Adam Mastroianni writes an interesting article that nicely examines two aspects of what we do as university teachers. It is a distinction that I aim to always keep in mind when determining if particular educational practice is ‘effective’ or not. These two aspects are:
Actually teaching our students something, preferably in a way they will actually remember it (what Mastroianni calls instruction).
Marking our students in order to provide a signal of their ability (what Mastroianni calls ‘point-guarding’).
Before analysing some of the points in more detail, a word on the story he colourfully tells at the beginning of his article where he is being told explicit details of his student’s lives because they are hoping for extensions on their work or are explaining absences. I have experienced three different regimes around applications for extensions and deferrals.
Each academic makes their own decisions (which seems to be the case for Mastroianni).
All students requests are assessed by panel of academics (and I have sat on such a panel).
All student requests are assessed by specialist administrative staff.
The benefits of the second and third are consistency of rules for students. I prefer the third, but then I would say that as it means no work for me! Even without this I think it is probably the best system if for no other reason than the time of the academic staff will normally be more expensive than the time of the administrative specialist. So to Adam Mastroianni I say, lobby your Dean to take these decisions off you and give to a specialist admin team!
Mastroianni draws attention to the clash between instruction and assessment. Arguing that the job of educating students is done less effectively when the need to assess them is present. Both student and staff time is used on the assessment, and the content of a course must be designed in a way that allows for accurate assessment, which can limit the range of what can be taught.
I think most academics would agree with this in some contexts, and could cite specific examples where they believe they could have run their course more effectively if they had free-reign over the type and timing of assessment (or whether to do it at all). The empirical evidence on this issue is mixed, the dominant hypothesis in literature on testing frequency is that more testing is in fact a positive. Evidence does not always support this, with an RCT in Uruguay finding little significant effect, and other studies finding a distinct positive effect. It is hard to find evidence for a distinct negative effect of assessment, though all the studies cited are tests of different assessment methods not a test of assessment versus no assessment, which is the heart of Mastroianni’s point.
Because of this perceived clash between education quality and the need to assess, Mastroianni goes on to analyse why we need to assess in the first place:
Grades are for motivating students.
Mastroianni is correct that topics that can be exciting, are often made boring. Though making things exciting need not be specific objective of teaching, it can certainly help, and simply having a fun time is a worthy objective in itself, even if learning is not improved. He also argues that students who are bored should simply pick something else to learn.
However this neglects that many students will be there because of the desire to acquire the grades so they can signal their ability. A large element, if not the main element, of what we are doing as university academics (as well as teachers at other levels) is telling others which of our students are better than the others1.
It seems unfair to castigate students for lack of enthusiasm when they have to a large extent been effectively compelled to be there by the dynamics of the labour market. Some students are motivated by grades for a good reason, and we would be wrong to discredit their motive.
Grades are for giving feedback.
Here Mastroianni argues that you can give feedback without giving a grade, and that the grade can in fact detract from the feedback. For some that might be the case, but not for everyone, and a grade can help focus the mind on how far away you are from excellence (or whatever level it is you are aiming for). The feedback you give on a piece of work scoring 68% versus one scoring 62% will likely not be too different, but the difference in the mark can help focus your mind on the degree of improvement needed to get to the next level in a way that I found useful when I was a student, and at least some evidence suggests others do too.
Grades are for separating good students from bad.
Mastroianni is dismissive of the need to do this, he just wants to educate people. This may seem idealistic but as I argued already, this is unfair on students who want to be evaluated. Providing grades is a significant element of why people want to come to university in the first place, and we should aim to do this effectively.
In the final section Mastroianni acknowledges that businesses and others are interested in ranking people, so there is value in this. His framing is one-sided as he emphasises the value to the employers of knowing who the best people are, but not the value to the students who can show they are better than others, resulting in better jobs for them.
His key policy suggestion echoes my very first point on giving specialists the function of evaluating requests for extensions, he wants to separate the function of teaching from that of evaluation.
I like this idea, but in a university setting I do not think it can work for two reasons.
The material is very highly specialised in many cases. To design and implement a good assessment requires a deep knowledge of the material and in many cases at the upper level of university education there simply won’t be people with the skills available to be a specialised assessor. Only the person teaching the course could do this.
Related to this is that university academics prize the uniqueness of their courses. Whilst they may have a lot of similarities, no two university courses on a similar topic, are exactly alike. Separation of teaching from assessment works best when there are returns to scale, and this happens when many different institutions are teaching the same curriculum that has a shared assessment across them. This would be fundamentally challenging in universities and would directly contradict Mastroianni’s point about trying to make teaching better. In this world teaching would be stifled as you would need to teach a strictly regulated curriculum that fits to a standardised assessment.
One way out of this quandary, might be the use of technology, specifically AI generated assessments, marking and feedback. We are not there yet, but maybe we will be someday soon.
In summary, there is some room for separation of functions, especially the administrative judgement on students being ill etc. But it is wrong to think that the ranking we do is without value, there are certainly problems with the way this system works, but given that it exists we need to acknowledge that students are paying us in large part to provide this ranking, and most of the time we are the ones who can do this best, even if we sometimes find it distasteful.
Read ‘The Case against Education’ by Bryan Caplan for lots of detail on this argument: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691196459/the-case-against-education