“I’m supposed to graduate summa cum laude so I need an A in this class.”
That sentence, repeated to me at the end of most sessions of a 2-credit elective, was one of the strangest student interactions I ever had, made stranger by the use of “supposed to.” I took it as the obsessive noting of an expected outcome, if only I wouldn’t get in the way and screw it up.
My usual responses to the student, such as: ‘So, that means you’ll work really hard in this class, right?” only received a blank stare. My prodding of what interested her in the subject matter were similarly blank.
And yet, at the end of almost every class, that “supposed to” returned.
“Re-Centering” Academics
The last several generations saw tremendous changes in the expectations of university education.
We went from academic admissions exams to an appeal for well-rounded students, from the introduction of aptitude tests to the test prep industry and the normalization of test retakes, from the blanket availability of student loans to dramatic tuition increases, from college attendance being the exception to the expectation, from mostly men to mostly women attending college.
Access to the subject matter changed as well. While advanced content was formerly locked away in specialized books only available in university libraries and in the heads of professors, today you don’t need to join an institution. An explosion of online courses, YouTube channels, niche newsletters, and now AI, means that interested students have education at their fingertips in just about any subject. Many of those library books I wished I had access to growing up are digitized, sometimes free, or available to search and purchase.
But what those books and online content don’t do – or don’t do very well – is provide a trusted evaluation of performance – a grade.
Many recent articles and faculty have been debating what grades actually mean anymore. So I read the recent report Re-Centering Academics at Harvard College: Update on Grading and Workload.
As we discuss grading, let me call out some sections of that report. Continue reading “What I Talk About When I Talk About Grading”
