Also any course taken pass/fail could not be used toward a degree requirement (so it would only make sense to take it as an elective) and there were only so many pass/fails you can use.
So, do you have any problem with what I have described above for normal, non-COVID times?
This is a really weird request, and I wouldn’t grant it without at least asking a few questions first.
Yeah, I agree. Of course as I outlined it no one would ever request it, so if someone did, I’d want to make sure they were sane. Also I’d probably have them sign some sort of long release and I might even videotape my discussion with the student just so that there is no confusion about why it is happening.
Like @cassette , I can’t think of a single scenario where a student would request a lower letter grade than what they earned. So I have a very hard time imagining how I’d react to such a request and my instinct is that I don’t agree that a student should have the right to simply request the grade of their choice, even if it’s lower than the one earned.
My university, as far as I know, has the pass/fail structure you describe in normal times. I think students can change to pass/fail mid-term, but I’m not positive. And pass/fail classes don’t count toward a specific degree requirement. All of which I think is good.
I agree this is all extremely hypothetical. But why don’t you agree? Who is harmed by you doing this (other than the student himself, who actually wants it)?
Who is harmed by giving any student who asks for an A an A?