Before I head off, I have to link to this one article about Benedict College in Columbia, SC (sent by Devoted Reader Greg M.), because (a) it's in my hometown, and (b) it's absolutely appalling:
Benedict College has fired two professors who refused to go along with a policy that says freshmen are awarded 60 percent of their grades based on effort and the rest on their work's academic quality.
Benedict President David Swinton says the Success Equals Effort policy gives struggling freshmen a chance to adapt to college academics. He expects students to improve - the formula drops to 50-50 in the sophomore year and isn't used in the junior or senior year. But he says he's "interested in where they are at when they graduate, not where they are when they get here."
Students "have to get an A in effort to guarantee that if they fail the subject matter, they can get the minimum passing grade," Swinton said. "I don't think that's a bad thing."
There are so many things wrong with this, I don't know where to start. How are professors supposed to accurately measure "effort"? How can a professor defend his or her measurement of effort if the student challenges it, given that the student's perception of effort might be vastly different from the professors?
And then there's the most important question of all, which gets to the heart of Benedict's supposed reasons for doing this. Why should we expect a struggling freshman to do better later on in their college career if it takes everything they've got to make a barely passing grade? It's not that effort doesn't matter in college. But ineffective effort doesn't get a student anywhere, and that's what Benedict wants to reward here. Putting in a lot of effort to little avail doesn't move a student along any more than putting in no effort. Put simply, Benedict wants to reward freshmen who work and work and work and still don't master the material.
Why should those students be passed? Why does Benedict think those students will succeed later on? Are there any studies showing that students who work very hard yet fail classes early on do better in their sophomore and junior years, and thus deserve that extra boost? Nothing is cited in this article.
And, of course, there's the part about professors who insisted on higher standards being dismissed:
Science professors Milwood Motley and Larry Williams defied that policy and Swinton dismissed them. Neither had tenure, which could have protected them from firing.
Motley, a veteran five years at Benedict, said he didn't like concept from the beginning but went along with it grudgingly. Then he faced an academic dilemma of passing a student he thought had not learned course material. In his case, giving a C to a student with a high exam score of 40 percent was too much.
"There comes a time when you have to say this is wrong," he said.
Especially if you're a freakin' SCIENCE professor. My God, I can't believe Motley was even going along with the plan grudgingly. It would have been torture, for any science professor, to be forced to reward students who DO NOT GET THE RIGHT ANSWER, yet make a lot of "effort." That is not how science works. That is not how the real world works. This is not how Benedict College, which is not educating children but young men and women, should work.
Benedict College is an open-admissions, historically black college that was founded in 1870 in order to educate freed slaves. The school sees itself as a "haven" for students who have to overcome a lot of things just to make it to that level, and for that, I admire Benedict. But a college that tries so hard to be a "safe place" that it rewards students less for actual achievement will end up doing a grave disservice to all its students.
Posted by kswygert at August 26, 2004 09:42 AM