Earlier this week two professors were dismissed from Benedict College for violating the college's Success Equals Effort (SEE) policy.

It seems to me that the professors will probably not get their jobs back, and I'm not sure they should considering they violated the college's policy. I think the more interesting debate here is the policy itself:


One of the professors' position is outlined below:


Questions for debate:
1. Should students be graded strictly on academic performance or should effort be figured into the equation?

2. Are we doing higher education a disservice by allowing students to claim mastery of material which they do not grasp or does Swinton have a point that this is beneficial to students? Why or why not?

I am an educator but I am not a master of education theory. However I find such a policy to be a shame. Aside from the issue of figuring out how to measure effort, this is rewarding things that are not rewarded in the real world. Someone who tries hard but gets less accomplished is not rewarded in the work place. This system gives people who are mentally retarded (am I missing a pc word here, it seems like I am but I can't come up with the "right" term) a chance at passing a class even if he cannot comprehend the material.

This is not the type of equality that our founding fathers had in mind.

I do not believe in this type of academic theory, but I would not keep this college from using such a practice. Now, were I an official accrediting agency I would have questions.

Eeyore hits it right on the head here.

Success if not measured by effort, but by results. I could never imagine my boss saying "Well, he failed, but he tried really hard..."

Effort is an ingredient in success, it is not an end-result that we should be measuring.

1. Should students be graded strictly on academic performance or should effort be figured into the equation?

Results.


2. Are we doing higher education a disservice by allowing students to claim mastery of material which they do not grasp or does Swinton have a point that this is beneficial to students? Why or why not?

What purpose does it serve to allow a student to pass (for example) Calculus 101 simply because he tried hard. By the time he gets to Calculus 301 he will in all likelihood be completely lost without having mastered the earlier skills.

This system breeds failure, but instead of showing a student that he needs to improve earlier (say, in his freshman year), it strings him along to believe that effort will allow him to get by with inferior comprehension. It does no one any good to allow a student to fail in his third year because he was not given the truth in his first year.

We all learn from failure, but moving the goal posts to allow more people to succeed (at least temporarily) is not any kind of solution.

I would say this:

I agree that Success Equals Effort, that you need to put effort in something to succeed.

BUT

Effort DOES NOT Equal Success.

Actually, that's not the worst of it. According to this idiotic system, a guy that goes into the class knowing the material, puts in ZERO effort, and aces every test will fail the class, since the actual results are just 40%. How about making smiling everyday 15% of the grade?



I'll tell you exactly what purpose. If someone fails out their first semester, the school doesn't get as much money as if the person "succeeds" their first 2 years, and then fails out when the training wheels are off.

Either this is pure unadulterated stupidity, or it's a scam of galactic proportions.

Every year in England & Wales during August, pupils of get the results of their nationally standardised examinations.

These are in two main externally-recognised tranches - the General Certificate in Secondary Education (GCSE), which most pupils sit at age 16, and the Advanced level General Certificate in Education which students sit at age 18 (known as "A-levels". To make life more complicated, Scotland has a different senior school exam known as "Highers".).

Thinking about the A-level, whose primary function is as a selection tool for university entrance, 25 years ago, all the exam marks were dependent on a series of formal examinations. The grades were awarded as a straightforward comparison between the entire exam cohort. The top 20% of students got awarded an A grade, the next 20% got a B, and so on.

The actual marks awarded did not matter - theoretically, depending on the distribution of marks, a person could get an A grade while scoring only 10 marks out of 100. Equally, one could fail with 90% - it all depended on where you were compared to everyone else who sat the same exams as you did. Clearly, this was not entirely fair, and at the extremes, was not very useful to university admissions tutors.

So the system was changed to one where grades related to specific bands of exam marks. Over time, teaching methods have improved, and more and more students have gone on to study A levels. The numbers of people passing and getting "good" grades (A or have crept upwards inexorably.

This change has been accelerated by a move away from the whole two year course being assessed on two or three exams at the end, to coursework marks being awarded during its duration, and the introduction of supplementary A levels ("AS levels") to broaden the subject studied (most people only take three subjects at A level).

The end result has been a general suspicion from employers and lay people that the exams have "got easier". On the plus side, though, the qualification is now a fairer reflection of how much effort AND ability AND retention have gone on through the duration of the course than it was in the days when it only measured performance in a total of nine hours, and when it only measured relative performance anyway (like an Olympic running race, you only got medals for beating everyone else in the field, not for beating the clock. It has it's uses, and is good for spectators, but has downsides too - you can run in a time that would be a new world record, but if the guy that beats you runs faster still, you're always the second fastest guy.).

All that leads me up to the actual thread topic (apologies for the contextual delay). Clearly, simple effort alone is not enough - it has to be productive and/or deliver some kind of competitive advantage to the expender of the effort. It's not just unfair, but counter-intuitive that the education system should be flipped on it's head in this way. However, I think that the idea of continuous assessment rewards productive effort, and exams reward competitive effort.

I think that business and commerce require both these types of effort, so it is reasonable to want to structure assessments of scholastic effort in ways that take them into account.

I'm thinking this through as I type, so there are overlaps between the two.

However, I don't think results alone are enough. If I was fantastically intelligent (hard to imagine, I know ) but lazy (equally hard to imagine ) I might be able to come top in the whole country in a particular exam with little effort. But I might be able to muster that level of commitment only once in my life. Most academics are the brightest people of their peer groups, but they are not the most successful in commercial or social assessments, because for one thing, extreme ability often does go hand in hand with laziness; and for another, Anglo-Saxon society doesn't place much value on pure academic ability. Think of the sneers about liberal intellectuals.

Of two equally bright people, the one that is most likely to succeed is the one who works harder. (Even then it isn't guaranteed, as successful people usually seem content to ignore the part that dumb luck plays in their own success and others' failure.)

So in summary, while "SEE" at this extreme is clearly nonsense, and "results are all" assessment process is better, we need to try not to exclude the spectrum in between that mixes both. If 0 is "SEE" and 100 is "all results" on a linear scale, I think a system that assessed students somewhere around the 70 mark would be the best all-round indicator of both ability and application.

Just dabbling in some thoughts here as my mind is not made up on this issue.

I wonder if the policy is an effort to put the daily work and intelligent participation in discussion on the same footing as exams.

If the goal is to give weight and value to in-class participation, discussion, etc, and not to have the greatest weight given to exams, why would that, in and of itself be a bad thing?

Some students are not good exam takers and others can ace an exam without ever even attending class. There are many factors to be weighed to determine when a student has "mastered" the substance of a course, not just the ability to parrot back answers in an exam.