"Students Want Below-Average Grades Abolished, Midterms Replaced with Conversations"

[Deleted]

Oberlin Students Want Below-Average Grades Abolished, Midterms Replaced with Conversations

https://reason.com/blog/2016/05/24/o...w-average-grad



Oberlin College's activist community is ready to call it quits. Progressive students are dropping out of college, citing academic and emotional difficulties stemming from their mental health problems and overall disgust with the toxic culture on campus.

That's according to a fascinating piece for The New Yorker by Nathan Heller, who interviewed a number of exhausted activists at Oberlin. They perceive that other students, faculty members, and the administration are completely against them, and have made it impossible for them to live on campus. Some are dropping out.

Of course, some of these students probably feel unsupported because their impractical demands were not realized. Two examples: activist students not only wanted to abolish all grades below a 'C,' they also thought faculty members should proactively offer them alternatives to taking a written, in-class midterm exam. Here is the testimony of Megan Bautista, who identifies as an Afro-Latinx student:

Protest surged again in the fall of 2014, after the killing of Tamir Rice. “A lot of us worked alongside community members in Cleveland who were protesting. But we needed to organize on campus as well—it wasn’t sustainable to keep driving forty minutes away. A lot of us started suffering academically.” In 1970, Oberlin had modified its grading standards to accommodate activism around the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings, and Bautista had hoped for something similar. More than thirteen hundred students signed a petition calling for the college to eliminate any grade lower than a C for the semester, but to no avail. “Students felt really unsupported in their endeavors to engage with the world outside Oberlin,” she told me.

If students take their activism more seriously than their classes, that's their choice. And certainly much good can come from an organized, aware, activist community on a college campus. But in some sense, doesn't school have to be about, well, learning? And measuring whether students are in fact learning?

And then there's this, from student Zakiya Acey:

“Because I’m dealing with having been arrested on campus, or having to deal with the things that my family are going through because of larger systems—having to deal with all of that, I can’t produce the work that they want me to do. But I understand the material, and I can give it to you in different ways. There’s professors who have openly been, like, ‘Yeah, instead of, you know, writing out this midterm, come in to my office hours, and you can just speak it,’ right? But that’s not institutionalized. I have to find that professor.”

Again, it's great that some professors are willing to make that accommodation, but should it be an institutionalized policy? Should we handicap professors' abilities to grade their students because some of those students think organizing and protesting is more important than class?

The students Heller interviewed seem to think they're not at college to be educated: they are at college to educate everyone else. As Jasmine Adams, a member of the black student union, put it:

“We’re asking to be reflected in our education,” Adams cuts in. “I literally am so tired of learning about Marx, when he did not include race in his discussion of the market!” She shrugs incredulously. “As a person who plans on returning to my community, I don’t want to assimilate into middle-class values. I’m going home, back to the ’hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”

While I share Adam's view that Marx is over-taught in college, I question her desire to leave college as a completely unchanged human being. You should change who you are, and what you think, in college. It's a transformative experience. That's the entire point. It's what you're paying for.

[Gamevizier]

"this is too hard for me to learn so I want to be in a system in which I don't have to learn jackshit."

[Deleted]

This is hilarious. Why even bother with college at all? Just give everyone a degree regardless of merit so its fair and no one gets hurt feelings, nor has to put in any effort. I am sure this will massively further academic study in all fields.

[Skroe]

el oh el liberal arts....

Christ... to learn about Marx and have it be serious. Where I went, we all took humanites to tactically boost my GPA bottom line. But then again we had a saying at my university: "H&SS (Humanities and Social Science) Makes for Less Stress".


I read this article as "Easy Mode Players want Easy Mode made even Easier".


So whats it going to take for Oberlin to throw these people out? Or they need more work. They're not busy enough.

[nonameelf]

To be fair, the current system is pretty garbage and places more emphasis on memorizing test answers over actually learning. Though this plan doesn't sound better.

[Slant]

Probably the latter @Skroe.

What I don't get is that college education being so expensive in the US, these kids are literally throwing their parents' money into the bin with that kind of thinking. I'm not sure if this is the university's problem but rather that of bad parenting. Do their parents actually support them through all their bullshit? Who's supposed to stand up and tell them to knock it off if not them?

[PACOX]

To be fair, the current system is pretty garbage and places more emphasis on memorizing test answers over actually learning. Though this plan doesn't sound better.

The kids in the article pretty much admitted to not going to class.

[Slant]

To be fair, the current system is pretty garbage and places more emphasis on memorizing test answers over actually learning. Though this plan doesn't sound better.

The idea is that if you learned the material, you'd be able to test answers. It's pretty straight forward and has been a proven method to test knowledge more or less objectively for centuries (or whenever the school system got methodical in educating people to a certain measurable standard).

[Deleted]

This is ridiculous. I'm currently back in college as a mature student and I tell you the amount of whining I'm seeing is beyond acceptable. These kids will have absolutely NO CHANCE outside an academic environment if they don't grow up.

[kail]

As time goes on, more people seem to forget the original purpose of schools.

[Deleted]

I consider my self to be a leftist in the EU, which is more a "far left" in the USA political spectrum. I hold social justice and freedom in high consideration.

But this -- this is simply ridiculous.

Evaluation should be fair, without discrimination. Maybe one could reasonably ask that some written tests are replaced by oral examinations. This could be beneficial to endure a better assessment of the student's understanding of the discipline at hand.

I would be in favour of providing more student grants, or even make university mostly state-supported.

But removing all marks below C ? No, thank you.

I once read an open letter coming from a local company which was seeking "strong" students with a master's degree for hiring. The letter complained that, in the last years marks have been higher and higher, to the point that they could no longer distinguish who were the really good students. So, they had to spend more effort in their interviews to test students again -- wasting resources.

Now the true question is -- when applying for a job, would you rather be judged for 1) how you performed in a ~5 year program (bachelor+master) as evaluated by multiple professors, or 2) how you performed in a 2-hours interview?

I perfectly agree with the point of view of Joel Spolsky, which is one of the most famous recruiters/interviewers in the world for computing jobs. Courses should be kept challenging, so that the marks do matter at the end.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articl...vaSchools.html

[Deleted]

To be fair, the current system is pretty garbage and places more emphasis on memorizing test answers over actually learning. Though this plan doesn't sound better.

What "system"?

Education quality varies massively, not just by country, but across institutions within countries. There will always be rote learning, but a good institution will challenge you to think critically based on assumed learned knowledge, rather than simply asking you to regurgitate facts.

I don't think Oberlin is in that camp if I am honest.

[Sorshen]

From a former student... students are idiots.

[Macaquerie]

The idea is that if you learned the material, you'd be able to test answers. It's pretty straight forward and has been a proven method to test knowledge more or less objectively for centuries (or whenever the school system got methodical in educating people to a certain measurable standard).

That's kind of the issue though, traditional exams are used mostly because they produce a result that's easy to quantify, not necessarily because they have all that much to do with how much the students are actually learning. As a teacher you are always going to have students who stand out as far more engaged and bought into the course than their peers and clearly deserve higher grades, but arbitrarily boosting their grades based on subjective evaluation isn't exactly the most fair mechanism either.

[kail]

Evaluation should be fair, without discrimination. Maybe one could reasonably ask that some written tests are replaced by oral examinations. This could be beneficial to endure a better assessment of the student's understanding of the discipline at hand.

How would that work out? A 1 on 1 with a professor? Sounds way too time consuming. There is also the potential bias from the professor on what answers he/she deems acceptable and what conversations are passable. Too much room for human error there IMO.

I don't see what could be wrong with simple tests to see if the student knows the material or not.

[nonameelf]

The idea is that if you learned the material, you'd be able to test answers. It's pretty straight forward and has been a proven method to test knowledge more or less objectively for centuries (or whenever the school system got methodical in educating people to a certain measurable standard).

Papers are a much better way of testing knowledge than regurgitating answers for a test.

[SageKalzi]

As Jasmine Adams, a member of the black student union, put it:

“We’re asking to be reflected in our education,” Adams cuts in. “I literally am so tired of learning about Marx, when he did not include race in his discussion of the market!” She shrugs incredulously. “As a person who plans on returning to my community, I don’t want to assimilate into middle-class values. I’m going home, back to the ’hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”

If you want to be equal quit actively TRYING separating yourselves from others. Also, if they want to "go back to the hood and be same person" then they shouldn't have gone to college in the first place. They're wasting their money/time/learning by attempting to stay the same, if you don't want to learn anything and hear different ideas and maybe change your mind or learn more about stuff you're already interested in then why are you even alive in the first place?

[Deleted]

As an employer I just want to say this: I wouldn't want to hire any of these students and I doubt anyone else would either.

But I guess they will go into politics anyway, so it's ok I guess.

[Slant]

That's kind of the issue though, traditional exams are used mostly because they produce a result that's easy to quantify, not necessarily because they have all that much to do with how much the students are actually learning. As a teacher you are always going to have students who stand out as far more engaged and bought into the course than their peers and clearly deserve higher grades, but arbitrarily boosting their grades based on subjective evaluation isn't exactly the most fair mechanism either.

Not sure what you're getting at, tbh. But I agree that education is hard to measure. Grades rarely reflect fairly on how well a student actually understood the material. But in modern education systems where one professor easily has to deal with hundreds of students per class, thousands of students per semester... you cannot make the perfect evaluation of each student's mental progress. And in the end, you want to give the student some sort of comparable certificate to present to his employer. And something that will always be the bane of students: To get to the juicy bits of science, sometimes you have to memorise shit to be efficient. It doesn't help your first steps into research if you're looking up terminology or values all the time that others know by memory.

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Papers are a much better way of testing knowledge than regurgitating answers for a test.

Ok, for me both are the same. If she means "multiple choice" when she says tests, ok that's not really helpful. I have never had to do a multiple choice test in my life, always written exams where the written content produced by me far outweighs the half page task given to us. But see... the problem is, we always look down upon multiple choice tests, because they're too easy. If she cannot cope with a simple set of questions where even RNG could luck her into getting the answers right that she doesn't know... how does she hope to produce a scientific paper that relies on her having the same set of knowledge, but also the understanding behind it and the ability to scientifically employ that understanding to reproduce something that's gradeable?

Heck, here's our rating system for law papers, see if she would like that... this is as described to first semesters: You have 18 grades. You get a task (usually a law case). You have to analyse it using the techniques you learned so far. You start out at 9 points (which is the middle, right). Then you proceed with your analysis and every bullet point that's correct will push you a bit higher, so you might reach a 12 or so... then you make a mistake, a tiny one, and you're bumped down to 5-6 points (you fail with 4 points). And then you have the rest of the paper to flawlessly work you up to basically end up at 10 points or so, if you're not making more mistakes.

This is how they grade law papers in Germany. Two mistakes and you're risking to fail that paper, because those mistakes leads to wrong conclusions which ruins the entire paper. I'd have taken a multiple choice test any day over that. Multiple choice is easy, it's a joke. You can game the system with that to an extent. A gap in your knowledge is just that, a gap... it'll be drowned in the average of the question scores. If you have to produce an actual paper, that same gap in your knowledge could very well lead to the entire paper going to shits as a result.

Those babies have no idea what they're wishing for.

[Vetis]

inevitable conclusion of a culture at home from birth through all school years of not being told no, everything doesn't have to cater to you and you do suck at some things - get over it; being prevalent in our society leading to spoiled idiots unable to handle difficulty.