Recently I lent my car to some friends who wanted to see a concert in Providence. Also recently, some friends of mine, who borrowed my car to see a concert in Providence, slid off the road on the way home and incurred about $6,000 worth of damage to my car, though they themselves were unharmed in the accident. My point? Mostly to call them out publicly as being miserable human beings. Not really, though. The driver's insurance will be paying, so this whole situation is only costing me some convenience. To be honest, I feel worse for him. He has to deal with all of this at the worst time of the term -- midterms. I'm sure most of you can sympathize. If I were writing this for a Harvard audience, however, I would not be able to assert the previous statement. "Sweet!" the Harvard student would say, "Less time for them to study means they'll get a lower grade which means I'll get a better grade which means I will graduate with honors along with the majority of my peers which means I will get to hang the Harvard honor diploma up on the wall of my fancy office next to the window out of which I will eventually throw myself when my ostensibly self-righteous, egotistical personality, which acts as a shield to my insecurities about my success being arbitrary and ultimately meaningless, collides with the merciless truth that my insecurities should probably be deeper than I even suspected! Sweet!"
My friend Michael Belinsky wrote that "moderated competition does not harm student relations because cooperation is possible within the competitive arena;" in fact competition improves education, and he then points to Harvard as, although a waste of four years, a good example of how competition could be fostered were it not for the sort that go there ("Competing at the Top," May 4). What "moderate and moderated competition" exactly means is a sticky point. Certainly Harvard, where students' sabotage of other students' work is commonplace, is neither moderate nor moderated. Belinsky mentions the ideas of bell curves or public recognition for high graders. The problem with mandated bell curves in individual course grading is that they are, well, dumb. Especially at a place like Dartmouth, where students aren't a random sampling of U.S. college students, but a place where the best and brightest come together. There probably ought to be a few more high achievers than our friend the bell curve dictates. As far as public recognition is concerned, good idea. But doesn't it already happen? Aren't there all kinds of awards and scholarships that the smart kids are getting? Maybe not, I wouldn't know. Grades are a tough subject, and competition might be even harder. It seems like Harvard should be an example of one end of the continuum that we don't want. At the other end are those hippy schools without grades at all, which is impractical and inefficient. If our goal is to learn the most material possible, then how do we reach it? If our goal is to distinguish ourselves to future graduate schools and employers, how is that different? And are the two mutually exclusive?
A professor of mine, in response to the charge that some of his test questions were nitpicky and memorization-based, recently said, "Sometimes in life we just need to reward the OCD kids." If somebody is willing to stay up all night memorizing the names of each of Winston Churchill's favorite restaurants, then, by all means, take a better grade than me. And if somebody is smart enough to remember that sort of thing in one passing of the text, you can have the better grade too. You deserve it. The classes I've learned the most in throughout my schooling are the classes in whose content I was the most interested and excited, not the ones that were the most competitive or strictly graded. I'm sure a lot of kids here are different, and give effort proportional to the difficulty of getting an A. But those are the kids that will probably be getting the best grades anyway, no matter the grading structure.
So what happens when a strict bell curve is instituted is a few of the kids get As, a few of the kids that deserve As get Bs, and a bunch of kids who still understand the material far beyond a perfunctory level but still feel like they might want to hang out with friends every once and a while get Cs. Structural reform is simply not a good way of fostering healthy competition, if competition is even what we want. The "bell curve" for a class of over a thousand students, if that's how it's meant to be, will develop over four years of courses. Learning the material should be a class effort, an intellectual exercise in cooperation. Some will be more enthusiastic about it than others, some more skilled than others. It should be a professor's job to assign grades by merit, not by unfair quota systems.
