Comments on Quick Takes: Decent Grades for Showing Up, BU's Push for Open Access, Columbia Debates Gaza, More Scrutiny for Brandeis President, Dallas Chaplain on Leave After Scam, Drunk Driving Arrest, Searching for Geronimo's Remains

• Best quote ever
• Posted by MWJ on February 18, 2009 at 9:16am EST

• When I was a grad student years ago, I had an essay from a young man that contained this: "My friends tole me that if I just show up for class, I get at least a C. That a lie. I prove it not to be true." I still haven't read a line in a student essay that tops it.

• Columbia Debates Gaza
• Posted by Robert lang on February 18, 2009 at 9:25am EST

• Bravo, Columbia University faculty members who signed an open letter asking President Lee C. Bollinger to take a public stand on Israeli actions limiting Palestinians’ academic freedom. As a scholar (and Columbia Ph.D.), I have been outraged by Bollinger’s public statements on issues pertaining to the Middle East. Just because successive American administrations have been in thrall to the Israel Lobby (or what, more accurately, we should be calling the Zionist Lobby), to the great detriment of both the US and (sad irony) Israel, does not mean a great university like my alma mater should endorse the values, objectives and ethics of that “lobby,” which is in conflict with significant portions of what the United States stands for (cf. the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights). A university as an especial responsibility to be ethical when our Government so clearly is not.

• On Our Shoulders
• Posted by Senior Professor on February 18, 2009 at 10:40am EST

• Accurate assessment of student performance is a central responsibility of teaching. When it is not done well, students understand and respond in various ways including those depicted in this news brief.

  We can posture all we want but the facts are: (1) it is our responsibility to communicate performance standards, metrics, rubrics, and application criteria for each possible grade, (2) it is our responsibility to ensure the comprehension of #1 through reasonable assessment procedures, (3) #1 and #2 are important and inseparable function of our role as teachers, (4) grade challenges arise in direct proportion to our lack of comprehensiveness, clarity, and even-handedness in executing our role as performance evaluators.

• re: grade inflation
• Posted by Peter C. Herman , Prof. at SDSU on February 18, 2009 at 12:50pm EST

• I resectfully disagree with "Senior Professor"'s comment about how the blame for student challenges lies with the professor: "grade challenges arise in direct proportion to our lack of comprehensiveness, clarity, and even-handedness in executing our role as performance evaluators." That is, in my experience, simply not the case. Time after time a student will hand in a perfectly unexceptional paper, one that does not make mistakes but neither does it excel, and demand an A. And if one makes clear--as I did last semester--that if students want to do well on the exams, they should read the texts (Shakespeare plays) multiple times. Several students on the evals singled out that expectation as evidence for the unreasonableness of my standards. In short, the problem here does not lie with faculty, but with students who expect high grades without first producing excellent work.

• Still On Our Shoulders
• Posted by Senior Professor on February 18, 2009 at 2:35pm EST

• Per Peter’s comments, the difficulty of accomplishing what I laid out above varies with the discipline. Taking Shakespearean literature, an admittedly more difficult case than, say, accounting (which has its own challenges, no disrespect implied), consider the following.

  At the beginning of the term, each student signs a document attesting his understanding of the evaluation metrics and rubrics for all assignments. This requirement leaves little to question when the paper is assessed by that public rubric and returned to the student. Easier said than done, right? Stick with me here; I’m not begging the question.

  It requires more than a little education and coaching to learn how to write good rubrics. That effort, however, is handsomely rewarding for several reasons: (1) the effort you put in designing the rubrics on the front end pays off, with positive leverage, on the back end (grading is simpler, of higher reliability and validity, and faster), (2) the time and hassle factor of grade disputes is virtually eliminated (there is one other component to this, see below), (3) writing good rubrics disciplines us as professors to think through exactly what we want in a paper deserving of various levels of proficiency (notice that the rubric does not legislate your standards; it makes them public and consistent in application), and (4) the existence of the rubrics is itself instructional in that it raises students’ consciousness with respect to dimensions of thought that you deem important.

  Can a rubric be developed to assess an essay on topics that are richly complex, admitting of various levels of subtlety beyond merely answering questions minimally in a syntactical correct fashion? Absolutely! It is done every day. Laying out the detail is beyond the scope of this forum but I can tell you that there need be no loss of evaluative richness in designing assessment rubrics for essays, term papers, etc. and that doing so enriches the total educational experience.

  I mentioned eliminating 100% of grade disputes. The first 90% are eliminated by setting forth detailed performance criteria at the beginning of the term and having all students sign off that they understand these criteria. The last 10% comes from placing both parties at risk in a potential dispute. As a part of the student sign-off: (1) publish a policy that any grade can be challenged, (2) that all challenges will be resolved by reapplying the performance standards agreed to by the student for a possible error (here is where you hope you have been detailed and unambiguous), (3) that the re-evaluation may result in a higher OR a lower grade (or no change), and (4) there is no further appeal, including those cases where the grade is lowered.

  Finally, if I can make one other point to those who teach classes, such as literature, where work products tend to be long samples of writing to a specified theme. Please employ the following principles: (1) take many measures, (2) take measures often, (3) take many different types of measures (factual recall, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, affective judgment, etc.), (4) eliminate high stakes assessments (e.g., a final exam that counts for 80% of the grade) with no assessment counting for more than 20% of the total, (5) embed many separate measurement points in each assessment (e.g., a short-essay quiz that has five questions each graded on four dimensions, each dimension having three points potential; i.e., 60 points total for that quiz), (6) arrange measures so that in any given 15-20% block of the term, the student knows exactly where he stands in terms of a grade if the class were to end at that moment.

  One more trick: employing the above strategy combined with the following will virtually eliminate grade inflation. For the many small measures taken, grade each on a three point scale where ‘1’ is below standard performance, ‘3’ is exceptionally positive performance and ‘2’ is everything else (‘2’ is the default to be displaced by an affirmative judgment that something falls out of the norm). It is too complex to explain here but doing this for 150 or so checkpoints (not onerous because of how the rubrics carry the load) will result in a nearly perfect distribution that is impenetrable with respect to whiney/lazy student complaints.

  Please do not think I am being reductionist in any of these suggestions. My primary discipline is philosophy and, as you know, we tend to live where the air is so thin that many accuse of hypoxia. If rubrics can be constructed to accurately assess a graduate students understanding of the similarities (not the easier topic of differences) between the early and the later Wittgenstein, I’m thinking they can assess most anything.

  Bottom line: Shame on the New York Times for reporting such empirically unsound rubbish.

• Geronimo's Skull, and bones?
• Posted by Bob W. on February 18, 2009 at 4:30pm EST

• Yeah. And bill Clinton and Demi Moore are aliens! Well, she's from Roswell isn't she?

  C'mon editors. We know you hate Bush, but you can do better than that.

• Posted by shut up and give me an A on February 18, 2009 at 4:30pm EST

• Senior Professor has obviously never had a student tell him that his rubric was wrong.

• grade wars
• Posted by Old Oligarch on February 18, 2009 at 4:30pm EST

• If it is as complicated as Senior Professor says to make sure that students understand the expectations in a course, surely something's gone wrong much earlier.

  How did his students manage to make it to graduate school if they have no sense of how merit is assessed in philosophical discussions and essays? His 'contract' reads as if it were meant for freshmen, not for students studying the 'earlier' and 'later' Wittgenstein. Surely most graduate students would be puzzled and insulted by it: it reads as if it were setting out the criteria for Olympic gymnastic competition, not for scholarship.

  As for Wittgenstein and evaluations—three years ago a colleague and I taught a course in Wittgenstein, a close reading of the Tractatus, part of the Blue Book, and as much of the Investigations as time allowed. At the outset, we impressed upon the students that we were going to read only Wittgenstein—no commentaries would come between them and the texts. On our student evaluations we received satisfying marks except in one category: 'Were the readings/texts useful?' Here the students gave only mediocre marks. Perhaps they wanted more Spinoza.

• Balance - US scolars in Gaza
• Posted by Marina on February 18, 2009 at 9:15pm EST

• It is a great shame that peopele write and sign "opem letters" with no clue what they are speaking about. Compare hoe many visas were denied by other governments and by Israel. Who will dare to say that it make the "academic life unworkable"? Why Israel's politics are so important to write "open letter"?
  Why so called "Palestinian" scholras' academic freedom is more important than academic freedom of many other scholars whos visas were denied by many other countries?

  And why Israel actions in Gaza worse for "academic life" than countless MURDERS practicing by Hamas? Why not the "open letter" to Hamas leaders?

  Why the professors become so "naiv"? Each country has borders and nobody discuss how it protects the borders. How many people paid their lives trying penetrate through Soviet borders and Berlin Wall? Where you were with your "open letters"?

  It is simply outrageous, such a position!