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Kingreaper comments on Defeating Ugh Fields In Practice - Less Wrong
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This reminds me of a thought I had before:
University costs thousands. Imagine that you received, along with your exam marks, $1 per % for your average grade.
It's meaningless, really, compared to the value of the degree, but... it feels like you're getting something real for that work. You're directly receiving money, rather than earning the chance to earn it in the future.
Someone I know actually started a business around this idea:
http://www.ultrinsic.com/
Hell, you could even use this as a replacement for merit-based partial subsidies (though not for fully free education). Everybody pays 1000 at the beginning of the academic year, then over time they 'earn' back a percentage proportional to their grades, eg. 60% or so for a straight-A student.
The one truly massive drawback to this is it would strongly encourage students of little means to pursue courses of study populated by easy graders. It's my experience that more practical courses of study, like Accounting, Engineering, and hard sciences tend to be much harder to succeed in than, say, Art History or English Literature. So, while a good idea, this may nudge students towards academic tracks with lower expected earnings attached to them.
Reward grades more and students will respond. The fact that we are so worried about small amounts of money causing large distortions in behavior is a sign of how powerful we expect this incentive to be. If maximizing your grades is not a good way to learn then that is a sign we need to be evaluating students on a different metric, presumably one that rewards difficulty.
It is indeed a problem, but it will be present any time you want to offer any type of incentive towards good academic performance. The proper solution is to tighten grading standards in humanities, not to take it as a given and drop the idea of merit-based incentives altogether. Or you could establish different subsidy rates for each department, but 1) it's an inelegant hack and 2) it's a political minefield.
(Somewhat related: a little over a year ago I was looking at applying for studying at the Université du Québec. It turned out that, for the purpose of converting the grades one gets during a bachelor's degree from an Italian university, they actually had separate tables depending on your course of studies. Had I been a philosophy or literature student, only my straight 30/30s would have been turned into As; as a math student, 27/30 and above would have sufficed.)
Declare that across the board all subjects must rate student performance on a bell curve.
The downside would be that some subjects have students that are just all round better. This is solved in the Victorian (Australian state) high school grading system which scales subjects based on statistical inferences that can drawn systematically from relative student performances across their various subjects (if all students who get medium grades in Specialist Mathematics get top grades in English it is probably hard...)
It's not a bad system, but it runs into two problems inversely proportional to the size of the classroom. First, it's very easy for students to start exercising social pressure against excellent performance, which "ruins" everybody else's grades; I've witnessed this happening first-hand, when one teacher at my high school decided to try this method. Secondly, statistical anomalies will happen where almost all students are diligent (or negligent), and it would be scandalous to have to fail a previously-determined percentage of them.
If I had to choose a strategy in the few minutes I'm dedicating to writing this post, I'd go for setting objectively measurable standards, which by necessity will come down to memorising a ton of works and notions. It's by no means an efficient educational supplement (and will be ready for a reform in a couple decades or so), but my anecdotal experience with humanities student suggests that what they are in most need of is some push towards competitiveness. Not all top-quality fiction writers, literary critics, and assorted essayists need be obsessed book-devourers, but a large majority of them will be. Plus, if they find this hypothetical academic neo-sciolism stifling, autodidacticism is a much more viable career option for them than for technical, business, and to some degree science students.
This is definitely something that you should not do within one classroom. Within one course is the absolute minimum I would want to accept.
Erk. I don't disbelieve your claims but the very thought seems so bizarre to me. In the hard sciences you get to go do exams that are worth about 90% of the mark, mostly objective and based on some rules from nature that are fairly easy to grasp. The alternative is trying to learn an endless stream of teacher's passwords!
I think it's just a human trait: we find it much easier to punish wrongness than not-very-rightness. On a math test, almost every answer you could give to a question is wrong. On an English Literature test, virtually any interpretation of the text is a right answer, provided you can back it up in some way, so even if your answer is flawed, it's easy to avoid saying anything obviously wrong. Furthermore, I think the culture of grading in the two differs greatly - the type of personality who is drawn to be a professor of creative writing is rather different than that of one who becomes a professor of electrical engineering, and I suspect the first is far less inclined to fail or treat people harshly.
Now that is an interesting consideration. You could well be right in general. But my anticipation of personal experience is of getting treated more harshly from a professor of creative writing than of engineering. This is because I can far more easily elicit the desired behavior from the engineering professor. That is, the desired behavior of giving me top marks and interfering too much with my education. If all goes well I may even be able to avoid him learning my name.
With a professor in something less objective I expect harsh marking for not optimally conforming to the (possibly flawed) positions that I was supposed to have guessed in the assessments. I am also more at risk of harsh treatment for political reasons. Given that their way of thinking is less like mine I am less able to predict what sort of things will piss them off and so provoke grudges more easily. I may say something that seems obvious to me but incidentally undermines something they care about. Once that happens I am not all that talented at making bitchy people not be hostile. My instinct is to avoid situations where I am potentially vulnerable to capricious whims.
(Yes, my personal anticipation is different than that of most people!)
That has less to do with professors' personalities than with the nature of their teaching.
An engineering professor may very well be a fanatical Nazist who would gladly fail any students he discovered harbouring pro-democracy views, but he's not going to discover them unless you wear a political t-shirt while handing over your home assignments. If he taught History of contemporary literature, however, the issue would be all but guaranteed to emerge.
Not that conflicts over personal views are limited to the humanities, of course. Imagine if Andrew Tanenbaum had been teaching at Helsinki in the early 90s...
That reminds me of the biology teacher who, when asked to write letters of recommendation, demanded that his students swear allegiance to evolution. A student sued in 2003. Some time between February and April, he added a little disclaimer. That form remains today. Of course, this was only for letters, not grades, and it was all put forward in writing ahead of time.
The nature of their teaching matters but I place specific emphasis on the professor's personalities:
The effect of personality is real. And I am not merely talking hypothetically here. It can bite me in the arse if I'm not careful. It is all too easy to overestimate how similar people are to ourselves and doing so comes at great price.
I may be biased on this issue, based on personal experience. But it seems to me that someone teaching English Literature is unlikely to be inclined to fail you, or even give you a low mark, if you're at least making a concerted effort. The idea that professors fail you for ideological differences is conceivable, and probably more prominent at lower-quality institutions. I've disagreed very strongly with professor's views before without it harming my grade, so long as able to state the grounds articulately. If you do have a professor with a clear bent, it's usually pretty easy to figure out what they want to hear and thus easy to get a good grade. I just think that because it's so much easier to be clearly wrong in harder subject matter, it's more tempting for professors to set a higher bar for a good grade. People who teach softer subjects are simply less concerned about right and wrong, and thus less inclined to punish people who make any kind of effort.
I can envision someone from LW writing a humanities paper that unintentionally raises red flags, leading to either a poor grade or an ugly disciplinary action, while it's hard to think of how that would happen in a quantitative course (except for in personal interactions with other students, but that's a danger either way.)
That sort of disaster is quite unlikely, but not entirely negligible. However, I tend to think the benefits of a humanities course in a topic of interest can vastly outweigh this sort of concern.
I did rather poorly in an ethics class because I realized moral relativism was rather obviously right and any form of realism logically indefensible (without an axiom - if you admit you have an unprovable assumption underlying your moral framework, then it's morally real-ish, but it isn't totally objectively correct, because of that assumption). There is also a real risk of relying on concepts that the reader is not familiar with, but that's usually pretty easy to screen, especially if you have a friend to read a draft.
The thing is, when I say, "rather poorly," I mean a B (possibly +), and this was at a top public university. In a math class (having not taken math in five years), I realized shortly before an exam that I had been taking derivatives when I should have been integrating. This would have had a rather more pronounced effect on my grade had I not caught it.
I suspect you underestimate how well developed these guessing skills become in high school. From my experience, students become very good at turning a sentence of content into a paragraph of gibberish.
I'm surprised by your reaction. I didn't expect you to be ignorant of the fact of the grade percentages in different fields and what students find difficult. The situation may be different in Australia, but your reaction seems to be total ignorance of the median.
I'm told that there's an easy algorithm, maybe not for majoring in English, but for the small amount that's required of all american students: ask the other students. (this may not be fast enough for discussion, but it works for essays)
Don't confuse ignorance and self expression.
I like this idea too, but I suspect it would be quickly hijacked - it's easier to bug your instructor until she lets you have a better grade than to study. Ask most "tough graders" how their student reviews compare to "easy graders."
I always hated those assessments that weren't marked anonymously!
That is a really, really good idea. And I don't think I'm just saying that because I'm biased.
Why would you?
Systems which provide financial privileges based on merit can be expected to appeal to those who consider themselves to have an abundance of merit. (And, naturally, any who dare speak out against such systems can expected to be considered to be doing so because they lack such confidence.)