Chris Talamo argues in his recent column ("Attitudes on a Curve," Feb. 25) that students should only receive 'A's for doing well, not for trying hard. He states: "We sometimes lose sight of a quintessential fact while pursuing our dreams in this academic wonderland: the only thing anyone else sees of our work is the finished product." Unfortunately, this isn't entirely true. There are many ways in which students can ensure that more than just the finished product is seen. One conspicuous way is through abuse of office hours.
I'm not arguing that students should receive good grades for effort, but rather that, under the current system, they do. While this might not apply to large, exam-based classes like Econ 1, office hours and other grade-grubbing venues provide students in many classes a loophole to boost their grade. Because of this, steps should be taken to make grades more objective, like the institution of blind grading and less reliance on participation grades.
I am sure professors make an active effort to grade students fairly, but professors are only human, and often allow some subjectivity in grading, even if it's subconscious. A multiple-choice exam does not offer the opportunity for a professor to practice subtle favoritism, but a class whose grade is based entirely on essays and class participation does. Although some students go to office hours for the right reasons (e.g. to ask a question or go over a paper) others view these meetings with professors as a way to talk their way into a higher grade.
If a class of 50 students has a class participation grade, and only has ten minutes of discussion per class, it seems impossible for the professor to know the names of all 50 students, or to hear all of their ideas and remember how much they participated. Going to office hours will not necessarily help a student produce better work, but it could boost his or her participation grade. For papers, office hours can have the same effect. Even if a paper does not improve following an office hours meeting, a professor might be inclined to give it a higher grade anyway. This may not be explicitly done to reward the effort in attending office hours, but it effectively does.
I am not saying that every professor is guilty of this tacit favoritism, or that going to office hours is an easy way to get an 'A.' I am only arguing that office hours have the potential to allow students to boost their grades in ways that have nothing to do with performance. There are other loopholes like this, including old-fashioned sucking up.
This flawed system is not anybody's fault. People are not robots, and not everything they do can be completely objective. Even with the best intentions, professors cannot always grade everything perfectly. There are, however, partial solutions to this problem.
Blind grading, the system under which professors grade papers and tests without seeing the students' names, would not be completely effective, given that professors would still recognize papers that they had seen during office hours. In a smaller class, they might recognize a student's writing style. But such a practice would be a step in the right direction. Unless the College wants to officially acknowledge effort in grading, there is no reason not to have blind grading, besides the effort it would take to implement the policy.
In the same vein, class participation grades should be reduced. While they might be necessary in a small seminar class, they usually are not in a 50-student, lecture-based class. One of the reasons they're used in these classes is to promote attendance. But all that class participation grades really do is encourage students to participate too much in the classes that they do attend. And unless professors are keeping tally of how many comments students make in class, there's no way to objectively grade that type of "participation." If professors want to encourage attendance, they should do so by taking attendance, not by tacking on a subjective class participation grade.
Until the current grading system changes, we will continue to play the games that the system has set up to get the highest grade possible. This means that lines at office hours will continue to be unnecessarily long, and that students will continue to raise their hands in class to make unnecessary comments. At the end of the day, there is really no way to make grading perfectly reflect our performance. But we can still bring it closer to that goal.
