Making Grades Count

I just finished reading a brilliant article in the October 2009 issue of the National Review by Robert Verbruggen entitled "Beyond the BA: Why Fewer People Should Get One." I am pretty ecumenical when it comes to looking for insight and erudition and the National Review does not disappoint.  It is good to see that not all conservative "thinkers" come equipped with personality disorders, and that there are some important voices coming from the right. I highly recommend that article.

In my last post I discussed how many college students hate the process of higher education and merely endure it.  I have some recommendations to make on how we can begin to change that by making grades really count and having a process of real accountability.

 We hire students emerging from college without adequate evidence as to their abilities and especially as to their character and work habits.  We know that grades earned in college may have no bearing on actual ability, and that letters of recommendation are from carefully picked persons who will at the very least damn them with faint praise. An acquaintance of mine, an editor at a magazine, told me how her publication inadvertently hired an intern who could not write.   The managing editors suspect that the sample paper used in the application was professionally written because there is such a mismatch between the quality of that document and the subsequent inability of that person to form coherent sentences.  They literally gave up on having the intern write stories since it was more work to rewrite (editing is too light a term) the articles than it was worth.  Situations like that can be avoided with improved hiring practices and expanding how we grade.  What to do?

First of all we need to not only award grades for academic performance but for such things as attendance and honesty.  As an employer I would definitely like to know that the job applicant in front of me had atrocious attendance.  I would like to know that the next candidate cheated on a biology exam, and the one after that routinely showed disrespect for the teacher or spent their class time texting.  Is that better to know than they made an A in English Composition and a B in Biology?  With such a system that C student with a stellar attendance record who worked full time while acquiring their degree might suddenly look better than the other candidates who cynically played the grade game with their constant mantra of: "Will we be getting a study guide?" and the perennial favorite "Will that be on the test?" Somethings are more important than the things we currently grade for.

Employers can do something too.  Get tougher on checking things out.  Ask for a recommendation from the students advisor, from two other faculty members including one outside their major.  Ask tough questions about attendance, ability to work with others, and how they accepted responsibility.  Ask for a couple of writing samples from old papers rather than something prepared especially for the hiring process.  Then, require them to write something right there during the hiring process. 

The current grading system is inadequite and designed for a different era.  That era is dead.  Grades no longer tell you enough about a student and many many things that you should know never make it onto a college transcript.  Trust me on that.

Hating College

I am amazed at the number of college students who despise going to college and are only doing so because of social/family pressures and their desire to "have a good job."  When I survey any given class the vast majority admit that they are essentially in college because they feel they have to be, and that they are only enduring college because they think it is their ticket to a more lucrative future. They admit to no intellectual curiosity and find the whole experience mind numbing. Admittedly my sample is skewed and I have no idea what students would be like in the physical sciences.  I have a theory though that there is a correlation between ACT and IQ scores and satisfaction with college as an intellectual experience but presently I have no data to support it.

With college rapidly becoming the new high school more and more people are coming to college that are marginally qualified by inclination and aptitude to attend.  These students are in a kind of vocational holding pattern as they put in their time to get their ticket punched so they can enter the adult work force.  In the meantime they take out student loans and work at low paying jobs in order to pay their way. What does this do to the college experience?

Do not be fooled.  Qualitatively there is a difference between the college graduate of today and the one of ten or more years ago.  The discourse and milieu of the current classroom is controlled not by students who are there to learn but by those who are there to endure.  To most students today the college experience is an obstacle they must navigate with guile and cunning so they can "get on" with their real life.  Grade inflation is in fact a result of what happens when the ideal of college is marketed with such spectacular success that college is seen as a necessity for even a modicum of success, and that in a society where success is mostly equated with higher incomes. 

This is at a time when the cost of college continues to rise much faster than the cost of living while institutions of higher learning show little propensity, or skill, in curbing the rising cost by focusing on the core mission of education.  Colleges are increasingly guilty of mission creep where the educational experience is subjugated to supplemental services while the growth in faculty numbers is fabulously dwarfed by the growth in staff.  Colleges and universities have recently been forced to cut expenses because of the current recession but these revised budgets have included continued increases in tuition which are funded primarily through student loans.

When a student graduates from high school there are few jobs for them and most have been led to believe that their future happiness is best served by obtaining a college degree.  There are "statistics" to support that claim but I am suspicious of those numbers.  I do not think there is a direct cause and effect connection but that something else is happening.  I suspect that those same persons without a higher education would have made more money than their unschooled peers for other reasons than having a college degree, and that those who do not have a college degree remain at a lower income level for reasons other than not having a college degree.  Many students leave college and enter jobs for which they could have been trained in much less time and with much less expense had other options been available to them.

I do not think the college degree, at least as I envision it, was ever intended to be the universal experience that we are making it.  It is like assuming that everyone who played high school sports is capable of  performing at the level required for college.  Also,I find it highly ironic that we are sending more and more students to college when the public education system is vastly inadequate and incapable of turning out students who are truly prepared to enter institutions of higher learning.  What to do?

The biggest culprit is student loans which are a racket.  Student loans guaranteed by the government are no longer the good deal they used to be but financial traps.  Colleges and universities can count on a seemingly endless supply of tuition monies funded by student loans and have no incentive to cut costs and lower tuition. Currently, colleges and universities have no incentive to restrict the flow of students through their doors despite the empty rhetoric to the contrary.  The next culprit is that we have no alternatives for young people and have created a myth that everyone is both obligated and capable of attending college no matter what.  Let me end with a true story.

Several years ago I had a student in one of my classes that was having some extreme difficulties. That student showed me their Individual Education Plan from high school and their paper work from the Missouri Department of Vocational Rehabilitation.  Both documents confirmed that the student was mentally retarded.  Think about the implications of this last example and what it means.