Otfried's response

Otfried posts another long and thoughtful comment describing his reaction to the academoblogosphere's (over-)reaction to the Ailee Slater column. For the benefit of people who don't read comments (or who read this through an RSS aggregator), here it is.

I'm still in a state of mild culture shock about the fact that everybody here seems to react as if an actual student had come to an actual professor, complaining of having been failed in spite of having paid her tuition. Bloggers seem to be embarking on a crusade against the author of the piece personally (the "spoiled little brat").

Where I live, newspaper columns are meant to be provocative. Hyperbole and irony are not only allowed, they are called for. The purpose is to provoke the reader into thinking about the subject, looking at it from a different perspective, to raise questions, not to answer them.

If a piece like this appeared in our campus newspaper, I suspect nobody would react by taking it literally, and if they did, they would probably just make a fool out of themselves, or would appear as stiff old conservatives with no sense of humor. (This is where my culture shock comes in - I know at least one of the bloggers as being none of the above.)

The piece in question is not very good - it appears to be plugged together in a break between classes (but then, many columns appear that way, they are always written with short deadlines). The analogy with cleaning toilets is rather silly (better ones would have been the relationship between a hockey team and their coach, or between the American president and his personal consultants - there is clearly a teacher/student or tutor/tutee relationship here, but if the tutee fails, it's the tutor who get's fired).
Yet the piece certainly suceeded in provoking people to think about an interesting, serious topic. Just look at the response on the newspaper website, or the fact that at least three academics with busy teaching and research schedules take time to rebuke her (some probably spending a far larger amount of time on this than the author originally did).

For what it's worth, in my experience students who volunteer to work for the campus newspaper are rarely spoiled little brats. And personally I would regret the day that students stopped to question the system either.

The lovely response at Anomalous Data does well at dealing with the question what grades are and what they are not. But it doesn't address the questions implicit in the second half of the column: what really is the role of grades in the academic system? Are they necessary? What would a university without grades look like? Are grades there just for industry's sake?

These are deep, interesting questions that deserve discussion. (Don't worry, this'll be my last contribution - otherwise some people might get the wrong idea that I have spare time and could review some SoCG submissions.) But let me add a few remarks that add nuances to what has been said here:

Are grades really that objective? It's easy to grade most engineering tasks objectively, but remember that the author of the piece is not an engineering student. I can imagine that it is hard to grade English essays objectively (and to communicate the standards used to the students). Personally, I find it very hard to explain to students why their writeups (about computer science!) were graded the way they were without spending more time on this than I can afford.

Even worse, I've taught at institutions where grading was along a curve: the top 5% get A+, the bottom 5% fail, and so on. It's clear that this is not objective: your grade does not depend on your achievement, but on how well you compete with your peers. An achievement that got you a B+ one year may give you an A- the next. Objective?

Which opens an entire box of questions: grades necessarily introduce an element of competition into university education. Is this intended? Desirable? Does education imply competition? The answer here must depend a lot on your background. If you are one of millions of Indian or Chinese students competing for a few thousand graduate student scholarships, you probably start competing in kindergarden. That doesn't necessarily mean that this is the right answer for every place. When I was a student, I considered the university a place that provided knowledge, together with the guidance to make the most out of it. The engineering schools of today's universities have, for a good part, turned themselves into machines that produce certified engineers. Education has been replaced by training, where grades come in naturally to measure the progress of trainees along the programmed course. Now, again, the author of the piece is not an engineering student. Perhaps in her field it is less obvious what the role of grades in education is?

Related is Suresh's remark that a student familiar with the UK or Indian government examination system could not have written the column. I find this more disturbing than the original column - I've seen institutations that, instead of providing an education, train students to pass governement exams, and I really do not want to consider this a model for university. No, I don't have better suggestions on how India, France, or Korea should select government employees, but I still feel bad about education that essentially turns itself into a cram school. (And, as Suresh points out, the quality of service at Indian government offices doesn't seem to show the effectiveness of the method.)

Another amusing factoid: a few years ago, the Minister of Education here [in Korea] told universities that a larger fraction of the students that enter university must graduate after the recommended time period. (Presumably she meant that faculty need to work harder to teach better to make students understand faster, not to just pass students more easily.) <Warning: irony>Now, if the Minister as the one who pays for the universities has the right to ask this, what does this imply for the tuition-paying students? </irony>

Well, that'll be it from me on this topic. I've learnt at least one thing: my own education was an utopia hardly imaginable by others. Not only did we not have grades, we had a student:faculty ratio of about 1:6, and paid no tuition whatsoever.

Well said.

I agree that "everybody here seems to react as if an actual student had come to an actual professor, complaining of having been failed in spite of having paid her tuition", but unlike Otfried, I'm not at all surprised. I have heard this precise argument from my own students, as have many other instructors. Sadly, the argument is neither new nor rare. Nor is it harmless. At its core, it reflects the increasingly common misapprehension that education is a passive activity, something teachers do to students in a vacuum, not something students do with the help of teachers, parents, and the community. This attitude is threatening to many people, especially educators, partly because it clashes so badly with our own deeply held convictions about education and personal responsibility, and partly because it places an impossible burden on our shoulders if the Powers That Be take it seriously. (Cf. No Child Left Behind.)

On top of that, Ailee seems to confuse education with grades, to confuse grades with judgements of personal worth, and finally, to demand that she be judged positively as a person. Frustrating.

So here we have someone espousing dangerous unorthodoxy, reflecting an attitude that (we suspect) is shared by a large fraction of the general population, expressed with illogical arguments, bad grammar, and general whininess. Of course people are going to react badly. Of course people are going to attack her grammar, her disjointed rhetoric, her immaturity, and even her appearance instead of responding to her ideas. That's what people do!

Comments

[Chris]

I think Otfried brings up a good point about the role of a newspaper article even if it is from a... *shudder*... school newspaper. Nonetheless, I still agree with you that her attitude is symptomatic of something worse. I don't believe this is a case of "I need to print something, let me be inflammatory".

I'm not even a professor yet but having been a teacher's assistant for 4 years I can say with some certainly that: many students feel exactly the same way and have no shame about their poor performance.

[Suresh]

"Related is Suresh's remark that a student familiar with the UK or Indian government examination system could not have written the column"

I said whaaaat ? Am I being misquoted here ?

[Otfried]

"I said whaaaat ? Am I being misquoted here ?"

Yes, you have been shamelessly misquoted. My apologies, I mismatched the attribution line (your name appears above the comment in question, but I should have looked at the attribution below).

As another blogger would say, after logging off I will immediately perform Harakiri.