(I will be traveling for a few weeks and rather than put this blog on hiatus, thought that I would continue with my weekday posting schedule by reposting some of the very early items, for those who might have missed them the first time around.)

One of the questions that students ask me is why it is that they find some subjects easy and others hard to learn. Students often tell me that they “are good” at one subject (say writing) and “are not good” at another (say physics), with the clear implication that they feel that there is something intrinsic and immutable about them that determines what they are good at. It is as if they see their learning abilities as being mapped onto a multi-dimensional grid in which each axis represents a subject, with their own abilities lying along a continuous scale ranging from ‘awful’ at one extreme to ‘excellent’ at the other. Is this how it is?

This is a really tough question and I don’t think there is a definitive answer at this time. Those interested in this topic should register for the free public lecture by Steven Pinker on March 14.

Why are some people drawn to some areas of study and not to others? Why do they find some things difficult and others easy? Is it due to the kind of teaching that one receives or parental influence or some innate quality like genes?

The easiest answer is to blame it on genes or at least on the hard-wiring of the brain. In other words, we are born the way we are, with gifts in some areas and deficiencies in others. It seems almost impossible to open the newspapers these days without reading that scientists have found the genes that ’cause’ this or that human characteristic so it is excusable to jump to genes as the cause of most inexplicable things.

But that is too simple. After all, although the brain comes at birth with some hard-wired structures, it is also quite plastic and the direction in which it grows is also strongly influenced by the experiences it encounters. But it seems that most of the rapid growth and development occurs fairly early in life and so early childhood and adolescent experiences are important in determining future directions.

But what kinds of experiences are the crucial ones for determining future academic success? Now things get more murky and it is hard to say which ones are dominant. We cannot even say that the same factors play the same role for everyone. So for one person, a single teacher’s influence could be pivotal. For another, it could be the parent’s influence. The influences could also be positive or negative.

So there is no simple answer. But I think that although this is an interesting question, the answer has little practical significance for a particular individual at this stage of their lives in college. You are now what you are. The best strategy is to not dwell on why you are not something else, but to identify your strengths and use them to your advantage.

It is only when you get really deep into a subject (any subject) and start to explore its foundations and learn about its underlying knowledge structure that you start to develop higher-level cognitive skills that will last you all your life. But this only happens if you like the subject because only then will you willingly expend the intellectual effort to study it in depth. With things that we do not care much about, we tend to skim on the surface, doing just the bare minimum to get by. This is why it is important to identify what you really like to do and go for it.

You should also identify your weaknesses and dislikes and contain them. By “contain” I mean that there is really no reason why at this stage you should force yourself to try and like (say) mathematics or physics or Latin or Shakespeare or whatever and try to excel in them, if you do not absolutely need to. What’s the point? What are you trying to prove and to whom? If there was a really good reason that you needed to know something about those areas now or later in life, the higher-level learning skills you develop by charging ahead in the things you like now could be used to learn something that you really need to know later.

I don’t think that people have an innate “limit”, in the sense that there is some insurmountable barrier that prevents them from achieving more in any area. I am perfectly confident that some day if you needed or wanted to know something in those areas, you would be able to learn it. The plateau or barrier that students think they have reached is largely determined by their inner sense of “what’s the point?”

I think that by the time they reach college, most students have reached the “need to know” stage in life, where they need a good reason to learn something. In earlier K-12 grades, they were in the “just in case” stage where they did not know where they would be going and needed to prepare themselves for any eventuality.

This has important implications for teaching practice. As teachers, we should make it our goal to teach in such a way that students see the deep beauty that lies in our discipline, so that they will like it for its own sake and thus be willing to make the effort. It is not enough to tell them that it is “useful” or “good for them.”

In my own life, I now happily learn about things that I would never have conceived that I would be interested in when I was younger. The time and circumstances have to be right for learning to have its fullest effect. As Edgar says in King Lear: “Ripeness is all.”

(The quote from Shakespeare is a good example of what I mean. If you had told me when I was an undergraduate that I would some day be familiar enough with Shakespeare to quote him comfortably, I would have said you were crazy because I hated his plays at that time. But much later in life, I discovered the pleasures of reading his works.)

So to combine the words from the song by Bobby McFerrin, and the prison camp commander in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, my own advice is “Don’t worry. Be happy in your work.”

Sources:

John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, eds., How People Learn, National Academy Press, Washington D.C.,1999.

James E. Zull, The Art of Changing the Brain, Stylus Publishing, Sterling, VA, 2002.

It is a natural human trait to confuse ‘is’ with ‘ought,’ to think that what currently exists is also how things should be, especially with long-standing practices. The same is true with teaching methods. Once a way of teaching reaches a venerable stage, it is hard to conceive that things could be any different.

This post will be largely excerpts of an excellent article titled Making the Case by David A. Garvin from the September-October 2003, Volume 106, Number 1 issue of Harvard Magazine (p. 56), showing how hard it is to change the way we teach. It gives as an example the way that legal education changed to what it is today, what is now called the case method. Although this has become the ‘standard’ way law colleges operate, initial efforts to introduce this method faced enormous resistance from students and faculty and alumni. This is because all of us tend to be most comfortable with doing what we have always done and fear that change will be for the worse.

The article suggests that to succeed, the changes must be based on a deep understanding of education and require support and commitment over the long haul.

Christopher Columbus Langdell, the pioneer of the case method, attended Harvard Law School from 1851 to 1854 – twice the usual term of study. He spent his extra time as a research assistant and librarian, holed up in the school’s library reading legal decisions and developing an encyclopedic knowledge of court cases. Langdell’s career as a trial lawyer was undistinguished; his primary skill was researching and writing briefs. In 1870, Harvard president Charles William Eliot appointed Langdell, who had impressed him during a chance meeting when they were both students, as professor and then dean of the law school. Langdell immediately set about developing the case method.

At the time, law was taught by the Dwight Method, a combination of lecture, recitation, and drill named after a professor at Columbia. Students prepared for class by reading “treatises,” dense textbooks that interpreted the law and summarized the best thinking in the field. They were then tested – orally and in front of their peers – on their level of memorization and recall. Much of the real learning came later, during apprenticeships and on-the-job instruction.

Langdell’s approach was completely different. In his course on contracts, he insisted that students read only original sources – cases – and draw their own conclusions. To assist them, he assembled a set of cases and published them, with only a brief two-page introduction.

Langdell’s approach was much influenced by the then-prevailing inductive empiricism. He believed that lawyers, like scientists, worked with a deep understanding of a few core theories or principles; that understanding, in turn, was best developed via induction from a review of those appellate court decisions in which the principles first took tangible form. State laws might vary, but as long as lawyers understood the principles on which they were based, they should be able to practice anywhere. In Langdell’s words: “To have a mastery of these [principles or doctrines] as to be able to apply them with consistent facility and certainty to the ever-tangled skein of human affairs, is what constitutes a true lawyer….”

This view of the law shifted the locus of learning from law offices to the library. Craft skills and hands-on experience were far less important than a mastery of principles – the basis for deep, theoretical understanding
. . .
This view of the law also required a new approach to pedagogy. Inducing general principles from a small selection of cases was a challenging task, and students were unlikely to succeed without help. To guide them, Langdell developed through trial and error what is now called the Socratic method: an interrogatory style in which instructors question students closely about the facts of the case, the points at issue, judicial reasoning, underlying doctrines and principles, and comparisons with other cases. Students prepare for class knowing that they will have to do more than simply parrot back material they have memorized from lectures or textbooks; they will have to present their own interpretations and analysis, and face detailed follow-up questions from the instructor.

Langdell’s innovations initially met with enormous resistance. Many students were outraged. During the first three years of his administration, as word spread of Harvard’s new approach to legal education, enrollment at the school dropped from 165 to 117 students, leading Boston University to start a law school of its own. Alumni were in open revolt.

With Eliot’s backing, Langdell endured, remaining dean until 1895. By that time, the case method was firmly established at Harvard and six other law schools. Only in the late 1890s and early 1900s, as Chicago, Columbia, Yale, and other elite law schools warmed to the case method – and as Louis Brandeis and other successful Langdell students began to speak glowingly of their law-school experiences – did it diffuse more widely. By 1920, the case method had become the dominant form of legal education. It remains so today.

What we see being tried in SAGES has interesting parallels with what Langdell was trying to achieve. The idea is for students, rather than being the recipients of the distilled wisdom of experts and teachers and told directly what they should know, to study something in depth and to inductively argue their way to an understanding of basic but general principles. The Socratic format of the instructor interrogating students is not used in SAGES, replaced by the somewhat more gentle method of having peer discussions mediated by the instructor.

Taking a long view of past educational changes enables us to keep a sense of proportion. The way we teach now may seem natural and even the only way but usually when we look back it was deliberately introduced, often over considerable opposition, because of some developments in understanding of the nature of learning. As time goes by and our understanding of the learning process changes and deepens, it is natural to re-examine the way we teach as well.

I believe that SAGES takes advantage of what we understand now to be important new insights into learning. But we need to give it a chance to take root. Abandoning it at the first sign of difficulty is absurd because all innovations invariably run into difficulty at the beginning as everyone struggles to adapt to the new ways.

POST SCRIPT: ‘Mission Accomplished’ by the numbers

As usual, I am tardy in my recognition of anniversaries. But here is a sobering reminder of what has transpired since the infamous photo-op three years ago yesterday on the aircraft carrier.

When I talk about the SAGES program (see here for a description of the program and how it came about) to faculty at other universities they are impressed that Case put into place something so ambitious. They immediately see how the program addresses the very same problems that all universities face but few attempt to tackle as comprehensively as we have sought to do.

Of course, the very ambitiousness of the program meant that there would be challenges in implementation. Some of the challenges are institutional and resource-related. Creating more small classes meant requiring more faculty to teach them, more classrooms (especially those suitable for seminar-style interactions), more writing support, and so on. This necessarily imposed some strain on the system.
[Read more…]

As might be expected, some people at Case are all of atwitter about the snide op-ed in a newspaper supposedly called the New York Times by someone supposedly called Stephen Budiansky. (Note to novice writers hoping to develop their snide skills: Putting words like ‘supposedly’ in front of an easily discernible fact is a weak attempt at sarcasm, by insinuating that something is sneaky when no cause for suspicion exists. Like the way Budiansky says “SAGES (this supposedly stands for Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship)” when he has to know this for a fact since he says he has been reading the SAGES website.)

But my point here is not to point out the shallowness of Budiansky’s article and make fun of it, although it is a good example of the kind of writing that uses selective quotes and data to support a questionable thesis, and uses a snippy tone to hide its lack of meaningful content. My purpose here is to articulate why I think SAGES has been the best educational idea that I have been associated with in all my years in education in many different institutions. It is clear to me that many people, even those at Case, have not quite understood what went into it and why it is such an important innovation, and this essay seeks to explain it.

I have been involved with SAGES from its inception in the summer of 2002 when I was appointed to the task force by then College of Arts and Sciences Dean Sam Savin, to investigate how to improve the college’s general education requirements (GER). American colleges have these kinds of requirements in order to ensure that students have breadth of knowledge, outside their chosen majors. Case’s GER were fairly standard in that they required students to select a distribution of courses from a menu classified under different headings, such as Global and Cultural Diversity.

While better than nothing, the task force felt that these kinds of requirements did not have any cohesive rationale, and result in students just picking courses so that they can check off the appropriate boxes. The task force wondered how we could make the distribution requirements more meaningful and part of a coherent educational philosophy. In the process of studying this question, we learned of other problems that were long standing but just lurking beneath our consciousness. Almost all these problems are endemic to many universities, not just Case.

One of these was that students entering Case tended to come in with a sense of identity that was identified with a specific program rather that the school as a whole. They saw themselves primarily as engineering students or nursing students or arts students and so on, rather than as Case students. This fragmented identity was aided by the fact that in the first year they had no common experience that transcended these disciplinary boundaries. So we wondered what we could do to help create a sense of oneness among the student body, a sense of overall belonging.

Another problem we identified was that it was quite possible, even likely, for a first year student to spend the entire year in large lecture classes where they were largely passive recipients of lectures. This could result in students feeling quite anonymous and alone, and since this was also their first year away from home, it was not felt to be a good introduction to college life, let along for the emotional and intellectual health of the student. Furthermore, we know that first impressions can be very formative. When college students spend their first year passively listening in class, we feared that this might become their understanding of their role in the university, and that it would become harder to transform them into the active engagement mode that was necessary when they got into the smaller upper division classes in their majors.

Another problem was that students at Case did not seem to fully appreciate the knowledge creation role that is peculiar to the research function of universities. While they had chosen to attend a research university, many did not seem to know what exactly constituted research, how it was done, and its value.

Another thing that surprised us was when even some seniors told us that there was not a single faculty member they had encountered during their years at Case whom they felt that they knew well, in the sense that if they walked into that faculty member’s office that he or she would know the student’s name and something about them. We felt that this was a serious deficiency, because faculty-student interactions in and out of the class should play an important role in a student’s college experience. We felt that it was a serious indictment of the culture of the university that a student could spend four years here and not know even one faculty member well.

Another very serious problem that was identified was that many students were graduating with poor writing and presentation skills. The existing writing requirement was being met by a stand-alone English course that students took in their first year. Students in general (not just at Case) tend to dislike these stand-alone ‘skills’ courses and one can understand why. They are not related to any of the ‘academic’ courses and are thus considered inferior, merely an extra hoop to be jumped through. The writing exercises are necessarily de-contextualized since they are not organically related to any course of study. Students tend to treat such courses as irritants, which makes the teaching of such courses unpleasant as well. But what was worse was that it is clear that a one-shot writing course cannot produce the kinds of improvement in writing skills that are desired.

Furthermore, some tentative internal research seemed to suggest that the one quality that universities seek above all to develop in their students, the level of ‘critical thinking’ (however that vague term is defined), was not only not being enhanced by the four years spent here, there were alarming hints that it was actually decreasing.

And finally the quality of first year advising that the students received was highly variable. While some advisors were conscientious about their role and tried hard to get to know their students, others hardly ever met them, except for the minute or two it took to sign their course registration slips. Even the conscientious advisors found it hard to get to know students on the basis of a very few brief meetings. This was unsatisfactory because in addition to helping students select courses, the advisor is also the first mentor a student has and should be able to help the student navigate through the university and develop a broader and deeper perspective on education and learning and life. This was unlikely to happen unless the student and advisor got to know each other better.

Out of all these concerns, SAGES was born, and it sought to address all these concerns, by providing a comprehensive and cohesive framework that, one way or another, addressed all the above issues.

The task force decided on a small-class seminar format early on because we saw that this would enable students to engage more, speak and write more, get more feedback from the instructor and fellow students, and thus develop crucially important speaking, writing and critical thinking skills.

Since good writing develops only with a lot of practice of writing and revising, we decided that one writing-intensive seminar was not enough. Furthermore, students need to like and value what they are writing if they are going to persevere in improving their writing. In order to achieve this it was felt that the writing should be embedded in courses that dealt with meaningful content that the students had some choice in selecting. So we decided that students should take a sequence of four writing intensive seminars consisting of a common First Seminar in their first semester, and a sequence of three thematic seminars, one in each subsequent semester, thus covering the first two years of college.

The need for a common experience for all students was met by having the First Seminar be based on a common theme (which we chose to be on The Life of the Mind), with at least some readings and out-of-class programs experienced in common by all first year students. The idea was that this would provide students with intellectual fodder to talk about amongst themselves in their dorms and dining halls and other social settings, irrespective of what majors they were considering or who they happened to be sitting next to. The common book reading program for incoming students was initiated independently of SAGES but fitted naturally into this framework. The First Seminar was also was designed to get students familiar with academic ways of thinking, provide an introduction to what a research university does and why, and provide opportunities for them to access the rich variety of cultural resources that surround the university.

The decision that the First Seminar instructor also serve as the first year advisor was suggested so that the advisor and student would get to know each other well over the course of that first semester and thus enable the kind of stronger relationship that makes mentoring more meaningful

The University Seminars that followed the First Seminar were grouped under three categories (the Natural World, the Social World, and the Symbolic World) and students were required to select one from each category for the next three semesters. Each of these areas of knowledge has a different culture, investigate different types of questions, use different rules for evidence and how to use that evidence in arriving at conclusions, have different ways of constructing knowledge, and develop different modes of thinking and expression. These seminars would be designed around topics selected by the instructor and designed to help students understand better the way that practitioners in those worlds view knowledge.

By taking one from each group based on their own interests, it was hoped that students would learn how to navigate the different academic waters that they encounter while at college. Taken together, we hoped they would complement each other and provide students with a global perspective on the nature of academic discourse.

In order to prevent the risk of content overload that eventually engulfs many university courses, it was decided that the University Seminars would have no pre-requisites and also could not serve as pre-requisites for other courses, thus freeing instructors from the oft-complained problem of feeling burdened to ‘cover’ a fixed body of material and thus cutting off student participation. Now they were free to explore any question to any depth they wished.

For example, in my own SAGES course The Evolution of Scientific Ideas (part of the Natural World sequence) we explore the following major questions: What is science and can we distinguish it from non-science? What is the process that causes new scientific theories to replace the old? In the process of investigating these questions, I hope that students get a better understanding of how scientists see the world and interact with it. And I do not feel pressure to cover any specific scientific revolution. I can freely change things from year to year depending on the interests of the students.

A senior capstone experience was added to provide students with an opportunity to have a culminating activity and work on a project of their own choosing that would enable them to showcase the investigative, critical thinking, speaking, and writing skills developed over their years at Case.

Next in this series: Implementation issues

POST SCRIPT: Talk on Monday about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo

On Monday, May 1 at 4:00pm in Strosacker Auditorium, Janis Karpinski, who was a Brigadier General and commanding officer of the Abu Ghraib prison when the prisoner torture and abuse scandal erupted and who feels that she was made a scapegoat for that atrocity and demoted, and James Yee who was U.S. Army Muslim Chaplin at Guantanamo, was arrested for spying and later cleared, will both be speaking.

It should be interesting to hear their sides of the story.

The talk is free and open to the public. More details can be found here.

Recall (see here and here for previous postings) that to argue that grade inflation has occurred, it is not sufficient to simply show that grades have risen. It must be shown grades have risen without a corresponding increase in learning and student achievement. And that is difficult to do because there are really no good independent measures of student learning, apart from grades.

Some have argued that the SAT scores of matriculating classes could be used as a measure of student ‘ability’ and could thus be used to see if universities are getting ‘better’ students, thus justifying the rise in grades.

But the use of SAT scores as a measure of student quality or abilities has always been deeply problematic, so it is not even clear that any rise in SAT scores of incoming students means anything. One reason is that the students who take the SAT tests are a self-selected group and not a random sample, so one cannot infer much from changes in SAT scores. Second, SAT scores have not been shown to be predictive of anything really useful. There is a mild correlation of SAT scores with first year college grades but that is about it.

Even at Case, not all matriculating students have taken the SAT’s. Also the average total SAT scores from 1985-1992 was 1271, while the average from 1993-2005 was 1321. This rise in SAT scores of incoming students at Case would be affected by two factors, the first being the re-centering of SAT scores that occurred in 1995. It is not known whether the pre-1995 scores we have at Case are the original ones or have been raised to adjust for re-centering. This lack of knowledge makes it hard to draw conclusions about how much, if at all, SAT scores have risen at Case.

Alfie Kohn cites “Trends in College Admissions” reports that say that the average verbal-SAT score of students enrolled in all private colleges rose from 543 in 1985 to 558 in 1999. It is also the fact that it was around 1991 that Case instituted merit scholarships based on SAT scores and started aggressively marketing it as a recruiting tool. So it is tempting to argue that there has been a genuine rise in SAT scores for students at Case.

Another local factor at Case that would influence GPAs is the practice of “freshman forgiveness” that began in 1987. Under this program, students in their first year would be “forgiven” any F grades they received and this F would not be counted towards their GPA. This is bound to have the effect of increasing the overall GPA, although a very rough estimate suggests only a 1-2% increase. This practice was terminated in 2005.

The Rosovsky-Hartley monograph points to the fact that many more students in colleges are now enrolled in remedial courses than was the case in the past, arguing that this implies that students are actually worse now. But again, that inference is not clear. Over the recent past there has been a definite shift in emphasis in colleges of now wanting to retain the students they recruit. The old model of colleges recruiting more students than they needed and then ‘weeding’ them out using certain courses in their first year, is no longer in vogue, assuming that there was substance to that belief and it is not just folklore.

Now universities go to great lengths to provide assistance to their students, beefing up their advising, tutoring, and other programs to help student stay in school. So the increased enrollment of students in remedial courses may simply be the consequence of universities taking a much more proactive attitude to helping students, rather than a sign of declining student quality. All these measures are aimed at improving student performance and are another possible benign explanation for any rise in grades. In fact, all these remedial and assistance programs could be used to argue that a rise in grades could be due to actual improved student performance.

Alfie Kohn argues that taking all these things into account, there is no evidence for grade inflation, that this is an issue that has been blown way out of proportion by those who have a very narrow concept of the role of grades in learning. Kohn says there are many reasons why grades could rise:

Maybe students are turning in better assignments. Maybe instructors used to be too stingy with their marks and have become more reasonable. Maybe the concept of assessment itself has evolved, so that today it is more a means for allowing students to demonstrate what they know rather than for sorting them or “catching them out.” (The real question, then, is why we spent so many years trying to make good students look bad.) Maybe students aren’t forced to take as many courses outside their primary areas of interest in which they didn’t fare as well. Maybe struggling students are now able to withdraw from a course before a poor grade appears on their transcripts. (Say what you will about that practice, it challenges the hypothesis that the grades students receive in the courses they complete are inflated.)

The bottom line: No one has ever demonstrated that students today get A’s for the same work that used to receive B’s or C’s. We simply do not have the data to support such a claim.

In addition to the factors listed by Kohn, psychologist Steve Falkenberg points out a number of other reasons why average grades could rise. His essay is a particularly thoughtful one that is worth reading.

Part of the problem in judging whether grade inflation exists is that we don’t know what the actual grade distribution in colleges should be. Those who argue that it should be a bell curve (or ‘normal’ distribution) with an average around C are mixing up a normative approach to assessment (as is used for IQ tests and SATs) with an achievement approach.

IQ tests and SATs are designed so that the results are spread out over a bell curve. They seek to measure a characteristic (called “intelligence'”) that is supposedly distributed randomly in the population according to a normal distribution. (This assumption and the whole issue of what constitutes intelligence is the source of a huge controversy that I don’t want to get into here.) So the goal of such tests is to sort students into a hierarchy, and they design tests that spread out the scores so that one can tell who is in the top 10% and so on.

But when you teach a class of students, you are no longer dealing with a random sample of the population. First of all, you are not giving your assessments to people off the street. The students have been selected based on their prior achievements and are no longer a random sampling of the population. Secondly, by teaching them, you are deliberately intervening and skewing the distribution. Thirdly, your tests should not be measuring the same random variable that things like the SATs measure. If they were, you might as well give your students their grades based on those tests.

Tests should not be measures of some intrinsic ability, even assuming that such a thing exists and can be measured and a number assigned to it. Tests are (or at least should be) measuring achievement of how much and how well a selected group of students have learned as a result of your instruction. Hence there is no reason at all to expect a normal distribution. In fact, you would expect to have a distribution that is skewed towards the high end. The problem, if it can be considered a problem, is that we don’t know a priori what that skewed distribution should look like or whether there is a preferred distribution at all. After all, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with everyone in a class getting As, if they have all learned the material at a suitably high level.

In fact, as Ohmer Milton, Howard Pollio, and James Eison write in Making Sense of College Grades (Jossey-Bass, 1986): “It is not a symbol of rigor to have grades fall into a ‘normal’ distribution; rather, it is a symbol of failure — failure to teach well, failure to test well, and failure to have any influence at all on the intellectual lives of students.”

There is nothing intrinsically noble about trying to keep average grades unchanged over the years, which is what those who complain about grade inflation usually want to do.

On the other hand, one could make the reasonable case that as we get better at teaching and in creating the conditions that make students learn better, and as a consequence we get students who are able to learn more, then perhaps we should raise our expectations of students and provide more challenging assignments, so that they can rise to greater heights. This is a completely different discussion. If we do so, this might result in a drop in grades. But this drop is a byproduct of a thoughtful decision to make learning better, not caused by an arbitrary decision to keep average grades fixed.

This approach would be like car manufacturers and consumers raising their standards over the years so that we now expect a lot more from our cars than we did fifty years ago. Even the best cars of fifty years ago would not be able to meet the current standards of fuel efficiency, safety, and emissions. But the important thing to keep in mind is that standards have been raised along with the ability to make better cars able to meet the higher standards.

But in order to take this approach in education, it requires teachers to think carefully about what and how we assess, what we can reasonably expect of our students, and how we should teach so they can learn more and learn better. Unfortunately much of the discussion of grade inflation short-circuits this worthwhile aspect of the issue, choosing instead to go for the quick fix like putting limits for the number of grades awarded in each category.

It is perhaps worthwhile to remember that fears about grade inflation, that high grades are being given for poor quality work, have been around for a long time, especially at elite institutions. The Report of the Committee on Raising the Standard at Harvard University said: “Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily — Grade A for work of no very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity. … One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work.”

That statement was made in 1894.

POST SCRIPT: Cindy Sheehan in Cleveland tomorrow

Cindy Sheehan will speak at a Cleveland Town Hall Meeting Saturday, March 25, 1-3 pm

Progressive Democrats of Ohio present Gold Star Mother and PDA Board Member Cindy Sheehan at a Town Hall Meeting on Saturday, March 25, 2006 from 1 – 3 p.m. at the Beachland Ballroom, 15711 Waterloo Road in Cleveland’s North Collinwood neighborhood. (directions.)

Topic: Examining The Cost of Iraq: Lives, Jobs, Security, Community

Panelists include:

US Congressman Dennis Kucinich, OH-10
Cindy Sheehan – Gold Star mother & activist
Tim Carpenter, National Director, Progressive Democrats of America
Francis Chiappa, President, Cleveland Peace Action
Paul Schroeder, NE Ohio Gold Star Father and co-founder of Families of the Fallen For Change
Farhad Sethna, Immigration attorney and concerned citizen