Tag: education

Grading students’ work

Reversing previous decisions about the grades awarded to students whose education has been interrupted makes some kind of sense, but only some.  The problem is that we expect grades to mean three somewhat different things, all at once.

In the first place, grades are given for achievement – reflecting the knowledge, skills and competencies that students have demonstrated.  This is problematic in the current situation, because even if the grades are given fairly, they will reflect the position of students who will have done several months less work or development than previous cohorts have done.

Second, grades are supposed to represent potential – not what students have actually  achieved, but what they might be capable of doing with further development.  If present achievement gave us a clear guide to the future, that might work – but it doesn’t, and there’s always been the suspicion that it says more about the preparedness of the school and the resources that school students are offered than it does of the abilities of the pupil.  This was a problem before the pandemic, and it will be a problem long after it.  The truth is that we only have very unreliable predictors of what students might be capable of – A levels, in particular, often make over-fine distinctions between very narrow bands across the grades, and are a weak guide to university performance.

Third, the grades represent opportunities, and impose limits on those opportunities.  If a student wants to study medicine, for example, the opening will depend more on high academic performance than it does on personal experience, sensitivity, commitment or interpersonal skills (the sort of thing that we used explore in interviews for social work places).

The emphasis on opportunity is the argument that has carried the day.   In Scotland, the decision will make it possible for more than 3000 students to go into a university course they wouldn’t otherwise have been admitted to.  Many people will look at that and say: why not?   But there is an objection: increased opportunities within the current system might just mean that people have more opportunity to fail.  The French system opens doors to everyone with the Baccalaureat, but it fails half the students after the first year.  In the UK, the institutions with the most liberal admissions policies are also likely to be the lower status institutions, and they may lose  up to 20% of their students as the course goes on.   It doesn’t follow that we’re wasting those students’ time, but  far too many university courses work on the principle that students must ‘sink or swim’.  I’d be more confident in the process if at the outset there were more engagement with students and more emphasis on developing the skills they’ll need to qualify.

Many students in UK universities are not being well served

Universities are in the news because of ‘grade inflation‘: the government is taking steps to penalise universities who award too many top grades.  Other recent coverage has focused on plagiarism and essay mills.  Over the course of my career, as a teacher in some institutions, and as an external examiner in several others, I’ve seen standards fall while marks improve.  Part of this has been a change in what marks mean.  A competent, sound piece of work without special merit used to be given a 2:2 mark; now it is routinely given a 2.1.  A piece of work that had some deficiencies but enough to be passed used to get a third class; now it would receive a 2.2, sometimes better. The third class mark in many institutions has almost disappeared, and is mainly arrived at only because results are being averaged.

Some standards have genuinely improved.  It has become much easier for a student to find a range of resources to support an essay, and word-processing and graphics programmes mean that standards of presentation are somewhat higher than they were thirty years ago.  However, in most other respects there has been a fall in the standards achieved.  When I was an undergraduate, I routinely did 36 essays or more in a year, plus unseen exams – that’s how I learned to write.  By the time I started teaching, the students were doing 12.  Now, many do six or less – so they write less in a whole degree than I had to in a year.  Some universities have reduced the number of assessments but increased the number of words required in an assessment, apparently in the belief that more words will give equivalent coverage.  That doesn’t work, because with more words there’s still only one exercise in structuring and ordering material, and students can’t develop through iterative feedback. The fewer exercises that people engage with, the less they learn; the less feedback they get, and the slower it comes, the less opportunity they have to improve and develop. Clearly, if students aren’t given the same opportunities to learn and develop, they can’t achieve develop the skills, or achieve the same standards, that students did in the past.  That’s true regardless of some of the other factors which may affect standards – such as students having to divide time between college and work to fund themselves.  This is not the fault of students; it reflects  a marked deterioration in the service that universities offer, and limits on what students are able to achieve as a result.

The reduction in the number of exercises that students do is part of a broader problem.  When I started teaching, four educational principles were widely accepted.

  • Universities were supposed to show students how to learn, not what to say.
  • Active learning – where students do something, like writing or talking – is better and more effective than passive, where they sit and listen.
  • Teaching has to be student-centred – the central issue is that the student has to learn how to learn, not that the teacher has to deliver a product.
  • The curriculum has to be designed as a structured learning experience.  The development of expertise in subjects and disciplines depends on specialisation and depth, not just on extra information.

Much of this has gone by the board.  Curriculum design has given way to ‘cafeteria’ courses, or pick and mix.  (That also allows researchers to pass off narrow topics of personal interest as courses for students, which is simply bad practice; that type of course is centred on the predilections of teachers, not the needs of students.)     Credit accumulation and transfer generally means that students who have acquired a knowledge base get nodded through – but what matters is the skills base, and that’s a different matter. Some universities now carry forward marks from courses taken in the year before finals  – that must mean that no progression is expected.

Inevitably, as the numbers of students increase, students don’t get the same treatment as they would in smaller cohorts.  Lectures are more common, seminars much less so, and personal tutorials rarer still – the larger the student cohort, the more difficult it is to make the time available.  Students have limited personal contact with teachers.  Beyond that, in most institutions, the sheer numbers of students mean that frequent assessment and rapid feedback is out of the question.   This hasn’t happened by design or deliberate action; it’s just that if numbers go up, and the methods and approaches don’t change with them, the experience of students and teachers is going to be different.

Expanding the numbers of students has happened without a serious rethink of traditional educational processes, and that’s had a pervasive effect on how universities operate. A colleague once suggested to me that I was talking about ‘boiling a frog’, and I promised him I’d steal the phrase.  People will put up with things done slowly that they wouldn’t tolerate if they were done all at once.  I’m not sure at this late stage that anything can be done about it, but many students are getting a terrible deal.

The private schools think they know what’s wrong with universities

A clip in today’s i caught my attention:

“Leading independent schools are to hold lessons for university lecturers aimed at telling them how teenagers should be taught. … Too often, lecturers are stuck in the past, headteachers argue, and think they can get away with just setting essays and offering the occasional one-to-one tutorial”.

Someone’s certainly stuck in the past, but I’m not sure it’s the universities.