"A Modest Proposal" or "Shamelessly Using Swift to Make my own Point"

A Plan to Norm YOUR Grades and Win at College Teaching.

If no one is willing to try a logical approach to grade inflation and we are locked into the whole “yell at people until they conform” model, I know what I’m doing. First, I’m doing nothing different. I’m going to continue to teach my students in a manner that is designed to raise them to the best of their abilities, infuse them with confidence, and make them better, happier, more compassionate people for having interacted with me.

If, however, my back is thrown up against the wall and I’m told that I must lower grades or hit the road, I suppose I might try spending a few more years here. I’d get the lower grades. It would be easy. I’d begin, of course, with gas-lighting (the beginning to so many great stories of heroics). I’d identify the dominant personalities in the room and draw them into my elite circle of fans. Then, I’d ask the weaker (dare I suggest “less intelligent” students or is that too offensive?) into my office where I would talk in circles around them about how I was trying so, so hard to help them improve and they weren’t paying attention…but, in reality, I’d just be confusing them. Then, in class, when they act confused, the dominant elite I'd groomed will stare at them as if they are very unstable. I’d spend a lot of time in class pontificating on Derrida or Baudrillard in ways that would have nothing to do with our assignments but would make me sound smart and witty. It’s important to keep the SRTEs from fully hitting the bottom. That’s where the gas-lighting comes in: blame for confusion always appears to rest with students and not with me.

There are a logistical steps one can take as well: schedule your senior classes after 3:30 on Fridays – the students who sign up will be the disorganized ones who got stuck with annoying class times. Then, they will want to miss most Friday classes for “Senior Year – it only comes once!”. I’ll just dock the points right off their heavily weighted participation grade every week. If the Equity Committee says I can’t grade participation, I’ll give a quiz on Fridays and say it’s “required by my department.”

If I should be so lucky as to have, say, a single mother with a special needs child, I should have plentiful opportunities to dock her for everything from late submissions and arriving to class late -- even one minute -- to missed classes and evincing distraction during discussions. I mean how can she really do a great job taking care of the precious soul who depends on her for life itself if she is consumed with my “rubrics” and draconian rules? Hopefully, students will develop mental illnesses but won’t realize what’s going on until it’s too late to seek help. They should drag down the curve in all sorts of desirable ways.

You can catch a few additional absences by scheduling class sessions in the library or a museum or computer lab, writing that clearly on the syllabus, but never mentioning it in class…until you arrive at the library and at exactly one second after class begins, start racking in the penalties.

Rubrics facilitate the lowering of grades because you can just plunk down a low number in a category --say, “free from error” -- and, when students complain, point to some misplaced metaphor or something.

Of course, if a student comes to you asking to “late add” a class, jump on that immediately. Explain that “to be fair” you cannot reteach all the materials that everyone else learned in, well, the class. So, the late student will need to acquire the information some other way. They will need to take any missed exams the day they add the class. They will also lose attendance points for all courses missed since the add/drop period ended. These types of students are almost always disorganized and entitled, but desperate, so will agree to whatever you tell them. Sometimes the “late add” students are struggling financially. That’s a different story. That means they will not be entitled, probably won’t be disorganized, and will be extraordinarily desperate. Students who don’t have their bursar bills settled fully by the beginning of the semester are usually prevented from registering for classes. Those unable to access the cash to eliminate this delay will find themselves reduced to begging professors to let them into classes late. They know that losing an entire semester might disrupt the financial aid upon which they rely and spell the end of their college career. I’ve sat with students as they cried in these situations.

Desperate poor people are accustomed to baring the brunt of life’s indignities. Most will be grateful when you tell them that the highest grade they can hope to receive is a C. With tuition costs rising and employers increasingly demanding degrees, these desperate kids – ripe for exploitation --- rain like manna from heaven for the lecturer seeking promotions. They are nice, too, for the lecturers who are, themselves, desperately poor and hoping that lowering their GPAs might help them pay down their own student loan dept. It’s a vicious cycle in which quite a few of the victims are desperate and poor. What could be better?! Nobody will even notice, let alone care.

Finally, Under NO uncertain circumstance should you accept an honors student into your class. Sure, some will sneak in with early enrollment, but NEVER agree to do honors options (this is often dissuasion enough) and never ever late add one of them. They are very bad for your GPA.

Where Did the Good Go?

Does that should like an awful existence? It does to me. I wouldn’t feel like an “educator”, rooted in “educo”, which means "to draw out from within." As scholars have articulated since Hippocrates modeled the oath that still bears his name and James Agee penned Let us Now Praise Famous Men, a fundamental goal of human compassion is the eschewing of causing harm to other people. Agee uses the argument as a peon against suicide – you may be free from worry when it’s over, but those who loved you will suffer agonizingly.

Essentially, even if you can’t do anything grand to really help other people, at least you can try not to hurt them.

Under my “bad grade” plane, I’d spend most of my time shattering my students’ dreams, making sure that they never want to write or do history again (since they are not good at it), and making them feel distressed about the advisability of taking out those student loans. That’s not good for them, but it’s even worse for me.

I’ve always considered teaching a calling and a sincere way to help students develop the confidence to try new things, hone their skills (especially in areas where they already have budding talent) and learn about some key ideas and trends in history and rhetoric so that when they graduate, they will have been educated.

If I’d wanted to earn my live scamming people, alerting them to the fact that they might be stupid, or crushing their hopes, I would have become an acquisitions editor at a major academic press. I would be a litigator, a wolf of Wall street, or someone who at least got paid exorbitant amounts of money. If being a lecturer isn’t even a low-pressure job where they pay, though low for the yearly salary of most people with terminal degrees, is still generous in terms of the ratio between the actual hours spent working and the compensation, and it's not worthwhile in terms of helping others or -- at least -- not hurting them....I mean if it's not even pleasant anymore, what's the point???

I doubt I’d last too long under my cold and calculating regime to put the students through “survival of the fittest” and “weed out the week”. Most likely, I’d try for a year or so then go on leave and CORBRA my insurance. Rumor has it that I might have enough money to live out the rest of my life. So, I’d start spending my free time poking around to see if could find any viable or nuisance lawsuits to bring against the university and essentially win the litigation lottery (our school almost always pays out rather than go to court). If that didn’t pan out, I could finally really get going on the academic satire novel I’ve been working on inside my head. Also, I would rescue cats. The basic goodness in saving cats is clear and obvious.

Making sure that students have a positive, learning experience in class is good not just for them, or even just for me, but for the University. During a recent alumni event, I was able to have a good conversation with an alumnus who donates to the College and sponsors an exchange trip with China. He couldn’t get enough of telling me the story about a German professor (I knew the professor’s daughter!) who, upon hearing that this future alum only needed one more class to graduate, give him a spur of the moment opportunity for verbal extra credit and changed his failing grade to passing. This had to have been forty years ago and the Alum remembers it like yesterday. He visits the university multiple times a year since he likes to be involved in the many projects that now bear his name and the international exchange programs in which he, high level administrators, and senior faculty who travel to Asia to foster trans-pacific ties. As we walked down the hallway near my office, he asked me if this was where the “real professors’” offices were. I started changing the subject, but he tried once more to explain that he’d been told how many of the current “professors” are not really professors, “just part-timers and grunt workers, some of them don’t even have PhDs”. Inside my head I thought, “yes, they don’t have the freedom to assign their own grades to their own students either….’they’ are screwed.”