By Professor Doom
Last time around I proposed my least
workable fix for higher education, addressing the problem of grade inflation.
Grade inflation is a natural consequence of student evaluations being basically
the only means of evaluating faculty, since a student evaluation is just a
reflection of the grade the student thinks he’s going to get. My fix, let
grades and tests be given not by the teacher of the course, is great in theory,
and not without precedent…but has a few problems beyond simple resistance to
change, a resistance that will be very strong by corrupt typical higher
education.
Student: “How come we didn’t do any
of this any of the other times I took this course?”
--quite often I get students that
have taken, and failed, math class three or more times with other faculty. As
these students systematically take faculty until they find one that can pass
them, they eventually end up in my course. Often they fail. Then they go to
another faculty, and pass. Sometimes I get hate mail from students saying “I
finally found a good teacher,” little realizing that the reason they finally
could move ahead was I gave them a push.
I grant this isn’t feasible for highly
specialized coursework (i.e., graduate school, which I hope to get to later—I’m
sorry to keep saying “I’ll get to this later”, but higher education is
fraudulent on so many levels, that even though I’ve now posted over 100,000
words on it, there’s still much to cover). It almost certainly won’t work for
heavily skill-based work, like, say, piano playing. I should probably address
the latter, because it highlights yet another problem: why are all degrees 4
years long? It’s so bizarre that, according to higher education, it takes just
as long to train a chemist as it does to train a high school guidance counselor
or a parking
lot attendant.
Administrators and Educationists in higher education devote
a positively stupid amount of time looking at education, but this obvious issue
has yet to come up, at least as near as I can tell. I guess “not every degree should take the same
amount of time” is too radical an idea for now, however. A related idea is “why
does it cost just as much to take a course in the factual truth of calculus as
it does to hear the
questionable arguments of diversity or the material of 3rd
grade math?” but now I’m getting way off topic.
Back to the original idea. Putting testing
and grading out of the teacher’s hands (at least, for his own students) would
go a long way to restoring legitimacy to higher education.
Unfortunately, it will take years before
that sort of system is fully implemented, assuming schools had the guts to do
it.
I have another fix that is quite trivial
to implement, would serve in the interim, and would serve even after a more sane
grading system is set up. Here goes: give an exit exam to all graduating
students. An exit exam upon graduation would give employers a far better
measure of what the degree means than the utterly useless GPA of today. Just
one general exam to verify the students have learned a little something, before
the degree is awarded.
“$2300”
--as a student, I was on the honors
council of presidents—a student “club” consisting entirely of presidents of
other student clubs. Our sole source of revenue was selling a tassel that we
sold to graduating students to put on their cap at graduation. Our monthly
irrelevant meetings were VERY well catered, as the above was our average yearly
revenue.
Would graduating students be willing to take
one more exam? Absolutely. Already, students get their degrees held up for
unpaid library dues, making them take that one more exam before they get the
degree would be trivial.
Unlike
my grading system, such exams already exist. For example, the GRE General exam would work perfectly for
this purpose, since it’s specifically intended for college graduates. I don’t
work for ETS, the makers of the exam, but that exam has been around for years,
with no major cheating scandals, and nothing but legitimacy to it…the latter is
the kind of thing higher education needs.
The scores on the GRE aren’t the easiest
to interpret…but they could be converted into percentiles that anyone can
understand. No longer would “average” be an “A”…average would be around the 50th
percentile, right where it should be. It would no longer be possible for
everyone to get an A.
Doing poorly on the exam wouldn’t prevent
the student from getting his degree, any more than a relatively low GPA did
back when low GPAs were possible. It would just be another number to put right next
to the useless “4.0 GPA” that everyone has on the resume. In times past, the
GPA was part of how someone evaluated a resume, but since GPA is now useless
due to corrupted higher education, the GRE (or other standardized) test score
could be used instead.
“Our best students average over 20 on
the ACT!”
--local high schools take pride in
having students that do well on standardized tests. I’m not wild about
standardized tests, but we need them, as I’m less wild about the absolute fraud
of higher education. Seeing as these tests already exist and are cheap to
implement compared to college tuition, why not use them?
And
just like that, the completely bogus degree students could be separated from
the students that actually had to do something to get their degree. It would
also go a long way to eliminating the unjustified “legitimacy” of
accreditation. An unaccredited school that turns out graduates with high GRE
scores will humiliate, humiliate, humiliate
all the accredited schools that crank out graduates that can’t break the 25th
percentile on the GRE. Think about that for a second: an unaccredited school
right now has nothing to offer students besides “we can’t give you federal loan
money.” Easy grades? Nope, accredited schools already offer those. Easy
courses? Ditto. Easy degrees? Ditto. But schools that can show their students
do well in controlled settings? That’s a plus.
In fact, schools that can’t get students
to do well on the GRE will probably get questions asked of them, questions that
nobody asks now, like “why is education so unimportant at this school?” and
“Why do your college graduates consistently perform at the sub-high school
level?” I bet universities that crank out students like that and get asked such
questions will suddenly look into that “integrity” thing I keep talking about.
I used to end my essays with a homework
question, and I’ve been remiss of late in challenging the reader to think about
what I’ve written. So, it’s long past time for an assignment:
Administrators have known for years that
most degrees are bogus and worthless. Administrators have also known for years
that GPA is meaningless. Perhaps I’ve said some unduly harsh things about
administrators. However, I seriously doubt I’m so blazingly brilliant that I’m
the only one to come up with an idea of an exit exam for college graduates to
alleviate the irrelevance of GPAs and even degrees.
Homework question: why does the gentle
reader suppose no administrator at any institution, from sleazy to ivy league,
has taken even the simple step of an exit exam to encourage legitimacy to their
institutions?
Think about
it.
What do you think about the CLA? It's already being talked about as the "SAT for the workplace," and I did see some analysis (which I now can't track down) showing that CLA score predicted life outcomes like employment, living with parents, being in debt, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe CLA is probably just as good. My issue with it is it's so hard to compare "apples to apples" on one year's test to the next. I know, it can be argued that tasks are equivalent, but the bottom line is some people are going to have issues with it. I see they're point, and even if they/I are/am wrong, it seems like it would be easier to just use a more (apparently) fair measure.
ReplyDeleteThe GRE, yes, the questions change from year to year, but since the "tasks" are much smaller, the changes are far less likely to be critical, or at least so it appears.
The point is really, why not use *something* so we can compare the institutions everyone "knows" are bogus to the other institutions? Even if the CLA has issues, it would still be at least something. The question still for me is: we all know what's going on, why hasn't even the most minimal thing been done to instill some integrity in the system?
For those going on to professional school and graduate school back in the Dark Ages of the 20th Century, we had them. You've mentioned the GRE. There were the LSAT and MCATs. After those, we had the licensing exams for the professional trades such as Engineering, Medicine, Law, etc.
ReplyDeleteYou've mentioned ETS, I do recall some scandals over the years, where students had ringers take the previously mentioned examinations, yes even the professional licensing ones. Simple security measures dealt with those, if I recall correctly.