The Problem with Meritocracy

College students are a lot more worried about grades these days. This is something I myself have witnessed in the large general education courses I teach at UCI. My offerings are part of the breadth requirements common at most universities. These attract learners from a wide array of academic disciplines –– which at UCI translates into large numbers of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors. The changes I’m seeing manifest in a growing preoccupation with grades and rankings, as well as increasing concerns about future earnings potential. This shift has not gone unnoticed by my colleagues, many of whom express disdain for students more invested in grade point averages than the intrinsic value of learning. Some view this as a troubling trend towards a consumer mentality in education. But I take a more sanguine view.

While grade pressure always has been present to some extent, its recent intensification goes beyond individual classrooms. Almost every university uses these metrics as the primary measure of learning. This makes assessments and scores central to most university teaching for a variety of reasons: measuring comprehension, motivating student effort, providing feedback, generating student rankings, etc.  But grade-centric approaches also can fail to account for learners’ diverse challenges, and may undermine equity as a result. Moreover, too much attention on grades can compromise critical thinking and intellectual curiosity crucial not only for academic success but also for life after college. Continue reading “The Problem with Meritocracy”

The Problem with Rigor

“It’s Time to Cancel the Word Rigor,” read a recent headline in education press.[1]  The article detailed growing concerns about hidden bias within what many see as conventional teaching practices. Here, “rigor” was taken to task for throwing roadblocks up for some students more than others, even as its exact meaning remains vague. Webster’s Dictionary defines rigor as “severity, strictness or austerity,” which educators often translate into difficult courses and large amounts of work, rationalized in the interest of excellence and high standards.[2]

While there is nothing wrong with challenging coursework, per se, this interpretation of rigor often becomes a recipe for failure for otherwise intelligent and hardworking students.  Such failures can result when rigor is used to incentivize or stratify students, as in gateway or “weed out” courses with prescribed grading targets, or situations where faculty overuse tests as motivation. Rigor discussions I have witnessed rarely consider instructional quality, teaching effectiveness, or principles of learning. Instead faculty complain about poor student attention, comprehension, or commitment. As the Chronicle explains, “all credit or blame falls on individual students, when often it is the academic system that creates the constructs, and it’s the system we should be questioning when it erects barriers for students to surmount or make them feel that they don’t belong.”[3] Continue reading “The Problem with Rigor”