This-essay is a7310012.htm which is available at the web-site www.essayz.com. See more notes at the bottom. Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay By-Months By-Years By-Words Webs of Like-&-Un-Like ESSAYS <==> Like-&-UN-Like This-One ========================================================== %GRADING PRACTICES 731001 Many new teachers in colleges and universities first experienced the instructor's role while grading papers for sections of required introductory courses. One of the purposes of such courses has been to identify those students who merit further educational opportunities---and to eliminate those who do not. Student evaluation has thus been unilateral and over-simplified to good and bad, if not good and evil. This creates, rather than solves, real problems. "Bad" is used in the sense of lacking ability. Educational institutions pride themselves on the great ability of their graduates. If instructors are unable to help students develop ability, the only way to insure that graduates have ability is to accept only students who already have ability, or insure that students accepted with inadequate ability fail before graduation. Grading practices are often designed to facilitate this drop-out phenomena. Only above average students are permitted to acquire degrees. Via collusion statisticians do not often point to the unexamined assumptions present in such policies. Is the quality of an institution to be measured by the quality of service it offers, or by the ability of its students before they profit from the services offered by the institution? Grading practices have not been developed to facilitate communication between students and instructors. Dialogue would be far more effective, although perhaps more embarrassing and painful. Perhaps for this reason authentic meeting is often avoided, and team work involving both students and instructors is impossible. Grading practices have evolved to help classify students according to what standardized roles they may be able to play in the machine which is the technocratic society. A potato grader classifies potatoes according to size, with the potatoes playing a passive role. Traditional grading practices classify students according to academic size---with the students playing a passive role, usually not even contributing their own self- evaluation. Evaluations of the educational process which are not mutual evaluations and which lack dialogue---will lack the power to facilitate the improvement of the educational process. So long as education and certification are always joined in a conflict of interest---there will be grading practices and bureaucratic violence which generate alienation. (c) 1999 by Paul A. Smith in GO: essayz.com "Search for Integrity and Honesty" (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================
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