I happened across a new weblog today, Critical Mass by Erin O'Connor. She's a young English professor who has taken up the task of pointing out what's wrong with the study of literature at the graduate level and beyond. This post and others got me thinking about my own experiences as both a teacher and a student.
On grading: At the graduate level, 4.0s are pretty common. A 3.5 means "good enough, but not quite in the top tier," and a 3.0 means "barely graduate-level work." At least, that seemed true to me in my two years in the Literature in English graduate program at MSU, and it didn't seem wrong to me. I figured that by the time people reached the graduate level, they ought to be working at the "A" level most of the time.
My one experience with something like grade inflation still rankles, though. I took a course in African-American literature and film which was organized in an unusual way. One faculty member oversaw the class, but he led only about one out of three or four sessions. The other sessions were led by other faculty from the department, or by visiting scholars. We would read the scholars' work and discuss it in advance of their visits, and they would come, meet with us, and give a public lecture the next day. We wrote only one long paper, due at the end of the semester, as was pretty typical.
My paper, on the intersection of race and class in the films Ghosts of Mississippi and A Time to Kill, earned me a 4.0. I was more excited, though, about my professor's spontaneous marginal scrawl about seven pages in: "This is a great paper!" I also got a 4.0 in the class.
A couple of days after grades came out, a friend from the class e-mailed to ask how I'd done. She was mighty unhappy with her grade, which was either a 2.0 or a 2.5. Other students also started feeling each other out. "I didn't know they gave grades that low in grad school," one said as it slowly became clear that very low grades had been common in the class, and that the professor had also not used the time-honored model that one's course grade should be 1/2 grade higher than the grade on one's seminar paper (when another faculty member violated this unspoken rule a year later, giving me a 3.5 on my paper and in the class, I was irate even though I knew I didn't deserve better. Deserved or not, that 1/2 grade bump begins to feel like an entitlement after awhile).
A few days after that, the professor sent an e-mail to the whole class, saying that he had not given credit for class participation because he had not been present at the majority of sessions to judge people's contributions, but that in the face of so many complaints he had decided to raise everyone's grades.
Everyone's but mine, I noted (and whoever else had gotten a 4.0 in the first place). It made me mad. It always makes me mad when professors cave in to student pressure rather than grading as they see fit. It undermines my respect for them, as the following story will also illustrate.
When I was a young graduate student at Rutgers, I had decided to leave school but stayed for one final semester in order to live on my fellowship money. You can imagine how hard I worked! One of my professors told me as the semester drew to a close that I would fail the class if I didn't manage something spectacular for my final project. I did not manage something spectacular. That professor also wrote a spontaneous and emotional scrawl just a few pages in, but his was more along the lines of "This is complete garbage and a waste of my time." It was clear he stopped reading at that point, because he noted my grades on that page as well. Final paper, F. Course grade "A pity C."
I had liked this professor all semester. I liked him even when he was threatening to fail me, because I knew I wasn't doing the work, I knew I was in over my head, and i was already imagining myself looking at New Brunswick in my rear-view mirror. I stopped liking him when he gave a "C" to a student he believed deserved an "F." I didn't want an "F" on my transcript, of course. But I did want to believe the school I went to, the faculty in it, and the sheepskin I eventually did earn there had integrity.
More on life in academia coming up: some reflections on the grad school admissions process, why being an English grad student is like being in "The Emperor's New Clothes," why you're not allowed to care about what you're studying, and what I thought after 9/11 when my department chair suggested that faculty might want to give over class time to helping students deal with their feelings.
Here's a quick P.S. about my paper on race. Whenver I met with the professor to discuss my plans for the paper, he kept telling me that I should discuss the film Shaft as well. I couldn't see a connection, I tried to tell him so, and he kept saying, "No, no, it's just what the paper needs." So I included a section on Shaft and I struggled to make connections between it and the other films I was discussion. In the end comments, the professor re-iterated his opinion that it was an excellent paper, but told me that the Shaft material was off-topic and felt tacked-on.
Posted by Su Penn at June 28, 2003 05:32 PM | TrackBack