If only students would listen to me!

The older I get, the more I am temped to respond with a "doh!" when I read stuff that I have been saying/writing forever.  But then other than the few losers, er, readers here, who cares about what I have to say, right? ;)

In this essay on the importance of innovation, I read the following sentence:

GPA was associated with innovation, but maybe not in the direction you’d think.

Why the "doh!" you wonder, eh ... let me tell you that first before I report on the innovation essay.

For starters, I have this post from December 2012, with the title "Education does not equal pursuing the GPA" in which I quoted a better known person:

The pursuit of the perfect GPA is a distraction that leads too many students away from the challenges they should be facing in their undergraduate years.

You can already see the connection, right?  In the American system (with which I am most familiar) students can follow a number of strategies in order to pursue the GPA.  They can, for instance, avoid the sciences if they think they are not quite strong in that field--even if they are genuinely interested in science.  They can bypass learning a foreign language if that is not their best suit.  Or, even within these, they can avoid mean old professors like sriram who have may earned a reputation for being intense.  Very rational, if the goal is the GPA.  But, the un-challenged mind is not good at creativity and innovation!

As I wrote in this post from March 2013:

Thus, we end up graduating students with high GPAs, making sure that all students being above-average is not merely the case in a fictional Lake Wobegon!  Commencement ceremonies now routinely have magna- and summa-cum-laudes by the dozens--of course, very, very few of them from math and science, and nobody seems to even acknowledge that!  Once, when I participated in the university's deliberations on choosing the outstanding graduates, I made a mistake of commenting that it would not be fair to compare GPAs of students who were in different majors; I was surprised that there was no discussion on that point. Keep ignoring and eventually people like me will go away, I suppose!  It worked--it has been years since I participated in those discussions.

 Have I established by now that I have always been railing against the GPA?  If only students understand that.  No, correct that.  If only faculty understood that and passed along to students that an easy A or an easy C or easy whatever is not going to help them at all.  It is no longer a world in which every college graduate can immediately transition to that successful middle class life.

Back to the innovation essay then:

From our findings, we speculate that this relationship may have to do with what innovators prioritize in their college environment: taking on new challenges, developing strategies in response to new opportunities and brainstorming new ideas with classmates.
Time spent in these areas might really benefit innovation, but not necessarily GPA.
Additionally, findings elsewhere strongly suggest that innovators tend to be intrinsically motivated – that is, they are interested in engaging pursuits that are personally meaningful, but might not be immediately rewarded by others.
We see this work as confirmation of our findings – grades, by their very nature, tend to reflect the abilities of individuals motivated by receiving external validation for the quality of their efforts.
Perhaps, for these reasons, the head of people operations at Google has noted:

GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring.

If only students understood that! :(

And, the essay presents everything that I tell every one of my classes.  Like this:

Classroom practices make a difference: students who indicated that their college assessments encouraged problem-solving and argument development were more likely to want to innovate. Such an assessment frequently involves evaluating students in their abilities to create and answer their own questions; to develop case studies based on readings as opposed to responding to hypothetical cases; and/or to make and defend arguments.

Any student who has been in any of my classes, even if that student slept through, knows well that my courses are structured exactly along those lines.  I emphasize over and over the importance of the ability "to create and answer their own questions."  Of course, I have posted about that too:

Higher education is then about understanding concepts enough to be able to ask questions.  In the format that most of higher education is, students rarely are taught how to ask questions.  And if they never figure this out after four years of university education, then all the access that Google provides will be of zero value.

Despite the "doh!" it does feel good to know that I am not alone in this cosmos ;)

If only students would listen to me though--for their own good!

Education does not equal pursuing the GPA

Grading is done, and I am all set to begin the process all over again in the new year.

When a new term begins, I know I will remind students in my classes, quite a few times, that education is not about the tests and the eventual letter grade. The goal is not to work towards a letter grade, but to gain an understanding of how to make order out of the chaos that the world is.  It is this understanding that then gets reflected in the assignments and tests, which then determine the letter grade and the GPA.

A goal of making sense of the chaotic world would require students to take courses in as many fields of inquiry as possible--from physics to literature to music.  And, geography, too.

But, that is not how education works.  For all I know, it has rarely worked that way in recent history.

The net result is my worry that we have stopped educating students; here is a related excerpt from a thoughtful essay by Ellen Rupel Shell, who is a professor at Boston U.:

A grade of B- or C in freshman chemistry seems to steer many students away from taking upper level science courses. A low grade in freshman English or anthropology discourages physics majors from taking other than the least demanding selections from the humanities and social sciences. In their understandable effort to maintain the highest possible GPA, undergraduates seem to cut themselves off from experimentation, challenge, and risk taking, the very things that a university education is meant to stimulate.

The pursuit of the perfect GPA is a distraction that leads too many students away from the challenges they should be facing in their undergraduate years. At a time when public understanding of science is critical, fewer and fewer non-majors are taking demanding science courses, due at least in part to their fear of getting penalized for their efforts with a less than stellar grade.

Fully aware of the "rational" decisions that students make, I shall continue to remind them that my courses are not about employment skills and that their focus should not be on "will this be on the test?"  I am equally aware that this will not be final post on this topic either.

But, there is always hope--no, I ain't referring to a student by that name in my class, but the hope that Pandora didn't mess around with :)  Here is a postscript a student had included with the final exam:

As a final note I would like to thank you Dr. K for teaching me more than I would have ever assumed on my own about the working of the world and the people that live in it.  It has opened my  eyes to look past the little bubble that I was in and view everything as a much larger picture now.  For the knowledge and experience I thank you and I also thank you for making the class interesting.  Here's to wishing you a happy holiday and may your months to come be always to your liking.

Score!

American students avoid science and math because of ... postmodernism?

When I was a kid, adults encouraged us kids to eat vegetables that might not typically appeal to us by saying things like, "eat this so that you will do better in science."  Or sometimes, it was "eat this so that you will get better at maths."  I am sure quite a few kids held their noses and gobbled up vegetables they hated only to make sure that they did better in science and math.  (Not me: I loved them all--vegetables and science and math!)

I wonder if parents and grandmas say that anymore to India's children.  Perhaps not.  If so, that will be awful, because the kids don't know what they are missing--vegetables and education!

Here in the US, the veggie food route to science and math will never work, given the typical aversion that most children have for vegetables, science, math.  Well, I take it back; it appears that the young might even hold their noses and swallow the veggies if they can entirely avoid science and math.  Again, they don't know what they are missing--vegetables and education! (Except this veggie, of course!)

My initial experiences of Americana were as a graduate student.  Walking or biking across campus from the social sciences area towards math, science, and engineering, well, was often punctuated by an observation about the rapidly decreasing female population.  The few female students in those areas were almost always graduate students from India or China or Europe.  American-born undergraduate science or math majors, male or female, were a minority on campus. 

American students avoiding math and science seems to have only gotten worse.  American-born science and math students are practically an endangered species in higher education. And that is terribly unfortunate.

The higher education system, meanwhile, makes it all the more attractive for students to almost bypass science and math.  While by now I ought to be used to this, I continue to be shocked every single time when I realize how easy it is for students to complete "higher education" and even graduate with a perfect 4.0 GPA, but with barely a couple of classes in science.  And even those science classes tend to be "Mickey Mouse" classes, as one student put it.

The hyper-inflated sense of self that students gain throughout their K-12 system does not help either.  The school system appears to be hell-bent on telling students how special they all are, and that they can do anything they wanted to do in life. Of course, we need to convey the idea that the world is their oyster, but shouldn't we also make sure they understand that hard work is a prime ingredient in a successful formula?  But, it seems that educators systematically dismiss that often one needs to go after difficult tasks, and that life is not simply about plucking those non-existent metaphorical low hanging fruits.

Science and math are by no means any low hanging fruit.  Well, accomplishment in anything, in the arts or languages or whatever, is not as easy to pluck those fruits.

I am convinced that this awful state of education is a result of the postmodernist conditions in education--though I love the postmodernist environment within which I operate.  Modernism and reason have been replaced with arguments of multiple truths.  While philosophically I have no problems with this, and have come to enjoy it over the years, the translation of these ideas into how we educate students means that we are in the mess that we are in now.

The multiplicity of truths, as opposed to the truth, has led us to legitimize any crazy approach to education as equally valid.  Along the way, we have even empowered students to stand up and loudly proclaim their aversions towards science and math.  We have then provided plenty of routes for them to "succeed" without ever having to deal with science and math.  (They do geography, for instance!)

Students educated in this manner in colleges and universities across these United States then go on to become teachers in elementary, middle, and high schools, where they amplify the message that children can do whatever they want to do without ever paying homage to science and math.  Science and math be damned, eh!

I still shudder recalling how an English professor told the freshman Honors students, in a course that I had put together, that it was completely ok if they were not good in science and math.  Because, she was like that and she made it as an English professor.  What a message to give impressionable college freshman, right?

Thus, even a small university like mine has quite an extraordinary amount of fluffy courses (like geography?) where students can excel.  The number of students graduating with the various levels of "laude" honors seems to increase year after year.  A casual scan of the list here indicates the highly skewed ratio of non-science to science majors when it comes to summa and magna cum laude.  Seriously, how many of us will openly admit that for a typical student, earning a B in organic chemistry is way more difficult than earning an A in economic geography?  I will.

What have we gained then as a society after thousands of students thus graduate magna cum laude? 

Our grade-inflated world makes college that much more worthless!

I semi-seriously note in my classes that neither the students, nor my colleagues, nor the world outside ever listens to what I have to say.  I refer to this as the Rodney Dangerfield syndrome, but the reality is that hundreds of thousands of people paid to hear what Dangerfield had to say!

Take, for instance, the issue of higher education, about which I have blogged a lot. I mean, a lot!  I have also authored op-eds in newspapers, like this most recent one.  But, I bet people pay a lot more attention when, say, a Robert Samuelson says the same thing, even though I beat him to these arguments by quite a few years :)

Thus, here I am blogging more about higher education, and about grade inflation, even though this merely adds to my collection:

A University of Minnesota chemistry professor has thrust the U into a national debate about grade inflation and the rigor of college, pushing his colleagues to stop pretending that average students are excellent and start making clear to employers which students are earning their A's.
"I would like to state my own alarm and dismay at the degree to which grade compression ... has infected some of our colleges," said Christopher Cramer, chairman of the Faculty Consultative Committee. "I think we are at serious risk, through the abandonment of our own commitment of rigorous academic standards, of having outside standards imposed upon us."

Well, in this age of every kid getting a standing ovation for merely doing the routine work, grade inflation ought not to surprise us at all anymore.  Yet, I am, every time I read yet another report on this. 

University of Minnesota anthropology professor Karen-Sue Taussig suspects that today's "grade-inflated world" can be traced to the growing cost of a college degree, i.e. today's "tuition-inflated world." As Taussig told the Star Tribune, "They're paying for it, and they worked really hard, and they put in time, and therefore they think they should get a good grade."

Makes sense to me--the more we operate in a business-like world, the more we are tempted to tell customers what they want to hear.  And what they want to hear is that they are all above-average.

We also devise elaborate shenanigans so that students can even begin to feel awesome about their routine work.  I need not go outside my own academic walls for that--we have an Academic Excellence Showcase coming up in a couple of days. 

The entire day will be dedicated to the presentation of student scholarly activities, including original research papers, projects, artwork, performances, and upper-division course projects, presentations, and papers. 

Such a description might convey a notion that there would be presentations galore that resulted from "original research."  Except, it is not.  Here, the term "research" is used in the meaning that students and I use when we deal with assignments.  Like, when I tell them, "do your research on this topic before you write the three-page paper."  "Research" is nothing but, well, do your homework.

It turns out that the celebration of "academic excellence" is often nothing more than standing ovations for routine coursework.  And lost in this circus is real accomplishment when that happens.  Like a former student, "A," who presented a philosophy paper at a regional conference as a true freshman.  Yes, a true freshman.  Now, when the excellent work like hers is granted the same ranking that a routine coursework gets, you now get an idea of the Lake Wobegon traits in colleges.

Full disclosure: when the idea of undergraduate research was kicked around on campus, I was one of the very few involved in that original effort.  But, I got severely disillusioned when the discussions quickly morphed into how to make students feel great, and how faculty ought to get workload compensation.  I stopped my involvement right there.  Because, remember, nobody listens to what I say, which was the story at those meetings, too :(

How smart is your elementary school teacher?

One taboo subject on campus, perhaps on any university campus: anything to do with comparing intellectual abilities of students across majors.  We are expected to pretend that all students are equally capable.  (Plus, of course, pretentious faculty, even at teaching universities like mine, walking around as if they are geniuses!) 

And then comes the GPA issue.  We are suddenly faced with a situation where we find plenty of students with perfect or near-perfect GPAs in some majors, and far-from-perfect GPAs in others.  But, of course, academia being nothing but politics anymore where honest discussions are not allowed, we never openly engage in discussions.

So, we whisper in hallways, and might complain to colleagues we trust.  In my case, not having a colleague to trust makes it all the easier to blog about all these :)

In my second year as a graduate student, when I was a teaching assistant, one undergraduate student, who was in my discussion section, referred to the very course that I was TAing for as a "mickey mouse" course and that she had no problems earning high grades in many similar university courses.  I was amazed at such an honest and open admission from a student. (BTW, she was a contender, that year, to be in the "Royal Court" at the Rose Parade.)

What a terrible contrast it has been since I became a faculty, only to discover that most faculty, unlike that student, do not want to engage in honest and open discussions.

Worse, they are ready to throw out idiots like me who cling on to seemingly antiquated notions that education and university are about honest pursuits of truths!

It will be awesome if, for instance, a faculty meeting were devoted to the following graph (ht):

Fat chance!