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grade-grubbing & course selection



I think we delude ourselves if we think this is not the way it's been for
some time now. How many of us, when we had a free elective (I had only
two
in my undergraduate days), really took a 'challenging' course--for the
sake
of knowledge. [OK, I did take Fortran, but also Music Appreciation.]

I took lots of challenging courses outside my major, by choice. I don't
believe I ever based any course decision on the grade I thought I would
get, and I didn't expect to get an A in any of the electives. Most of the
math and science majors I knew either took extra math and science courses
(challenging ones) or took challenging outside electives.

At the school I now teach in, I see little evidence that an instructor's
reputation for grading hard or easy affects the enrollment in a course;
what evidence I see is mostly the opposite of what you suggest. We have a
history teacher who grades extremely hard, and his courses are always
filled. Same with our main calc teacher, one of our bio teachers, and a
few others.


Career
preparation has been the primary goal of college for quite some time now,
and that is not likely to change any time soon (if ever). At prices now
often exceeding $100,000 for a college education, the buyers are not
often 'risk takers'.

I sadly agree that most of the people paying for college educations see
college primarily as career preparation. But I also think that a large
fraction of the population considers the quality of the schooling to be at
least as important as the grades received.


All of this is not to say that there are _no_ students
really turned on by learning (I get a few--far too few) and that some
will
take courses to really try and learn something they are interested in
(outside their major)--but that is VERY seldom physics.

I disagree that there are only a few students who are turned on by
learning, and will try something challenging outside their majors. I do
agree that that "something challenging" usually isn't physics, at least at
most colleges. But I think that's largely a function of the sequential
structure of most physics programs. Physics for poets type courses often
have pretty good enrollment, and many of them are not easy A's for most
students.

Our best hope is to
present courses that are interesting and effective so as to trigger the
intellectual excitement of the students, but realistically we need to
understand that this will work for only a few.

Again, I agree with your first part of your statement and disagree with the
second. In both high school and college, I noticed that a course that had
a reputation for being fun and exciting usually drew students regardless of
grading standards.

At the same time, an instructor's ability to offer such a course does
depend on the constraints under which they teach.


Digby