Grade inflation

After the break, a neat graphic on grade inflation (which I saw on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish). Nothing specific to SIUC, where, at least in my experience, grade inflation is not particularly rampant. Of course, talk about retention rates can readily shade over into grading pressure, but I didn't find the only administrative effort on this front known to me particularly heinous (their flagging of core courses that gave more than 20% of students Ds, Fs, Ws, or INCs). The one problem was their lumping the withdrawals and incompletes in with the Ds and Fs, as it amounted to an effort to pin faculty with all the responsibility for retaining students.

But that initiative led me to think again about my grading, so was worthwhile in my case. Certainly the distribution curve in my large lecture class looks rather more like 1960 than 2007 on the chart below--in fact, my distribution has sometimes been scarier for students, as I learned when forced to think this through by the administrative initiative. You may need to readjust when you are giving out many more Ds and Fs than your faculty peers are—though I find that almost all Fs and most Ds in my classes go to students who fail to turn in significant assignments. There's not much you can do about that.  At any rate, rather than easy grades, I rely on my charm and outstanding good looks to assure high student evaluations.

Public Grading

I’d like to inaugurate a new feature here at Deo volente. Public grading. It’s always terribly difficult to explain to students why grades aren’t anything more than largely pointless evaluations or unnecessary obstacles. After all, no one really grades your work on the job in precisely the same fashion as that which occurs in a class. That is, no one evaluates your work with the level of attention and care that grading and commenting requires. Perhaps that’s a good thing, but it does mean that we allow students to imagine grading as the end of teaching, not a part of teaching. Moreover, we allow students to think of grading as the evaluation of apprentices, something that you move beyond once you leave a primarily academic world. But looking at the world through the lens of grading’s intense precision is important and we should try it more often. At the very least, it would allow us to stop letting “good enough” be “good enough.” That is, if we’re not demanding more from the documents and the authors that we read every day, I do not see how we can expect our students to believe us when we demand precision, care, and sound argument from them. Please don’t hesitate to post your own versions in the comments (no anonymous grading, though, please). I think that seeing competing rubrics and comment patterns would help not only our students, but also faculty readers. After all, grading is sometimes a very isolating experience. So on then to our first installment:

Office of the Chancellor

Message from the Chancellor

— This title is redundant and gives no substantive indication of what the remainder of the missive will contain. It’s as if you simply titled your paper “Ms. Johnson’s Paper,” after putting your name at the top. In addition, offices don’t send messages: people do.