Professor X

by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic

  Even President Obama, in dark moments, has alluded to the underside of expanded enrollment: the fact that so many students are not able to complete the program.

  At the colleges where I labor, particularly the community college, student attrition is an enormous problem. I see the statistics borne out in my own classes, where rosters of 25 regularly shrink to less than half that. Open admissions policies have thrown open the doors to all comers, but graduating from college does not happen automatically the way high school graduation can. Some of the students who wind up in my classroom report how they were mediocre or poor students and yet found themselves carried along year after year in the general high school wave, promoted without having mastered sufficient academic skills.

  A study released in 2008 by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University looked at all graduates of the class of 2000 in Boston public schools. Of the 2,964 graduates, 1,904 of them—64.2 percent—went on to college. Most attended locally: Bunker Hill Community College, University of Massachusetts at Boston, Roxbury Community College, Massachusetts Bay Community College, Northeastern University, Quincy College, and UMass Amherst.

  Seven years later, only 675 students—35.5 percent—had earned a bachelor’s degree, an associate’s degree, or even a one-year certificate. The students who attended community college could muster only a 12 percent graduation rate.

  On its editorial page, the Boston Globe decreed that action needed to be taken, that “the colleges, and especially the community colleges, need to step up with some big ideas on how to turn entering students into graduates.” Ideas were already being floated, some with a tinge of desperation. The Boston public schools were already “ramping up academic rigor by offering more college-level courses.” It isn’t clear, of course, how students who wouldn’t pass college-level classes in college would do it in high school. The superintendent of the Boston schools proposed the creation of a “newcomers academy” for immigrant students, and floated the idea of single-gender classes.28

  None of this is news to the adjunct instructor at the college of last resort.

  11

  Grade Inflation Temptation

  COLLEGES EMPLOY INSTRUCTORS not just for their expertise but for their willingness to administer grades, which is by far the most gut-wrenching and distasteful aspect of the job. Grading student work, like writing parking tickets or leveling property tax assessments, is not employment for the tenderhearted. No one enjoys grading assignments. The classroom itself is often a joyous place, with instructors and students striding together toward some enlightenment, but the evaluating of tests and essays and research papers turns those same instructors and students into adversaries, often leaving bitterness and hard feelings on both sides. What makes things sticky for the instructor is not just the subjectivity of the whole process but also the dazzling multiplicity of factors that clamor to be weighed before each grade is assigned. Semester after semester, I find myself buffeted and sometimes unmoored by my own shifting assumptions and expectations regarding the students and their relationship to the curriculum.

  I fail plenty of people, but it’s a struggle.

  There is something in the human psyche that shrinks at sitting in judgment of another’s efforts. I suspect that grading has been a sore point for teachers since Ichabod Crane hit the tenure track. To hand out grades with complete objectivity, to adhere to however well considered a rubric, to give the students exactly what their assignments deserve is a daunting task. Without constant vigilance on the part of the instructor, grades will tend to rise.

  Certainly there seems to be grade inflation at the Ivies. In 2007 more than half of the grades received at Harvard were in the A range.1 Maybe this is to be expected. Harvard is a clubby place, with a “we’re-all-A-students-here” mind-set. And maybe their mind-set is correct. Harvard’s acceptance rate now hovers around 7 percent; it takes only the best of the best, proudly turning away hundreds of valedictorians, National Merit Scholars, and students with perfect SAT scores.2 It’s quite possible Harvard’s professors can’t make quizzes or tests tough enough to stump those who make the cut.

  At the colleges where I teach, the issues are different. Many of my students have landed in the world of academia with only the scantest scholastic preparation. Their efforts are meager and unsatisfying. Do they fail? Do whole classes fail? And for those few students who are at college level, who have perhaps overcome adversity to get themselves to a B or B+ level, doesn’t it seem churlish to award them the grades they actually deserve and not give them a little rewarding boost?

  Sometimes it is said that adjunct instructors are the worst offenders when it comes to grade inflation. In her cleverly named study “A Is for Adjunct: Examining Grade Inflation in Higher Education,” Brenda S. Sonner spends two years studying a small, unidentified public university that relies heavily on adjunct instructors. She concludes that “adjunct faculty give higher grades for comparable work than do full-time faculty.”3 Ronald C. McArthur studies full- and part-time humanities faculty for three semesters at a small two-year college in New Jersey and concludes that students are “substantially more likely to get a grade of A from an adjunct professor than from a full-time professor.”4

  The studies are somewhat vague about the source of this adjunct grade inflation. McArthur says that the reasons “are not clear,” though he suspects that adjuncts “are being held hostage to the student evaluations. Wanting to receive a good evaluation could influence a grading decision.” Sonner is more decisive, and she agrees. “It seems reasonable to conclude that adjunct faculty, who are employed on a term-by-term basis, are hesitant to give lower grades as it could create student complaints that would result in the adjunct not receiving an offer to teach in subsequent quarters.”

  Though my experience may be singular, I have never felt the smallest bit of pressure to be a “popular” instructor. The colleges have never suggested any uptick in my grades. I am under no pressure to assuage disgruntled customers. My colleges’ official stance is one of vehement opposition to grade inflation, and I believe they are sincere. They don’t need to worry about enrollments; students, cognizant of the requirements of their jobs, are beating down the door to get in. Both Pembrook and Huron State caution against grade inflation in their adjunct workshops; Pembrook goes to the trouble of generating a little spreadsheet comparing the grades given by full-timers and adjuncts.

  A tenured professor at Huron State says that she hasn’t given an A on an English 101 assignment in twenty years. The English chair at Pembrook told me that nothing pleased her more, on a course evaluation, to see that a student wrote that a professor seemed too tough. “The world is a tough place,” she said, “and they’ve just got to get used to it.”

  I’m not sure, however, that college administrations are always aware of the intellectual depths to which some of the students have sunk. Let me now use the sort of modern-speak cliché I so decry in my students’ writing: there is a disconnect. At my last yearly adjunct meeting at Pembrook, my old friend Dean Truehaft, he of the boxy wool three-button suit who oriented me to the whole adjunct game so long ago, still athlete-trim, spoke about academic rigor. With great Weltschmerz, he chastised the adjuncts: “People, we can’t just give out A’s and A-minuses.” His comment floored me. I nearly choked on my wedge of student dining services carrot cake. The imperially slim dean seemed, at that moment, pathetically out of touch with the realities of one large swath of his student body. I have discussed grades with other adjuncts, and, believe me, we’re not giving out A’s and A-minuses with jolly abandon. If the issue were merely A’s that should be B’s and B’s that should be C’s, my professional existence would be a more straightforward one. The real question is a lot thornier, and one that doesn’t seem to come up at adjunct meet-and-greets: what exactly constitutes base-level college work? Who are we serving by admitting so many students who couldn’t do it without years and years of remediation?

  Most English departments ad
here to a standard rubric for grading freshman compositions. The guidelines issued by Modesto Junior College in California, for example, delineate an A paper as a “markedly exceptional, superior essay.” The paper “addresses the assignment thoroughly and analytically,” with “fresh insight that challenges readers’ thinking.” It provides “adequate context for readers (i.e., necessary background information, brief summaries, or definitions of key terms, etc.).” It uses a “clearly focused and sufficiently narrowed controlling idea (thesis).” It presents a “logical progression of ideas.” It “analyzes ideas and issues skillfully using sound reasoning.” In terms of mechanics, the nuts and bolts of expression, it “displays superior, consistent control of syntax … sentence variety … diction … punctuation, grammar, spelling, and conventions of Standard English.” Other rubrics I have seen stress the importance of a clear authorial voice.5

  Let’s be brutally frank. I’ve never been handed such a paper.

  The guidelines for the A paper could really apply to an essay by David Foster Wallace. His approach was analytical, and his insights fresh. His work always challenges the reader. It is chock full of context, the control of syntax is superior, and there is a polished authorial voice working.

  The B paper is a “clearly above average essay.” The Modesto rubric actually doesn’t make much of a distinction between an A and a B paper. The B paper deals with the assignment “clearly and analytically, setting a meaningful task.” I love that phrase, “meaningful task.” It is difficult to get my students to believe that their writing must have a purpose. They don’t believe that there is a job to be done, an idea to be gotten across, that writing is not just a string of words conveying a shopworn or self-evident idea. The B paper presents a “clearly focused” thesis and “clear and coherent organization”; it “evaluates and analyzes ideas and issues carefully (but not with the skill or sophistication of an A essay).” The mechanics of the B essay, the diction and punctuation and syntax and all that, are exactly the same as that of the A essay, except that the control is only “consistent,” not both “superior” and “consistent.”

  I’d put a Chuck Palahniuk novel such as Choke at about a B, being organized but sometimes not sophisticated. I’d put Anna Quindlen at about B level, too: her theses are focused but somehow a bit lacking. B-minus.

  The C paper displays only “some analysis”; it has a thesis but not necessarily a good one. The organization is “adequate,” but “the focus may not be as clearly maintained as in the A and B essay.” Examples and details are “less developed and less persuasive” than those in the A and B essay. The control of mechanics is “adequate”; mistakes do not “slow the reader, impede understanding, or seriously undermine the authority of the writer.”

  According to this rubric, most of the best papers I have ever gotten are C’s.

  The D paper is “seriously flawed.” The thesis is “unclear.” the paper “lacks focus and a clear pattern of organization.” The paragraph structure is “flawed.” The syntax “lacks sufficient control,” and the errors do tend to “slow down reading and impede understanding.”

  Ah, yes. The flash of recognition.

  These are the waters in which I swim regularly.

  An F paper? That’s “fundamentally deficient.” It “fails to address [the] assignment or does so minimally.” It lacks a thesis. The organization is illogical. The paragraphing is “inadequate or nonexistent.” The mechanical errors “greatly impede understanding.”

  Writing is a peculiarly unforgiving endeavor. Good writing is good writing, whether done by grade-schoolers, college freshmen, syndicated columnists, or Booker Prize short-listers. Though the grading criteria seem overambitious, an A college paper really should jump off the page. It should surprise. It should even jolt. Its language should, if not crackle with subtext and implication, at least please.

  Based on strict adherence to such grading criteria, my students would forever be doomed to dwell in the place of F’s and D’s. Occasionally, very occasionally, a student may stand on tiptoes and crane her neck and breathe the sweeter air of a C.

  I fail lots of students, more at Huron State than at Pembrook. But it’s not easy to maintain my resolve. Failing all those in a class who deserve to is like trying to keep 23 helium balloons at ground level with your hands. They tend to rise.

  First of all, twenty-first-century American culture makes it more difficult to fail people. Our society, for all its blathering about embracing diversity and difference, really has no stomach for diversity and difference when it constitutes disparity. We don’t like to admit that one student may be smarter, sharper, harder working, better prepared, more energetic, more painstaking—simply a better student—than another. So we level the playing field. Slow readers get extra time on tests. Safe harbor laws protect substance abusers. Students who miss class for religious reasons, as it says in the boilerplate language Huron State suggests that I place in my course syllabus, may be absent without incurring a penalty. While fairness and inclusion are desirable, and while I have no argument with the impulse behind any single policy that strives to mitigate the capricious nature of life, the effect in the aggregate has been to render distasteful the whole idea of one human being passing judgment on the efforts of another. It is a reflex: to be understanding and compassionate about the curveballs life has thrown our fellow human beings. A noble reflex, but at odds with the very nature of grading. How can an instructor even enforce the simple concept of deadlines for assignments? Cars break down, don’t they? Computers crash. Infants get sick. Our quest to provide universally level playing fields has made us reluctant to keep score.

  And professors have become demystified. Surely that’s not bad, right? Isn’t it good that students do not quail in their professor’s presence, that they feel at ease enough to send friendly, jaunty e-mails? A young man kept up a steady correspondence with me during the course of our semester together. He had questions about missed classes, he wanted to substitute a different paper topic for the one assigned, and so on. The e-mails invariably began with “Hey there”; his trademark sign-off was “Later, peace.” We seemed to be something like pen pals, two bros collaborating on the worthy goal of his passing the course, which he didn’t. He didn’t do the reading and failed a bunch of quizzes and the final exam. His final missive to me, no less breezy than his others, suggested that our friendship had suffered a breach. He was dissatisfied with his final grade of F. There was, however, a remedy. He asked me to change one of his paper grades from a C to an A-minus or B, which would raise his overall grade enough so that he passed the course.

  When I attended college, grading was a fairly straightforward matter. Professors assumed that their students had successfully completed work at the more difficult end of the high school curriculum, and grades were in part based on whether those students had successfully progressed to postsecondary levels of thought and expression. There was a universal baseline of skill. I would no more have questioned an instructor about a grade than I would have questioned God. I understood that my Shakespeare professor knew in his very marrow that my paper on Sonnet 50 was a B. How could I even dream of changing his mind? (And he didn’t use written grading criteria, either. The need for a set of formal written guidelines only arose when the papers the students were submitting no longer aligned with the instructors’ internal scale. Written guidelines manifest desperation; they almost always appear in times of noncompliance. As the pool of college students expanded, skill levels declined, and instructors found themselves grading more and more papers that left them frankly puzzled.)

  The professor was the expert; he sat on high, like a photographer perched on a stepladder to get the best view. I don’t want deference. That’s the last thing I’m looking for or deserve. But the fact that there really is no deference, that there is very little social distance between instructor and student, impairs the instructor’s ability to dispense grades. Students view instructors not as oracles but as college employees bound b
y rules of fairness and disclosure. This is a good thing, but grades then become highly negotiable.

  The whole system of grades may be too nineteenth century for our modern taste. Nevertheless, the system remains in place. I have to give grades, and I frequently have to give bad ones, but the system rankles and depresses me in a way it did not rankle and depress previous generations of college instructors. My resolve to give grades blindly, based solely on the work and without regard for the consequences to the student, is compromised; my stance as an arbiter of academic success is debilitated. Passing a failing student starts to seem like one more “accommodation,” like extra time given for an exam, to make college life fair.

  I am keenly aware of how important these courses are to their livelihoods. Colleges have insinuated themselves everywhere, and the need for college credits is an important part of contemporary work life. The attainment of degrees and certificates is now routinely linked to promotions and higher salary scales. The licensed practical nurse may need 65 more college credits to get her R.N. The aspiring laboratory technician takes core courses in medical technology but also three years of prerequisite courses in the liberal arts and sciences—including English 101 and English 102. B.A. candidates in sociology with a specialty in criminology will be prepared, in the words of the catalogue, for “scholarly careers” in sociology, criminology, and social deviance, as well as jobs in victim counseling, corrections, and law enforcement. Virtually none of my students are headed for scholarly careers in social deviance or anything else. They will work—or are working—as bailiffs or federal marshals; in sheriff ’s departments; as nurses of all kinds; in the billing or human resource divisions of large institutions; in county, state, or federal prisons; as court or correctional officers; or as caseworkers in the caverns of whatever social service agency will have them. Whether much of their college coursework will actually be of any use to them, other than qualifying them for the job, is questionable.