20101016.0820

So.

The school at which I work was reviewed by one of its accrediting agencies last year, and assessment was one of the areas in which the school was found wanting. Accordingly, the school scrambled to put measures in place to correct the lack, and as a result, I have been attending a series of assessment meetings during this first semester of being full-time faculty.

(It still sounds really nice to have a full-time gig.)

The idea of evaluation and assessment has, consequently, been much on my mind. It became more so when, as happens from time to time, a student asked: "Do you want us to pass?"

I would like to have quipped at that student "All except you," but I did not; I actually behaved myself, despite the class more or less erupting into a discussion where the students more or less agreed that my reporting them as having earned As would represent me having done my job. The sentiment thus expressed is one commonly voiced, and I think it speaks to students not understanding the purpose that assessment/evaluation should have.

I explained to my students that what it looks like, at least initially, when a great many students show As on their transcripts is that their instructors are not enforcing rigorous standards. In brief, it shows grade inflation, and grade inflation devalues achievement. It makes all involved look bad: when all students get As, the A doesn't matter, and when all students get As, the curriculum obviously cannot be that difficult, so that it looks like the students aren't being challenged and the teachers aren't pushing the students.

"If it's not hard," I tell my students, "then you've got no reason to get better."

Some of them get the point. They understand that I push them so that they will be forced to improve or suffer penalties to their transcripts and finances (I also make a point of repeatedly and, I think, impassionedly calling upon them to come get help with their difficulties with course materials--but only few ever take me up on the matter). But a great many suffer* from the notion that higher education is about credentialing, as Jane Jacobs notes. They do not view college as a place to test old ideas and develop new ones; it is for them instead a means of getting a nifty little piece of paper, and they want to get it for minimum effort.

That desire, to gain most for least effort, is a natural human desire. But it is not one that I am going to reward in my classroom. Doing so would do a disservice to those students who actually want to work at their education--and it is with those students that I am most concerned.

*The term is used deliberately.