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PARTING SHOT Grading Standards: There’s a Person Behind Each Number

By Chris Tucker |

It’s hard to say what good, if any, came out of the recent flap over grading standards at Carter High School. Bush’s Law of Political Campaigning fits the Carter mess: what matters is not what is true, but what most people believe (or can he made to believe) is true. And the lasting impression, for many people, will he that somehow Carter bent the rules so that a star football player could remain eligible, thus betraying the letter and the spirit of the no-pass, no-play reforms.

This is a depressing story, all the more so because of its racial overtones. When television cameras showed the mostly white Piano players sulking while the all-black Carter team rejoiced, it’s for sure that certain viewers saw one more “proof of something they already believe: minorities must have special help in order to compete. Again, this has little to do with reality, much to do with distorted perceptions.

Beyond the Carter problem, a larger question remains. We all believe in academic standards-but what sort of standards? How tough, and who decides? Readers of this space know I’ve done my share of howling about the decline of book-based culture and the rise of vidiocy. Of course, your view of educational decadence probably depends on your particular place on the downward spiral. In the last generation, they actually read The Decline of the West. today few adults read the book, but we might recognize the allusion, while many kids would think it’s the name of a rock group. (In fact, it probably is the name of a rock group.)

But seriously. After attending several local colleges that will never he confused with MIT, I graduated in the mid-Seventies. My grades were generally good, but with every passing day I am more convinced that I did not get the quality of education so many of my professors had received during their school days in the Forties and Fifties. One of them, the author of a respected book on Charles Darwin, was a true genius and a masterful teacher. Yet I recall a disturbing story he once told. After taking his degrees from a top-notch Southwestern university, he had applied for a teaching post at Harvard. A few weeks later came the rejection letter curtly informing him that when Harvard needed to hire, Harvard knew where to look-and it would not be looking in this backward region. Standards, you know.

A stint as an instructor of English in a South Texas college taught me another lesson about standards: they’re easy to worship in the abstract, hard to uphold when real people are involved. Like most state colleges at the time, this one had an “open admissions” policy. Sounds good in theory-after all, this is a democracy-but in practice it had cruel results. The college raked in the tuition from anyone who could fill out an application form, then left it to the faculty to weed out the unfit or pass them along. It’s a very cynical arrangement, especially when the school is not committed to the remedial programs needed to help poorly prepared students succeed in college. The motto was sink or swim-after we cash your check.

Some swam and many sank. Grade inflation was rampant. Near the end of one semester, an older student in a sophomore literature section came to discuss her grades. She was a senior, going into nursing, had a job Just about locked up. All she needed was this class, which she had taken and dropped three times before because she had “never been much at English.” A look back at her tests and term paper revealed just how little she had been. We had a gallows joke among the instructors: a college graduate should be able to speak, read, and write the English language, but we would settle for two out of three. This lady had no problem with talking, but the other mysteries had eluded her.

Her average was a solid F, and with one major test to go it was hard to see her climbing above a D. I told her so, and the floodgates opened. Between sobs she told me she had passed high school English and her two required freshman courses. She had come so far. she knew she would be a good nurse, her husband was counting on her, they were planning to buy a house after she got the job. And so on. She saw her life headed into the trash can because she could not write a paragraph about Shelley’s poems. The scales were loaded: on one side was her future, her family’s happiness. The health and welfare of the sick and dying. On the other side was a little mark in a gradebook and a bunch of dead poets.

She insisted that she had tried as hard as she could. The bad thing was that I believed her. She showed me voluminous notes, too many notes for anyone to use in studying. “Write down only the main points,” say the study guides, but she was so lost that everything seemed like a main point. She had even written down some irrelevant jokes and puns that had seemed funnier when I was telling them. She had everything but an understanding of what she was writing.

Such dilemmas are supposed to build character, but I seem to recall a lot of anger and self-pity. I had signed up to teach writing and literature; now I was being asked to play social worker, therapist, and God. I went through all her papers again to see if I had been too harsh. Perhaps her insistence on spelling Wordsworth as two words had blinded me to other virtues? But no: if anything, it seemed I had been too generous. On one essay question worth twenty points, I had given her ten for writing one sentence, albeit a pretty long one.

As the last test approached, she looked older and more fragile with each class meeting. She slopped gazing around when others asked questions, stopped filling her book with notes. Apparently she was resigned to whatever fate I chose for her. A visit with the department head was no help, though he did show me test scores indicating that my student had a low IQ and had made only one grade higher than a C in four years of college.

It was tempting to blame the system for the whole thing. After all, I had not admitted this woman to college, or passed her in freshman English, or let her finish high school unable to write a coherent paragraph. She was not my problem. Besides, I agreed with the standards. A college degree ought to represent something more than the presence of a warm body in a room for four years. And yet she had not asked for this either. She had not raised the academic ante to the point that nurses had to know about Keats as well as blood pressure. She wanted a good job in a noble profession. Now, for reasons she could not fathom, people were putting hurdles in her path.

I’m not very proud of the decision 1 finally made, but the alternative would have been just as bad in its own way. I eventually sought an easier line of work, but I still think of that student and wonder what she’s doing now. When you hear impassioned talk of upholding academic standards, remember that these are not just numbers we’re talking about. And ask yourself what you would have done.

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