“FAILING OUR STUDENTS IN A CRISIS”: I see that over at the Law & Liberty blog, John McGinnis’s thinking is similar to mine.
About a month ago, the faculties of law schools across the country decided to grade students this semester on a pass/fail or credit/no credit basis. The argument in favor of this was that the lockdown was putting students under a lot of stress. Some were in living situations that make studying more difficult than usual. And besides, students really wanted it. Or at least many of them did; some preferred the opportunity to demonstrate what they’d learned. (Faculty members tended to be even more enthusiastic about pass/fail than students—for reasons you will at least understand if you’ve ever graded a stack of 80 blue books.)
I voted against it. Call me mean ol’ Professor Heriot if you will (or something worse). On the other hand, I didn’t bother to argue the point in the zoom faculty meeting. This was a train coming downgrade, and nothing I could have said was going to stop it. Or maybe I was engaging in some self-interest of my own. Nevertheless, now that I am reading through the exams, I regret not putting my reasons on the record.
My two most important reasons for wanting to grade exams as usual were these:
- Professors flatter themselves into believing that they make the light bulbs go on over students’ head during class through the sheer force of their brilliance. But the reality is that the lion’s share of the learning occurs when students are under the pressure of exams. Reading Week—the week during which students don’t go to classes—is the week students learn the most. Classes are nice, but the professor’s most important function is to grade those $*&% blue books. In a sense, colleges and universities sell discipline. Take away the pressure to do well on the exams and a whole lot less learning occurs.
- Law schools are all about training lawyers. What are lawyers good for? Well … they are supposed to be the ones people go to when they are in deep, deep trouble. If you can’t take that kind of pressure, law is not the career for you. (Mercifully, unlike some other jobs, practicing law seldom puts one in physical danger.) By teaching students that when they are under more than the usual amount of stress they can’t be expected to hold up, we are teaching them that they don’t have to be their client’s last, best hope. They can fold.
Are there counter-arguments that should be considered here? Of course. Among them: Since exams had to be given over the internet, exam security could be a problem (as it always is with take-home exams). But I don’t think that’s enough to justify abandoning grades. Might there be exceptional cases or an argument for weighing this semester’s grades less heavily than others in computing a student’s GPA? Yes, I can see that. But no grading at all? That struck me as a mistake, and it still does.