David Dockstader has given an outstanding reply. It is not softpedalling
the mutual obligation, and it gives me excellent food for thought to pass
on to those faculty who are trying to improve the system.
I have managed to motivate many students to give 110% of themselves and to
never quit until the very last opportunity to improve the grade is used up,
including telling them to never trust my ability to calculate their grades
without error. Nonetheless, I have never done the meticulous attention to
documentation that David suggests. I have worried that I was hitting a
blind target, and probably was deluding myself that I actually hit it.
Do others of you have additions to David's approach to validating your
grades and inventorying your students as you progress? I see Keith's
dilema as a microversion of what happens at the University in freshman
courses. The difference is that faculllty *currently* have autonomy in
their grading, even if the *do choose* to flunk 75% of the class. However,
our Dean maintains a comparison between students' overall GPA in their
college and their performance in each class. If there is too great a
discrepancy, the instructor may be taken to task. I see more of this
validation down the road as legislators push for greater accountability.
For years I have wrestled with having a grading system that allows every
student to get an A in a given section--and every student to get an F in
another section *if* the performance warranted it. My motivation was to
allow the best teachers to give the best grades, even if their students
were not performing that well in other courses, *provided* they
outperformed the other students. I wanted faculty to have to look in the
mirror for the cause of student failure. We have Departmental exams, and
the performance on them is not even a standard deviation difference between
the performance of students under the most outstanding award winning
professor and the absolute worst instructor in the Department.
Suggestions?
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Dr. Karl I. Trappe Desk:(512)471-4152
Physics Dept-Mail Stop C1600 Office: (512) 471-5411
The University of Texas at Austin FAX: (512) 471-9637 (other building)
Austin, Texas 78712-1081 E-Mail:trappe@physics.utexas.edu
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