Beth
Benoit wrote:
I do believe that most of us are "hung up" on the issue of grading because we are trying to be fair to our students. No one in education, to my knowledge, has come up with a much better system than assigning grades.
What are alternatives? Give everyone an "A"? Give everyone a "P"? Thumb our noses at our college and university's requirements that grades be given? (Lose our jobs?)While I agree completely with the sentiment, and I understand that I'm in a fairly unique situation, I'd like to point out that I work in a system that I honestly do believe is better. I can't take any personal responsibility for its original design and/or implementation, but here at Alverno, we don't give grades, and instead record the details of students' learning. On the surface it might look like a "pass/fail" system. A student's responsibility is to meet ALL of the criteria in a course, and all students who do so are then treated equivalently (by the larger record-keeping system). Of course the faculty do know that students vary in quality of work, and there are plenty of opportunities to acknowledge that fact (for example, Graudation with Honors, Psi Chi, publication and presentation opportunities, letters of recommendation), but all students who graduate have in theory at least* demonstrated all of the required abilities of her major and minors.One significant advantage of this system is what I think of as the "C dilemma". Can a student really compensate for her failure in some areas by excelling in others? When I took my undergraduate statistics students were allowed to make up points they'd missed by writing a biography of a famous statistician. Does that kind of thing really compensate for not having been able to identify a situation for which a t-test is appropriate? The notion seems akin to saying that a student pilot who is no good at all at landing can still qualify to fly by being REALLY good at navigating. My students fail** if they can't do certain required things, and they don't (generally) try to argue that their good performance in other areas should make up for that.* Of course there are situations in which a student manages to use the system, but that's no different here than it is elsewhere.** Honest!Paul SmithAlverno CollegeMilwaukee
