Ken Goodman wondered if student evaluations of faculty contributed to grade
inflation. I tend to doubt it, if only because the evaluations are,
deliberately, done before students get their grades, and by and large
students tend to be overly optimistic (though still surprisingly realistic)
about the grades to come.
In my own institution I think there is little doubt that grade inflation is
the creation of faculty attitudes. Many of our faculty are acutely aware of
the Great Social Sorting and the role grades play in it, and we do not give
the lowest grades (C, D, F) except in extreme (total ineptitude) or
guilt-free (no attendance) circumstances. We do not want to 'punish'
students because their native language is not English, because their
dialect features don't fit models of 'good writing', because they were too
busy working or helping their families survive to read all the assignments
or spend as much time in the library as more privileged students. We hope
that they will do better, given more time and opportunity, and we know that
the unacceptably low grade would pre-empt such opportunities. I would say
that a C grade today in the US would probably represent non-passable work
in many other countries. C-students in the US simply could not obtain a
baccalaureate degree in Europe or Asia; indeed they would never have been
admitted to a university in the first place. Grade inflation is an integral
part of the US experiment in mass higher education.
And this does indeed connect to the issue of cultural and social class
diversity. Higher education presents a very procrustean set of cultural
standards; they are the standards of the traditional upper middle class
(with still a whiff of those of the aristocracy, a legacy of ancient
legitimation struggles). Academic standards do not encourage much at all in
the way of diversity, except perhaps in matters of opinion. But not in
practices: the right way to do it is fixed, and with it by and large the
genres and symbolic forms of legitimate products.
I do not in fact see much evidence for the grander claims of higher
education: that it initiates students into critical thinking at a high
level, or that it fosters a disciplined intellectual creativity. Perhaps
occasionally in doctoral programs this does happen, but it is hard to see
how it could issue from the nature of the first-degree curriculum. We
primarily teach students the one right way to think, as interpreted in the
traditions of our disciplines. There is no provision for real diversity or
critique: not in kinds of thinking, not in forms of writing, not in basic
assumptions, not in practices of any sort. Our standards of evaluation and
quality are all INTERNAL to our disciplinary traditions; the only diversity
we allow is _precedented_ diversity, the historically legitimated diversity
WITHIN our disciplinary traditions. Anything else is 'bad psychology' 'poor
thinking' 'not logically argued' 'incoherent' ... 'shoddy work' ... 'not
really psychology at all ' ... and of course I could have chosen physics or
mathematics or literary criticism or ...
SORTING is not the ONLY function of higher education. We are also in the
business of reproducing a system of 'strong classification' in Bernstein's
terms: strict criteria defining what does and does not count as legitimate
practice of each separate discipline. We also have a wonderful ideological
defense of our pro-disciplinary, anti-intellectual practice: 'You can't
criticize the discipline until you really understand it', when we know very
well from our own experience that the most basic critique of the practices
and assumptions of a discipline comes at the very beginning, and thereafter
rather unpredictably, but quite piecemeal ... we do not criticize the
discipline as a whole, and we do not need to know the discipline as a whole
in order to critique it. We always critique small parts of it, and
sometimes these criticisms have wider implications for the discipline as a
whole. We are especially intolerant of divergent proposals regarding
practices, and the moreso when they come from those most likely to make
them: novices; while we are most tolerant when they come from those least
likely to make them: experts. But expertise in a field is no necessary
qualification for criticizing its foundations, and certainly not for
proposing alternatives outside its disciplinary self-definitions.
Of course relatively few students are interested in critique; mostly they
just have an instrumental interest in learning the standard practices. But
at some point in advancement into a discipline, you cannot deploy the
standard practices effectively if you do not have a deeper understanding of
the programme of the discipline, its objectives, its agenda, its way of
construing the world. At that point we can either inculcate an implicit
disciplinary habitus or we can introduce an explicit critical examination
of the foundations of the discipline. The former is sufficient for lifetime
technocrats; the latter is a prerequisite for intellectual leadership. From
here on the issue becomes a moral one: should all students aspire to a
critical intellectual attitude toward their disciplines, their professions,
or should those of us who do simply accept that we are different?
Chickens and eggs are inextricably scrambled in such questions. Should/can
education lead all students from an early age toward the stance of the
critical intellectual? where would the teachers come from who could do
this? Is such a project merely reproductive on the part of a specialized
subspecies of society? Do we deny legitimacy and value to all those who
have no interest in this stance?
A footnote ... compare academic higher education with initiation into the
fine arts ... in late modernism the fine arts have adopted the view that
creativity, and with it a sort of radical but not necessarily logic-based
critique of current practices and values, is to be rewarded ... creating a
rather dynamic contradiction between artistic training in traditional
practices and acceptance of very radical departures ... still not from rank
beginners for the most part (else there would be too little reproduction),
but from a fairly early stage. Some arts are more tradition-bound (ballet,
classical music) while others embrace novelty (painting and sculpture,
performance art, modern dance, avant-garde music). How are students
'graded' in the arts? How does a teacher of painting, creative writing, or
architectural design, react to radically new techniques, critiques, and
their incorporation into products? How 'weak' can disciplinary
classification become and still achieve a longterm balance between
disciplinary continuity and fundamental innovation? Are there in fact
weak-paradigm fields as well as strong-paradigm ones? If Kuhnian ideas
characterize the strong-paradigms of the natural sciences, where
fundamental change represents a radical break, are there other fields, such
as in some of the contemporary arts, where 'continuous revolution' is
'normal art'?
Can we learn something important about grading from our colleagues in the
less strait-jacketed fields of cultural production?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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