“Law schools solve unemployment by raising grades. Human resources departments declare it sheer genius, wondering why nobody thought to give them better applicants to work with from the beginning…”
OK, I made that last bit up, but I tell you, it’s a great day when you can’t tell the difference between the New York Times and The Onion.
Here’s the article: In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That – NYTimes.com.
This is my favorite part, so absurdly brilliant:
One notable school has managed to maintain the integrity of its grades through an idiosyncratic grading rubric. The University of Chicago Law School grades its students on a scale of 155-186, a system so bizarre that employers are unlikely to try to match it against the 4.0 scale or letter grades used almost everywhere else.
I personally plan to move to a Pantone system next semester. Here’s my new rubric:
The Pantone Rubric
So here’s a theory on what’s contributing to grade inflation: evaluations of faculty by students.
The guy can be a bit of a crank but he’s got a decent theory here: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Student-Evaluations-Grade/24926/
I think Vedder definitely pushes causation a little too hard and getting rid of the evaluations won’t solve the problem of grade inflation or, more importantly, the commodification of this thing called “education.
Speaking of cranks, the inevitable Stanley Fish has an opinion too: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/deep-in-the-heart-of-texas/
And its not totally insane or even completely reactionary. But then, compared to politics in Texas and Arizona, I guess even Fish can be the voice of reason!
Ah, well, you know me. I think “grade inflation” is no more absurd than its unnamed opposite. Merely the reductio ad absurdum of grading in general. Beware the term that nobody owns for themselves. Nobody is “for” grade inflation.
And beware, beware I say, professors who polarize rigor and good evaluations. Student evaluations may very well be a huge factor in grade inflation, while this may still keep us from examining anything. Saying they prefer rigor is not, for all of that, a rigorous argument. It’s cliche.
I’m reminded of a lyric from Clang, a band from my college days: “There are so many ways to skin a cat and still everyone uses a great big knife.”
As I see it, both the “inflation” strategy, and the “curmudgeon” strategy–if I can give it an equally absurd name–are both the same great big, double sided, knife.
What remains unexamined are the deep assumptions, and the tensions that live within them that we prefer to keep at bay with indignation. We aren’t so good at digging in.
Chicago’s unwitting genius is in using incoherence as a disrupter. We should just not be fooled into thinking that behind the cryptology we would find a message that had integrity because it is stabilized.
OK, I’m going to go organize my pantones…