Get Schooled
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More A’s in English classes? Not easier material or grade inflation but more open-ended discussion
Here is an interesting response to our discussion this week on grade inflation from UGA professor Peter Smagorinsky.
By Peter Smagorinsky
March 14, 2014
A Get Schooled entry this week poses the question, Are students avoiding STEM courses because the grading is tougher than English or history classes? The essay concludes that grade inflation has made English and history classes easier, while math, science, engineering, and technology courses have maintained their rigor and hold students’ feet to the fire with greater consistency.
The article features blogger Thomas K. Lindsay’s admiring summary of Valen E. Johnson's Grade Inflation to make these points. Johnson is a statistician who does not take course content into account, rather focusing only on the course outcome: the grade. Since English teachers tend to assign higher grades than math and science teachers, he concludes, English teachers have succumbed to the pressures for grade inflation and now teach such easy classes that the STEM emphasis is threatened because students are avoiding STEM courses to enroll in fluffy English and history classes.
Lindsay’s conclusion: “Simply stated, while the nation cries out for more STEM graduates, grade inflation in non-STEM fields undermines this effort. This is but one more price—a substantial price—that society pays for a dysfunctional academy in which ‘knowing the grading practices of the instructor from whom students took courses is as important as knowing the grades they got.’ For his part, Johnson deems ‘carefully designed constraints on mean course grades’ to be the ‘most comprehensive solution’ to the problem. Such constraints nullify the incentive for students to enroll in classes with easier-grading professors and lower-performing students.”
In other words, the solution is for administrators to require a bell curve so that more students get poor grades, regardless of what the course involves, how well it’s taught, how open-ended the problem solutions are, and other such factors. Lindsay speculates that “Professors who give higher grades get higher student evaluations, calling into question the usefulness of both student evaluations and the grades themselves” to explain why students enroll in English over math, or Professor A over Professor B. The assumption is that people want easy courses and high grades rather than good learning experiences, regardless of outcome.
A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay addressing an economist’s belief that the field of education was an “easy” discipline because students in education tend to get higher grades than students in other disciplines. My contention was that education faculty tend to be career teachers and thus might give higher grades because they teach the material better than faculty whose training involves research but not teaching. I’ll not review that argument here, but instead refer readers to that essay.
One point, however, carries over from that essay to this one: Looking only at outcomes and not course content and process can lead to spurious conclusions.
In this essay I will confine myself to the discipline I know, secondary school English, and explain why it might be amenable to higher grades that don’t suggest easiness but rather open-endedness. I think that the closed-ended nature of STEM disciplines might help explain why English is “easier” than such fields. That is, 1+1 is going to equal 2, and that’s indisputable. If you answer 3, then you are demonstrably wrong. The meaning of Hamlet, however, has been debated for centuries, and one’s interpretation can be expressed in many ways.
I will illustrate how a good English teacher might approach two canonical texts from American Literature: Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance. Of course, each can be taught to provide the bell curve so coveted by those who think English is too easy a subject. I could provide a closed-book exam, for instance, that includes such questions as, “Emerson stated that “The civilized man has built a coach, but (a) knows not how to drive it; (b) has lost his direction; (c) has lost the use of his feet; (d) awaits the horses.” I could come up with an exam filled with questions focused on such minutiae that would flunk enough students to make Johnson and Lindsay think I am a very hard, and thus very demanding and effective teacher. (The correct answer: C.)
To me, though such trivial pursuit games don’t engage students with thinking about the essays, which is the point of reading them: thinking and acting in society so as to make it a better place. A creative English teacher might assess students quite differently, providing a range of ways in which students could make sense of these complex and challenging texts that many citizens believe represent fundamentally American values.
One might ask students to write an essay on the question: “To what modern political party would Thoreau belong? Explain your answer using references to both Civil Disobedience and current events.”
My conservative critics in this space might be heartened to know that Thoreau opens his essay with the famous lines:
“I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto, — "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”
So would Thoreau be a Republican? That would be a good answer. But he also might be an Independent, or a Libertarian, or a member of the Ayn Rand-inspired Objectivist Party. It’s up to you, and the answer depends on how well you argue your points.
English teachers might also have students write a comparison-and-contrast essay examining the two essays and identifying their points of agreement and disagreement.
Or, students might conduct a stylistic analysis of one or both of the essays and write a “period piece” in which they imagine themselves as citizens of the mid-19th century expressing their own views on how a person of conscience might respond to the Mexican-American War, one of two conditions (the other being slavery) that led Thoreau to protest by refusing to pay taxes and thus be imprisoned. Such an essay would require interdisciplinary thinking in conjunction with that other “easy” subject, history.
Or students might produce their own essays in their own voices on how they, as a person of conscience, should act in light of a present-day conflict of their choice, from Crimean intervention to a very local problem. The essay would be evaluated on how well students express their beliefs and actions, rather than their endorsement of a correct ideology and following of a single solution path.
How about if students imagine a scenario that involves Emerson speaking to Thoreau through the bars of Thoreau’s jail cell, writing dialogue that captures each man’s perspective in a creative form? How about if students then work in groups to dramatize an especially provocative interaction, perhaps including additional characters, either historically based or created for the performance? How about if students who are ill-suited for performing contribute in other ways, such as providing a soundtrack to amplify the tone of the drama?
Perhaps students could construct a body biography of each author, and then use the different depictions as the basis for further writing of various kinds: a magazine profile, an obituary, a legal opinion, a website, a social media page, or other genre that requires an understanding of form and appropriate content in relation to readers’ expectations.
I could go on and on; I’ve collected gobs of unusual ways to promote discussion and composition and assembled them here. My point is simply that in an open-ended discipline such as English, the worst, least stimulating assessments are the ones that produce the worst (i.e., lowest) grades that Johnson and Lindsay believe make a discipline rigorous and teachers sufficiently demanding.
What makes English such a fascinating subject, however, is the malleable nature of how teachers and students may engage with it. Those open-ended possibilities allow for multiple pathways to understanding and expression, and thus better grades. Is that such a bad thing?