[lit-ideas] Re: Grade inflation
- From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 12 Apr 2004 19:51:54 PDT
[Students should, says John] 'learn to deal with the fact that customers,
clients, bosses, and, yes, even police and other government bureaucrats
frequently make what seem to be arbitrary judgments.'
I doubt that they are all that innocent these days about bosses and the police,
but shouldn't they also be allowed to learn what it would be like to experience
a world from which the 'arbitrariness' had been wrung out as much as possible?
I(This might teach them something about reason giving if nothing else.) f I
can't justify an assessment by pointing to specific features of the work ibeing
assessed, it really would be arbitrary, and the very idea of evaluating student
work--or anybody's work--would lose its point. One might as well throw darts.
But having set forth his own criteria (elsewhere in the post to which I'm
responding again), I'm not sure why John wants to imply that their application
is arbitrary, in the sense of being undiscussable or inexplicable. (I have to
confess that I've taught for a long time at an institution where grades are not
much talked about, and where students have a pretty good sense of their progress
without reference to them.)
Robert Paul
Utopia
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