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Thursday, June 24, 2004
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TO: Alliance for A’s
FROM: Janice Sidley (for background, see many earlier UD posts, especially 5/18) SUBJECT: WHEW! For a minute there, I thought this writer for the Carnegie Foundation was agin’ us: These days it seems as if nearly everyone in college is receiving A's, making the Dean's List, or graduating with honors. What's more interesting is that college students in general are spending fewer hours studying, while taking more remedial courses and fewer courses in mathematics, history, English, and foreign languages. Students everywhere report that they average only 10-15 hours of academic work outside of class per week and are able to attain "B" or better grade-point averages. In a study for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, former Harvard Dean Henry Rosovosky found that in 1950 about 15 percent of Harvard students got a B+ or better. Today, it's nearly 70 percent. Last year 50 percent of the grades at Harvard were either A or A-, up from 22 percent in 1966, and 91 percent of seniors graduated with honors. Eighty percent of the grades at the University of Illinois are A's and B's, and 50 percent of Columbia students are on the Dean's List. If today's college students were smarter or better prepared, that would explain the higher grades, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Over the last 30 years, SAT scores of entering students have declined, and fully one-third of entering freshmen are enrolled in at least one remedial reading, writing or mathematics course, the highest enrollment being in math. According to Lynn Steen, a mathematics professor at St. Olaf College, 80 percent of all student work in college math is remedial. If they're not smarter or better prepared, perhaps they're working harder? This doesn't seem to be the case either. The assumption behind most college courses is that students will spend two hours studying for every hour they spend in class, but that is rarely the case. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) reveals that not even 15 percent of students come close to this ideal. I mean, this is the whole round up, ain’t it? Everyone gets A’s even though no one’s working hard and no one’s prepared and no one’s very smart… Sounds like your basic anti-A’s indictment, the sort of negative thinking the Alliance for A’s fights so fiercely against. But then the author concludes in this way: What [really matters is what] kinds of teaching and student engagement promote "deep learning.” Can that learning be measured? What is the evidence? As basic as it sounds, few institutions in America can answer these questions with any certainty, even though learning is ostensibly the core purpose of higher education. …There is also the issue of educational purpose—whether or not students and faculty have common goals. In October 2002, a report, "Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College," asserted that every student, not just those attending elite institutions, should receive a liberal education, not liberal in a political sense but "liberating," i.e., opening the mind. In short, rooting out grade inflation by publicly shaming easy graders would be a band-aid, and nothing more. The larger issue is the intellectual life of a campus. It appears that there is still much work to be done to reclaim the priority of undergraduate teaching and learning on our nation's campuses. I like the way this fizzles out! I call this pleasant rhetorical strategy “going cosmic.” The writer poses the problem precisely (lots of damning statistics), but then instead of zeroing in on actual solutions (solutions that might hurt people‘s feelings, as in that “shaming“ business), speaks soothingly about “deep learning” (which, as in my communication to members of 5/18, I think is best understood in terms of the "spa immersion" experience), “common goals,” “liberation,” and “intellectual life.” I don’t want to sound cynical, but as long as organizations like the Carnegie Foundation produce this sort of writing about grade inflation, the Alliance for A’s can relax. |