Ivory Tower Blues

In a comment to "It's the difference between night and day", fromEurope asks how universities control for the lack of standardized high school graduation marks in Ontario. An interesting perspective on this issue can be found in one of the books in our lending library, Ivory Tower Blues: A university system in crisis. This excerpt (pp. 22-24) is taken from a section disucssing the importance of grades.

"A useful voice to add to this analysis comes from a Western professor, Thomas Collins, who spent 21 years as an administrator, first as chair of the English Department, then as dean of Arts, and finally as provost and vice-president academic of Western (the second-highest position in the university). These posts took him out of the classroom entirely from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Thus, we have  a rare case study in which someone's institutional memory is untainted by the experience of having to adjust his teaching year after year to increasingly unprepared and disengaged students, as appears to be the case for many professors, as we shall see in chapter 2. In a paper written for the Council of Ministers of Education, Collins admitted to some naivety when he returned to the classroom in the mid-1990s, and considerable shock at how standards had slipped in 21 years and how ill-prepared students were for the English courses he taught, especially the first-year courses. From his experiences in the trenches during his first year back, he concluded that he could not 'assume even a moderate level of literacy from [these students] ... presumably because they think, or have been led to believe, that they are at least proficient in' English.

"Collins blamed this result on poor and inconsistent preparation in secondary schools in reading and writing, poor work habits, and low levels of critical thinking and learning skills. Given the high grades with whcih these students gained entry into university (Western, in this case), Collins clearly saw the negative consequences of grade inflation that we discuss here. He presented institutional data showing an average 14% grade drop for first-year students, who entered with a 79.5% average as a group, but finished first year at Western with a 65.3% average. Western's standards had not yet changed significantly from the traditional standards about which we write, but high school standards had obviously loosened, giving students terribly false feedback about their abilities, while selling them short by not preparing them for university-level learning.

"At the same time, Collins recognized how universities were contributing to grade inflation because, confronted with so many ill-prepared students, he and his colleagues could not grade them by traditional standards, because then they would have failed most of them. Consequently, they patiently corrected papers, but passed on a certain amount of false feedback with higher grades than the work deserved. For example, in his 1997-98 first-year tutorial, out of 17 students, 'only 4 wrote at an acceptable level of literacy,' by which he means the ability to 'construct basic sentences and paragraphs.' The remaining students struggled but could not move up a learning curve of literacy, so they made the same mistakes in assignment after assignment.

"To conduct a reality check on his own experiences, he talked with his colleagues and found that their experience was much the same as his, but they were just accustomed to it as a result of their adjustments over the years. He also looked for other evidence about hte decline in standards and student preparation. In one case, Collins gained access to the results of a chemistry test that had been administered each year in Introductory Chemistry from 1978 to 1996. On this test, which contained the same 40 questions over this two-decade period, there was a steady decline in average grades from 64% in 1978 to 48% in 1996."

Stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting installment, in which I reveal what Professor Collins did next....

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