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This is pretty much how the Norwegian college/universiyt education system used to be, at least in theoretical areas where teaching can be mostly lecture-based. in particular the points about students having a right to take the exam without attending lectures, if they feel they learn better in other ways (or are in a full time job) and the bit about exams being anonymous - we also (often still) have/had an external examiner who had definitely never met the students before, and who does/did grading with the course teacher. Very good system for fairness and also a good way for the teacher to discuss the course and have a partner in evaluating how it all worked out.

The system works wonderfully with motivated students who turn up, do the reading, make their own student-run study groups etc. Actually, it's great for teachers too, because un-motivated students drop out - or don't cause any trouble during the semester, anyway, cos they're basically not there, and if they fail their final exam (there is only one exam that determines the whole grade), well, so what, they're own problem, right? And teachers don't have all that bother of grading and advising throughout the semester - it's just lectures. The distance between student and teacher does actually give both a lot of freedom in many ways.

A few years ago, though, we had a "Quality Reform", which made all this out of date. Now we require lots more participation, which does give the students more of a chance to actually LEARN how to write, for instance, but it also means a LOT more work for the teachers - and it means that mediocre and unmotivated students dominate the classroom a lot more than they used to.

Pros and cons with either system, I think. You'll definitely have more students pass if you force them to turn up and make them do assignments throughout the semester. You'll also have more bother and a lot of students who turn in terrible work they really didn't want to do.

Our department's middle way is to make participation voluntary but for there to be a few compulsory assignments.

Posted by: Jill on March 31, 2006 03:46 AM

I think this is a brilliant way to go for those classes that are not seminar-type discussion courses.

Posted by: scott d. feldstein on March 31, 2006 11:57 AM

Re: 711

All the best commentary I've read suggests a personal inteaction with students. This posting reads like instructions for making widgets. I certainly hope it's not the "new, new thing" that will sweep through the schools.

Posted by: Robert N Leamnson on March 31, 2006 01:32 PM

My question is reffering to Msg. #711 A TEACHING MANIFESTO, posted today, March 31, 2006.

I am a graduate student at the University of Michigan. For my research, I am looking for any discussion about the importance of consistency grading system.

I was excited to find here some thoughts about that issue, note h: "Keep the distribution of grades consistent with that of other courses offered in the same department or school."

Does any one know any additional references that can contribute to that important issue?
Also, is anyone familiar with any literature about consistency grading system across sections in a multiple section courses at college level?

Thanks in advance,
Nirit Glazer
University of Michigan
nirit@umich.edu

Posted by: Nirit Glazer/University of Michigan on March 31, 2006 01:45 PM

I find this post highly problematic, to say the least. Food for thought, perhaps, but only as a test of the conceptual coherence of the philosophies of those who disagree. The gentlest way to say this that I can think of is to paraphrase Samuel Johnson: this essay is both good and original. But the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good. Excluding the good (and the trite), I would say that the "bad" would make faithful adherence to this manifesto a recipe for disaster in almost any course at any level in any discipline that I can think of. The author may well be a highly successful and effective teacher, but in that case this introspection of his (assuming the author is male. I cannot tell; please do not read a gendered philosophy into this!) teaching philosophy is faulty, and he does not practice what he preaches. If he believes he does faithfully uses this model, I would conjecture that he might well be assessing student satisfaction and self-delusion rather than student learning, in assessing his success (which presumably prompted this writing). They say about good popular science writing that it should make the reader feel like a genius. Pedagogy, unfortunately, has more substantive goals, not all of which can be intelligently intended by students a priori, even with the most creatively motivating first lecture and overt learning contract. That brings me to my main philosophical objection: the necessity of the teacher-student assymmetry for learning to occur.

There is an element of trust in the student-teacher relationship, where the teacher says, in essence, "I will guide you through this territory on MY terms and show you what *I* think is interesting. You must trust me to make the best sincere effort in doing so with your best interests in mind, and I will in turn trust that you will eventually acquire the critical skills necessary to engage the material on your own unique terms." This is a complex social contract between teacher, learner and the overall educational context. The student and teacher trust each other, and both trust the larger academic context. I will trust that my freshmen students will eventually make it up Bloom's taxonomy and the manner in which, for instance, I chose to present probability theory 101 to them, will not constrain their creativity and potential future reconstruction of probablity theory. I will trust that my graduate-level students are sophisticated enough to critically assess and reconstruct for themselves the material that I present in the assertive, sage-on-the-stage manner I adopt for advanced students. Certainly, as with any set of trust relationships, there is room for, and risk of, subversion, bad faith, exploitation and tyranny. But to meekly refuse to use structural assymmetries out of a misguided fear of tyranny (or worse, a confused sense of egalitarianism) is to undermine the most important modes of value-addition in the teaching and learning process. More on that in a bit, but I must do the piece the justice of at least one specific critique, and I will take on his thought on "sequencing" homework problems.

Material sequencing, in most cases, is a necessary and useful element of the teacher-student assymmetry . Certainly, the teacher's scripted path through the material (either homeworks or lectures) may not be the most effective for all learners in all contexts, but I believe a huge amount of the value teachers bring to the a subject is in the way they choose to sequence the material in both homeworks and presentation. The reason is that there is a third entity in the equation besides teacher and student: the material itself. The logic of the material dictates sequence. Those with more experience of the material are better able to mirror and manifest the underlying logic of the material in their presentation. Certainly, this creates a structural hegemony, but it is a benign and well-intentioned one, and one that is a test of strength for the critical faculties of students as they mature. You want to challenge the canonical presentation of string theory? Certainly, please proceed to demonstrate your strength by toppling this (presumed arbitrary and tyrannical) structure that was presented to you. NOT imposing this hegemonic structure on students is, in many cases, the same as attempting to help a struggling baby chick break out of its shell by helpfully cracking it open. You kill the chick because you disturbed its strength maturation time table.

To take a ridiculously exaggerated example, one would not attempt to teach K-12 mathematics by providing an unsequenced set of homework problems ranging from integer arithmetic to calculus, with solutions, and expect students to chart an individual course through it. This may seem an inappropriate example, but knowledge is recursively complex, and such natural orderings of concepts occur even within a single subject or lecture. Procedural skills (mathematical or, in the humanities, argumentation and rhetorical) skills are built from the ground up, you learn one set of concepts and skills, reinforce it and move up to more abstract levels (recall the excellent TP post a few months back on the role of rote and the associated critique of "new" pedagogies that eschew reinforcement and repitition). Even declarative knowledge exhibits internal "presentation logic" but I will not press this point.

I realize that my implicit defense of sage-on-the-stage teaching (at advanced levels) and critique of cooperative learning has been broader than this particular post, so I will attempt a brief elaboration. First, in terms of my own practices, I very heavily use so-called "cooperative" learning techniques in my class. Half or more of each of the meetings of the class I am teaching now involve small group and individual exercises. The scare quotes around "cooperative" are there because the activities only involve student-student cooperation; my role in the process could hardly be *less* egalitarian. Few apostles of cooperative learning realize that the techniques they praise are vastly more power-assymmetric and dicatatorial than chalk-and-talk. Controlling learning through form, by scripting behavior, is vastly more impactful and harder to rebel against than controlling learning through content. Cooperative learning techniques are powerful active framing devices, and vastly better utilize the ``medium is the message" dynamic. In the hands of the ill-intentioned, it can do far more damage than the most pedantic of lectures. So what then, are advocates of the "cooperative" label (for what is really a powerfully dictatorial teaching style)? They are, I believe suffering from unreconstructed egalitarianism carried over from their political views (which is fine, so long as they are effective and well-intentioned in practice - they are succeeding, then, inspite of their views, not because of them), OR they must enjoy the power that accompanies a dictatorial style that can be conveniently packaged as "student empowering." I am optimistic enough to believe that the latter kind of machiavellian teacher is rare. (Personal-experience: my most "oppressed" moments in my learning life have been brought about by not-so-nice "cooperative learning" dictators, who have shut down my voice with the subtly tyrannical "equal airtime" rule... but enough discursion, that's a whole other essay).

Finally, I must conclude by commenting on my obvious engineering bias, since I teach engineering topics. Perhaps the humanities work differently, but I do not think so, even the most extreme relativist must acknowledge that in any sane pedagogical model, "A for Apple, B for Bug" must come before Derrida and Foucault. More famous names than mine (Pinker for instance) have criticized the tabula rasa "all knowledge is constructed/nothing is out there" approach to teaching. Whatever the ontological and epistemological merits of such a stance, it is not a pragmatic one. Acknowledging the contingent superiority of some constructs over others, in a Hegelian sense, in order to teach using that construct as an unexamined frame, is necessary. We must trust that the construct will be brittle enough to eventually collapse under the critical assaults of generations of students, teachers and scholars, and that in good time, knowledge will evolve. It is a flawed system, but it is the best we have.

I do apologize to the author of the original piece if I have caused any offence, and I do appreciate any act of thoughtful introspection. The results of any such act are worth sharing, but one must not conflate successful teaching with an arbitrary model of the success. The model proposed by the experiencer has no special place and must be deconstructed as rigorously as any second-hand model. The opinions of a retired winner of many teaching awards merely provide better data, not necessarily better concepts.

Posted by: VGR on March 31, 2006 01:47 PM

This manifesto operates under the premise that a university course is about collecting facts, not about an experience. Certainly there's no need to reward or punish a student for attendance if the only course objective is memorization of facts: an exam will determine if the student has memorized the necessary content. But what if education is about an experience that is shared? What if, instead of collecting facts, a student needs to be present to contribute to the learning of others? Jill's comment (below) alludes to that, but it goes beyong just seminar classes. It goes without saying that discussion classes, workshop-type classes and the like are driven by student participation, and the absence of one harms others. But beyond that, there are experiences we want students to have that aren't about collecting bits of data. Can't a music appreciation course expect students to be present to hear the examples in a hall rather than download and listened to using a laptop with earbuds? Or a film class expect students to see the movie in the full-screen mode for which it was created? If that's a course objective, assessment by means of examination seems difficult.

Posted by: Dom Caristi/Ball State University on March 31, 2006 03:45 PM

Some one asked for grading systems in this column and hence this note. The distribution of grades should not manipulated towards preconceived results but should emerge naturally. This helps the lesser students in imposing on themselves some realistic targets.

I am yet to see two teachers who fully agree on what to teach and even more so on why to teach. When it comes to grading, the disciplinarians are outnumbered by the populists. All these affect teaching and more so even the desire to teach. The students are considered either as an amorphous mass or a collection of slugs absorbing/repelling what is given to them or ever active effervescent lot that radiate good will and comprehension. The golden rule seems to be that there are no golden rules, as Bernard Shaw commented.

In my search for an examination system that is participative as well as fair, I had to devise what I call a ‘mass viva’ for mid-course tests. I claim no originality except that I have not seen others do it. This goes quite well for biology and biochemistry courses that I teach. On a mutually convenient day (like a week end morning), we assemble (applicable up to 20-30 students but no more, since our classes are much smaller than even this). The game is… I write the questions and the students write the answers. The topics are suggested by students based on the syllabus I covered and I modify the suggestion on the spot into a question that is answerable …a multiple choice question, an equation, an explanation...no more than 2-5 sentences. The question can be challenged by any student if it is ambiguous but (s)he has to explain his/her difficulty. Ambiguities are corrected on the spot. In the process, if by mistake, the answer gets revealed, we simply move on to next question. We go on with questions taking turns for all students till they believe they had enough. All of them, that is. Usually we cross 25- 30 questions of this kind for a half course of some 30 lectures.
Then the students exchange their papers and we look at the answers. The correct answer is identified but the discussion centers on variants on the answer. The wrong answers are discussed for the nature of the errors. It is often surprising how the same subject matter is interpreted differently by different students. Occasionally, unfortunately not too often, the answer contains a better insight than the question asked for. To give a mark or not is decided by the student correcting. The recipient can challenge it if he wants to. Rest of the students arbite whether the student is defending his answer for sake of a mark or whether the argument is significant. I intervene only when absolutely necessary. If I am stuck in a conflicting argument, we get the books and find the answer right away. If the student is, …well, bullshitting,… most of them time he admits with a sheepish grin or other students tell him so.
The marks are totaled and passed on to the perpetrator who looks at them again to point out errors of any kind. A frequency distribution is computed on the spot. Since the cut off for passing is given right at the beginning, students have a right to ask for another collective exam if some do not make it. Few do.
The major problem in the mass viva is the time it takes, generally 2-3 hour pre session. Actually it is a review of the concepts taught rather than the information to be regurgitated. It is time consuming but it helps the lesser students to make up and the better students about more to be learnt. I suspect that over the last 15- 20 years, students generally liked it.
The second aspect of a viva relates to admission of students wherein some 10-12 faculty participate. These vivas have terrible standard deviations over students and over faculty that makes viva a lousy aid in selections at the entry level. The problem is that teachers are fairly good in making up their mind about a student on a go-no go basis but are miserable in giving a number to it. Therefore we invented a ‘written viva’. The students are given a question paper where there are different kinds of questions, concepts, information comprehension and what have you. They spend some 15-30 min answering these before entering the viva room where all the eagles have gathered. The faculty are not allowed to ask any questions other than…Are you sure, why do you say that, if not, then… as appropriate while the student gives the answers verbally. At the end of the viva, the faculty immediately decides whether the student is in or out. The student can be recalled if there is a doubt. What is amazing is that the faculty has no difference of opinion given a clear option. The other written tests help to make up numbers but the standard deviation in marking students in a viva has become virtually nil. This is again good in smaller numbers rather than in hundreds.

Posted by: v.sitaramam, university of pune, pune, India on April 1, 2006 06:32 AM