If the issue of grading is fresh in your mind (especially as students are complaining about their dissatisfaction with grades), perhaps you should read the following article: “If students fail, fire the teacher.” I am confident that it will give you food for thought considering the theory of giving grades at the College level.
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2008/05/if_students_fail_fire_the_teac.html
I am not going to attempt to justify either Norfolk State University or Steven Aird, in this particular case. But I have a larger question to ask.
If 90% of your students have truly earned the grade of F or D, what should you learn from that fact?
Here are a few proposed answers:
- The students aren’t prepared to do the teacher’s definition of college level work.
- The students want good grades for little work.
- The teachers have unrealistic expectations for what college level work today is.
- The definitions of “college-level work” and “prepared” are unclear in the 21st century.
- The teacher has not adequately motivated or prepared the student to succeed.
Maybe there are more. I know that the same explanation can’t lie behind every failed grade given. What do you think? Feel free to click the comment button to add your own thoughts to the discussion.
The article on Aird gives few details by which to evaluate his case, so one must make some assumptions. If he was denied tenure, he was probably a recent hire. Likewise, his students were probably underclassmen. Frequently, profs just out of grad school tend to teach over the heads of their students, as if they were postgraduates themselves. What Aird perceived as “dumbing down” the curriculum may actually have been justified by the level of the students.
The 66% average attendance indicates that the school needs to be more demanding of its students. It also may indicate that Aird could not maintain interest in his class. One would have to compare attendance in other classes to Aird’s to see.
In the late 60s, I had one or two classes where only 10% of the students made a B or better. It was the Viet Nam War era; colleges were full and these classes were perceived as “flunk-out” courses designed to weed out the students who were only in college to party or to avoid the draft. After the war ended, enrollments dropped and both college admission standards and grading tended to get easier, in my opinion.
I think these expectations should be made clear up front. When I taught at Colorado, most of the senior members of the department taught beginning lecture courses. I ended up teaching most of the language courses for graduate students. The reason things were like that was that departmental appropriations were dependent upon enrollment, and thus that was the emphasis. Most universities have few required courses; at most they have “area requirements”. I have little doubt that most of this individual’s students probably didn’t do a lot of work, but I wonder what were the stated requirements of the department when he was hired. Students often learn as much (sometimes more) from professors they don’t like, but usually they have to take the course as part of a requirement. There has existed for some time a myth among university students that they either are brilliant or not. Many expect that the university is the place they will find that out. The good students are those that realize early that effort also matters and perhaps much more.
C J
Basic to student success at Norfolk State or in any college is a high expection for class attedance — whether or not Mr. Aird is the teacher. How successful can people be in a job when they show up for work less than 80% of the time? The high attendance expectation at CCCB (80% minimum) facilitates on-going (rather than on-off) student attention to the tasks designed into a course. Attendance and timely submission of assignments are basic. As in most things, remember the basics. D J D
Excellent points for all of you. But I have a bigger question . . . is there a reason why students were only motivated to attend 2/3 of the time? Did they feel it was too hard, too boring, too irrelevant, something else?
And if the students had that kind of discouragement in the class, what could have the teacher done to turn it around?
David