Originally Posted: September 10, 2019
Jo Guldi learns a lesson from students who embrace the challenge of high academic standards.
At midterm, half of the class was failing. I had encouraged everyone to come to my office hours, and so they did, flooding in to ask questions and complain. At least one of my student visitors presented outrage at the way he had been treated and said he wanted me to account for the grades.
The particular subject of his outrage was my standard of clear, well-supported, written argumentation. “We’re supposed to be learning about history, not about writing,” complained my student. I was taken aback. I briefly considered wrangling with his assumption that historical understanding and clear writing could be divorced, based on the commonly held belief that one can understand a subject without being able to communicate about it clearly. But given my student’s impatience, I took a more pragmatic attack. After all, I teach in a university where the vast majority of applicants declare an intended business major before they even arrive.
“I want my students to be able to compose an email to a CEO, a senator or a newspaper,” I explained. “Clear writing is a capability that will serve you well, whatever your occupation or calling, and therefore maintaining a high standard of writing is a service that this class provides to all its graduates.”
Watching his face as I spoke, I could tell that something was resonating. It was as if he were pondering, for the first time, a future in which the rigors of well-punctuated, clearly supported statements in chronological order could persuade CEO’s and presidents of his reasoning about some crisis. His manner changed, and his body relaxed a little. I offered my attention on his paper, and we walked through his interests, sources and strategies together. After an hour of working together, I pointed him to the college’s writing tutors and librarians as resources to help him build on our work.
I have never been a professor who lowers expectations for her students. Rather, I enforce high expectations about relatively old-fashioned standards, such as those involving written communication.
Because clear writing — including justifying one’s claims through detailed fact and citation of scholarly sources — is an essential component of organizing one’s ideas about the past, I grade the first short assignments of any class harshly. I subtract 10 to 20 percent of each grade for failure to conform to departmental standards of footnotes, citation and research, and another 10 to 20 percent for failure to conform to college standards of spelling, punctuation and grammar. My standards mean that — not even considering their ideas about history — many students in my class find 40 percent of their grade deducted.
Not everyone takes these deductions in stride, and I have made a point of compensating for student alienation by preaching regularly about how the grades in my class are structured to reward improvement. As soon as I see a hint of curiosity about a specific idea, or an encounter with a historical question, I lavish encouragement and appreciation upon them — reminding them of how their new talents will help them draw into their grasps whatever ambitions they entertain for their future.
A few failing grades on early assignments teach a lesson, and by the end of the semester, usually there is overall improvement. Students who have produced lackluster work at the beginning often delivered excellent final papers of which we could both be proud, and many have thanked me for the exacting attention they received. But with the larger, general curriculum course that I taught last semester, the tactic backfired. My high standards were provoking mutiny.
Although I was prepared to put up a fight for tougher standards with my students, I wasn’t ready for half the class to fail. I tried to rationalize what was happening: declining standards of writing that other professors had warned me about, for example, or a classroom filled with non-humanities majors there simply to satisfy university-wide requirements. Faced with harsh grades, I expected many of them to drop my class.
I asked colleagues for guidance: Should I assign less work in the future? Was there a collective standard to which I needed to align myself? I began to cross-examine my teaching strategy. READ MORE