Built on Facts

The Atlantic has a pointed and somewhat grim article by a pseudonymous Professor X (no, not that one) about assigning failing grades to failing students. It’s called In the Basement of the Ivory Tower. Professor X is an English instructor at a community college teaching largely adult students, so he’s not dealing with an ideally suited class. I myself teach at a well-respected state university in Texas so I have no complaints about my students, but physics is nevertheless not something many of them are prepared to deal with. Now as a TA, I’m also not responsible for directly assigning grades - about 20% of the overall grade comes from me in the form of quizzes and lab reports, with the remaining 80% coming from the professor’s tests. The professor bears most of the burden described in the article. But I feel a bit of it myself. Read the whole article, but I want to comment on a few sections in particular.

The bursting of our collective bubble comes quickly. A few weeks into the semester, the students must start actually writing papers, and I must start grading them. Despite my enthusiasm, despite their thoughtful nods of agreement and what I have interpreted as moments of clarity, it turns out that in many cases it has all come to naught.

Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.

Sentences aren’t generally the issue in physics classes, though there have been a few in lab report conclusions that I’m not happy to have witnessed. “I really enjoyed this lab” has no place in a lab report, but I’ve seen it. Repeatedly. Now though Professor X doesn’t really speculate too much on what differentiates the successful students from the unsuccessful, I find that the only way I myself improve is practice. Correlation is not causation, but doing the homework correlates exceptionally well with good test performance. There is no substitute for practice in physics, writing, or any other academic discipline.

How I envy professors in other disciplines! How appealing seems the straightforwardness of their task! These are the properties of a cell membrane, kid. Memorize ’em, and be ready to spit ’em back at me. The biology teacher also enjoys the psychic ease of grading multiple-choice tests. Answers are right or wrong. The grades cannot be questioned. Quantifying the value of a piece of writing, however, is intensely subjective, and English teachers are burdened with discretion. (My students seem to believe that my discretion is limitless. Some of them come to me at the conclusion of a course and matter-of-factly ask that I change a failing grade because they need to graduate this semester or because they worked really hard in the class or because they need to pass in order to receive tuition reimbursement from their employer.)

Well professor, cheer up. Physics has completely objective answers, but we too have to worry about how we grade the people whose methods are close but not executed entirely properly. No multiple choice for us, except occasionally in very low-point-value concept questions. In fact, even biology isn’t just a set of facts to memorize. “A cell membrane has property Z” is a great thing to know, but the question is rarely “Which of the following properties does a cell membrane have?” That’s not very useful by itself for a biologist to know. The question will instead ask for an extension of that fact, e.g., will that property cause a given molecule to diffuse across the lipid bilayer or does it require active transport through a protein channel?

As for the discresion, I’m rarely asked for it. I really have very little in the first place, and in fact TAs don’t even have access to class grades other than the ones I directly give. This is probably merciful for me, as it prevents me from having to deal with situations like this:

I gave Ms. L. the F and slept poorly that night. Some of the failing grades I issue gnaw at me more than others. In my ears rang her plaintive words, so emblematic of the tough spot in which we both now found ourselves. Ms. L. had done everything that American culture asked of her. She had gone back to school to better herself, and she expected to be rewarded for it, not slapped down. She had failed not, as some students do, by being absent too often or by blowing off assignments. She simply was not qualified for college.

Fortunately I rarely encounter this. If you make it to my class you’re almost certainly qualified for college though you may not be qualified for the major you’ve picked. Failure usually comes from slacking. Those who fail because they simply cannot understand the material are small in number, and will anyway likely be successful in a different major. Most figure this out early and have the sense to drop the class. It’s tough to watch those who don’t, and I don’t envy the professor who has to mark D or F on a grade spreadsheet even though those students will in all probability go on to success in something different. It would be much worse to mark a grade which is a declaration that someone is simply not suited for college in the first place.

In her own mind, Ms. L. had triumphed over adversity. In her own mind, she was a feel-good segment on Oprah. Everyone wants to triumph. But not everyone can—in fact, most can’t. If they could, it wouldn’t be any kind of a triumph at all. Never would I want to cheapen the accomplishments of those who really have conquered college, who were able to get past their deficits and earn a diploma, maybe even climbing onto the college honor roll. That is truly something.

And that same concept makes thousands of physics buildings on thousands of campuses infamous as places of real defeat and real triumph. I’ve personally experienced both. I wouldn’t have it any other way.