By Professor Doom
“Drink Brawndo. It Has Electrolytes!”
--from the movie Idiocracy, which presents an
alarmingly credible look into our future. The word “inclusive” is used much
like electrolytes in the movie, without considering if there’s any evidence
having such things is always a good idea.
Hey, remember last post where the Progressives had decided students
can’t be trusted to evaluate their professors because RACISM? I sure do. Well,
that doesn’t mean they can’t evaluate themselves:
“Inclusive” is one the many code words relating to RACISM, in this case
meaning a way to get around theoretical racial inequality. What’s the
workaround in this case?
According to a December
6, 2017 Powerpoint presentation by the CTL,
inclusive grading starts by “trusting students to assess themselves.”
…
Fifteen of the 34 Powerpoint
slides specifically encourage professors to let students grade themselves. If
students can choose their own grades, the presentation asserts, then they’ll
feel less stress and anxiety, and maybe even learn more productively.
Heck, why don’t we just get rid of the professors, and just have the
students do it all? It’d free up much more money for administrative pay raises.
I’m there’s some lakefront property they haven’t bought yet.
We already know GPA is ultimately worthless even in academia, but the uselessness of GPA
in the “real world” has been reality for a long time. All grades are for is
motivation, little different than how parents use Santa Claus to get kids to
behave.
Hey, do we have any academics advocating for how little kids should be
allowed to get their own gifts for Christmas? I mean, Santa is white, so they
could certainly argue RACISM is a factor here. Oh wait, there aren’t any
student loan checks involved.
Anyway, I concede I was graded with unfair harshness from time to time
in school…and graded generously a few times as well. I couldn’t tell you if
overall my GPA would have shifted 0.1 one way or the other, but it doesn’t
matter: the false value of “grade” motivated me to work just a bit harder than
I would have otherwise, and that’s the entire point of grades. Despite the
inherent falseness, I would no more get rid of this system than seek to annihilate
Santa from our culture.
So, despite the fact that RACISM means students can’t be trusted to
evaluate their teachers, RACISM also means students can be trusted to evaluate
themselves.
Times like these, I really appreciate being in mathematics, as such
contradictory thinking would make my head hurt if chemo didn’t already do so.
“Grades are currency for a capitalist system that
reduces teaching and learning to a mere transaction” (emphasis added), the CTL
states, quoting activist Jesse Stommel. “Grading is a massive co-ordinated
effort to take humans out of the educational process.”
I swear I hear the mock Russian
“kyep-it-al-ist” in my head when I read “capitalist” in the above. He’s
seriously saying grading takes humans out of the educational process? This
truly is documenting how little faculty measure here: we don’t even register as
human.
I really want to point out the people
running these seminars are Educationists, they have Ph.D. degrees in
Education…and yet they don’t know grades are simply a motivational tool. Educationist training really is that atrocious.
How can none of the academics involved in
this not see obvious flaws in thinking like I’ve pointed out, above?
According to one study by Nelta Edwards,
a professor at the University of Alaska, 86% of students report that
“self grading is a great/good teaching method.”
Yeah, no kidding. I suspect 86% of kids
report chocolate cake for breakfast is a great/good meal. Nevertheless this
type of study will be used to support these lunatic ideas.
This is actually part of a whole series of
seminars on “Inclusiveness,” which is really just another sham to try get the
system to grow just a little bit more, exploiting the few parts of our
population that haven’t been screwed by the worst aspects of higher education.
The “Inclusive Teaching
Seminar” will be held in Spring 2018
and will host five meetings. While “inclusive” is vague, the CTL website explains
that each session will be dedicated to a specific topic, such as “inclusive
grading” or “preventing microaggressions.”
I
wish them luck on these kinds of seminars, I really do, but I also wish someone
would show up and ask real questions about the thinking involved in the policy
changes they are advocating. Seminars like these go on throughout the country
on campuses all the time. They give their talk, there’s polite applause…and a
few months later some Dean will be ordering community college adjuncts to have
students grade themselves, cheerfully implying anyone who opposes her must be a
RACIST.
And she’ll have these nice results from
Columbia backing her up…
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