Almost everyone in higher education is now worried. There are new pressures for accountability, new online competition and now the sequester.  It also seems at last, as if the great tuition ramp is finally about to level off: we’ve brushed off concern from legislators for years, but with the economy still in neutral, parents are increasingly making college decisions based on net price. Look for smaller tuition increases and eventually even some tuition reductions. You might also recall that the baby boom is over and the number of high school applicants is declining in most states.

Still not worried? Republicans and Democrats can agree on almost nothing these days. Actually, they probably agree on absolutely nothing, except for one thing: higher education.

Yes, President Obama and Sen Mark Rubio agree on something: Washington gives out $175 billion a year on student grants, loans and tax breaks and both of them want to use that leverage to create more accountable and more affordable system. (WSJ Feb 20 Obama, Rubio Put Higher Education on Notice).

Many parents and students already use College Navigator, and now the White House has already introduced a new College Score Card.  It  has flaws, but external calls for accountability and transparency will only intensify.

Luckily for us, higher education legislation is not the most important issues in Washington right now.  At some point, however, perhaps before the midterm elections, both parties will want to find to find something they can get done and something that everyone in the country agrees upon. It is easy to assume that all of those ethical violations of for-profit schools did not tarnish the image of traditional not-for-profit colleges, but remember–all of thew were accredited. “Every bad thing you read about happened in an accredited institution,” says Kevin Carey, director of education policy at the nonpartisan New America Foundation.  Oh dear…

We will resist and it will not be futile. (No Jedi mind melds please.) We are a diverse and unwieldy system and we can still claim to be the best in the world. But in the end, there will be some new accreditation systems and new metrics for us to track. It would be very unlikely that higher education can really get out in front of this issue.  Radical innovation is in the DNA of most institutions, but with the coming disruption, it is the nimble who will mutate into something that can survive in the new climate.

Most successful organizations are careful to align key practices with the mission.
How do grades support our mission? If the goal of college is to open minds, facilitate change, explore new ideas and help students discover how to change their minds, then which bit of that is fostered by grades?

The arguments in support of grades are familiar, but perhaps their time has passed.

–Grades enforce standards. They might, but standards of what? If a grade signified how many times you had changed your mind during the semester, they might be more useful. The flip side of standards is that grades are a form of punishment: you FAIL. But grades are not a necessary evil: being a teacher does not mean you also have to be the enforcer.

–Grades help graduate schools or employers determine which students are most capable, know the most or worked hardest in college. Ick. If I wanted to be in the sorting business, I could work at the M&M factory. Sorting has indeed been an important part of school—we allow Ivy Leagues schools to sort the potential candidates for President of the United States, for example. (No other schools comes close to the 12 US Presidents who went to either Yale or Harvard. Only George W. Bush went to both!)  Now that we’ve had a Black President, I’m waiting for the community college President.

–Grades reward the best work. Maybe, but they also punish innovation, experimentation, creativity, and mostly failure, which is where we all learn the most. In Teaching Naked  I often suggest that grades need to be aligned with the learning goals, assignments, games and even discussion activities, but what if we just used the learning outcomes directly and measured what you had learned?

Even if grades are not bad, are they good? Do they HELP students learn and change?

But the best reason to eliminate grades comes from the amazing assessment guru Martin Sweidel,  (really our Assoc Dean for Administration at the Meadows School at SMU ). If we eliminated grades, then building a culture of meaningful assessment would be easy.
–Our confusion about assessment would vanish: assessment is about what students are learning. We confuse that with grades, which is often only a way to sort students according to which work we like the best.
–We would have to articulate the real standards, and these could align with our mission.
–We could drastically reassess work-load. One of the main complains about assessment is that we don’t have the time, because we are too busy grading. Imagine what could happen if we had that time to focus on learning and assessment of that learning?!?

Without grades, we would be free to align our time, activities, and classrooms around our mission: creating situations that demonstrate and give students permission to change their minds.

Without grades, we would need to rethink everything else we do. In one step, we would be free to think about what we want to accomplish.

Apparently we have Yale to thank for “grades” (descriptive and first recorded in 1785). There were lots of systems through the 19th century, including a 100 point scale used at Harvard in 1877, and a letter system shortly thereafter, but the descriptive (excellent, good, fair etc.), the letter (A-E) and the numerical (95-100 = A) were combined and adopted at Mount Holyoke in 1897. But like the SAT, these systems of sorting were designed to replace other systems of sorting, that focused on class, race or religion. Eliot, C. W. (1923). Harvard Memories. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. I appreciate that the SAT was a part of admissions reform with the goal of making college admissions more of a meritocracy, but maybe the days of sorting can be left behind?

Eliminating grades does not mean we eliminate standards or assessment. It might, in fact, increase both of those things, because we could align our teaching with our goals and not arbitrary need for grades at the end of each class.

We need reform in higher education. At the very least we need to see some bio-diversity—lots of different institutions trying different things. We can’t all survive with the same model anymore. At least SOME of us need to try eliminating grades. Who is with me? To the barricades!

“When we consider the practically universal use in all educational institutions of a system of marks, whether numbers or letters, to indicate scholastic attainment of the pupils or students in these institutions, and when we remember how very great stress is laid by teachers and pupils alike upon these marks as real measures or indicators of attainment, we can but be astonished at the blind faith that has been felt in the reliability of the marking system. School administrators have been using with confidence an absolutely uncalibrated instrument.”
Finkelstein, I. E. (1913). The marking system in theory and practice. Educational Psychology Monographs 10.

The University of Wisconsin has announced the first Bachelor’s degree option to online students based on competency. College Degree, No Class Time Required
University of Wisconsin to Offer a Bachelor’s to Students Who Take Online Competency Tests About What They Know (WSJ, Jan 24, 2013) The UW ecampus has already has a robust eCampus, but the UW Flexibile Option is new.

The UW video on the Flex Option says it wants to decouple teaching, learning and assessment. Students would demonstrate they have fulfilled  an area of the major by demonstrating competence –with or without taking the course associated with that skill.  This, by itself, is not new.  We’ve got lots of university curricula that include competency requirements.  At SMU, for example, our new University Curriculum includes a second language requirement, that can be fulfilled just by arriving with a second language, taking two years of coursework, study abroad or completing some other sort of process and demonstrating you have attained the learning goals. This makes sense–a college degree should be about what you can do and how you think, not about how many classes you took.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (the very folks who invented the credit hour and helped get it adopted over 100 years ago) have announced plans to reconsider the credit-hour as a measure of … what exactly ?? and propose something new (surely some measure of learning?).  There is also the AAC&U’s efforts with the Lumina Foundation to field test a new Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP) in 9 states and 20 institutions.  The DQP will measure measure broad and integrative knowledge, deep knowledge in a particular subject area, high-level intellectual skills and demonstrated achievement in applied learning and in civic learning and engagement.   I note that much of the rest of the world (since 1999) has already adopted a similar system of comparing students by skills or qualifications rather than degrees  with the Bologna Declaration.

There is clearly a tidal wave coming, but what does it mean?

1. While the motivation behind the Wisconsin Flex Option isn’t public, my guess is that they are hoping that students will not simply sign up to take the assessments and collect their degree, but will need a few courses too.  My guess is they will also charge for the assessments and the degree, so maybe they are ok either way, but if this drives students with a few missing credits (like their own Gov. Scott Walker) to enroll (and pay for) a few of their existing online courses, then there will be lots of new revenue streams.

2. I also assume that the degree will say “UW Flex Option Degree” to protect the main UW brand.  While the goals is to get more “qualified” (i.e. credentialed) citizens for jobs, if employers continue to desire those with better credentials (degrees with better brands) then all will be well in the land of residential campuses.  If, however, UW manages to keep the standards the same as they are on the residential campuses, then employers will eventually need to take a second look.

3. For students/consumers this is all great news. The flood gates for free transfers are about to open.  Students can already transfer in much lower cost community college credits, but if a system for determining competencies becomes widely accepted, and MOOCs, YouTube or job experience learning can be converted into something that counts toward a degree, then  prices for students will fall and universities are in trouble, quickly.

4. A few elite private or very large state schools will be able to survive by selling the networking, branding or the experience they offer.  But for schools that can’t offer the benefits of rock-climbing walls, winning football teams or an elite jobs network, they had better (and quickly) come up with a plan to demonstrate that their students have better skills  and not just more credits tied to seat time.

So in many ways, the move to demonstrate the competency, skills or qualifications of graduates should HELP liberal arts colleges that are doing a good job. One of the most interesting sessions I attended at the AAC&U Annual Conference last week, featured research by Charles Blaich and Kathleen Wise that compared data from the Delta Cost Project (on what colleges are spending per student) and the Wabash National Study (that measures student learning) and –surprise!–while more money in general is tied to increased learning, it is a VERY weak correlation and more importantly, there are school with terrific student learning that cost a fraction of the cost of schools with the same learning ($9000 vs $50,000/student).  As the researchers noted, it is hard to imagine a college marketing person suggesting 90% of the learning at 20% of the cost as a slogan, but that is the calculation parents and students are starting to make.

VALUE is going to be the new holy grail for potential students. Where and how can I learn the most at a reasonable cost. As expensive campus-based schools, we can either cut costs, or demonstrate more learning.  A move away from credit hours to competency will make all of this easy to see.  The sooner we all ditch the credit-hour and find ways to better compare the differences in what our graduates can do and how they think, the better for everyone.

I’ve read two great books about college students recently. Ken Bain’s What the Best College Students Do (Harvard, 2012) deeply influenced my teaching this fall as he described ways to encourage the self awareness and self motivation of students who become happy and successful later in life (and often also do well in school, but more as a by-product). There are indeed too many things school and especially college do to poison the very characteristics that most lead to success later in life, and I’ve actually taken to talking about HAPPINESS in my classes this fall. But Bain is talking about the best students at the best colleges.

So yesterday I read about the rest of our student population. In The College Fear Factor: How Students and Professors Misunderstand One Another (Harvard 2009), Rebecca D. Cox reveals what she discovered sitting in English 1A classes for a semester at community colleges. She describes the enormous stakes for students who are both working and paying or using loans for college and how they think about the potential rewards and the daily real costs of college. These students are making a critical life decision and the anxiety they feel about the distance between themselves and he almighty professors are real. (Read the first 40 pages here.)

It is disturbing to realize that faculty are complicit in the grade anxiety that exists. What we think of as “having high standards” or “weeding out students who don’t really want to be here” is perceived as not caring if students fail. One student is quoted saying his high school AP teachers were like real college professors because “they didn’t really care about your grade…if you failed a test, that’s too bad.” (p. 68).

Another disconnect happens when professors try to motivate critical thinking in discussion, but students see this as something they did in high school and “stupid” or “I don’t feel like she is really teaching us anything.” (p. 92) This same student complains about assignments and wants to know “is the essay 300 or 500 words,” and “what’s going on with all these drafts and due dates?” (p. 93),

It is not a surprise that students see the traditional passive lecture approach as more valuable but also more “like college”, but it has made me rethink the importance of recognizing how their fears drive these desires.

I was also struck, however, by her short but biting analysis of why college writing courses are fundamentally flawed because “the skills required in different academic disciplines vary immensely” (p. 147) and that it is very hard for students to transfer skills from one class to another.  We know that students don’t see the connections among courses easily, but it is also true that “A person does not simply write: a person writes something for some purpose.  Accordingly, learning how to write according to the conventions of a particular academic discipline is best accomplished while a person is immersed in discipline-spcific activities.” She provides a long list of research to back up this claim.

We’ve got this problem in my own institution, and while we have just revisited the learning outcomes and titles for the first-year composition courses, I fear we will still have departments complaining that students are unprepared for the disciplinary writing faculty want to see in the sophomore year. I’ve thought of three possible solutions.

1. A common writing rubric for the entire 4-year would help a great deal. It would be hard (maybe impossible) to agree upon, but it would help students progress and would counter their anxiety that college is about figuring out what each professor wants and giving it to them. It seems to me these could be partially discipline specific.

2. At step further would be to have first-year writing courses taught in discipline-specific clusters, perhaps STEM, Humanities, Social Science, or Business?  Students today and much more likely to arrive with a desired major in mind and departments could recommend one of these types of writing class. At the moment, we just let students pick a first-year English class based on topic: do you want vampires or Victorian novels?

3. Most radically, we might even allow departments to offer first-year writing courses (or suggest curricula) that provide the discipline-specific training they desire. The low-paid non-enure-track lecturers who teach the basic English courses are controlled by the English dept, so there is a political blood-bath there, but the University has the resources to diversity that body of faculty.

I would not want to lose the interdisciplinary mixing that occurs in these classes–and I think students start majors too soon–but I also know that complaints about writing are  a persistent issue.  If there is a way to improve student writing we should look at it.   That still leaves the problem of student fear and our faculty insensitivity to it, but as with most things, seeing the problem is the first step.

Here is a challenge: engage your students with issues around the Presidential election this semester, change their minds about something, but leave them guessing about your political leaning and how you will vote. Asking you to swallow a toad might be easier, but it is vitally important for our country and our colleges that we try.

With recent accusations of indoctrination in the classroom, and the widening gap between more liberal professors and more conservative students, it would be easy for faculty to avoid politics, but consider some evidence. While faculty (especially in the social sciences and humanities) are much more liberal than the general population, college does not make students more liberal or less religious. (See, for example “The Indoctrination Myth” by Neil Gross, NYT, March 3, 2012.) Be sad or be happy (depending on your politics) but if you were trying, you’ve failed.

But we also know that college in general is not leading students to more open minds or a greater ability to think critically. There are plenty of other causes to blame for the increasing contention of our political system, but college is the best place to model what open and informed debate can and should look like. If we shy away from demonstrating to students in our classrooms what civil disagreement and real civic discourse looks like, what hope is there for future public debate?

I am not suggesting that we turn our music or biology classes into political forums, but rather that we not be afraid of political issues during this season. A fundamental principle of teaching is that faculty must engage students with questions that matter to them and start with an understanding of student assumptions. We need to understand what our students think, and that includes politics.

If college is failing to open minds it is because faculty forget that it is easy to learn facts without understanding concepts. Eric Mazur at Harvard discovered that even his “A” students in physics, had no idea about basic scientific concepts, so he changed his pedagogy.

More readings and longer papers won’t change minds, but class discussion and the willingness to investigate thoroughly assumptions might—what I call “teaching naked.” Starting with student beliefs is essential in every class. If a college degree is to mean an ability to think critically, then all of us need to probe and ask students to examine their assumptions. This is not indoctrination, it is learning to think. It also probably won’t endear you to all students, but it is our job. If we are not willing to try, who will?

So the next time your students tell you Mitt Romney is not a Christian or Barack Obama was not born in the United States, you know what to do. Democrat or Republican is much less important than thinking or not-thinking. It is our challenge to create a nation of thinkers.

Headlines this week a bout the software programs being just as accurate as human readers.http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/13/large-study-shows-little-difference-between-human-and-robot-essay-graders#ixzz1rwEWd9Y9  I’ve got two reactions to this.

First, I heard a fantastic TED talk yesterday from one of our computer science students (Christian Gecko) who presented us with a real life ethical problem: suppose you had been hired to check data as a job, but you knew how to code, so you wrote a computer program to do your same job, only it did with 10 times the accuracy in a fraction of the time? Well in this version, the guy finally feels guilty and tells his boss, who fires him. So he tells the bosses boss, who rehires him, fires the boss and put him in charge.

He also gave the example of tollboths at DFw airport where people are paid to sit in a booth and transcribe license plates from one computer screen to another. If you could write code to automate this, you could save the airport $258,000 a year.

These are menial jobs, but the point was that we can count on computers doing more in the future, and looking for a way to reduce the time you need to spend on basic tasks is just smart.

So i don’t think a robo reader is as good as a human reader in all things, but I do think it highlights the need for understanding the distinction. Which think can the robo reader do to free humans to do more critical tasks?

So to start, HAVE STUDENTS WRITE MORE!!! A limiting factor in almost all college courses is the amount of grading faculty have to do. Grading essays is time consuming, so we assign less writing to keep our sanity. Now, we don’t have to limit the writing based upon our grading time!!!

that does NOt mean that we should abandon human grading. But students who practice writing more, will become better writers. The NEW QUESTION is how should we structure courses so the human grading is most useful?

As it happens, grades are NOT the most useful part of learning to write. Assigning grades takes time though, and leaving that to a computer, could free up more time for the really useful feedback on multiple drafts that will really improve writing.

The changes to higher education are coming daily.

First comes the news that students taking free online courses from Harvard and MIT through EdX will be able to take a proctored exam at 450 testing centers in 110 countries.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/edx-offers-proctored-exams-for-open-online-course/39656

The BIG issue of course, is if these courses will be accepted by others, mainly employers and other universities. Employers probably count the most. If employers are willing to hire candidates who have web badges or certificates instead of university degrees, the market value of a college degree will plummet.

I believe the market will test this by hiring a few folks and seeing what happens. The for-profit world is better (and has had much incentive0 to determine the real results of different experiments.

My guess is that free online course badges won’t prove to be any better or worse that a college degree when it comes to learning. We have MOUNTAINS of evidence that you get As in college and not have a clue (as Eric Mazur discovered of his Harvard physics students) and we have equally compelling research that tells that intrinsic motivation far outweighs any possible change in pedagogy. In other words, if a student wants to learn, teaching methods make little difference. For the student who wants to learn in a free MOOC, she will, for a student who wants to be a college surface or strategic learner (See, for example, Ken Bain’s new book, What the Best College Students Do, Harvard 2012), 4 years on a college campus will still result in nothing really being learned.

So the big choice for colleges is whether to accept transfer credit from MOOCs. If they do, then students will be able to drastically able to reduce costs (take a few free courses instead of summer school and still get a regular college diploma.

The first step has happened. Some Austrian and German universities already do, but Colorado State University-Global campus has become the first US university to accept a Udactiy course for credit.
http://chronicle.com/article/A-First-for-Udacity-Transfer/134162/
This is only the Colorado State online campus, but if other colleges agree to take this credit the implications are serious.
If students can take this free Introduction to Computer Science and get transfer credit, why would they need to pay Stanford $6000 for the same product? Part of the answer will be that extra learning is offered on the Stanford campus, but Stanford had better figure out a way to demonstrate that extra learning (and justify is enormous additional cost) in a hurry.