The 2006-07 Intellectual Life Report concludes that Georgetown students party too much, study too little and get too many “A” grades. Like the 1996-97 Intellectual Life Report, which had nearly identical findings, the current Report recommends that faculty assign more work and give out fewer A’s.
The Report’s findings and recommendations are based on quantitative tabulations of the number of hours Georgetown students say they study and party per week, compared to the hours reported by students at other highly ranked universities.
I am not really sure what to conclude from the fact that Georgetown students report partying more hours per week than Princeton students do (the numerical differences are not provided by the Report). I am not sure what this has to do with determining how many hours students should party, or study, and what such numbers have to do with determining how much students learn from their classes. All I can ascertain with confidence is that we like to invent ways to compare ourselves with places like Princeton.
But perhaps what is most striking about the Report is its neglect of a rather pressing question relative to its own recommendations: what do grades have to do with learning, and why does giving out fewer A’s ensure that students will learn more? If Georgetown students “do only what they must do to maintain their grades” (1997 Report: p. 1), how will being more punitive about grading encourage them to study simply for the love of learning? If students follow the easy A’s and are thus led to “inappropriate career choices” (2007 Report: p. 46), how will implementing the Report’s recommendations ease grade obsession?
Here’s an idea worth considering: let’s abolish grades altogether. In my sixteen years of teaching at Georgetown University, I have seen it do more harm than good because grades function primarily as a psychological mechanism. An “A” means “You are a good person,” and subsequent grades are increasing degrees of “You are a bad person.” This is not what I personally intend by grades—I use them to try to give an objective indication of the quality of a student’s work, which is useful and necessary feedback. But the psychological impact of grades is inescapable and that is why students focus on them.
I generated some numbers on my own grading recently: I took twelve sections of Introduction to Buddhism that I taught in the past ten years, tabulated the percentage of A’s for each class, threw out the high and the low figures, and averaged the rest to derive a twenty-one and a half percentage score. This makes me a “good person,” well within the thirty percent limit on A’s recommended by the Report. But so what? Many of my A students probably get their grades in large part because they already possess the writing and analytical skills that I look for. I know many of my B students have studied diligently and have been devoted to the course. I use grades simply to assess the quality of their final work. Based on this system I cannot even begin to evaluate how much a student has actually learned in my class, and I am not confident that this is something we can ever quantify.
If we want to improve the intellectual life at Georgetown University, one thing we can do is to provide an environment that emphasizes learning rather than grades. At the very least, we should not be shocked and dismayed when our own obsession with competitive rankings filters down to our students.
