Scott Walters's List: Teaching

• The first great assault on accuracy is the use of the zero on a 100-point scale. If the grade of A represents a score of 90-100, B is 80-89, C is 70-79, and D is 60-69, then the interval between each letter grade, A to B to C to D, is 10 points. But if a student fails to submit an assignment and receives a zero, then the interval from D to zero is 60 points, a sixfold penalty compared with the other grading intervals.

   

  Let us stipulate that work receiving a D is wretched, and that the failure of a student to submit work at all is abysmal. The use of the zero, however, requires us to defend the proposition that abysmal is six times as bad as wretched.
• The use of the arithmetic mean, or average, to calculate final grades—often the consequence of computerized grading technologies—is another offense against accuracy in grading.
• I've taught graduate statistics courses in which mathematicians are seated next to nurses, teachers, marketers, and biologists. My task was not to evaluate where they started but where they finished. For some of them, multivariate analysis was a recent memory, while for others, high-school algebra was a distant and painful one. The mathematicians soared at the start of class but were challenged a month or two later; their colleagues struggled to remember the basics of algebra at first, but reached their "Now I get it" moments during the final days of the class. They argued quite persuasively that the professor should not use the average of their scores to calculate their final grade, but rather should consider their proficiency at the end of the term.

• I have found that faculty members sometimes conflate quiet compliance with proficiency. That sends the message to students—female students in particular—that the path to success is acquiescence rather than achievement.

   

  My observation comes first from a simple analysis of the membership of the National Honor Society. In the high school where I volunteer, the gender balance of the student body is equal. Yet the ratio of women to men in the National Honor Society in this high school is eight to one. I have checked hundreds of coeducational institutions since that observation and found all of them to have a female-to-male advantage. A gender imbalance is also found in the college-matriculation rate of women to men: 58 percent to 42 percent, respectively. I've lost enough debates with women to stipulate that it may be true that they are smarter than men, but I doubt that they are eight times as smart. Some other factor is at work here, and it may be the societal value that elevates behavioral submission over academic performance.

  • This then gets used for admissions -- compliance is king!
• That may not apply to your student body, but I would ask only that you find out if the dropout and failure rates of your students are equally distributed by gender and ethnicity. If not, it is at least possible that students were lured into the challenge of your institution based upon rewards for quiet compliance, and that then they were punished for not having the skills required for college-level work. Conversely, some minority male students may have never reached the front door of your institution because, as high-school students, they were not rewarded for academic proficiency but punished for abrasive behavior that was unrelated to academic performance.

  • Exactly!
• Without leave of administrators or permission from grading-system programmers, professors can stop the use of the zero. They can suspend the use of the average. They can override the deterministic mentality that drives so many grading systems and provide regular feedback designed to help students actually learn.

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