After returning to teaching after several years as an administrator, I found grading to be the most outmoded, inconsequential, and irrelevant feature of teaching. Thus for ISIS 120, S 2010, all students will receive the grade of A if they do all the work and their peers certify that they have done so in a satisfactory fashion. If you choose not to do some of the assignments and receive a lower grade, thats permissible. You will be given a chart at the beginning of the course with every assignment adding up to 100 points. A conventional system will be assigned (95-100 points = A-, etc). We total the scores at the end and you get the points youve achieved. If, on any one assignment, peers rank the work unsatisfactory, you will either not be assigned any points for that assignment or you can submit a revised assignment in response to the class critique. Revision and resubmission results in full points. In other words, everyone who chooses to do the work to the satisfaction of his or her collaborative peers in the course will receive an A, but no one is required to do all of the work or to earn an A.
In lieu of a final exam, students will write an evaluation of the class (in addition to the university-required student evaluations). This will emphasize what you learned in the class, what you feel you accomplished (with “accomplished” self-defined). I will offer feedback on your self-assessment, amounting to an “evaluation” of your contribution to the experiences of, in Toffler’s phrase “learning, unlearning, and relearning” that are central to “Your Brain on the Internet.”
From the syllabus of class taught by Cathy Davidson, a Professor of English at Duke. Here is more on her blog.
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I shiver to imagine how much conflict or unfairness that policy generates. Someone should take her classes and regress number of points on standard indicator of popularity like greek membership, amount of alcohol consumed in the most recent week, number of sex partners, etc. Also race. Also GPA in other English courses. And then the quality of the work produced should be compared to other courses to see whether suppressing any thought that might annoy, offend, or unsettle their classmates hurts the students’ writing.
I don’t agree Paul -
I think if anything I’d be concerned about classmates not being critical enough. I would think (at least at my school, which is very similar to Duke) most, if not all, students would end up with an A.
I like a lot about this – thinking critically about your peers work (actually reading it), the relative unimportance of the grade as opposed to the learning experience…
And I think spending less time as a teacher thinking on how to classify students and more time on how to give each of them individual and helpful feedback sounds like fun.
I wonder what students say – I’ve read that “Millenials” (hate the word…) like measurable and comparable assessment, so this might not be all that popular.
Also, I think to me the class itself sounds a bit too technology drive. I just don’t see why I should encourage students to “Twitter and Facebook” as part of a class. I guess there I’m a conventionalist again…
The chronicle has a blog post about this, too.
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Duke-Professor-Uses/7538/
Sounds to me like a pretty good argument against tenure.
I agree with Paul Gowder – this sounds like a horrible policy that will result in unpopular students being ostracized, just because the teacher is too damn lazy to give proper performance feedback.
As a teacher, I know the crush of grading is heavy, and I find it interesting that Marton is willing to pass such judgment.
What is the incentive for peers to give criticism? Why deem anyone’s work unsatisfactory?
I think the policy will actually be unfair in a very different way. EVERYONE will get As. Giving someone else a “satisfactory” doesn’t hurt you at all, and since they can redo the work to improve it, that means the “unsatisfactory” wouldn’t stick.
The unfairness is to everyone who ISN’T taking the class and will have to make do with their rather pedestrian 3.6 GPAs.
On the other end of the scale, we are held here to giving out a mean GPA approximately at the mean for classes in our major at that level (lower/upper/grad) in previous years. Yep, there’s no grade inflation here, but if your students don’t do well (or do poorly), you don’t recognize that either.
I wrote a longer comment which is held – I assume because I put a link (to the chronicle article on this) in it – would be nice if it could still be posted?
You should read Cathy’s comments on her blog. This is clearly not done out of laziness.
Also, I’m a big puzzled that everyone here in the comments so far seems to think that the most important part of a class is to give out grades. If everyone gets an A and has an amazing educational experience that sounds a lot fairer to me than people getting graded on a curve in a mediocre class.
And I do think there is a correlation: Grades suck for getting students to learn.
like Sebastian, I expect this is quite unpopular with students, who (in my thus far limited experience) seem to harbor a lack of faith in each other’s intellectual ability and objectivity.
they are also very caught up the notion that there is a “right grade,” and rather than learning from this to think otherwise, i expect they would just simply see this as illegitimate.
i’d bet anything she gets more grades protested this way.
Perhaps it works with the sort of students one is likely to find at Duke. Of course, most schools aren’t Duke.
Grades aren’t important in the greater scheme of things/relative to learning, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t serious business for the students, who might want to do things like go to grad school or get good jobs. And the idea of making that dependent on things like who is more sexually attractive or whatever…
in terms of students having no incentive to give bad grades at all, that might be true, but is there some kind of imposed distribution at the end?
(And, no, I don’t *know* that her students will give better grades to, e.g., people to whom they are sexually attracted. But this isn’t the way to find out. A study in a school of education with IRB approval and no real possibility of injury to students’ lives is the way to find out.)
Sebastian
I have a different reaction than you. I read Cathy’s blog posting, the responses, and the discussion on insidehighered, and I lean toward the “this is a terrible idea” end of things.
Cathy is open right from the start: she hates grading. It’s not laziness but it is a desire to avoid one of the more tedious and unrewarding parts of our work.
I suppose the question is, however, whether grading is a necessary part of our jobs. Aren’t we responsible for using our professional expertise to evaluate the work of our students?
Cathy claims to hate grading because it turns “learning … into a crass competition” but with all due respect, as someone who taught at Duke for nine years, that is as much a function of the kind of learning environment that is fostered at that institution.
We grade at Reed. And in no way is there a crass competition. But that is also because an instrumental approach to leaning is not central to the Reed ethos–and it was very much a part of the model at Duke.
And I admit it is hard to resist the more cynical side of me that chalks this up to old fashioned work avoidance. We’d all love to teach students who do all the readings, who write all the papers, and who are only there for love of learning.
The world doesn’t work that way, however. Isn’t it up to the professor to evaluate who and who is not actually learning the material?
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