Finish

Fowllow Outline and theis

gather all of your information, plan the direction of your essay, and organize your ideas by developing a 1-page thesis statement and outline for your essay.

Only one source is required, and I will agree that this essay is probably the most difficult/confusing of them all.  Please remember I am very lenient with this first essay:-)  Think about it like this– read one of the online articles given in the Reading and Study folder.  Hopefully, one of those will trigger some past educational experience– this could either support what the article is saying or even go against it– for example, if you chose the article on chores for children, you may disagree that chores are bad for children; thus, your thesis/argument would be something regarding that and your narrative portion would need to support your argument.  I prefer that only your narrative portion(maybe several paragraphs at the most) would be the only part that  is in first person.

Essay 1: Narrative Argument Rubric

Essential Requirements for grading:

1. The Essay has been submitted to safe- assign

2. The essay addresses the writing Prompt

3. The Essay Follows Assignment Instructions (-5pts Deduction for Not Following Instructions)

Student: Date:

CONTENT

Good/Excellent (45-39)

Fair/Competent (38-31)

Deficient (30-0)

Development

(CCLO # 2)

/45pts

· Major points are stated clearly and are well-supported
· Content is persuasive and comprehensive
· Content and purpose of the writing is clear
· Thesis has a strong claim. The audience is clear and appropriate for the topic
· Supportive information (if required) is strong and addresses writing focus

· Major points are addressed but clarity or support is limited
· Content is somewhat persuasive or comprehensive
· Content is inconsistent (lack of clear purpose and /or clarity)
· Thesis could be stronger
· Supportive information (if required) needs strengthening or does not address writing concepts

· Major points are unclear and/or insufficiently supported
· Content is missing essentials
· Content has unsatisfactory purpose, focus, and clarity
· Supportive information (if required) is missing

Organization and Structure

(CCLO #1)

/45pts

· Writing is well-structured, clear, and easy to follow
· Introduction compelling forecasts the topic and thesis
· Each paragraph is unified and has a clear central idea
· Transitional wording is present throughout the writing
· Conclusion is a logical end to the writing

· Adequately organized with some areas difficult to follow
· Introduction needs to provide a stronger gateway into the writing
· Some paragraphs lack unity
· Better transitions are needed to provide fluency of ideas
· Conclusion is trite or barely serves its purpose

· Organization and structure detract from the writer’s message
· Introduction and/or conclusion is incomplete or missing
· Paragraphs are not unified (more than one topic / missing or inadequate controlling and concluding sentences)
· Transitions are missing
· Conclusion, if present, fails to serve its purpose

MECHANICS

Good/Excellent

Fair/Competent

Deficient

Grammar and Diction

(CCLO # 1, 3)

/45pts

· The writing reflects grammatical, punctuation, and spelling standards
· Language is accurate, appropriate, and effective
· Writing’s tone is appropriate and highly effective

· The writing contains some grammatical, punctuation, and/or spelling errors
· Language is unclear, awkward or inappropriate in parts
· The writing’s tone is generally appropriate and moderately effective

· The writing contains many grammatical, punctuation and/or spelling errors
· Language use is largely inaccurate or inappropriate
· The writing’s tone is ineffective and/or inappropriate

FORM

Good/Excellent (15-11)

Fair/Competent (10-5)

Deficient (4-0)

Format:

MLA/APA/Turabian Paper

Requirements

(CCLO #6)

/15pts

· Writing correctly follows formatting guidelines
· Parenthetical and bibliographical source citations are used correctly and appropriately

· Writing follows most formatting guidelines, but some flaws are detected
· Parenthetical and bibliographical source citations are incorrectly formatted or used

· Writing lacks many elements of correct formatting
· Parenthetical and bibliographical source citations and/or references are not provided

Total

Assessment

Development

( CCLO # 2)

Organization and Structure

(CCLO # 1)

Grammar and Diction

(CCLO #1,3)

Format : MLA/APA/Turabian Paper Requirements

(CCLO # 6)

Total Points

___ / 45

____/ 45

____ /45

_____ / 15

______/ 150

Grade Scale

A

B

C

D

F

A= 150-135

B= 134-120

C = 119-105

D = 104-90

F = 89-0

Instructor’s Comments:

ENGL101

Essay 1: Narrative Argument about Education

Instructions

In Module/Week 3, you will write an appro

x

imately 1000-word (3–4-page) narrative essay in response to the following prompt: Use a personal narrative to state your views in response to one of the assigned readings on education.

Be sure to follow the Writing Processes guidelines: gather all of your information, plan the direction of your essay, and organize your ideas by developing a 1-page thesis statement and outline for your essay. Format the thesis statement and the outline in a single Word document using current MLA, APA, or Turabian style (whichever corresponds to your degree program). Submit this thesis and outline by 11:59 p.m. (ET) on Monday of Module/Week 2 for instructor feedback.

As you compose your essay, be sure to:

· Follow the appropriate formatting style for your degree program (MLA, APA, or Turabian).

· Use signal phrases and proper in-text citations, and make sure you include a References or Works Cited page.

· Use the Grading Rubric, Thesis/Outline suggestions from your instructor, and Proofreading Checklist (provided below) to draft and revise your essay.

· Include your thesis statement and outline on a separate page at the end of the document.

· Type your degree program and which style of writing you are using (MLA, APA, or Turabian) on the the title page of your essay and in the “Submission Title” field of the SafeAssign link in the module/week so that your instructor can grade your essay accordingly.

You may use one or more of the authors from the readings in the course up to this point. Be sure to fully cite all quotations, summaries, and paraphrases used within your essay, or those excerpts will be regarded as plagiarism and result in a “0” on your essay and possibly course failure.

Please Note: This assignment must be submitted by 11:59 p.m. (ET) on Monday of Module/Week 3 and must include a title page, essay itself, a works cited/references page of any primary or secondary texts cited in the essay, followed by the thesis/outline page. 

Proofreading Checklist

Part 1:

Read through your paper and check the appropriate boxes on the chart below. If any area of your paper needs revision, make sure you correct it before submitting your essay. One of the best ways to proofread your writing is to read it backward to forward, sentence-by-sentence. This helps you to see words and ideas you may have missed. Another very successful tool for proofreading is to read your work out loud to someone else. Students often think that handing their paper to someone and asking them to read it is the same thing, but it isn’t. Instead, ask them to listen while you read your own words. You will immediately hear what you missed or want to improve in your writing.

Feature (Instruction from Lessons 1-8)	Successful	Needs Revision
x
1. Clearly shows my opinion
2. Tells a story that reflects my opinion
3. Contains pathos (emotional) appeals
4. Contains ethos (values/belief) appeals
5. Contains logos (factual) appeals
6. Title reflects my issue and opinion
7. Contains appropriate header for my discipline (MLA, APA, Turabian)
8. If using APA, contains properly formatted title and abstract pages
9. Double-spaced
10. Margins are 1 inch wide on all sides
11. Font is New Times Roman, 12 pt.
12. References/Works Cited page includes all sources used for this essay
13. Spellchecked

Part 2:

When you are satisfied with the quality of your essay, post it to Blackboard via the SafeAssign link for grading. Do not forget to write your degree program and whether you are using MLA, APA, or Turabian on the Title Page and in the “Submission Title” field when submitting your paper.

Page 1 of 2

PRINCIPAL LEADERSHIP

March 2003

What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated?

By Alfie Kohn

No one should offer pronouncements about what it means to be well-educated without meeting my ex-wife. When I met her, she was at Harvard, putting the finishing touches on her doctoral dissertation in anthropology. A year later, having spent her entire life in school, she decided to do the only logical thing . . . and apply to medical school. Today she is a practicing physician — and an excellent one at that, judging by feedback from her patients and colleagues.

She will, however, freeze up if you ask her what 8 times 7 is, because she never learned the multiplication table. And forget about grammar (“Me and him went over her house today” is fairly typical) or literature (“Who’s Faulkner?”). After a dozen years, I continue to be impressed on a regular basis by the agility of her mind as well as by how much she doesn’t know.

So what do you make of this paradox? Is she a walking indictment of the system that let her get so far — 29 years of schooling, not counting medical residency — without acquiring the basics of English and math? Or does she offer an invitation to rethink what it means to be well-educated since what she lacks hasn’t prevented her from being a deep-thinking, high-functioning, multiply credentialed, professionally successful individual?

Of course, if those features describe what it means to be well-educated, then there is no dilemma to be resolved. She fits the bill. The problem arises only if your definition includes a list of facts and skills that one must have but that she lacks. In that case, though, my wife is not alone. Thanks to the internet, which allows writers and researchers to circulate rough drafts of their manuscripts, I’ve come to realize just how many truly brilliant people cannot spell or punctuate. Their insights and discoveries may be changing the shape of their respective fields, but they can’t use an apostrophe correctly to save their lives.

Or what about me (he suddenly inquired, relinquishing his comfortable perch from which issue all those judgments of other people)? I could embarrass myself pretty quickly by listing the number of classic works of literature I’ve never read. And I can multiply reasonably well, but everything mathematical I was taught after first-year algebra (and even some of that) is completely gone. How well-educated am I?

*

The issue is sufficiently complex that questions are easier to formulate than answers. So let’s at least be sure we’re asking the right questions and framing them well.

1. The Point of Schooling: Rather than attempting to define what it means to be well-educated, should we instead be asking about the purposes of education? The latter formulation invites us to look beyond academic goals. For example, Nel Noddings, professor emerita at Stanford University, urges us to reject “the deadly notion that the schools’ first priority should be intellectual development” and contends that “the main aim of education should be to produce competent, caring, loving, and lovable people.” Alternatively, we might wade into the dispute between those who see education as a means to creating or sustaining a democratic society and those who believe its primary role is economic, amounting to an “investment” in future workers and, ultimately, corporate profits. In short, perhaps the question “How do we know if education has been successful?” shouldn’t be posed until we have asked what it’s supposed to be successful at.

2. Evaluating People vs. Their Education: Does the phrase well-educated refer to a quality of the schooling you received, or to something about you? Does it denote what you were taught, or what you learned (and remember)? If the term applies to what you now know and can do, you could be poorly educated despite having received a top-notch education. However, if the term refers to the quality of your schooling, then we’d have to conclude that a lot of “well-educated” people sat through lessons that barely registered, or at least are hazy to the point of irrelevance a few years later.

3. An Absence of Consensus: Is it even possible to agree on a single definition of what every high school student should know or be able to do in order to be considered well-educated? Is such a definition expected to remain invariant across cultures (with a single standard for the U.S. and Somalia, for example), or even across subcultures (South-Central Los Angeles and Scarsdale; a Louisiana fishing community, the upper East side of Manhattan, and Pennsylvania Dutch country)? How about across historical eras: would anyone seriously argue that our criteria for “well-educated” today are exactly the same as those used a century ago – or that they should be?

To cast a skeptical eye on such claims is not necessarily to suggest that the term is purely relativistic: you like vanilla, I like chocolate; you favor knowledge about poetry, I prefer familiarity with the Gettysburg Address. Some criteria are more defensible than others. Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge a striking absence of consensus about what the term ought to mean. Furthermore, any consensus that does develop is ineluctably rooted in time and place. It is misleading and even dangerous to justify our own pedagogical values by pretending they are grounded in some objective, transcendent Truth, as though the quality of being well-educated is a Platonic form waiting to be discovered.

4. Some Poor Definitions: Should we instead try to stipulate which answers don’t make sense? I’d argue that certain attributes are either insufficient (possessing them isn’t enough to make one well-educated) or unnecessary (one can be well-educated without possessing them) — or both. Let us therefore consider ruling out:

Seat time.
Merely sitting in classrooms for x hours doesn’t make one well-educated.

Job skills
. It would be a mistake to reduce schooling to vocational preparation, if only because we can easily imagine graduates who are well-prepared for the workplace (or at least for some workplaces) but whom we would not regard as well-educated. In any case, pressure to redesign secondary education so as to suit the demands of employers reflects little more than the financial interests — and the political power — of these corporations.

Test scores
. To a disconcerting extent, high scores on standardized tests signify a facility with taking standardized tests. Most teachers can instantly name students who are talented thinkers but who just don’t do well on these exams – as well as students whose scores seem to overestimate their intellectual gifts. Indeed, researchers have found a statistically significant correlation between high scores on a range of standardized tests and a shallow approach to learning. In any case, no single test is sufficiently valid, reliable, or meaningful that it can be treated as a marker for academic success.

Memorization of a bunch o’ facts
. Familiarity with a list of words, names, books, and ideas is a uniquely poor way to judge who is well-educated. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed long ago, “A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth. . . . Scraps of information” are only worth something if they are put to use, or at least “thrown into fresh combinations.”

Look more carefully at the superficially plausible claim that you must be familiar with, say, King Lear in order to be considered well-educated. To be sure, it’s a classic meditation on mortality, greed, belated understanding, and other important themes. But how familiar with it must you be? Is it enough that you can name its author, or that you know it’s a play? Do you have to be able to recite the basic plot? What if you read it once but barely remember it now?

If you don’t like that example, pick another one. How much do you have to know about neutrinos, or the Boxer rebellion, or the side-angle-side theorem? If deep understanding is required, then (a) very few people could be considered well-educated (which raises serious doubts about the reasonableness of such a definition), and (b) the number of items about which anyone could have that level of knowledge is sharply limited because time is finite. On the other hand, how can we justify a cocktail-party level of familiarity with all these items – reminiscent of Woody Allen’s summary of War and Peace after taking a speed-reading course: “It’s about Russia.” What sense does it make to say that one person is well-educated for having a single sentence’s worth of knowledge about the Progressive Era or photosynthesis, while someone who has to look it up is not?

Knowing a lot of stuff may seem harmless, albeit insufficient, but the problem is that efforts to shape schooling around this goal, dressed up with pretentious labels like “cultural literacy,” have the effect of taking time away from more meaningful objectives, such as knowing how to think. If the Bunch o’ Facts model proves a poor foundation on which to decide who is properly educated, it makes no sense to peel off items from such a list and assign clusters of them to students at each grade level. It is as poor a basis for designing curriculum as it is for judging the success of schooling.

The number of people who do, in fact, confuse the possession of a storehouse of knowledge with being “smart” – the latter being a disconcertingly common designation for those who fare well on quiz shows — is testament to the naïve appeal that such a model holds. But there are also political implications to be considered here. To emphasize the importance of absorbing a pile of information is to support a larger worldview that sees the primary purpose of education as reproducing our current culture. It is probably not a coincidence that a Core Knowledge model wins rave reviews from Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum (and other conservative Christian groups) as well as from the likes of Investor’s Business Daily. To be sure, not every individual who favors this approach is a right-winger, but defining the notion of educational mastery in terms of the number of facts one can recall is well-suited to the task of preserving the status quo. By contrast, consider Dewey’s suggestion that an educated person is one who has “gained the power of reflective attention, the power to hold problems, questions, before the mind.” Without this capability, he added, “the mind remains at the mercy of custom and external suggestions.”

5. Mandating a Single Definition: Who gets to decide what it means to be well-educated? Even assuming that you and I agree to include one criterion and exclude another, that doesn’t mean our definition should be imposed with the force of law – taking the form, for example, of requirements for a high school diploma. There are other considerations, such as the real suffering imposed on individuals who aren’t permitted to graduate from high school, the egregious disparities in resources and opportunities available in different neighborhoods, and so on.

More to the point, the fact that so many of us don’t agree suggests that a national (or, better yet, international) conversation should continue, that one definition may never fit all, and, therefore, that we should leave it up to local communities to decide who gets to graduate. But that is not what has happened. In about half the states, people sitting atop Mount Olympus have decreed that anyone who doesn’t pass a certain standardized test will be denied a diploma and, by implication, classified as inadequately educated. This example of accountability gone haywire violates not only common sense but the consensus of educational measurement specialists. And the consequences are entirely predictable: no high school graduation for a disproportionate number of students of color, from low-income neighborhoods, with learning disabilities, attending vocational schools, or not yet fluent in English.

Less obviously, the idea of making diplomas contingent on passing an exam answers by default the question of what it means to be well- (or sufficiently) educated: Rather than grappling with the messy issues involved, we simply declare that standardized tests will tell us the answer. This is disturbing not merely because of the inherent limits of the tests, but also because teaching becomes distorted when passing those tests becomes the paramount goal. Students arguably receive an inferior education when pressure is applied to raise their test scores, which means that high school exit exams may actually lower standards.

Beyond proclaiming “Pass this standardized test or you don’t graduate,” most states now issue long lists of curriculum standards, containing hundreds of facts, skills, and subskills that all students are expected to master at a given grade level and for a given subject. These standards are not guidelines but mandates (to which teachers are supposed to “align” their instruction). In effect, a Core Knowledge model, with its implication of students as interchangeable receptacles into which knowledge is poured, has become the law of the land in many places. Surely even defenders of this approach can appreciate the difference between arguing in its behalf and requiring that every school adopt it.

6. The Good School: Finally, instead of asking what it means to be well-educated, perhaps we should inquire into the qualities of a school likely to offer a good education. I’ve offered my own answer to that question at book length, as have other contributors to this issue. As I see it, the best sort of schooling is organized around problems, projects, and questions – as opposed to facts, skills, and disciplines. Knowledge is acquired, of course, but in a context and for a purpose. The emphasis is not only on depth rather than breadth, but also on discovering ideas rather than on covering a prescribed curriculum. Teachers are generalists first and specialists (in a given subject matter) second; they commonly collaborate to offer interdisciplinary courses that students play an active role in designing. All of this happens in small, democratic schools that are experienced as caring communities.

Notwithstanding the claims of traditionalists eager to offer – and then dismiss — a touchy-feely caricature of progressive education, a substantial body of evidence exists to support the effectiveness of each of these components as well as the benefits of using them in combination. By contrast, it isn’t easy to find any data to justify the traditional (and still dominant) model of secondary education: large schools, short classes, huge student loads for each teacher, a fact-transmission kind of instruction that is the very antithesis of “student-centered,” the virtual absence of any attempt to integrate diverse areas of study, the rating and ranking of students, and so on. Such a system acts as a powerful obstacle to good teaching, and it thwarts the best efforts of many talented educators on a daily basis.

Low-quality instruction can be assessed with low-quality tests, including homegrown quizzes and standardized exams designed to measure (with faux objectivity) the number of facts and skills crammed into short-term memory. The effects of high-quality instruction are trickier, but not impossible, to assess. The most promising model turns on the notion of “exhibitions” of learning, in which students reveal their understanding by means of in-depth projects, portfolios of assignments, and other demonstrations – a model pioneered by Ted Sizer, Deborah Meier, and others affiliated with the Coalition of Essential Schools. By now we’re fortunate to have access not only to essays about how this might be done (such as Sizer’s invaluable Horace series) but to books about schools that are actually doing it: The Power of Their Ideas by Meier, about Central Park East Secondary School in New York City; Rethinking High School by Harvey Daniels and his colleagues, about Best Practice High School in Chicago; and One Kid at a Time by Eliot Levine, about the Met in Providence, RI.

The assessments in such schools are based on meaningful standards of excellence, standards that may collectively offer the best answer to our original question simply because to meet those criteria is as good a way as any to show that one is well-educated. The Met School focuses on social reasoning, empirical reasoning, quantitative reasoning, communication, and personal qualities (such as responsibility, capacity for leadership, and self-awareness). Meier has emphasized the importance of developing five “habits of mind”: the value of raising questions about evidence (“How do we know what we know?”), point of view (“Whose perspective does this represent?”), connections (“How is this related to that?”), supposition (“How might things have been otherwise?”), and relevance (“Why is this important?”).

It’s not only the ability to raise and answer those questions that matters, though, but also the disposition to do so. For that matter, any set of intellectual objectives, any description of what it means to think deeply and critically, should be accompanied by a reference to one’s interest or intrinsic motivation to do such thinking. Dewey reminded us that the goal of education is more education. To be well-educated, then, is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.

 

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION November 8, 2002 — vol. 49, no. 11, p. B7 The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation By Alfie Kohn Grade inflation got started … in the late ’60s and early ’70s…. The grades that faculty members now give … deserve to be a scandal. –Professor Harvey Mansfield, Harvard University, 2001 Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily —   Grade A for work of no very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity. … One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work. –Report of the Committee on Raising the Standard, Harvard University, 1894 Complaints about grade inflation have been around for a very long time. Every so often a fresh flurry of publicity pushes the issue to the foreground again, the latest example being a series of articles in The Boston Globe last year that disclosed — in a tone normally reserved for the discovery of entrenched corruption in state government — that a lot of students at Harvard were receiving A’s and being graduated with honors. The fact that people were offering the same complaints more than a century ago puts the latest bout of harrumphing in perspective, not unlike those quotations about the disgraceful values of the younger generation that turn out to be hundreds of years old. The long history of indignation also pretty well derails any attempts to place the blame for higher grades on a residue of bleeding-heart liberal professors hired in the ’60s. (Unless, of course, there was a similar countercultural phenomenon in the 1860s.) Yet on campuses across America today, academe’s usual requirements for supporting data and reasoned analysis have been suspended for some reason where this issue is concerned. It is largely accepted on faith that grade inflation — an upward shift in students’ grade-point averages without a similar rise in achievement — exists, and that it is a bad thing. Meanwhile, the truly substantive issues surrounding grades and motivation have been obscured or ignored. The fact is that it is hard to substantiate even the simple claim that grades have been rising. Depending on the time period we’re talking about, that claim may well be false. In their book When Hope and Fear Collide (Jossey-Bass, 1998), Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton tell us that more undergraduates in 1993 reported receiving A’s (and fewer reported receiving grades of C or below) compared with their counterparts in 1969 and 1976 surveys. Unfortunately, self-reports are notoriously unreliable, and the numbers become even more dubious when only a self-selected, and possibly unrepresentative, segment bothers to return the questionnaires. (One out of three failed to do so in 1993; no information is offered about the return rates in the earlier surveys.) To get a more accurate picture of whether grades have changed over the years, one needs to look at official student transcripts. Clifford Adelman, a senior research analyst with the U.S. Department of Education, did just that, reviewing transcripts from more than 3,000 institutions and reporting his results in 1995. His finding: “Contrary to the widespread lamentations, grades actually declined slightly in the last two decades.” Moreover, a report released just this year by the National Center for Education Statistics revealed that fully 33.5 percent of American undergraduates had a grade-point average of C or below in 1999-2000, a number that ought to quiet “all the furor over grade inflation,” according to a spokesperson for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. (A review of other research suggests a comparable lack of support for claims of grade inflation at the high-school level.) [Addendum 2004: A subsequent analysis by Adelman, which reviewed college transcripts from students who were graduated from high school in 1972, 1982, and 1992, confirmed that there was no significant or linear increase in average grades over that period. The average GPA for those three cohorts was 2.70, 2.66, and 2.74, respectively. The proportion of A’s and B’s received by students: 58.5 percent in the ’70s, 58.9 percent in the ’80s, and 58.0 percent in the ’90s. Even when Adelman looked at “highly selective” institutions, he again found very little change in average GPA over the decades.] However, even where grades are higher now as compared with then, that does not constitute proof that they are inflated. The burden rests with critics to demonstrate that those higher grades are undeserved, and one can cite any number of alternative explanations. Maybe students are turning in better assignments. Maybe instructors used to be too stingy with their marks and have become more reasonable. Maybe the concept of assessment itself has evolved, so that today it is more a means for allowing students to demonstrate what they know rather than for sorting them or “catching them out.” (The real question, then, is why we spent so many years trying to make good students look bad.) Maybe students aren’t forced to take as many courses outside their primary areas of interest in which they didn’t fare as well. Maybe struggling students are now able to withdraw from a course before a poor grade appears on their transcripts. (Say what you will about that practice, it challenges the hypothesis that the grades students receive in the courses they complete are inflated.) The bottom line: No one has ever demonstrated that students today get A’s for the same work that used to receive B’s or C’s. We simply do not have the data to support such a claim. Consider the most recent, determined effort by a serious source to prove that grades are inflated: “Evaluation and the Academy: Are We Doing the Right Thing?” a report released this year by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Its senior author is Henry Rosovsky, formerly Harvard’s dean of the faculty. The first argument offered in support of the proposition that students couldn’t possibly deserve higher grades is that SAT scores have dropped during the same period that grades are supposed to have risen. But this is a patently inapt comparison, if only because the SAT is deeply flawed. It has never been much good even at predicting grades during the freshman year in college, to say nothing of more important academic outcomes. A four-year analysis of almost 78,000 University of California students, published last year by the UC president’s office, found that the test predicted only 13.3 percent of variation in freshman grades, a figure roughly consistent with hundreds of previous studies. (I outlined numerous other problems with the test in “Two Cheers for an End to the SAT,” The Chronicle, March 9, 2001.) Even if one believes that the SAT is a valid and valuable exam, however, the claim that scores are dropping is a poor basis for the assertion that grades are too high. First, it is difficult to argue that a standardized test taken in high school and grades for college course work are measuring the same thing. Second, changes in aggregate SAT scores mostly reflect the proportion of the eligible population that has chosen to take the test. The American Academy’s report states that average SAT scores dropped slightly from 1969 to 1993. But over that period, the pool of test takers grew from about one-third to more than two-fifths of high-school graduates — an addition of more than 200,000 students. Third, a decline in overall SAT scores is hardly the right benchmark against which to measure the grades earned at Harvard or other elite institutions. Every bit of evidence I could find — including a review of the SAT scores of entering students at Harvard over the past two decades, at the nation’s most selective colleges over three and even four decades, and at all private colleges since 1985 — uniformly confirms a virtually linear rise in both verbal and math scores, even after correcting for the renorming of the test in the mid-1990s. To cite just one example, the latest edition of “Trends in College Admissions” reports that the average verbal-SAT score of students enrolled in all private colleges rose from 543 in 1985 to 558 in 1999. Thus, those who regard SAT results as a basis for comparison should expect to see higher grades now rather than assume that they are inflated. The other two arguments made by the authors of the American Academy’s report rely on a similar sleight of hand. They note that more college students are now forced to take remedial courses, but offer no reason to think that this is especially true of the relevant student population — namely, those at the most selective colleges who are now receiving A’s instead of B’s. [Addendum 2004: Adelman’s newer data challenge the premise that there has been any increase. In fact, “the proportion of all students who took at least one remedial course [in college] dropped from 51 percent in the [high school] class of 1982 to 42 percent in the class of 1992.”] Finally, they report that more states are adding high-school graduation tests and even standardized exams for admission to public universities. Yet that trend can be explained by political factors and offers no evidence of an objective decline in students’ proficiency. For instance, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as “the nation’s report card” on elementary and secondary schooling, have shown very little change over the past couple of decades, and most of the change that has occurred has been for the better. As David Berliner and Bruce Biddle put it in their tellingly titled book The Manufactured Crisis (Addison-Wesley, 1995), the data demonstrate that “today’s students are at least as well informed as students in previous generations.” The latest round of public-school bashing — and concomitant reliance on high-stakes testing — began with the Reagan administration’s “Nation at Risk” report, featuring claims now widely viewed by researchers as exaggerated and misleading. * Beyond the absence of good evidence, the debate over grade inflation brings up knotty epistemological problems. To say that grades are not merely rising but inflated — and that they are consequently “less accurate” now, as the American Academy’s report puts it — is to postulate the existence of an objectively correct evaluation of what a student (or an essay) deserves, the true grade that ought to be uncovered and honestly reported. It would be an understatement to say that this reflects a simplistic and outdated view of knowledge and of learning. In fact, what is most remarkable is how rarely learning even figures into the discussion. The dominant disciplinary sensibility in commentaries on this topic is not that of education — an exploration of pedagogy or assessment — but rather of economics. That is clear from the very term “grade inflation,” which is, of course, just a metaphor. Our understanding is necessarily limited if we confine ourselves to the vocabulary of inputs and outputs, incentives, resource distribution, and compensation. Suppose, for the sake of the argument, we assumed the very worst — not only that students are getting better grades than did their counterparts of an earlier generation, but that the grades are too high. What does that mean, and why does it upset some people so? To understand grade inflation in its proper context, we must acknowledge a truth that is rarely named: The crusade against it is led by conservative individuals and organizations who regard it as analogous — or even related — to such favorite whipping boys as multicultural education, the alleged radicalism of academe, “political correctness” (a label that permits the denigration of anything one doesn’t like without having to offer a reasoned objection), and too much concern about students’ self-esteem. Mainstream media outlets and college administrators have allowed themselves to be put on the defensive by accusations about grade inflation, as can be witnessed when deans at Harvard plead nolo contendere and dutifully tighten their grading policies. What are the critics assuming about the nature of students’ motivation to learn, about the purpose of evaluation and of education itself? (It is surely revealing when someone reserves time and energy to complain bitterly about how many students are getting A’s — as opposed to expressing concern about, say, how many students have been trained to think that the point of going to school is to get A’s.) “In a healthy university, it would not be necessary to say what is wrong with grade inflation,” Harvey Mansfield asserted in an opinion article last year (The Chronicle, April 6, 2001). That, to put it gently, is a novel view of health. It seems reasonable to expect those making an argument to be prepared to defend it, and also valuable to bring their hidden premises to light. Here are the assumptions that seem to underlie the grave warnings about grade inflation: The professor’s job is to sort students for employers or graduate schools. Some are disturbed by grade inflation — or, more accurately, grade compression — because it then becomes harder to spread out students on a continuum, ranking them against one another for the benefit of postcollege constituencies. One professor asks, by way of analogy, “Why would anyone subscribe to Consumers Digest if every blender were rated a ‘best buy’?” But how appropriate is such a marketplace analogy? Is the professor’s job to rate students like blenders for the convenience of corporations, or is it to offer feedback that will help students learn more skillfully and enthusiastically? (Notice, moreover, that even consumer magazines don’t grade on a curve. They report the happy news if it turns out that every blender meets a reasonable set of performance criteria.) Furthermore, the student-as-appliance approach assumes that grades provide useful information to those postcollege constituencies. Yet growing evidence — most recently in the fields of medicine and law, as cited in publications like The Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Educational Research Journal — suggests that grades and test scores do not in fact predict career success, or much of anything beyond subsequent grades and test scores. Students should be set against one another in a race for artificially scarce rewards. “The essence of grading is exclusiveness,” Mansfield said in one interview. Students “should have to compete with each other,” he said in another. In other words, even when no graduate-school admissions committee pushes for students to be sorted, they ought to be sorted anyway, with grades reflecting relative standing rather than absolute accomplishment. In effect, this means that the game should be rigged so that no matter how well students do, only a few can get A’s. The question guiding evaluation in such a classroom is not “How well are they learning?” but “Who’s beating whom?” The ultimate purpose of good colleges, this view holds, is not to maximize success, but to ensure that there will always be losers. A bell curve may sometimes — but only sometimes — describe the range of knowledge in a roomful of students at the beginning of a course. When it’s over, though, any responsible educator hopes that the results would skew drastically to the right, meaning that most students learned what they hadn’t known before. Thus, in their important study, Making Sense of College Grades (Jossey-Bass, 1986), Ohmer Milton, Howard Pollio, and James Eison write, “It is not a symbol of rigor to have grades fall into a ‘normal’ distribution; rather, it is a symbol of failure — failure to teach well, failure to test well, and failure to have any influence at all on the intellectual lives of students.” Making sure that students are continually re-sorted, with excellence turned into an artificially scarce commodity, is almost perverse. What does relative success signal about student performance in any case? The number of peers that a student has bested tells us little about how much she knows and is able to do. Moreover, such grading policies may create a competitive climate that is counterproductive for winners and losers alike, to the extent that it discourages a free exchange of ideas and a sense of community that’s conducive to exploration. Harder is better (or Higher grades mean lower standards). Compounding the tendency to confuse excellence with victory is a tendency to confuse quality with difficulty — as evidenced in the accountability fad that has elementary and secondary education in its grip just now, with relentless talk of “rigor” and “raising the bar.” The same confusion shows up in higher education when professors pride themselves not on the intellectual depth and value of their classes but merely on how much reading they assign, how hard their tests are, how rarely they award good grades, and so on. “You’re going to have to work in here!” they announce, with more than a hint of machismo and self-congratulation. Some people might defend that posture on the grounds that students will perform better if A’s are harder to come by. In fact, the evidence on this question is decidedly mixed. Stringent grading sometimes has been shown to boost short-term retention as measured by multiple-choice exams — never to improve understanding or promote interest in learning. The most recent analysis, released in 2000 by Julian R. Betts and Jeff Grogger, professors of economics at the University of California at San Diego and at Los Angeles, respectively, found that tougher grading was initially correlated with higher test scores. But the long-term effects were negligible — with the exception of minority students, for whom the effects were negative. It appears that something more than an empirical hypothesis is behind the “harder is better” credo, particularly when it is set up as a painfully false dichotomy: Those easy-grading professors are too lazy to care, or too worried about how students will evaluate them, or overly concerned about their students’ self-esteem, whereas we are the last defenders of what used to matter in the good old days. High standards! Intellectual honesty! No free lunch! The American Academy’s report laments an absence of “candor” about this issue. Let us be candid, then. Those who grumble about undeserved grades sometimes exude a cranky impatience with — or even contempt for — the late adolescents and young adults who sit in their classrooms. Many people teaching in higher education, after all, see themselves primarily as researchers and regard teaching as an occupational hazard, something they’re not very good at, were never trained for, and would rather avoid. It would be interesting to examine the correlation between one’s view of teaching (or of students) and the intensity of one’s feelings about grade inflation. Someone also might want to examine the personality profiles of those who become infuriated over the possibility that someone, somewhere, got an A without having earned it. Grades motivate. With the exception of orthodox behaviorists, psychologists have come to realize that people can exhibit qualitatively different kinds of motivation: intrinsic, in which the task itself is seen as valuable, and extrinsic, in which the task is just a means to the end of gaining a reward or escaping a punishment. The two are not only distinct but often inversely related. Scores of studies have demonstrated, for example, that the more people are rewarded, the more they come to lose interest in whatever had to be done in order to get the reward. (That conclusion is essentially reaffirmed by the latest major meta-analysis on the topic: a review of 128 studies, published in 1999 by Edward L. Deci, Richard Koestner, and Richard Ryan.) Those unfamiliar with that basic distinction, let alone the supporting research, may be forgiven for pondering how to “motivate” students, then concluding that grades are often a good way of doing so, and consequently worrying about the impact of inflated grades. But the reality is that it doesn’t matter how motivated students are; what matters is how students are motivated. A focus on grades creates, or at least perpetuates, an extrinsic orientation that is likely to undermine the love of learning we are presumably seeking to promote. Three robust findings emerge from the empirical literature on the subject: Students who are given grades, or for whom grades are made particularly salient, tend to display less interest in what they are doing, fare worse on meaningful measures of learning, and avoid more challenging tasks when given the opportunity — as compared with those in a nongraded comparison group. College instructors cannot help noticing, and presumably being disturbed by, such consequences, but they may lapse into blaming students (“grade grubbers”) rather than understanding the systemic sources of the problem. A focus on whether too many students are getting A’s suggests a tacit endorsement of grades that predictably produces just such a mind-set in students. These fundamental questions are almost completely absent from discussions of grade inflation. The American Academy’s report takes exactly one sentence — with no citations — to dismiss the argument that “lowering the anxiety over grades leads to better learning,” ignoring the fact that much more is involved than anxiety. It is a matter of why a student learns, not only how much stress he feels. Nor is the point just that low grades hurt some students’ feelings, but that grades, per se, hurt all students’ engagement with learning. The meaningful contrast is not between an A and a B or C, but between an extrinsic and an intrinsic focus. Precisely because that is true, a reconsideration of grade inflation leads us to explore alternatives to our (often unreflective) use of grades. Narrative comments and other ways by which faculty members can communicate their evaluations can be far more informative than letter or number grades, and much less destructive. Indeed, some colleges — for example, Hampshire, Evergreen State, Alverno, and New College of Florida — have eliminated grades entirely, as a critical step toward raising intellectual standards. Even the American Academy’s report acknowledges that “relatively undifferentiated course grading has been a traditional practice in many graduate schools for a very long time.” Has that policy produced lower quality teaching and learning? Quite the contrary: Many people say they didn’t begin to explore ideas deeply and passionately until graduate school began and the importance of grades diminished significantly. If the continued use of grades rests on nothing more than tradition (“We’ve always done it that way”), a faulty understanding of motivation, or excessive deference to graduate-school admissions committees, then it may be time to balance those factors against the demonstrated harms of getting students to chase A’s. Ohmer Milton and his colleagues discovered — and others have confirmed — that a “grade orientation” and a “learning orientation” on the part of students tend to be inversely related. That raises the disturbing possibility that some colleges are institutions of higher learning in name only, because the paramount question for students is not “What does this mean?” but “Do we have to know this?” A grade-oriented student body is an invitation for the administration and faculty to ask hard questions: What unexamined assumptions keep traditional grading in place? What forms of assessment might be less destructive? How can professors minimize the salience of grades in their classrooms, so long as grades must still be given? And: If the artificial inducement of grades disappeared, what sort of teaching strategies might elicit authentic interest in a course? To engage in this sort of inquiry, to observe real classrooms, and to review the relevant research is to arrive at one overriding conclusion: The real threat to excellence isn’t grade inflation at all; it’s grades. _______________________________________ Click here for a list of sources used in this article.

Copyright © 2002 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and author’s name). Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact page at www.alfiekohn.org.

Running Head: SETTING THE EDUCATION STANDARDS

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SETTING THE EDUCATION STANDARDS

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Setting the Education Standards

(Author’s name)

(Institutional Affiliation)

Essay outline

Introduction

Thesis statement

Basic education analysis

Emerging issues in education

Challenges in the learning process.

Possible solutions to the problems

Conclusion.

Thesis Statement

The core objective of both the learners and the teachers is to achieve the best out of the learning and teaching process. Teachers focus on giving their best to the students by providing every bit of relevant information to the learners. The learning process is run by three main parties with the greatest of all the students. Students must show interest in education and this motivates the teachers to put more efforts in teaching the students. Discipline is also vital in the learning institutions hence the teachers must put efforts in maintaining the required leaning environment.
A good learning environment translates to good results in the academics since the learners are able to concentrate in their studies. External interference especially from nonacademic matters is the major cause of poor performance in schools as it reduces the level of concentration in studies. Most of the distracters emanate from home especially in areas with domestic issues and the students extend this to their studies. This takes much of the time allocated for academic matters and students have little to cover by the end of the learning period. This results to poor performance in academics interfering with the academic progress in the learning institutions. A poor leaning environment has effects on the teachers as they spend much of their time in trying to put some order in the school. Indiscipline among the students affects the expected learning atmosphere and the students are also unable to concentrate in their studies. Teachers spend some of their time in solving issues related to indiscipline among the students. This reduces the time allocated for learning resulting to poor performance in the academics (Edward, 1999).

A good learning environment should be maintained especially by observing the school rules. The school administration should work together with the teachers in maintaining the expected smooth learning atmosphere. The students are also expected to observe the set school rules and regulations in order to keep the required discipline for smooth learning.

Reference

Edward L. (1999). Hitting the High Marks in Education Standards. The Best Approach to Academics. New York. University Press.