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Re: grade-grubbing & course selection



----- Original Message -----
From: "Digby Willard" <dwillard@milk.central.stpaul.k12.mn.us>

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.

I didn't count the Linear Algebra and the Partial Differential Equations
courses I took as an undergraduate (along with many of my classmates). We
took these not out of great intellectual curiosity, but rather because we
believed this to be beneficial to our future careers. We are also talking
amongst ourselves in a rather unique group--mostly Ph.D.s and Master level
physicists. I'm not sure we can extend our experiences to the general
student body.



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.


What do you mean by hard graders? Is the average grade in the courses
really a C? If the students are college-prep (and looking toward schools
with competive entrance requirements), are they really unconcerned about
their likely grades?


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.


I agree. They want quality but they don't want their kids getting Cs. When
that happens, they often jerk them out of that school and place them in
another.


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.


If things nationwide were as you portray them, then why is there a problem
with grades inflating upwards and why did we all get so upset a couple
months ago about a large public university course where one could pass
without do anything (certainly without leaning anything)? Colleges and
Universities are in competition for students and (despite the formal
rhetoric) in most cases the product being sold is a degree (not knowledge or
skill). It therefore falls on the faculty to maintain the standards that
will ensure that the degrees conferred will represent the prerequisite gain
of knowledge and skills by the graduates. Unfortunately, we've had enough
reports, on this list alone, of instructors under pressure from
administrators to back off from some of those standards.

To return a little more to Jim's original concern about grade inflation: It
seems to me to be a real detriment to send students out of High School with
3.9 averages and then have these students find out that they are B- students
in College. I have any number of these B- students come to me totally
confused (yes, about the Physics too) because they just can't understand why
they aren't doing better in the course. After all, they had all A's in High
School! Their expectations are that they can get an A with the same level
of effort (or the same memorization techniques) that they expended in HS,
and it doesn't work. This is not just a problem at the HS level either. My
wife is an elementary school principal. She has to deal with parents who
can't understand why their children have to go to summer school (based on
the state-wide testing program) when they have been on the honor-roll all
year!

Rick