Making fair exams can be really, really hard. Evaluation of students is sometimes difficult. In fact, I’ve mentioned in several classes that I think the quality of University education would skyrocket if grading was abandoned. Now, instead of grading, they’ve said, you need something. They’re perhaps right… but maybe not. It doesn’t exactly matter how well a doctor does on her exams throughout school — if she flunks the licensing exam, she flunks; and it doesn’t matter whether a doctor flunks every exam going through school, if he gets 100% on the licensing exam (and then goes home and forgets everything). We do need a way to ensure competence on the part of doctors, engineers, lawyers, and others upon whom we depend daily for our lives and safety.
But I don’t think exams are really the way to do it. What we need is a rational Whuffie system of some kind. Perhaps, compartmentalized Whuffie.
Whuttie? you say. If you don’t know this word, go and buy and read Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (or download and read, or listen to this podcast, or this podcast (that link’s part 1, here’s the feed). Or check out the Wikipedia entry, if you’re a lazy uncool bugger:
Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This future history book describes a post-scarcity economy: All the necessities (and most of the luxuries) of life are free for the taking. A person’s current Whuffie is instantly viewable to anyone, as everybody has a brain-implant giving them an interface with the Net.
If you think about the way we grade students now, it’s a really, well… it’s an inefficient, unrepresentative system, no matter what we do. Some students game the system, by cheating or plagiarizing — acts that don’t permanently impact on their academic rating, but instead at worst (even in the West) involve temporary problems like expulsion, and (in my experience) in Korea routinely just results in a slap on the wrist.
Let’s set up a little comparison chart here:
| Grading & Academic Programs | Education and Learning |
|---|---|
| Is a static set of evaluative records. | Is a dynamic process. |
Involves discrete, arbitarily compartmentalized accumulation of unrelated “knowledges
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Wow!! I am glad I am done with studying!! Does your perfectionist attitude make you popular? I dont think that one bothers you anyway. There are the frivolous sorts all around but most youngsters have to fight terrible demons in the name of peer pressure nowadays. The off campus life attributes to a lot of things. An alma mater is meant to mould the heart and tease the brain. Let’s hope our efforts are a balance of both.
Therapist Boulder,
Well, but you should take into context that these are Korean students I’m working with. The demands placed upon Korean students are generally lower than placed on Western students, ostensibly because the education system here sort of obliterates all semblance of a teenaged life. They study like hell in the last year or so of high school — ie. longer hours of study than most Westerners ever study but unfortunately, as far as I’ve gathered, it’s mostly rote memorization and a great big hoop-jump.
Which means when they get to college, they expect to relax. As one Korean professor I know put it, “The freshman year of university is a drinking contest.” (And not just for the equivalent of frat boys; it seems the norm to be drunk a frightening number of times in freshman year here.)
I don’t know if the western concept of “peer pressure” has made it across the Pacific in quite the form familiar to us. After all, in a sense, “peer pressure” is just sort of normal here. I know a number of adults who seem to feel pressures to be “normal” that I haven’t seen among Western adults outside of strongly conservative religious communities.
(But I must also admit that I am skeptical of it from the outset. I felt pressure by people who were jerks, in school, but those pressures very rarely pushed me into things I didn’t really want to do. The most I can say is that misbehaving peers gave me a license to misbehave too. So I think this whole notion of “peer pressure,” like the idea of “positive role models,” might be part of the patronizing psychobabble that adults use to talk about young people. I certainly never had a role model for my behaviour. I looked up to Miles Davis, for example, but only musically. I didn’t aspire to having a bunch of ex-wives and a drug problem in high school.)
As for moulding the heart, believe me, I try, but there are two things: one is that these are college kids, and I suspect much of the moulding has been done long before I meet them. The other is that the people who are in a position to hear me out usually don’t need much moulding, while the few who could do with a little more growth in terms of their compassion, ethics, or even just capacity to treat classmates with respect, well… they tend to find it all too easy to dismiss what I’m saying because they perceive me as an outsider. Understandable, I suppose, but as it is, I’m not really the guy to reach them. Knowing that frees me to focus on the intellectual side of teaching.