{"id":10,"date":"2012-04-03T11:15:39","date_gmt":"2012-04-03T11:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/ctl\/?p=10"},"modified":"2012-09-04T08:47:59","modified_gmt":"2012-09-04T12:47:59","slug":"academic-rigor-maurice-wade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/ctl\/2012\/04\/03\/academic-rigor-maurice-wade\/","title":{"rendered":"Academic Rigor — Maurice Wade"},"content":{"rendered":"

Below is a written version of the comments Maurice Wade of the Philosophy Department offered at the CTL roundtable discussion on academic rigor on Thursday, March 15, 2012. We’re grateful to Maurice for participating in that discussion as a panelist and for giving us permission to post these comments here.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to do here what philosophers often do and what so often makes philosophers so irritating to so many.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to pose a bunch of questions and offer little to nothing by way of answers.\u00a0 Philosophers often wonder if we know as much as we think we do or need to know when we set out to make judgments about matters that we regard as important, in this case rigor in our educational efforts.<\/p>\n

Even with the kinds and amount of data that Dan Blackburn and Rachel Barlow have provided, we should be reluctant to arrive at any substantive conclusions about the rigor of our educational efforts at any level\u2014college-wide, divisional, departmental, etc.\u00a0 My view is that before such conclusions can be justifiably reached, we need to know much, much more than these data can tell and much, much more than we already know.\u00a0 We need much more detailed knowledge of the educational choices that our faculty colleagues are making, how they enact those choices, and the goals that they aim to serve by those choices.\u00a0 Our starting point should be the moral equivalent of the legal presumption of innocence, that our faculty colleagues take their professional responsibilities seriously and care a great deal about how much our students learn.\u00a0 This presumption is refutable, of course, but only with the kinds of knowledge about the actual educational choices and practices that are being enacted in our classrooms.\u00a0 Do we know ourselves well enough as teachers to give legitimate meaning to the data that we have?\u00a0 I strongly suspect that we do not.<\/p>\n

I have heard the term \u2018rigor\u2019 used many times in my thirty-two years of teaching in a full-time position.\u00a0 Yet, I don\u2019t remember ever hearing or reading a definition of the term.\u00a0 If we are going to make judgments about rigor, then we need to know what we think we are judging.\u00a0 And, the effort to define rigor is likely to raise important questions that will merit our collective consideration.\u00a0 Is, or must, rigor be the same thing for all fields or even for all courses?\u00a0 Is what is recognizable as rigor in a course on poetry to count also as rigor for a philosophy course or a physics course?\u00a0 Is what counts as rigor the same when my students and I are grappling with 18th<\/sup> century British empiricism as when we are grappling with 20th<\/sup> century psychoanalytic feminism?\u00a0 We are very much creatures of our disciplinary training and so are the sensibilities that inform our educational choices and practices.\u00a0 Given how widely disparate our disciplines often are, can meaningful judgments about rigor in the educational choices and practices of faculty members in a given discipline be made by those of us with very different disciplinary educations?\u00a0\u00a0 I would be very dubious about using my own, admittedly ill-defined, sense of rigor to judge the educational choices and practices of a colleague teaching sculpture, for instance.\u00a0 How much about teaching photography, for instance, would I need to know to be able to make legitimate judgments about what constitutes rigorous teaching of photography?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know enough about photography teaching even to answer this question.\u00a0 I suspect that I am not at all unusual in this regard.\u00a0 We are specialists within our disciplines.\u00a0\u00a0 Mightn\u2019t that inhibit our ability to step outside that narrowness and recognize what is or isn\u2019t rigorous in other disciplines far more than we might think?<\/p>\n

One likely motivation for being concerned with rigor is the wide range in the percentage of high grades given across divisions.\u00a0 Perhaps we ought to investigate the validity of a thought that might be regarded as heretical, the notion that intellectual achievement and mastery might be less difficult in some fields than in others.\u00a0 My suspicion is that this notion is an uncomfortable one because I also suspect that we share the view that less difficult academic endeavors are less valuable than more difficult ones and we want our fields to be valued equally.\u00a0 But, is this necessarily true?\u00a0 Does more difficult mean better?<\/p>\n

If achievement in some fields is less difficult than others, then we might reasonably expect grades to be higher there.\u00a0 We simply don\u2019t know whether this is or is not the case.\u00a0 We don\u2019t know whether our different disciplines and sub-disciplines are equally difficult nor do we know whether they are not.\u00a0 Perhaps this too is something we ought to attempt to know, as disquieting as that might be.\u00a0 In the absence of that kind of knowledge, inferences about rigor based on the percentages of high grades given in a division, discipline, or even a class might be very wide of the mark.<\/p>\n

I know very little about the educational choices of my faculty colleagues, so I can draw only on a very narrow band of experience, my own.\u00a0 I give no in-class exams anymore.\u00a0 I assign papers and give take-home tests that require writing essays.\u00a0 The student performances meriting failing grades are easy to recognize, as are the ones that merit high grades.\u00a0 \u2018F\u2019s are easy to see, as are \u2018A\u2019s.\u00a0 I find that I have much greater difficulty in confidently grading the work that falls between these extremes.\u00a0 And, in part because of that, my tendency is to let any doubt favor the student.\u00a0 Does this count as failure to be rigorous?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 Does it contribute to grade inflation?\u00a0 It probably does.<\/p>\n

I know from experience that I can design assignments that will make deciding who gets what between \u2018F\u2019 and \u2018A\u2019 much easier and more \u2018objective\u2019.\u00a0 Assignments of that kind would result in giving lower grades to more of my students.\u00a0 But, my professional judgment is that, while those kinds of assignments would challenge the ability of students to remember information obtained from their reading, lectures and discussions in class, and from their notes, they would not be sufficiently focused on challenging students to understand that information, to grapple with how best to articulate and explain it, on integrating it into their own views, and the like.\u00a0 My view is that this would be an irresponsible way for me to fight grade inflation.\u00a0 I\u2019m willing, perhaps wrongly, to endure grade inflation if that is the cost of doing what I believe best promotes the kind of learning that I am after.<\/p>\n

At the recent faculty retreat, the claim was made that the student social climate on campus would be less problematic if we made students work harder and longer.\u00a0 Should our educational choices and practices be based on reform of the campus social climate?\u00a0 My view is that only our judgments about what best achieves our educational goals should determine what we do or do not do as teachers.\u00a0 I want the student social climate to be reformed.\u00a0 What we require students to do for our courses should not, in my opinion, be a vehicle for that end.\u00a0 I hope that the thought that some assignment will give my students less time and energy to party will never have a role in my choices as a teacher.\u00a0 I do hope that those choices will be motivated by the belief that they will effectively promote learning.\u00a0 My belief might be mistaken, because I might be making choices that are not effective.\u00a0 But, it is, I think, the right kind of belief.<\/p>\n

Supposing that grades and rigor are connected, are we agreed about what we are doing when we grade student work?\u00a0 At one end of the continuum is what I refer to, uncharitably, as the social Darwinist ethos.\u00a0 Grading is about thinning the herd of the unfit and ranking the degrees of fitness of those remaining.\u00a0 At the other end of the continuum is a different ethos.\u00a0 Here students are regarded as fit to make productive use of the College\u2019s educational resources because they have been admitted.\u00a0 (Of course, mistakes can be made.\u00a0 But, the presumption is that these are rare.)\u00a0 Our educational choices and practices should aim to maximize their learning.\u00a0 These two rather different outlooks very likely result in significant differences in grading.\u00a0 Which outlook is the correct one?\u00a0 Might both be correct?<\/p>\n

During the question and answer session, Jim Trostle said that the notion of rigor made him uncomfortable.\u00a0 I won\u2019t attempt to convey Jim\u2019s thoughts.\u00a0 He can do that far better than me.\u00a0 I do share his sentiment.\u00a0 For although we might not have a clear and shared definition of rigor, there is a dictionary definition that we ought not to ignore.\u00a0 The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines rigor as: a <\/strong>(1): harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment: severity<\/strong> (2) the quality of being unyielding or inflexible: strictness<\/strong> (3) severity of life: austerity<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Even if rigor is a worthwhile aim, if this definition has some validity, then we ought to be mindful of the costs that might accompany achieving this goal.\u00a0 Will students be engaged by, even occasionally inspired by, educational choices and practices that they experience as severe, strict, and austere?\u00a0 My own pursuit, as an undergraduate, of \u2018higher consciousness\u201d through psychoactive substances stopped when I became deeply engaged with philosophy.\u00a0 I simply found time spent doing philosophy to be much more fulfilling.\u00a0 Philosophy became important to me, and competing activities of that kind lost their allure.\u00a0 If we want rigor, how do we have it while minimizing these costs, if they cannot be avoiding altogether?\u00a0 My guess is that severity, strictness, and austerity are not a winning combination if we value student engagement.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not claiming that we ought not to have high standards.\u00a0 The standard that I think ought to be highest and most important to us is maximizing student learning.\u00a0 I would be much, much more comfortable with discussions centered on this than on rigor.\u00a0 I am much more highly motivated to work with colleagues to find ways to achieve this than I am to achieve greater rigor.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have \u2018rigorous\u2019 means of generating data, measuring phenomena, or making calculations.\u00a0 So everything said here should be judged in that light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Below is a written version of the comments Maurice Wade of the Philosophy Department offered at the CTL roundtable discussion on academic rigor on Thursday, March 15, 2012. We’re grateful to Maurice for participating in that discussion as a panelist and for giving us permission to post these comments here. I\u2019m going to do here […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions\/30"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}