Jorge Mahecha

“They only study for the grades”, claim some teachers and professors, dissapointed that students are some sort of utilitarians that only care about a cold transaction where they do whatever is required of them, just in exchange for a number, and not caring for learning at all. I find this claim for misguided idealism highly dissapointing for many reasons. The first is that always I’ve heard that kind of complaint, it almost invariably comes from a humblebragging overachiever whose entire academic experience is nothing but top grades. It feels as authentic as a billionaire telling people not to worry about the money. But on a more practical basis, claiming that it is somehow wrong that students care only about grades and not about learning, reveals a misalignment between grades and learning that is the signature of a poorly designed course, where evaluation manages to be disconnected from performance and where it is possible to get good grades, indeed even a top grade, without having learned much at all. It sounds unethical because it is unethical.

Las notas son importantes porque hay mucho en juego dependiendo de ellas. Los procesos de admisión a universidades y escuelas competitivas las toman en cuenta. Una calificación significa que un experto, es decir, el instructor, certifica que el estudiante ha alcanzado cierto nivel de dominio en el tema del curso. En algunos contextos profesionales, las calificaciones y certificados incluso pueden ser la base para ser aceptado como miembro de una comunidad profesional. Entonces sería honesto dejar de fingir que las notas no importan. Importan, e importan mucho, y en la mayoría de los casos los estudiantes están interesados en obtener buenas calificaciones, incluso en cursos tan aburridos como el suyo. Perdón. Todos sabemos que su curso no es aburrido, sino muy especializado.

If what really matters in a course is not what ever activities earn a student a good grade, there is a serious disconnect between the evaluation system in the course and whatever elicits learning in the course. I had the chance to experience such a disconnect as a student in one of my undergraduate courses. It was Plant Science. One of courses I’ve been most engaged with in my undergrad. It was a couple times a week, maybe Tuesday and Thursday at 7:00 AM and it lasted for two hours. After a brief review of concepts we had to start a discussion. What is there to discuss about plant science, you might wonder. It turns out there is a lot to discuss about plan evolution and about how a particular morphological feature is advantageous for plant reproduction and growth. The instructor was in charge of the concept review, and then he started the discussion. In a course of over 25 people,two students discussed. One of them was a Biology major named Gustavo, if I remember correctly. The other guy was me. I never imagined doing that much independent reading on plant evolution as I did for that course, but I had to do it because otherwise how would I defend my arguments in the upcoming discussion?. I enjoyed that class a lot. Then, we had midterms. I failed miserably. The questions were all about plant parts and structures. I knew that was the style of the midterms with that professor (Eblis Álvarez), and I honestly tried to memorize as much as could. But I just couldn’t. And I got pretty low marks on that midterm.

But I kept on reading for every class, and discussing with Gustavo, who was in favor that if aliens arrived to earth perhaps they should not contact humans as there was no objective basis for considering humans the dominating species in this planet, based on biomass. I couldn’t agree with that, and I kept debating and reading well outside the scope of the recommended readings for the class. I also tried to memorize the stuff I knew I had to memorize. And it was time for the end term examinations. My performance was very mediocre. My final grade for the course was a mere 3.1 over 5. I met Eblis one last time to discuss my final exam and my class performance. He congratulated for my deep involvement in class discussions. Then he looked at my grades and I still remember how surprised he was that my grades were so bad. From his point of view I was one one of his best students. So he decided to approximate my 3.1 to a 4.0. This is like turning a C- into a B+. Never again I experienced such generosity in grading. Many of my classmates who never uttered a word in class discussion got the same B+ I got or even better grades. To me Eblis, was a great teacher. But very obviously there was a disconnect between learning and grading that nobody cared about because they memorized what they had to learn for the exams, looked at old exams to learn the questions and got good grades. And as long as they got good grades, there was not reason for them to complain about class discussions. Students tend not to complain about getting A as a final grade, disregarding how much they learned.

Lack of correspondence between learning grades creates perverse incentives. I remember a graduate course I took in my first masters about that arcane and long forgotten fad called “learning organizations”. It was so poorly designed that the course syllabus was the contents for a book called something like “the fifth discipline, schools that learn” by Peter Senge, not a word more, not a word less. Abstruse organizational cybernetics and other disconnected contents ended up in a final work that nobody understood really well, but everyone, absolutely everyone, got a 5.0/5.0 as final grade. Not even this perverse incentive managed to shut the strong criticisms of many students with that course -after all, it was part of a master’s in education. What did the sacred cow professor in charge of the course did? Changed the grading system from numeric to pass/fail. Roberto Zarama was not going to put any more effort in a course for a Master’s in Education degree.

Una mala correspondencia entre las calificaciones y el aprendizaje puede terminar dando malas notas a estudiantes que sí han aprendido mucho, o buenas notas a estudiantes que han aprendido muy poco o que ni siquiera están seguros de qué era lo que tenían que aprender. También lleva a los instructores a trivializar el diseño del curso y a no reflexionar profundamente sobre qué deben aprender los estudiantes y qué evidencia es válida y sólida para demostrarlo. Si eso suena difícil de hacer, es porque requiere instructores profesionales que lo hagan. Los estudiantes siempre están motivados por obtener buenas calificaciones. Como docentes, es nuestro deber diseñar cursos en los que obtener una buena nota sea evidencia inequívoca de un aprendizaje profundo y significativo.