Professor Denis Rancourt of the University of Ottawa has taken a radical step in his teaching practices: he tells all the students in his classes that they automatically get an A+. For this, among other infractions of convention, he has been suspended with pay from his teaching position pending institutional review.
Prof. Rancourt’s suspension is the most serious step in a long series of grievances and conflicts with the university dating back to 2005, when, after researching new teaching methods, he first experimented with eliminating letter grades. He also altered course curriculum with student input – although not the approval of the university – an approach he calls “academic squatting.”
A well-published and politically outspoken scientist who revels in hashing out theories on napkins at conferences, Prof. Rancourt’s unconventional teaching style has generated both an ardent following among a core group of students, and the rancour of many of his fellow faculty members, one-third of whom signed a petition of complaint against him in the fall of 2007. In the letter, which he provided, the complaints stem largely from a series of critical e-mails he distributed about their “paternalistic” teaching methods – a criticism he still expresses, with little restraint, today.
Well, I have to say that what he proposes actually sounds cool and interesting, and that I’d have to see a lot more information before I could say whether the suspension was warranted or not. Grades are a pain and sometimes an obstacle to real learning, and sometimes they are a crutch — a whip we use to motivate when we can’t get the students excited about a subject. I think that one of the things tenured professors ought to be able to do is experiment and innovate in their teaching.
However, there are two potential problems. One is that sometimes innovation doesn’t work — if you’re going to experiment, sometimes experiments fail. The article doesn’t say whether there was some objective assessment of the outcomes of his classes. Do his students actually come out the other side of the term with him with more knowledge and understanding? If they do, bugger the objections, let him keep at it. If they don’t, and the university is actually complaining that he is ignoring the assessment of his experiments to keep doing stuff that doesn’t work, then goodbye Professor Rancourt.
The other problem is that a university education is not the product of a single instructor, and we must respect the whole of the curriculum and work together with our colleagues. I rely on other faculty to teach our students cell biology and molecular biology, for instance; if students showed up in my upper level elective courses with the expectation that they’d learn some developmental biology, and I discovered that they knew nothing about those foundational subjects because their instructors had decided that they’d teach philosophy and political science instead (something I know they wouldn’t do), I would be screwed, and more than a little upset. I’d like to know how far he deviated from the course curricula…a little flexibility is good, but if he was ignoring the needs of the whole discipline’s program, then that’s also reason to say bye-bye to Rancourt.
Rancour or Rancourt? Or was that deliberate?
I’m of a couple of different minds about this.
On the one hand, as a student finishing up an undergraduate engineering major, I’ve seen the actual academic content and spirit of learning completely eclipsed by obsession with making the grade in several classes. In a badly-assessed class, I’ve betimes found it actually detrimental to my grades to make an honest attempt to learn the material, as opposed to committing large segments of text to short-term memory, to be regurgitated for a test and forgotten immediately after. I think removing the worry of grades from the equation is a great way to combat this.
On the other hand, as a student applying to graduate schools, where my GPA will be scrutinized and compared to that of other applicants as a significant determining factor of my acceptance… free A+’s tend to muck up the works. The rubber-stamp grades will be given the same weight on one student’s transcript as the hard-won B for similar material on that of another.
So, it’s an interesting concept, but not one the current academic system is very well-equipped to deal with, perhaps.
Sounds like he need to go teach at the Evergreen state college here in WA. They operate on a no grades system, your learning is pretty much quantified at the end of the quarter based on a conference with you and your professor.
“Grades are a pain and sometimes an obstacle to real learning, and sometimes they are a crutch — a whip we use to motivate when we can’t get the students excited about a subject.”
No kidding! I am currently enrolled in a teacher certification program at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, and in a class on teaching writing, this article was handed out, “From Degrading to De-Grading,” by Alfie Kohn. http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
It certainly struck a chord with me.
I’ve been through two curricula where something like this was done, and in both cases I think it worked well.
The first was a high school where the modern languages program didn’t issue grades. We had projects and assignments and all that, and the teacher did attack them with a red pen, but points were not scored. At the end of the year, the teacher would decide whether each student was ready to progress to the next level the following year or if they should wait a year. Classes were done immersion style, so I think the theory was that it should be fairly easy to keep track of who understood what was going on and who didn’t.
The second was a humanities class I took in college which covered an emotionally-charged subject. The professor let us know he would be issuing everyone a A as long as they showed up for class and did the assignments. His rationale was that he didn’t want concerns about his objectivity being compromised by his personal opinions to discourage students from being honest in their papers and whatnot. He also wanted us to be free to take risks instead of doing the kind of milquetoast, swallow-and-regurgitate work that he associated with letter grades.
He seemed to achieve both those goals well, and it definitely was a decision that was made in context. To the best of my knowledge, all his other courses were graded normally and he certainly wasn’t afraid to pass out a poor grade in his lower-level classes.
Yeah, I have the same dilemma about grading.
on the one hand, I’ve learned more from some of the classes in which I’ve gotten B’s because they were truly challenging, than in those in which I’ve gotten A’s while sleeping through the lectures (or sometimes not even showing up at all). Plus, I’ve known a fair share of students who were going out of their way to get the “easy” courses, thus getting on the honor roll without learning anything.
On the other hand, how else do you quantify how well a student has learned the material? It’s not like it would be reasonable to expect professors to write personal recommendations for each student in each class, the way it’s done with jobs. if we got rid of grades, we’d need a mentor system from the very beginning, so that students could be fairly assessed on an individual basis that really reflects what they’ve learned etc. and I don’t think the public education system has that kind of money
it’s a tough problem to solve, indeed.
Oh, one I forgot: In the same high school that didn’t grade the language classes, we had an “open study Wednesdays” thing going on. There was no class on Wednesday, and we were supposed to be free to study whatever we wanted. We were assigned an advisor who would help facilitate – mentor, make suggestions, help arrange lab time, whatever – but the advisor didn’t issue grades, either.
That, I think, was an unmitigated failure. Most of us really didn’t know what to do with ourselves without an established curriculum and assignments being handed to us by others.
At the college level, it’s pretty confusing to students that have had 12+ years of equating learning with grades to move to something else. That’s my only worry about Rancourt’s actions, because otherwise grades are just completely detrimental to learning. If there’s a concern that a student isn’t willing to do something that they don’t find interesting, then a better solution than giving incentives that only encourage learning what’s going to be on the test is to find comparisons between subjects and use what the student is already interested in to create connections.
I admit that this would require a massive shift in education from the very beginning, but the change to a system that encourages with meaningful concepts (as opposed to “B”) is worth the effort.
For the little it’s worth, here are the guy’s online student ratings. A mixed bag. He used to teach physics, but seems to have talked a lot about other stuff, and recently he seems to have started teaching a course in “Activism.” I infer that he gets very argumentative. He may well have gone too far at some point.
@ Bastian #7: That’s something I’m curious about to see if it would work or not. It sounds like a bit of Montessori schooling was stuffed into your Wednesday afternoon, which I think would definitely confuse anyone not used to taking control of their own studies. Again, it’s likely a good idea that only works if the students are used to it.
On the other hand, that’s pretty much exactly what happens to students a few years later when they graduate and get jobs, and most people seem to make the adjustment OK.
I remember back when I was in college* there was a concept called “pass fail.” You took a course and, if you showed up at most of the lectures, wrote the required papers, and properly regurgitated data on exams, and you passed. If you neglected to do these things, you failed. I even took a class or two under this system.
By the time I was in graduate school** this system had gone away for all but inconsequential electives (art history, music appreciation, bowling for credit, etc.). Pass fail screwed up GPAs and people tended to coast in those courses, doing the absolute minimum required to pass.
There are problems with grades. I once*** got the only A that one professor gave that entire semester. He bragged that he only gave one A (and sometimes didn’t, if nobody met his exacting requirements) but this A was as meaningful as the A that half the people in the Geography for Non-Majors (aka Rocks for Jocks) course got.
I can understand the professor giving everyone an A+ if grades are meaningless to him. I can also see the other faculty and the administration objecting, since grades are meaningful to them. Without knowing more about the situation, I don’t really have an opinion on this one.
*Shortly after Columbus landed in Hispanola or Willy the Conk invaded England, I forget which.
**I remember hearing rumors of the Huns sacking Rome, so I can probably pinpoint this time more closely.
***My roommate was dating some French girl, either Joan of Arc or Madam de Pamadour, I misremember which.
some of the reviews remind me of the reviews my favorite English teacher in College got… some people were enthusiastic because they learned bunches and were involved, while a lot of others where whining because the course was “too hard”, i.e. wasn’t formulaic enough, and he insisted that you figure shit out yourself rather than spoon-feeding you the solutions.
So, on second thought I’d very much support less focus on grades (look at what a mess NCLB made), and more focus on debate, participation and individual learning. first of all though, we’d need to completely revamp funding for public education though. not only is there not enough, it’s extremely inequitable from school to school and district to district, and also the funding seems to go to all the wrong places (queue anecdotes about closing libraries to fund the new stadium etc.)
I know exactly how this feels. A while back a student handed me a final paper which was mostly incoherent, completely misrepresented the views of those she was discussing, contained about 10 major grammatical errors per page (54 major errors in a 5 page paper), and several gross errors in citation (including at least one completely plagiarized sentence). When I failed her on the assignment, she threatened to appeal the grade, saying she had gotten an A in English comp and creative writing, and she thought she was an excellent writer. The only thing I could conclude was that her English teachers must have been handing out A’s like candy.
(Funnyguts #10): I think it’s something that would work better if kids were used to that kind of unstructured time rather than having it suddenly dropped into their lives at grade 10.
On the other hand, it worked out great for some of us. I ended up using the time to lay down the intellectual foundations of what would eventually become my career.
Here’s an interesting variation on that theme. Over 40 years ago I took an entomology course at a large university. The professor had the practice of handing out copies of the next exam one week before the exam would be given. These advance copies were the exact test you would take a week later. All tests were of the same type: a mixture of multiple choice, true/false, short answer, fill in the blank, and a couple of short essay questions. About 15 pages long. He strongly encouraged that students get together in study groups to work out the correct answers on these advance copies. On the actual test day you got the very same test, and filled in your answers under conventional test taking conditions. Every time, after he had graded the tests; he would laugh as he put a summary of the results on the board – nothing unusual, just the normal distribution of As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and even Fs.
There’s actually a lot more to the story which goes back several years. Here’s a link to a recent newspaper article, and here’s a letter from a student disagreeing with parts of the article.
As a college teacher myself, I’m inclined to agree with the student if only because it matches the earlier information about the previous controversies with Professor Rancourt.
Bix
how the fuck do you get an F on what’s basically a take-home test…!?
As a current University of Ottawa student I have been hearing snippets of supposed bad behaviour by Professor Rancourt for the last year or so, and had a chat about this latest incident with some friends over brunch just this afternoon. As I don’t know the full story, from both side of the debate, it’s hard for me to know what to think about this situation.
On the one hand, I wholeheartedly agree with Rancourt’s assertion that a graded system is not always the best way to teach students to think autonomously and to foster a creative, independent mind. I have taken many University level courses, a few here at U Ottawa, and at this University in particular I can fairly say that at least 90% of the professors I have encountered are very ineffective teachers. I’m often left feeling that those 3 hours I just spent in class were a waste of my time, that would have been better spent reading a text book and just teaching the content to myself. Many of them are very dis-passionate and don’t seem to give a second thought as to how best to get their content across, but instead just mutter on for hours on end without following a logical train of thought, and without putting their topic into a useful context. When you do come across a passionate teacher, however, who steps out of the comfort zone of ‘just spew out the required information with no extra effort’ that many seem to be stuck in, it can be a very enriching experience. So yes, we absolutely need more professors who are passionate about engaging students and really showing them how awesome, and not boring, science is. For this reason it is important to allow professors to exercise their individual teaching styles without dictating to them too strictly how they are to conduct their course.
On the other hand, PZ is absolutely right that faculty members need to be able to work well together, and to support each other, in designing and implementing a cohesive academic program. If Rancourt has drastically changed the course content so that students aren’t adequately prepared for future courses, then that should be unacceptable. The level of the classroom is not the place to be implementing course content reform – take that to your departmental meeting and discuss it with your colleagues. As for giving every student an A+, the same logic applies. It sounds good in theory, because a graded system is far from perfect; but again, grading is a deep-rooted part of the system. I would agree that the efficacy of a graded system is an important issue that should be debated… but communications between colleagues, not in the classroom, is the place to do it.
I too find it frustrating that nothing is mentioned regarding whether or not Rancourt’s teaching methods result in enhanced student learning, and if he is adequately preparing students for future courses and careers. I would think this should be an important point in deciding whether he should be permanently fired. I think he does have quite the positive following and seems well respected by many students, so it’s really hard to say whether he’s a negligent teacher or not.
Jadehawk #18 – Surprisingly easily, on some take-home exams. Though the one you’re responding to probably isn’t the kind I’m thinking of (true-false questions are, well… easy to look up), my classmates and I live in fear of take-homes in some classes. Take-home tests give the professor an excuse to really pull out all the stops and give a problem that takes three hours to do. Assuming you know how to do it. <_>
The best idea I have ever seen was a History professor who used statistical scoring to take the bite out of grading. What he did was to create extremely difficult tests and then place everyone on a bell-curve when scoring. I think I remember he skewed the mean and median at 80 points out of 100 and the size of each standard deviation from the mean determined the amount of points added or subtracted from a person’s score. The combination of his testing method (which was brutal) and his scoring method ensured that learning the subject would net you a high score, while taking it easy in class would merely get you an OK score. He even used the test scores to review and improve his tests, since he could empirically verify their effectiveness. As a side effect, he had a concrete justification for his punisment of cheaters, since they were literally stealing the scores from harder workers.
In the absence of a no-grade system (which works only in some circumstances), I would like to see students judged by their merits in an empirical scoring system like the one in that History class.
Some interesting details from the newspaper article linked above by Bix Lee (read it all):
I have to say that in my view, teaching about social activism and “understanding power and its contexts.” in introductory and nonmajors science courses is not OK. He wasn’t doing his job. “A”s to everybody in an upper-level seminar? So what?
Ha. I had a part-time colleague some years ago who had perfected the art of the “A as hush money” gimmick. Students learned not to complain if he didn’t show up for class because he was going to give them all good grades no matter what. He gave assignments that included such things as “mental health” days (that is, “don’t come to the next class session; we all need some time off”). When the math dean sat in one day because faculty evaluations were due, a student leaned over and asked the dean’s identity. When quietly informed that the dean was performing a pre-arranged teacher evaluation, the student whispered back, “Oh, so that’s why he showed up today and actually has a lesson plan for a change.” The dean made another visit to the class on a later date without warning the instructor and got to witness a flustered 30-minute-late arrival. (We think he got a phone call from a co-conspiring student that the dean had returned.)
The dean declined to assign any classes to the instructor when the next term arrived, effectively dismissing him from our adjunct ranks, and the teacher filed a grievance. And lost. The next thing we heard was that he had been hired … as the math dean at a local pay-for-play diploma mill. (But that lasted only a few years.)
#22:
Exactly! As a faculty member who regularly teaches a 400 level (senior/grad) seminar which generally has about a dozen students, it is very difficult for me to justify giving any letter grade at all. Students who take such courses are usually highly motivated and very well prepared, and it is difficult if not impossible to say that one person’s work is more “brilliant” or “original” than another’s. Generally, I wind up giving pretty close to all As (except to those extremely rare people who don’t turn in all the required assignments.
In other words, there is a huge difference between large introductory courses and senior/grad seminars. Letter grades make sense in the former, but not in the latter.
@ Sven DiMilo #22: Why wouldn’t understanding how science and politics intersect be meaningful? I haven’t seen specifics about his class, but analyzing how science is part of society (or how it isn’t) is a worthwhile subject and could get nonmajors interested in the sciences enough to not flee from basic knowledge like so many people do.
funnyguts, that may be so, but if an introductory course in physics deals more with politics than science, then the students won’t have the necessary knowledge to do well in any further classes, as PZ mentioned. One lesson on science as part of society is ok, but more just takes away from the actual physics that are supposed to be taught. for anything more, there should be a “philosophy of science” class, or something like that.
I hove nothing against a course that explores “science and society”–half of the universities in the country have a course with that or similar title. The kind of stuff they cover in such courses is very similar to your suggestions. From what I understand, that’s not what this guy was doing. I could be wrong.
An important part of the problem here (and in computer benchmarks, car performance testing etc) is that devising a meaningful test is hard, administering said test is hard and time consuming, and marking/evaluating the results is very hard and after all that getting anyone to pay attention to what it reveals is almost impossible.
Thus you get multiple choice tests being used to decide whether kids get offered places in grammar schools and teachers get pay raises. Stupidly thought out tick-box charts used to decide what computer is ‘best’ and gets the multi-million dollar order. 0-60 times used to assert the primacy of a car’s performance.
Not testing is stupid (and unscientific). Bad testing is worse.
I teach at technical college and I would love to have a system of giving everyone an A. However it would never work. The students would never do anything.
But it would eliminate the hassle professors at smaller colleges face of kissing ass and kicking ass at the same tim which is the problem of retaining students (tuition payers) versus getting them to actually do something which many at technical college are not inclined to do. So it would be great to just give everybody an A …teach the class…the college gets paid..everybody is happy. But alas the students would learn little …society gets nothing. So I am forced to be a paternalistic socialist like Rancourt suggests and prod those kids to learn something.
And truth be told many people in this society have a dire need to be told what to do. The students I believe actually want me to be paternalistic. They would not know what to do if they actually had a little freedom to think for themselves. Believe me…I have tried it..and they will slam you on your reveiews as being disorganized if you allow a lot of class freedom.
I don’t feel grades are a good measure of what a person knows.
I’m a Computer Science Engineering major and I have seen people in 3000 and 4000 level courses that still don’t understand basic ideas in computer science.
Hell, there is a 1000 level course in Java Programming Language that one MUST get an A or B in to take ANY 2000+ level CSE course and yet I’ve seen people in higher level courses that don’t know Java at all.
@ BT #29:
“…many people in this society have a dire need to be told what to do. The students I believe actually want me to be paternalistic. They would not know what to do if they actually had a little freedom to think for themselves.”
To me this is an indictment of the entire school system as it is now, and the primary reason that a full restructure is needed.
(Just to be clear, I’m not blaming any single teacher, but the way the system is set up.)
I’m reminded of a case at Dartmouth College some years back where the parents of a student complained their kid had received a lower grade (a c I think)and demanded the dean change it because of the amount of money they had spent over tuition. It was a big issue locally, and the tenured prof wound up leaving rather than change the grade.
We talked about this a lot at Hopkins. Yes, too much attention to grades can distract from learning and yes profs need to have some flexibility in the curricula they teach. But in the end, if your GPA is going to be the guiding measure of how you perform overall and its critical to continuing your education later, then there has to be some cohesiveness in the grading process in that particular institution. A GPA of 4.0 should say “I busted my ass and didn’t drink nearly enough beer”, not “my parents bitched” or “the prof couldn’t be bothered”.
Holy Unclear-On-The-Concept, Batman! My parents would have disowned me if I’d tried to negotiate a higher grade on the grounds of how much money we’d paid in tuition. (Coincidentally, my dad is a Dartmouth alum.)
I had a friend who used to teach. On the first, day he’d tell the class that they a 0% for the semester so far which was an F and would fail if they did not improve.
Needless to say, his administration was not amused and he no longer teaches.
Back in the good old days [late 60’s-early 70’s Berkeley], there was one prof in the Education Dept. that gave all A’s in an intro class [Intro to Teaching Methodology IIRC]. He was almost universally liked from student evaluations and had tenure while he was mostly tolerated by the faculty. Incidentally, he used one book that students raved about – Summerhill, by AS Neill – which might have some lessons about self-directed students The book ws bout a boarding school with the same name in England that has entirely self-directed education from the age of 6 through high school age [American]. It seemed to work well and virtually all of the students eventually became highly motivated learners after mostly playing for a few years. Maybe self-directed learning needs a much earlier start if it is to be successful. Neill certainly was unconventional and was known to have said that he would consider himself a failure if one of his students grew up to be Prime Minister.
I understand that good tests (ie., essay-style tests) are hard to make, hard to grade, and hard to administer. I also understand that most people think that multiple-choice tests should more descriptively be named “multiple guess” tests, too.
The problem is, most teachers of any level just use “it’s too hard” as an excuse for not doing better. Multiple-choice tests can actually be made easier to administer, easier to grade, and more difficult to master than essay-style tests, and with an appropriate piece of software can be made to have an empirical basis. The trouble is, the academic community tends to sit on its hands and quote tradition as its reason for lack of innovation – so these improvements never make it into the mainstream.
Whether this professor was doing something wrong or not remains to be seen, but I’m sure he was at least interested in breaking with tradition to try something that could possibly be better, and the hubris the general academic community holds for its traditions was most likely the reason this was scrutinized so carefully. Or politics, which is the other vice of academia. I’d like to know more about this class and his supposed lack of a grading method before I form an opinion about it.
Ken Blanchard was teaching a graduate course at Columbia when he gave the students a copy of the final exam on the first day of class. His point was that the material he wanted the students to grasp was clear. Any other way of teaching is just “gottcha”; a test of quantity of retained material rather than quality. Needless to say he was censured by the academic senate. I guess their philosophy is “We can’t tell people what we want them to learn, it’s up to them to guess.” More likely the instructors do not have a clear concept of what they want their students to get and wait until the last minute to decide.
I rely on other faculty to teach our students cell biology and molecular biology, for instance; if students showed up in my upper level elective courses with the expectation that they’d learn some developmental biology, and I discovered that they knew nothing about those foundational subjects because their instructors had decided that they’d teach philosophy and political science instead (something I know they wouldn’t do), I would be screwed, and more than a little upset.
Never take up a teaching position at the University of Central Florida then. My wife and I both went there for four years, and it wasn’t uncommon in upper level courses for the professor to ask who our taught the lower-level prereqs. This was less common in my engineering classes than it was in broader subjects like physics, chemistry, and biology. My wife was offered tutoring in an upper-level course by the professor when she told her the name one of her previous biology teachers, and I took over tutoring her in physics after attending one of her physics lectures. Previous to me attending that lecture, I’d thought she was just very bad at physics. She wasn’t, she was doing exactly as the instructor had told her.
Of course, the real problem we ran into at that school is that when asked who our teacher for a given subject was, the most likely answer was “I don’t know, some grad-student / substitute hired permanently / etc.”
Well, that and they had a course that required me to push greased freshmen up a hill to learn what “real engineers do.”
Real engineers, as it turns out, drop that class and find somewhere more worthy of their time.
“suspended with pay” – a dream come true
The best single site for background and updates on my case is this one:
http://academicfreedom.ca/
Please take 10 minutes to review the site.
An obsession with assessment is definitely detrimental to learning. On my course, reams of easy assignments are used to force the mostly uninterested students into doing work throughout the course, and it’s a waste of time for the better students, who could be independently challenging themselves instead. They should be encouraging students to use their initiative.
Assessment, though, comes easier to some subjects than others. I’m studying maths, and in maths, at least at undergrad, you can test people well with a thoughtful exam paper, which can be marked comparatively objectively. Still, a good fraction of the course material never makes it onto an exam paper, so there’s an element of luck in which fraction is missed.
On the other hand, I’m not sure if the near total multiple choice assessment employed by my university for biomedical sciences can accurately assess someone’s understanding or encourage intellectually fruitful behaviour.
There are 2 things a university does… teach and accredit. This guy wasn’t doing the second part. And he wasn’t experimenting with teaching methods if he wasn’t measuring the outcome.
It’s unfortunate that so many students believe that the degree is what they want, not the education, but this does give the instructor a motivator for learning the less fun bits about any subject. He was throwing that away. But maybe he just couldn’t get around to marking.
Feyerabend (a well-known philosopher) at Berkeley always gave everyone in his classes an A. I believe he didn’t have much respect for the educational institutuon.
Thank you, Professor Rancourt, for the link. I spent some time wandering around the website. From what I could tell the University of Ottawa wants you to teach physics and you want to teach other stuff. You also appear to have some rather strange ideas about what motivates college students.
Most students come to a university to get qualifications for a job. For them, university will teach them how to be accountants or architects or physicists. But the important thing is the diploma. The piece of paper that tells an employer, “I can successfully sit through four years of inconsequential drivel and mindnumbing bullshit, therefore I’m capable of working for you.”
Right now my company is looking for an entry-level supervisor. The requirements include a bachelor’s degree. Any bachelor’s degree. The leading candidates are a man with a BS in psychology and a woman with a BA in history. The job they’re competing for has nothing to do with history and very little to do with psychology.
I’m an economist. If I were teaching an upper level economics course, I would expect my students to have a decent grasp of what money is.* I should not have to teach them this because some other professor (or TA) couldn’t be bothered but instead taught them about the beliefs of von Mises or Rodbertus instead.
Most undergraduates don’t know enough to know what they don’t know about a subject. They need to have a firm grasp of the basics. I won’t go into the aspect of many students’ immaturity other than to point out many students drop out or flunk out because of lack of motivation.
Professor, while I think your teaching style would benefit intelligent, motivated students, the less talented kids away from home for the first time would fall out even faster than they already do.
*”Money is a matter of functions four, a medium, a measure, a standard, a store.” That is, money functions as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a standard of deferred payment, and a store of value.
Wes #14 –
I did a masters in creative writing and was ridiculed by the other students for being ‘over the top’ when I admitted turning out about 10 000 words of fiction a week. When I asked what they felt the course was for if not to practise and improve writing I was told it was fro getting published. The disconnect was frightening and yes, it was also a course where a significant part of your grade was lost if you didn’t pander to the tutor’s opinions.
I’m glad I did the MA – it was a learning experience, definitely, just not the kind the tutors intended.
Re #37
Much of the discussion about tests here seems to be based on the idea that what you are testing is “what the student knows”. However, even in my introductory astronomy class that is only one component of what I’m trying to teach, so it is only one component of what I test for. I also want to see how they think about problems for which they haven’t seen the details before and aren’t going to have time to go to Wikipedia and look up the answers.
For that reason, I don’t give out my test questions beforehand, though I do give lots of examples and homework assignments that ask them to answer similar kinds of questions. In an intro course it is hard enough to come up with questions that can’t be answered with a quick internet search, and that doesn’t give me any sense of whether they have learned how to think scientifically.
Has anyone else read ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’?
The author covers the concept of no-grade teaching very effectively.
monkeytrumpets! just as my faculty bumps up the pass/fail bar to 60% from 50% last year (“all the other schools are doing it”), i see this!
it would be wonderful if they got rid of grades. i know far too many people whose self-worth revolves around them, and would take a major in basket-weaving if it got them that coveted 90+ average to get into med school. i think far more promising than the concept of no grades is the prospect of requiring professors and tas and lecturers actually INTERACTING with the students, rather than standing at the front and pretending as though they are the ones paying us exhorbitant amounts of money to be there (they are very cat-like in that sense). can you imagine. the faculty might even start valuing the ability to speak and communicate goodly in english as a job requirement.
It’s about mastery. The “grade” should be a fair assessment of the student’s mastery. The historical average-based system is deeply flawed and pedagogically unsound.
At the end of the course, the “grade” that the student sees should be a reflection of the student’s mastery of the material. IOW, what does the student know and what is the student able to do? A summative assessment that determines mastery is most meaningful moving forward, not an average that reflects a kid’s goofing off or meltdown at the beginning of the term.
IIRC the entire freshman class at MIT is pass-fail. No letter or percent grades for the first year. The reason is: The work is hard enough as it is without having to worry about what the actual grade is. The students are already highly motivated (they got in to MIT.)
-DU-
I once heard that Richard Lewontin (at Harvard) gave every student an A- in his classes and told students the first day that this would be the case and that there was no use arguing about it. I just tried to confirm this via the internet and the only thing that I could easily find is this: http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/features/98/04/23/GRADE_INFLATION.html which says that in his biological statistics course students either get a B+ for doing the work or an F for not doing the work.
‘Tis Himself:
When I was an undergrad, the administration implemented freshman pass/fail for all courses. There was a lot of verbiage about allowing the students some low-pressure time to explore, but we were pretty sure it was really done in the hope of lowering the suicide rate.
The rules in Richard Lewontin’s graduate stats class: Hand in every homework assignment completed as best you can = B. Anything else = F.
I am curious if anyone is aware of an address where one can send letters regarding this? I haven’t been motivated enough by anything I’ve read on this blog thus far to actually write a letter, but grading in the college system has been a long time disgust of mine.
Back in college so many of my friends took the easiest courses in an effort to earn the highest gpa; avoiding challenges at all costs. I took the road less traveled, and took some of the most challenging courses my major offered, and you know what, these are the only courses I performed exceptionally in. The disparity in grading amongst different professors in the same university and between different universities makes this all that much worse when so many internships and graduate programs have GPA requirements. To me, this seems to funnel many students towards the path of least resistance. (Just think how many twenty-somethings you know that can barely make a decision on their own?)
I may not agree with essentially eliminating grading, but every student in this professor’s class got what they wanted out of the class (or would have had he not been sacked). I think the current system is failing college students, and I can’t help but applaud him for at least trying something new.
I’m usually generous in giving B’s (B+ to B-), but I only give an A to the top student, and that’s only if there’s a big enough gap between #1 and #2. (Or at least I used to, we use a standard curve in the Uni I just moved to.) I almost never give an A+. The idea is to get rid of or reduce the extreme fear of failing that many students seem to have, while keeping the top few students competitive. I teach accounting in B-school though, which is a bit different from teaching Physics. And I’m in Asia, where grade inflation is a lot less.
‘Tis Himself @ #44:
I agree that “any bachelor’s degree” is not a great predictor of skill or talent, though it can show how driven you are, depending on how recent it is.
For instance, I work in the Data Processing department of a county-level government agency. I have two B.Sc. degrees, in Comp Sci and Comp Engineering, so I have something of a ‘rock star’ reputation (which is, admittedly, undeserved, but they seem to take my denial as confirmation). Two of the three best programmers in the department that I’ve had the opportunity to work with have B.Sc. degrees in Information Technology, and the third has a business degree. The one with the most raw talent, in my opinion, has no degree at all, and had never written a line of code before he started working here.
The worst programmers, generally, have business degrees, with the one noted exception. Then again, they were also the ones working with COBOL back in the 1980s, and are basically waiting for retirement. No drive whatsoever.
Maybe I’ve always been so “smart” to other people (and made poor grades) because I never measured myself by them.
Hmm…I think it’s about time I wrote that software I was talking about earlier. I need something to do in my spare time that does not involve what I do at work. Something that emphasizes the idea of measuring learning rather than grading and finding a way of standardizing that measurement. I just wonder how I could apply this to writing projects…
Just so you know, it’s going to be on SourceForge as the name Simple Score. If you were wondering.
I am a big fan of pass/fail grading, provided the pass level is set high enough, and it can be clearly defined what a pass means.
I graduated near the bottom of my class in 1987. Not at the bottom, happily, but it’s fair to say I didn’t have far to go.
By chance, I happen to work with some people who were in my my class 22 years ago. The nature of our work occasionally presents problems directly related to our BScs.
Every time this happens, I get “wow, you still remember this stuff?”
That’s because while they were practicing memorize and regurgitate to get an A on the regurgitation test, I was busy learning it, but only getting a C or a D because I couldn’t spew the word-for-word answer. Now, almost a quarter century later, they have to come to me for the answer.
So who really passed those courses? The A student who can’t do the work, or the D student who can? That’s a huge issue with letter grading.
Professor Eidelheit,
I would have thought you’d be dead by now, shot by some student who busted his balls in your Economic Decision-making Theories class but got a B because you decided that another guy in Advanced Game Theory deserved your sole A. Did I ever tell you that you were not only a bullying asshole but also a lousy teacher?
I certainly don’t think he should be dismissed just because of his grading policy. That would make the whole idea of tenure a travesty.
#59: I don’t think that’s what he was saying. And besides which, Accounting is the sort of degree path where people are much more afraid of failing than they are of not getting an A.
#59: Heh, I get the point. But I’m in Asia, where A’s are rarer, so a B+ is probably worth more than it would be in many U.S. schools.
Mastery of material and the ability to apply mastered material are two different things. Grades measure the first one- the other we’re still working on.
I have a very ideologically verbose history professor. (I’m a chem major, but if it interests me I’ll check it out). He is an antivaxxer, 9/11 truther, fluoridation nut. He’s also one of the first history profs I’ve ever had to get me to realize what history is about. He teaches the material (though he gives us a great deal of autonomy to explore different ideas) and occasionally segues into craziness. We all get an A for showing up, participating in class discussions, and turning in our papers on time. The occasional tirade and loose grading scheme does not change the fact that I get what I want while I’m there: an education.
Meanwhile, my chem classes don’t interest me half as much. I love chemistry, I get good grades, but more often that not I fail to see what the prof. is teaching me that I couldn’t have learned on my own. It’s the class, not the material, that fails to captivate me. The exception to this is labs. There, I seem to luck out on my professors. You would think it’s easier there to work by rote and be a technician, but somehow, I learn more from lab lectures than class lectures.
Some people may have the wrong idea about my post #59.
Years ago, before many of you were even gleams in your daddy’s eye, I had an economics professor named Eidelheit. He bragged that he only gave out one A per semester. One semester I was the student who got his A. It helped that not only did I work extremely hard for his class but also I sailed. Since he was an avid sailor he arranged that I sail with him on weekends. So I got the A not only for my hard work and knowledge but also because I was a brown noser.
I have never hated anyone as much as him. He was an arrogant bully who gloried in being a tyrant over his students. Also, he was a very poor teacher who knew his subjects but couldn’t deliver this knowledge is a clear, useful way to students.
He died a couple of years ago. If I knew where he was buried I’d drink a beer in his honor and then share it with him after filtering through my kidneys.
My wife went to Alverno College in Milwaukee. At least when she went there (graduated in late 1990’s) they didn’t have grades or tests. At all. And I can tell you without a doubt that my wife’s BS was more rigorous than most master’s programs.
Instead of tests and grades, their entire curriculum was set up to teach the students particular skills. Each class fulfilled certain elements of a skills matrix, with mastery of the skill being the criterion for success. She did oodles of writing, problem-solving, and presentations.
That sort of assessment method is better than testing at giving students the tools they need to succeed in business (and life). It also ensures that each class fits within the larger curriculum.
#64: Well now I feel all defensive and stuff. Grading is fairly objective in my field though, because tests and other assessments are mostly MC or numerical problems. Hopefully no one out there wants to piss on my grave :)
Caltech implemented pass/fail grading years ago for its entering freshmen students. It was supposed to reduce the emotional shock of suddenly discovering you’re average in a class composed almost entirely of high school valedictorians. (As a transfer student, I did not get the benefit of that accommodation and plowed right into a couple of C’s in my math classes. Ow!)
As if that makes a scientist some sort of weird maverick! I work with a few scientists. Far as I can tell, you are all like this.
I wonder if he’s had a psychiatric evaluation. His behavior seems to have suddenly turned bizarre, and apparently he has a persecution complex involving the Israelis and the military-industrial complex (according to wikipedia). This doesn’t seem just eccentric.
When I was a graduate student I took a few courses that were guaranteed A’s. One of them was taught by someone who later won the Turing Award. I did somehow manage to get an A- in the other one though. :(
Last I heard both were still employed.
I think this is the crux of the matter we can actually productively comment on. And I think this particular idea is absolutely right: What most academic institutions seem to be doing these days is produce a host of graduates who are good at regurgitating disconnected facts, giving “the right answer”, and generally saying what their teachers want to hear. (Of course I’m oversimplifying, but I think the situation is sufficiently serious to warrant a rather broad brush.)
And as for the “automatic A” idea: This is something that Benjamin Zander talks about in his The Art of Possibility, where he calls it “giving an A”. Of course that’s a different situation, where he can deal with more or less master-class students. But still, the idea is certainly worth taking seriously.
Vestrati @54
See website http://academicfreedom.ca/
“Letters stating an opinion on Denis Rancourt’s case should be sent to: [email protected] This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ; these will be forwarded to Allan Rock, President of the University of Ottawa, and posted on this website.”
A “me too” to everyone who has made the experience that less worry about grades leads to better class time and more learning.
One of my school teachers (in German, i.e. native language) in the final two years straight out told the class that everyone would get a passing grade if they did not get on his nerves. “Not getting on his nerves” included sleeping, doing homework, or being absent, but not reading large-format newspapers or playing cards.
Best mandatory class I ever had. We did stuff way beyond the curriculum, because everyone who was active in class was so enthusiastic about it. We were also the only class in the year that continued to have lessons in the six weeks between getting final grades and nominal end of the year.
Second best class, the teacher said that a passing grade would be given to everyone not skipping class (unless officially sick). Worked wonders for morals, too.
(School and most of uni, with very few exceptions, was all about passing grades. I was upper quintile in both classes mentioned, with the rough equivalent of a B-.)
#58
I completely agree with you about the grading system. I went to a prestigious high school that decided to change the grading system from a 10 point scale, to a 7 point scale (93 and up was an A, 86 and up was a B). I came out of that school with a B minus average. I also never studied for the SAT. I just woke up one day and took it, and got a 1300. Yet, I was rejected from half the colleges I applied to, because my GPA and SAT scores weren’t shiny enough (I had a wide variety of extra-curriculars, though).
In college, I made some stupid decisions my freshman year, and failed a course. Retook it, and failed it again. I ended up with a B average when I graduated. Yet, if you actually look at the classes I took, they varied wildly, and probably showed a higher interest in learning then the people who were just grade mongering or just wanting some basic business degree. And now that I’m in the real world, I’m probably still smarter, and have retained more of that information then my fellows. Yet, many of them have gotten opportunities that I haven’t gotten, simply because programs look at my B average, and think that I’m not good enough.
Which, that’s something else I have an issue with. A B average is a DAMN good average. When did we get to this point where if you can’t be the absolute super best, then there’s no point in you doing anything at all?
The all-or-nothing final exam system that I was subjected to is looking better and better – problems and essays to test mastery of the subject, no multiple choice, and you have the whole year to recover from the same culture shock that Zeno mentioned in his post at #67.
Original article: Prof. Rancourt’s unconventional teaching style has generated both an ardent following among a core group of students, and the rancor of many of his fellow faculty members…
Boy, does this take me back. When I was in my first year of college, we had a teacher who similarly had a fervid following among the students. One of them was me. He taught his field fairly well, so far as I can remember, but also charismatically preached freedom from grades, freedom from dead formal structures, and free love. (This was the 70s, of course.)
He was fired by the administration, and skulked off to work as a better class of TA somewhere out east. The protests and anger of his fans was pretty intense.
Well, I went on to grow up and, after a number of years, it dawned on me that he was no hero — he had been an unmitigated jerk. His moderate teaching skills were eclipsed by the damage he did to his students and the peace of his department. In retrospect he probably had a personality disorder like narcissism or possibly severe ADHD.
Since then I’ve been cautious about charismatic figures in general. I don’t know anything about Rancourt, but the support of his students is not necessarily an indication of quality.
There’s a scene in a science fiction novel like this. Mindkiller by Spider Robinson. The instructor in question wasn’t tenured, though, and was told to desist immediately.
I had a Geology instructor who announced that the highest score on each exam resulted in an automatic A for the course. He said that his main reasoning for this was simple curiosity as to whether these individuals would continue to have high test scores now that the pressure was off. But it sure served as a motivation for students to study hard for midterms.
“I once heard that Richard Lewontin (at Harvard) gave every student an A- in his classes and told students the first day that this would be the case and that there was no use arguing about it. I just tried to confirm this via the internet and the only thing that I could easily find is this: http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/features/98/04/23/GRADE_INFLATION.html which says that in his biological statistics course students either get a B+ for doing the work or an F for not doing the work.”
Having been in one of Dick’s classes (albeit many years ago, before rampant grade inflation) I can tell you what he said *then*: That everyone would get a B, but if there were premeds in the class who wouldn’t get into med school with that grade then they should talk to him after class.
I give open book exams in at least some of my courses. It does help students focus on thinking about the material rather than memorizing vast tracts of information. However, I do also fear that without grades many people would actually not learn much at all.
This guy is also a climate change denier, and has various other fairly kooky claims. He’s a nut, and his “give everyone an A+” idea isn’t the only reason he’s being canned.
If grades are so meaningless to these guys, why doesn’t he just give all his students a C?
I mean, it’s a passing grade,and hey, grades don’t matter, right?
I detest grades. As a pre-professional student, I have to avoid all of the courses that I really, really want to take for fear of getting something less than an A: I can only take easy-As and those courses mandatory for my graduate schools of choice.
Does anyone honestly think that hasn’t ruined the educational experience for me? I adore physics, and I am dying to take physics courses. I have a bad foundation in mathematics. I can’t chance it, so I stick with biology and chemistry courses where I’m gauranteed my A. How damned fantastic.
I know that science education is, well, a science. My wife has a master’s degree in it.
There’s overwhelming evidence that lecture based education is not good. Overwhelming evidence.
So I find it a little odd that PZ, here, who is so willing to condemn religion over the fact it makes no senses, has no evidence, no nothing at all is 1. ignorant of the overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrating that lecture style education stinks on ice, given that part of his own job is that of teacher and he is a scientist and 2. he is so quick to condemn that which he clearly does not know.
PZ, for crying out loud, LOOK AT THE SCIENCE LITERATURE ON THE SUBJECT. For those of us who have looked at it, you’re mostly making a fool of yourself.
And who gives a damn if the truth upsets some grognards on campus? I thought you were all about the scientific method and proof being more important than clinging to an outdated ideology!
While I’m not sure Rancourt doesn’t deserve to be fired (he sounds a little nutty to me), I do agree about grades.
The grading system is a joke. Just look at all the variations we’re seeing on how to work around/through it. Look at how many students are avoiding learning to get as high a GPA as possible because that’s the only way they can get into grad school?
And this is coming from someone who was a lackluster student in high school (bored bored bored), but an honors student when I went to college. Thankfully, I maintained that by dropping that German 101 course busting at the seams with ex-military brats. Meaning, people who actually spoke German. My college was so greedy that they didn’t even ask why you wanted to take a course. Oh, you’re fluent in German already but want to take 101? Sure! Go ahead! Cash or credit?”
And there’s yet another example of why the grading system is just about worthless. I should have next to zero chances of actually learning what a course purportedly offers just because someone else is looking for an easy A?
Then let’s see the evidence, #83. Citations, please.
What do you mean by lecture-based teaching anyway? Is it the guy standing at the front of the class droning on and on mindlessly, and you’d better take notes or else? Or does it also include the professor who presents some information, but then engages the students, let them hash out ideas? If it’s the former, then I can see a reason to think that it’s detrimental to learning. The former–sorry, can’t see that.
Besides, what do you know about PZ’s teaching method? Have you taken any of his classes?
Argh. Last sentence in 2nd para. was supposed to say “The latter–sorry” and etc.
I know better than to post before I’ve had my first batch of caffeine.
Mr Bradley: your comment is wildly out of synch with what I wrote.
First, there’s nothing here about the virtues or flaws of lectures. For all I know, Rancourt is doing monologues in his courses. The only topics mentioned here are assessment and curriculum-appropriate content.
Second, I didn’t condemn Rancourt! I said that tenured professors ought to experiment with better teaching methods, and that they ought to be constrained by evidence of success or failure, and by the needs of the degree program.
Read it again. So far, you fail. Aren’t you glad I don’t give out grades here?
One friend of mine described an idea of replacing all grades with qualifications, sort of like passing the bar or medical board exams. The idea is to try to make it as objective as possible.
-jcr
Regarding lectures, I’d have to say that the success or failure of the lecture format depends enormously on the talent of the lecturer, and to a lesser degree on the suitability of the subject matter. I’ve attended some absolutely fascinating history lectures in my time, and I’ve been to lectures in computer science (my own profession, in which I have a great interest), which put me to sleep.
-jcr
Re: “There’s overwhelming evidence that lecture based education is not good. Overwhelming evidence.”
Thanks for clarifying the validity of my education, from K-12 through Ph.D. I thought I had actually learned something from all those lectures.
And now I feel just awful about attending those public lectures by Sagan, Gould, etc. All that time, what a waste.
If only I had been taught by someone with a Masters in Sci-Ed–I could have made something of myself and my decades of education.
Yes, the Education Experts insist that lectures (“Sage on the Stage”) are inferior to Inquiry-based Learning, Cooperative Learning, Case-based Learning, and anything else they can think of. The proper role of a professor is to be a “Guide on the Side,” don’t you know. What they never seem to advise me on, though, is how I am supposed to cover the material my department expects me to. Shall I break up my 150 freshmen into groups of 4 so they can discuss among themselves, in a spirit of cooperative inquiry, how mammalian kidneys concentrate urine? Or should I spend the same 20 minutes actually explaining it to them?
@ Sven #91: The assumption that underlies the “Guide on the Side” methods is that you have a class of about twenty students instead of 150.
The problem with lectures doesn’t apply to everyone, which is why people here won’t see as much of a problem with them since we’re probably the ones who absorbed knowledge from lectures easily. However, that doesn’t apply to a lot of people, and different kinds of teaching methods are needed.
Re: “However, that doesn’t apply to a lot of people, and different kinds of teaching methods [Inquiry-based Learning, Cooperative Learning, Case-based Learning, etc. ] are needed.”
In my experience all of these alternate modes of learning are of little benefit if you lack basic intellectual curiosity, or if you think that everything you need to know can be googled, copied and pasted just-in-time, or that you can count on a group member to do the heavy lifting while you freeload your way to an A. No wonder these students report on course evaluations that they are bored or that you “put them to sleep.”
I’m still reeling from last semester when no less than three students asked me couldn’t they just copy and paste lengthy direct quotes from papers as long as they put them in quotations marks and added a citation (which was actually a URL, instead of a real citation to the relevant journal article). And one of these actually argued with me about this and went away pissed because I was requiring them to do some actual thinking.
I’ve seen a real sea change in the last decade of teaching. Too many students believe they are entitled to what they have not earned.
I’ve seen a real sea change in the last decade of teaching. Too many students believe they are entitled to what they have not earned.
Only in the last decade? Seems to me I’ve been seeing it for rather longer than that.
I’ll tell you though, it’s kind of fun to see those people in the job market. I’ve run into people in my time who think that they’re entitled to employment or promotion just because they got their ticket punched.
-jcr
I got a A+ in an undergraduate course on Trends in Computer Science (or something like that). The University sent me a letter explaining that there wasn’t a grade higher than “A” (i.e., 4.0).
I don’t know if anyone is still following this thread, but there was a nice piece in the NY Times today about Prof. Rancourt.
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/the-two-languages-of-academic-freedom/
enjoy…
PZ,
Perhaps I came off too strong. But . . . I did find your post mealy-mouthed. Like, you said that you’ve got to get along with the people in your department. What if, y’know, one of them was a creationist? Would you, then, feel the urge to get along with them? I don’t think you would.
It’s very near the same situation. Lectures and grades are tradition. However, examination of evidence demonstrates that lectures and grades are poor pedagogic tools. So, when you said that you feel you have to get along with people in your department, I called bullshit. I think if someone had good science in your department, that you’d support them even if other people didn’t.
Well, this guy has the good science. He should be supported even if it fucks with his department. Because, y’know, he’s right. Which, in other contexts, seems real important to you. That he’s scientifically, demonstrably right. That there’s a lot of tradition concerning grades and lectures should be about as relevant as there being a lot of tradition around Christianity, if you ask me. The evidence is the evidence, right?
I urge you not to believe me. You seem inclined not to, anyway. Go look into it for yourself.
Yeah, and you’re right you’re not grading me. You don’t have that power. ;)
#97:
hmm… I guess this would be entirely the product of peer-reviewed scientific research … ?
People are actually here, on The Internet, reading scienceblogs, worrying about whether anyone would learn anything ever without grades????!!
PZ and other educators- have some courage of your convictions. Stop whipping the students.
Here at UCSC, we didn’t used to have grades at all. All classes were pass/fail. This made it quite hard for transfers and GPA ratings, so now you can only take 1/4 classes P/F and they can’t be within your major. Bummer…
I am a University of Ottawa student but have no experience with Prof. Rancourt whatsoever other than what I have read in the news. Superficially he seems erratic but maybe there is more to him than that.
As a student I do feel quite disappointed with post secondary education but I am not sure exactly where that disappointment lies. Personally I have never been one to put an exceeding amount of pressure on myself due to grades and in retrospect this strategy has not served me well in my schooling. Class sizes are huge and the truth is school by nature is very competitive; grades or no grades. How is a professor going to know if 1200 first year Cell Biology students are actually learning and engaged in the material they are teaching? I would place very little faith in a prof making a ‘pass vs. fail’ determination in that context.
Basically what my experience has lead me to believe is what was already stated earlier; The piece of paper that tells an employer, “I can successfully sit through four years of inconsequential drivel and mindnumbing bullshit, therefore I’m capable of working for you.”. Universities at least at the undergraduate level are more about navigating through the bullshit then learning and critical thinking.
But maybe thats a good thing bullshit navigating seems to be away more applicable skill than rationale thinking.
RE: “I adore physics, and I am dying to take physics courses. I have a bad foundation in mathematics. I can’t chance it, so I stick with biology and chemistry courses where I’m gauranteed my A.”
Chance it, who cares if you get a couple of C’s if you are working hard to understand the material? I took advanced physics as an undergrad and got two C’s (and felt lucky to get those grades)–but that never impeded my career one bit. The class was difficult but I got a perspective on physics that would have been lacking in the “tell-us-what-we-need to-know-for-the-MCAT” physics course.
I have mixed feelings about grades, but they do represent one measure of a student’s development, just not the only one. I have known straight A students who couldn’t get into med school, and those with straight B’s that got in with flying colors. Same for grad school. On the other hand, I would have some strong reservations about letting a student with straight D’s into either (at least without some compelling reason).
The difference, once again, is basic intellectual curiosity. Are you going to college because you want to really understand & contribute to the world around you, or are you just there to check off a list of requirements in the way to your acceptance into some professional program? I see far to many of the latter. Even more distressing are the small (fortunately) percentage of students that are willing to do anything (cheating) to get that A, often to the detriment of not only themselves, but also their peers.
Re: “”I can successfully sit through four years of inconsequential drivel and mindnumbing bullshit, therefore I’m capable of working for you.”
Wow, that’s utterly fucking cynical–at so young an age! If that’s your experience of college, I think maybe you picked the wrong one to attend. If you have not have at least one professor that makes you think and thirst to know more–man, I really pity you.
My undergrad degree was in biology, but I can’t help but be grateful for the professors outside my field of study that provided new perspectives on the world (sociolinguistics, symbolic logic, planetary geology). One of those professors scared the class shitless most of the time, but he forced us to think about and stand & defend our ideas. That class was at least as important as any courses I took in biology and chemistry.
Yeah that was some siropy thick bitterness in my last post. I want to clarify that its not for the most part the professors or material that I’m a bitter about its the first and second year classes with 400+ students per lecture. Office hours and two line emails do not constitute a student-professor rapport.
I have been reading a lot of evolutionary psychology and maybe thats just made me too cynical in my world view….
P.S. I completed a logic course last semester and really enjoyed it
@102:
Posted by: hje | February 9, 2009 1:25 PM
RE: “I adore physics, and I am dying to take physics courses. I have a bad foundation in mathematics. I can’t chance it, so I stick with biology and chemistry courses where I’m gauranteed my A.”
Chance it, who cares if you get a couple of C’s if you are working hard to understand the material?
Well, you know, I do. I’m hoping (fingers crossed) for ivy-league grad, and I’m coming from a non-ivy undergrad. Part of what will get me in will be my standardized test scores – and some of it my GPA. I want my future career so bad that I can taste it, and I’m unwilling to risk it. It’s unfortunate that I have to be placed in the position where that choice needs to be made, and it frankly angers me.
” I took advanced physics as an undergrad and got two C’s (and felt lucky to get those grades)–but that never impeded my career one bit. The class was difficult but I got a perspective on physics that would have been lacking in the “tell-us-what-we-need to-know-for-the-MCAT” physics course.”
I can believe that. I’m currently finishing my undergrad degree taking my “tell-us-what-we-need-to-know-for-the-MCAT” organic chemistry course. When I mentioned HOMO/LUMO in class (because I spent my winter break reading more advanced orgo books) the professor’s jaw dropped. Someone actually cared about the material! Certainly our textbook doesn’t even **mention** HOMO/LUMO. It pisses me off that we have these courses where we’re not even taught the real current models being used in the relevant science.
“I have mixed feelings about grades, but they do represent one measure of a student’s development, just not the only one. I have known straight A students who couldn’t get into med school, and those with straight B’s that got in with flying colors. Same for grad school. On the other hand, I would have some strong reservations about letting a student with straight D’s into either (at least without some compelling reason).
The difference, once again, is basic intellectual curiosity.”
Unfortunately, I don’t think graduate schools have a good way of seeing intellectual curiousity on your transcript, as opposed to grades. Sure, I have a year as an undergrad research assistant in a lab on campus, and I hope that goes some distance toward showing it – but research experience is as common as candy canes, now. How do I *show* a grad school the professional peer-reviewed journals I’ve been reading for the last three years? How do I *show* them I was the only twelve-year-old in my jr. high carrying around a dog-eared copy of Hawking’s essays like it was my personal bible? I can’t. All I can show them are that lots of people gave me A’s.
“Are you going to college because you want to really understand & contribute to the world around you, or are you just there to check off a list of requirements in the way to your acceptance into some professional program?”
Ironically, the couple hundred dollars (my entire income, essentially) that I spend on used books every month, after having cleaned out my local library, are based on my need to understand the world around me. College is where I go to check off a list of requirements on my way to a professional program.
I wish it were otherwise, but I can not recall the last time a professor *taught* me something. No, wait, that’s not quite true: I had a general physics professor that actually got some concepts through to me I otherwise had trouble with, and I had an instructor at an honors research colloqium that reinvigorated my love of learning for learning’s sake. I have otherwise never been *taught*, just handed lists of material to memorize. That’s not always the professor’s fault: I had a lot of great professors who, realistically, just can’t teach groups of 100+.
“I see far to many of the latter. Even more distressing are the small (fortunately) percentage of students that are willing to do anything (cheating) to get that A, often to the detriment of not only themselves, but also their peers.”
I never worried about the cheaters: they usually get caught sooner or later. I hate the students that are just outright Machiavellian: they don’t cheat, they just play real dirty to get ahead (i.e., taking out the last copy of a particular text on reserve at the library and holding it late, so that no one else in the class can xerox the particular pages the professor sent us to get).
Frankly, college has done more than anything else in my life to squash my love of learning. It is something that is endured for a diploma’s sake: it’s certainly not where I learn. For that, the system should be ashamed. I’m intensely passionate about learning, interested in every last field of academic study, an obsessive reader, and so on. I’m, in the truest sense, a good student. I *enjoy* hard classes: I *enjoy* being challenged enough that I walk out with a B rather than my usual A. And the system is so arranged that to do so would be to do harm against my future.
The discussion about teaching and evaluation methods may be interesting, but seems to me to miss the point.
If Rancourt wants to set up the “Denis Rancourt University” then I think no one would object to his teaching in any way he felt appropriate. But he is not currently at DRU, but at the University of Ottawa, and thus has a responsibility to teach in line with the accepted procedures at the University of Ottawa, and to teach the curriculum as approved by the University.
@106: I’ve yet to see anything definitive as to whether or not he was fulfilling his teaching duties or not. Some anecdotes and a history of stirring controversy are hardly enough to say that he’s shirking his “responsibility to teach…”
Giving out all A’s in a 400-level course consisting of finishing undergrads and graduate students isn’t all that controversial. By the time you’re taking 400-level courses, you should really be doing the sort of capstone work that defies easy grading anyway.
#105: It sounds like you’re doing all the right things. I never let specific courses/teachers get in the way of my education. I only had a handful of really awful professors in undergrad/grad school, but I managed to find a way to learn something even in those classes–usually by outside reading.
Re: Cheaters. Unfortunately they manage to entangle good students in their problems. I had a student who was working on a group assignment (not in my course) show me what the other members of the group did in terms of “research”–which was to copy and paste text wholesale from online journal articles–but they were so stupid they left in the citation numbers (e.g. 112, 123) when they pasted the obvious plagiarized text. The conscientious student fixed the problem the best they could, but they did not want me to contact their instructor and out the scoundrels. As far as I can tell, the instructor was none the wiser.
Of course it can be outright comical like when I had a student barely re-write the first sentence of multiple pages of copy-pasted text before they gave up and just left the copied text as is. It was pretty obvious, given that most students do not use phrases such as “and furthermore” and “moreover.” After being assigned an F, the student had the audacity to argue they should be given a higher grade. Which I put to a quick end by suggesting I could have the dean review the decision if they were not happy about it. Motivation for the student: I HAVE to do this so I can get an A and get into a professional school.
Giving out all A’s in a 400-level course may or may not be controversial (depending on the department, university, etc.), but announcing that all students will get an “automatic” A, is, I submit, not. There are universities that do not use grading as evaluation, but if the university does use grades as a matter of policy, then it is not up to individual professors to make up their own rules. And the same applies to the university’s (or departments) approved curriculum.
From my university experience (which I doubt very much is out of the ordinary), universities normally have some sort of policy on grading, and on curriculum. If a professor wishes to teach a university course, then s/he must have the course approved. S/he may have unofficial seminars on any topic s/he might choose (and I attended some such), but if it is to be an official university course, then it must be approved by the university.
The point here is that one has a choice as to whether one wishes to be a part of the university (with all that this implies) or not. If Rancourt is dissatisfied with the policies of his university, then he may attempt to change them, or may find a more hospitable university — but not ignore them and make up his own.
I’ve never had a uni professor use the same grading scheme as Prof. Rancourt, but when I was in high school in the early ’70s, my honors chem teacher became a convert to a book called “Teaching as a Subversive Activity,” by Neil Postman. In one week, our class changed from a graded, lecture-oriented course to a no-grades, student-directed exercise in futility. In my opinion, my teacher’s experiment was an unmitigated failure for most of my classmates.
This was in New York, which has a series of exams high school students take to qualify for a New York State Regents Diploma and state uni scholarships. While these exams were nowhere near as difficult as the SAT II subject exams some of us also had to take, to pass them with a 70% or higher required some basic knowledge in chemistry, as determined by the regents curriculum.
What I learned, if anything, in that chem class is a blur. What I do distinctly remember is meeting with a group of my buddies to cram for the regents chem exam, effectively teaching ourselves in a couple of weeks what our instructor should have been doing all year. To my knowledge, we all passed the state test.
I cannot say the same for the less motivated or less academically skilled students. Sure, maybe they would have still passed or failed no matter what our teacher did. In retrospect, though, his decision to change course midstream was unprofessional and largely disorganized. I’ve been a teacher for 25 years now. To do it really well requires enormous effort, including careful planning and an understanding of one’s students and their motivations. I am all for experimentation in pedagogy, but it is professional laziness for a teacher to walk into a class one day to say he/she is scrapping the “old order” in favor of a “new order,” without carefully preparing the students first for the “new order.”
Grades are two-edged sword. I hate them, but the entire K-16+ academic system hinges on GPAs. I taught at a private high school that wanted to scrap grades entirely, until we considered how it would affect both our students’ college admissions and our own enrollment — and thus the school’s very existence. Until someone can devise a better means to measure student performance, I am resigned to hand out letter grades.
I feel tht this kind of tech. might work in smaller classes. i would put it this way.
1. All students are given A to begin with.
2. students are divided into groups.
3. each group is given a problem to solve at the end of week/lecture/chapter. the problem is such tht the group has to given a presentation for its solution.
4. The only 2 criteria to keep the grade as A is almost 100% attendance in the class AND a decent presentation.
5.one could add the grade of presentation to the final grade.
(i would put them into smaller groups so as to reduce ‘commoners tragedy’)