By Professor Doom
Higher Education
really is strange when you start to look at the big picture. Educators have
almost no influence on what goes on. Instead, ridiculously powerful,
non-education, administrators have taken over our campuses. What are the
results? A quick summary:
1) We all know
standards have been annihilated to the point that many college courses require
no effort; it’s even quite
documented.
2) Social
promotion is now a part of higher education. Who cares if you don’t
know lower level material because there’s no work in the courses, you can still
take higher level coursework.
3) Grade
inflation has made GPA essentially meaningless. The mode
grade on campus is an ‘A’—more students get this grade than any other, and on
some campuses more than all other grades put together.
These changes
didn’t come from educators. Educators know that standards are important for
motivation, for education—we were students too, you see, and know that students
usually don’t do more than what is asked of them. If you ask nothing, they do
nothing…but admin threatened us to ask less and less, so assigning nothing in a
college class is fairly common now.
Similarly, we
know social promotion is a terrible idea—if the student knows he’s going to
pass no matter how little he does, then it gets that much harder to motivate
the student to work towards an education.
Faculty:
“In four semesters and hundreds of students, I’ve failed exactly two students.
Also in that time period, I’ve twice received correspondence from admin
requesting me to justify and explain my grading system, a system that I’m
following to the letter, since it’s set by admin. Of course, both times I had
to defend my grading to admin were the both times I failed students. Do you
think maybe there’s a message here I should get?”
--a common
explanation of how university campus works.
Grade inflation
is a slightly different matter. Of course educators want students to do well,
and, sure, we know that an over-emphasis on grades can lead to students
focusing too much on the grade and not enough on the material. Still, grades
can serve as early motivation until the student gets a real desire to learn.
Admin didn’t need to threaten us much to lighten up on grading…but we still
were threatened.
The
American-style higher education system, with its eager capability to trap young
people in perpetual debt while enriching the connected class, has spread for
the most part across the planet. The abuses that faculty in the United States
take for granted because we’ve been subjected to them for decades are still
relatively new elsewhere, and thus are considered shocking:
The student loan
system has led to a huge increase in tuition; with such an increase, one would
expect college degrees to become more valuable. Instead, many degrees are
basically worthless, and part of that reason is, within a degree, it’s almost
impossible to distinguish the hardworking student with a 3.98 GPA (he met that
one tenured professor on campus will uses “old school” grading) from the
complete slacker with the 4.00 GPA (he used his slacker connections to stick
with all the faculty who just plain got tired of explaining their grading to
admin every semester). There might well be some extremely hardworking and
bright African-American Studies degree holders…but there’s just no way to
distinguish between good and bad.
Some 46% of
academics said they have been pressurised to mark students’ work generously,
according to the survey hosted on the Guardian’s Higher Education Network,
while 37% did not believe teaching was valued by their institution.
So, about half of
academics are feeling the pressure from admin. I ask the gentle reader to read
between the lines: 46% feel pressure. The 54% that don’t feel pressure? These
are the academics who have learned not to fail students, and to grade as
generously as possible (hence, they don’t get pressured by admin).
It’s hard to
believe only 37% realize teaching was not valued by their institution. I’ve
seen many good teachers punished for good teaching, and I’ve never seen one
rewarded for it. A few good teachers have managed to avoid punishment, but it
seems every terrible teacher I’ve known gets praise and kudos from admin for
passing everyone.
Again, I want
everyone to succeed…but if the course material is so simple that everyone gets
an A, that literally nobody on the planet can fail at learning it, how can you
justify charging many thousands of dollars for teaching it? How can you justify
your job if you honestly believe everyone can do it perfectly well no matter
what you say or do in class?
Admin never seems to ask these questions,
mostly because admin is too busy congratulating another 100% A-giving teacher
on the fine work the teacher is doing.
The survey didn’t
just ask about pressure to raise grades, a few other questions came up:
Many
academics said recent reforms, which encourage universities to treat students
as consumers and expand their intake, have damaged the quality of education
offered to undergraduates.
The student-as-customer paradigm, so
responsible for the riots on American campuses, is spreading…it really is just
a matter of time before we see such riots in other countries. It’s a shame that
we can’t use the experience of the failure of this paradigm to stop it from
spreading.
Half of the
academics and university staff surveyed described their workload as
unmanageable.
It really is
strange how my workload goes up every semester. Sometimes it’s incremental—just
ten more students in each class, or just one more mandatory set of training
seminars on educationist muck. Sometimes it’s wholesale, such as redefining
classes as “half credit,” so that I must teach twice as many courses as
before…for the same pay. It’s a shame faculty have no voice in these
decisions…but I suspect if faculty did have a voice, these types of changes
would be laughed out of existence long before anyone even tried to implement
them.
It’s quite
understandable that totally disenfranchised faculty, upon seeing their workload
go ever higher while pay remains unchanged (or is lowered), just can’t care
anymore and so, indeed, we stop assigning so much (or any) work in our classes,
absolutely we eliminate our classwork so that socially promoted college
students don’t get overmatched by material they can’t possibly know, and, yes,
we just award mostly A’s to the students, even as we know we’re not doing
anyone any favors.
And still admin
threatens us to give in more…
No comments:
Post a Comment