You know how I can't resist picking on a terrifically bad Maroon editorial, right? I know I've graduated, and I should move on, but the Maroon is just too excellent a venue to leave behind. So I feel compelled to draw attention to this fine policy proposal: Since getting good grades takes too much time away from my social life, let's just get rid of grades.
Because we all know that grades are arbitrary, right? For example, people who study more, get, on average, better ones. People who dedicate themselves wholly to extracurriculars or hanging out or reading everything except what's assigned get, on average, worse ones. See--totally arbitrary! Injustice! School should be about doing things that you like when you like, and not being held accountable in any way. That's why, instead of grades, we should have written evaluations. That way, when you haven't done any of the course reading by the end of the quarter because you were too busy organizing your club and spending time with your family and attending workshops and lectures, your professor, rather than giving you an F, can instead write, "This student clearly did none of the reading, showed no interest in the subject, and deserves to fail the course." Progress!
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
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4 comments:
My dad, now retired, taught at Sarah Lawrence, where they had no grades until about a decades ago; instead paragraph length written evaluations. By student demand, they added grades, so that law schools, grad schools, etc., would be able to make comparisons between Sarah Lawrence students and other applicants--quick and dirty comparisons, doubtless, but no comparison was possible without them, which tended to leave Sarah Lawrence students at a disadvantage. Which doesn't speak to the educational benefit of not having grades--Sarah Lawrence agreed with the op-edist--but grades serve other purposes than education.
Grades can serve other ends, and it's also by no means impossible to both get good grades and maintain a normal life outside the library. But these are not suggestions that our writer is evidently willing to consider.
Miss SI, the little bit of the column that I could get through reminded me of something. It will be a revelation to many students (year after year after year) that West Point is part of the army, that a major university isn't exclusively (or even primarily) about educating undergraduates, and that most people in your future won't care about the details of your performance in each of your classes, but I realized one day in graduate school that I couldn't be a party to those epiphanies. First, because the realizations themselves held little interest, and second they were usually resisted by the students with great vigor and little sense.
Somehow, watching an infant learn to walk fills me with optimism. Watching someone in their twenties try to refute an obvious consequence of the fact that they are not the center of the universe does not.
Your post makes me so happy.
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