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posted by martyb on Thursday March 01 2018, @08:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the Betteridge-says-"No" dept.

According to Molly Worthen's article in The New York Times, The Misguided Drive to Measure 'Learning Outcomes':

"[...] In 2018, more and more university administrators want campuswide, quantifiable data that reveal what skills students are learning. Their desire has fed a bureaucratic behemoth known as learning outcomes assessment. This elaborate, expensive, supposedly data-driven analysis seeks to translate the subtleties of the classroom into PowerPoint slides packed with statistics — in the hope of deflecting the charge that students pay too much for degrees that mean too little. [...]"

But apparently, there is little to show for tons of money and effort expended to gather data on what students are really learning or adapting curricula to their actual needs.

Mr. Erik Gilbert, a professor of history at Arkansas State University, who has criticized the methods, said to the author: 'Maybe all your students have full-time jobs, but that's something you can't fix, even though that's really the core problem. Instead, you're expected to find some small problem, like students don't understand historical chronology, so you might add a reading to address that. You're supposed to make something up every semester, then write up a narrative.'

As Frank Furedi, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, told the author about the situation in Britain: 'It's a bit like the old Soviet Union. You speak two languages. You do a performance for the sake of the auditors, but in reality, you carry on.'

As the author puts it: 'If we describe college courses as mainly delivery mechanisms for skills to please a future employer [...] We end up using the language of the capitalist marketplace and speak to our students as customers rather than fellow thinkers. They deserve better. [...] Producing thoughtful, talented graduates is not a matter of focusing on market-ready skills. It's about giving students an opportunity that most of them will never have again in their lives: the chance for serious exploration of complicated intellectual problems, the gift of time in an institution where curiosity and discovery are the source of meaning.'

A lengthy read, but worthwhile. Are we preparing current students better than in the past or are we simply siphoning money out of them? Yesteryear, a degree was a sure bet to a better life, nowadays, it doesn't mean as much. Are the education methods lacking or is the surplus of graduates to blame for useless degrees?


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  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday March 02 2018, @02:44PM (1 child)

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Friday March 02 2018, @02:44PM (#646381) Journal

    Thanks for sharing your insight! This should be +6 Informative, even if wanting it to be so violates the canons of your discipline.

    So, you have letter grades that assess performance both in the class and on individual subunits. How does administration (and the layer above that - those who control funding from government) determine if those grades have meaning? "Shouldn't all students be getting an A?" Or, even worse, a mandate from on high to become better or improve even when you, as subject-matter experts, are trying to state that we already have the best system possible. Because students are failing, and the prevailing belief seems to be that if you were doing your jobs "right" then students would learn and not fail.

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  • (Score: 2) by melikamp on Sunday March 04 2018, @02:25AM

    by melikamp (1886) on Sunday March 04 2018, @02:25AM (#647423) Journal

    Administration does not give meaning to grades, teachers do. As long as teachers don't get pressured into inflating or deflating grades, the meaning is just as I described. There are lots of warning signs right now in California Community College system, and I am sure also in state universities, that the admin is fully focused on increasing "student success". As far as teachers can tell, this will probably devolve into agonizing over the passing rate, and then, just as you suppose, there will be a strong pressure on the faculty to inflate the grades. The pessimists are saying, the pressure will likely come in the form of funding strings attached, which can only have one outcome. Some schools will be lucky enough to have "good" stats just because they are in the lucky student demographic, or found a clever way to juke the stats without inflating the grades. All the rest, the majority, will be juking the stats by teaching less.