The Five-Year Party (11 page)
Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
Tom Fleming, one of the most popular teachers at Arizona State University, has turned his “Introduction to Astronomy” class into a high-tech quiz show. His classroom is equipped with portable feedback devices called “classroom clickers” that students use to choose among four options at critical points in his lectures. Students express their opinions by pushing one of four buttons and the total results are registered on the screen at the front of the class.
“I can sit here and rant and rave that our standards are low and our students don’t learn in high school what they used to, but the fact of the matter is that I have 135 students here and now and I can’t go back and change history about what kind of high school education they received,” he said. “They’re here. They’re paying their tuition money and as I tell them on the first day of class, I’m going to give you your money’s worth.”
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Almost none of the students who take his class are astronomy majors or even science majors but art students, business majors, and journalists, who require nine credits in science to fulfill a graduation requirement.
To fellow teachers who complain that he is doing nothing more than “putting a happy face” on education or turning his class into a circus, he replies that he is using what he calls the “Mary Poppins” principle: “A spoonful of sugar does help the medicine go down.”
Derek Bruff, assistant director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt, has written an entire book for college teachers about innovative ways to use classroom clickers or “Classroom Response Systems,” as they are officially called. Students who are afraid to raise their hands in class, he said, find it less intimidating to push a button and have their response recorded electronically. If this sounds suspiciously like
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
, that’s the idea, only there are no lifelines that let students call their mothers if they get stumped. These classes are, of course, very popular with students, but many professors worry, with good reason, that as clickers replace the traditional lectures and seminars on college campuses, critical thinking has taken a giant step backwards.
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Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
, that’s the idea, only there are no lifelines that let students call their mothers if they get stumped. These classes are, of course, very popular with students, but many professors worry, with good reason, that as clickers replace the traditional lectures and seminars on college campuses, critical thinking has taken a giant step backwards.
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Walter H. G. Lewin, a seventy-one-year-old physics professor at MIT, has turned himself into an internet star by using costumes and props in his classes. Videos of his classes are stored on the internet and watched by thousands of viewers who never set foot in his classroom. He also has found a way to become a kind of circus performer to illustrate the laws of physics. He beats a student with cat fur to demonstrate electrostatics. Wearing shorts, sandals with socks, and a pith helmet, he fires a cannon loaded with golf balls at a stuffed monkey wearing a bulletproof vest to demonstrate the trajectories of objects in free fall. He rides a fire-extinguisher-propelled tricycle across the room to show how a rocket works.
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Not only is he popular with his students, his videos are among the most popular on YouTube, and he receives a constant barrage of fan mail from both college and high school students around the country.
To demonstrate how a pendulum works, he hangs an iron ball from the ceiling on a long rope. The ball swings back and forth but stops just short of his chin. “Physics works,” he proclaims. He told the
New York Times
that he spends twenty-five hours preparing each of his lectures, choreographing each detail, and paring the information down to the essential parts. Anything boring is discarded. Fun and clarity are the important elements. For many students all over the country, this is the ideal teacher and the ideal class.
New York Times
that he spends twenty-five hours preparing each of his lectures, choreographing each detail, and paring the information down to the essential parts. Anything boring is discarded. Fun and clarity are the important elements. For many students all over the country, this is the ideal teacher and the ideal class.
Another professor who has made it into the ranks of celebrity is Paul Worsey of Missouri University of Science and Technology, who calls himself “the mad professor” but who students call “professor pyro.” In an age when motion pictures are rated by the number of car crashes they contain, Worsey is famous for blowing things up. He victimizes everything from tree stumps to watermelons to his students’ favorite: textbooks. His class is being picked up nationally by the Discovery Channel. “I’m a little bit insane, so that helps a bit,” he said during a television interview. “I’m the last person you’d call boring.”
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Stuart Rojstaczer, a former geophysics professor from Duke, is the nation’s foremost expert on grade inflation. He left academia in 2005 after writing a memoir,
Gone for Good
, about the decline of standards in colleges once the business model administrators came in and took over.
Gone for Good
, about the decline of standards in colleges once the business model administrators came in and took over.
“Teaching is often more about babysitting and joke telling than it is about education,” he said. “I like to tell jokes. Babysitting twenty-one-year-olds is another story. I had a working body and brain fully capable of doing something new. . . . I feel that higher education has lost its way. The quality of undergraduate education has seriously degraded. But no one seems to mind. In fact, parents and students seem to be ecstatic that we’ve replaced content with entertainment. They love our ‘college as summer camp’ model.”
Rojstaczer maintains a grade inflation website where he keeps track of recent studies. In a recent op-ed piece, he described how grade inflation worked at Duke, which is generally not considered a party school. Each semester his grade report included only As and Bs with no Ds or Fs. He had not given a C in over two years. He has since collected data from more than eighty schools, all of which show grade inflation.
“The C, once commonly accepted, is now the equivalent of the mark of Cain on a college transcript,” he said. How rare has the C become? His data indicates that “not only is C an endangered species but . . . B, once the most popular grade at universities and colleges, has been supplanted by the former symbol of perfection, the A.”
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Even non-subprime colleges show signs of this same grade inflation. At Duke, fewer than 10 percent of grades are Cs, a significant decline since 1969, when a quarter of the grades awarded were Cs. The A supplanted the B as the most popular grade in the early 1990s. At Pomona College, less than 4 percent of grades are Cs. Approximately 50 percent of all grades at Duke, Pomona, Harvard, and Columbia are As, while Ds and Fs represent just 2 percent of all grades given. Grade point averages among colleges that publish this data are rising at the rate of about 0.15 points every decade, Rojstaczer found.
“If things go on at that rate, practically everyone on campus will be getting all As before mid-century, except for the occasional self-destructive student who doesn’t hand in assignments or take exams—if exams are even given.”
Grade inflation is a logical result of the changes that have occurred in the power structure at colleges and universities as the business model replaced education with retention. High grades have become an essential ingredient in the potent academic brew prepared by colleges to keep the customers satisfied.
“As are [as] common as dirt in universities nowadays because it’s almost impossible for a professor to grade honestly,” he said. “If I sprinkle my classroom with the Cs some students deserve, my class will suffer from declining enrollments in future years. In the marketplace mentality of higher education, low enrollments are taken as a sign of poor quality instruction. I don’t have any interest in being known as a failure.”
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Parents and students, the people who pay the tuition that keep the college in business, want high grades and professors are expected to cater to their desires.
Administrators are well aware of grade inflation but have come up with some lame excuses for it, Rojstaczer said. They say that college is teaching more effectively or that students are smarter than they used to be, even though the statistics do not back that up. “Many students and parents believe these explanations,” he said. “They accept the false flattery as the real thing.
“Today’s classes, as a result, suffer from high absenteeism and a low level of student participation. In absence of fair grading, our success in providing this country with a truly educated public is diminished. The implications of such failure for a free society are tremendous.”
Alicia C. Shepard, a journalism teacher at American University, recounted how she was relentlessly pursued for weeks by students who received anything other than an A in her classes. They asked to retake tests and rewrite papers. They sent her e-mails. They showed up at her office demanding that she reread their papers. Thinking that this was somehow unusual, she asked her colleagues about her experiences and found the same thing. She was told about students who had slept through the midterm exam and showed up late for the final and then harassed the teacher who gave them a C minus.
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Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University Teacher’s College and an authority on grading, told Shepard that many students who have come to see college as a financial transaction where they exchange cash for a diploma think anything less than an A means they are not getting their money’s worth.
Students who are given Cs often react aggressively or passive-aggressively because they had been told in high school that they were outstanding rather than just average. They insist that they worked hard on the project in question, but the reality is that they worked hard only the night before for a project that was supposed to involve thinking, researching, intensive study, and several weeks of preparation.
Professors who go against the trend of providing easier courses and higher grades can face severe consequences, from being viewed as “dinosaurs” or “out of touch” by their hipper colleagues to unpleasant encounters with students. Professors have to deal with seasoned grade-mongers who pester them incessantly, sometimes resorting to objectionable and threatening behavior ranging from verbal abuse to physical threats. The professor is expected to act as a social worker, dealing with some students who just don’t have the ability to pass their courses, let alone the maturity or emotional stability to have to be told this for the first time.
Despite occasional newspaper articles, the issue of grade inflation remained in the background until February 2009, when a report prepared by Ellen Greenberger at the University of California-Irvine made national headlines. She found that a third of college students felt they deserved a B just for showing up in class and 40 percent said they deserved a B if they completed the required reading for the class. This report suddenly focused national attention on the phenomenon of entitled college students who thought they deserved high grades for doing minimal amounts of work in the classroom.
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“I noticed an increasing sense of entitlement in my students and wanted to discover what was causing it,” said Greenberger. What she found was something that professors had been noticing for more than a decade. Students thought they should get an A for effort, even if they didn’t score well on tests or write A-level papers. “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work,” said James Hogge, associate dean of education at Vanderbilt, in comments about Greenberger’s study. “There is a mentality [among] students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’” When students receive a grade inferior to an A, they often blame the teacher for being incompetent or unfair.
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In professors’ defense, it’s impossible to teach students who are uninterested in learning. I know because I tried to do this for years. The crisis that pushed higher education into party school land began in the middle to late 1990s, when increasingly unprepared and disengaged students began to confront the academic gatekeepers who insisted on high standards. That confrontation created a culture war that was documented by the National Survey of Student Engagement, which academia calls Nessie. Over the past decade, NSSE has asked more than a million American college students at more than a thousand colleges to fill out an online survey about their attitudes towards higher education.
In a span of just a few years, NSSE found students’ attitudes towards college underwent a significant change. Prior to the culture war, students generally accepted that professors were in charge and set the rules in the classroom and students who didn’t conform to those rules would flunk out and not receive a diploma. But during the late 1990s, serious scholars were being replaced by a new cohort who believed they deserved high grades for minimal amounts of work and that working hard was not necessary. In a very short period of time, these new students found themselves in the majority.
Skirmishes broke out in classrooms all over the country as the new students complained that professors were too demanding and made them work too hard. The students also had the ear of the new CEO-wannabe administrators who had been trained to safeguard the college’s income sources and concentrate on the retention of students. To get back at professors who set standards that they felt were too high, students savaged teachers on their end-of-class evaluations, which many colleges still use to determine who gets rehired and who gets tenure. Students found that these evaluations were powerful tools and used them to threaten professors who demanded too much of them.
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