Event: How Should the United States Act Towards Iran?

On March 20, 2014, Dr. Michael Rubin from the America Enterprise Institute will debate the question, How Should the United States Act Towards Iran?, with Dr. Rene Paddags from the department of history & political science. The event will take place at 7:00pm in the Ashbrook Center.

As You Like It

Last semester some faculty and students went to see Shakespeare's play Richard III at the Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland. It was such a good performance that we thought we'd try it again this semester. This time around the play is Shakespeare's As You Like It.  We have reserved tickets on Saturday, April 12, at 1:30 PM.  There is also a half hour pre-play talk at 12:30 we can attend if we want to.

Students who want to go must contact Dr. Edith Foster by next Thursday (March 20) with $13 for their tickets; professors should do the same, but their cost is $20 per ticket. 

The deadline is firm, since Dr. Foster will have to confirm and pay for the tickets on the 21st.

Learning Italian in Florence

Jackie Horn (History & Political Science, 2015) and John Case (History & Political Science, 2015) are studying Italian this semester in Florence, Italy. It is all Italian all the time in a small class made up of three Guatemalans, four Americans, a Colombian, and four Catholic priests, one from India and the others from the Philippines. They say their teachers are great and that they are learning a lot of Italian as well as a lot about countries other than Italy from their classmates.

John, learning at the feet of the dark lord.

In case you haven't had a chance to visit Florence, the sculpture below is the "Rape of the Sabine Women" by the Renaissance artist, Giambologna (the sculpture in the right background, also by Giambologna, is called "Hercules Fighting the Centaur Nessus").

"A" is the New Average?

In "Where A Is Ordinary: The Evolution of American College and University Grading, 1940–2009," Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, examine data on the awarding of A–F letter grades at over 200 four-year colleges and universities over the past 70 years. The findings:

Contemporary data indicate that, on average across a wide range of schools, A’s represent 43% of all letter grades, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. D’s and F’s total typically less than 10% of all letter grades. Private colleges and universities give, on average, significantly more A’s and B’s combined than public institutions with equal student selectivity. Southern schools grade more harshly than those in other regions, and science and engineering-focused schools grade more stringently than those emphasizing the liberal arts. At schools with modest selectivity, grading is as generous as it was in the mid-1980s at highly selective schools. These prestigious schools have, in turn, continued to ramp up their grades. It is likely that at many selective and highly selective schools, undergraduate GPAs are now so saturated at the high end that they have little use as a motivator of students and as an evaluation tool for graduate and professional schools and employers.

The authors conclude that "A has become the most common grade on American college campuses. Without regulation, or at least strong grading guidelines, grades at American institutions of higher learning likely will continue to have less and less meaning."

Figure 1, "Distribution of grades at American colleges and universities as a function of time," gives a nice overview of what has happened:

The number of Bs, Ds, and Fs have changed a little, but are generally in the same range. The number of Cs awarded, on the other hand, dropped as dramatically as the number of As awarded rose.  Many students who used to get Cs must now be getting As.

One big question is what caused this change? The article discusses various possibilities at some length and concludes, humiliatingly for us professors, that we have lowered our standards. If that is true, the question of grade inflation  may be tied to the assessment regime we all now live under and mostly loathe.  Lower standards would of course mean that students will learn less, and the fact that so many students are being graduated without the skills employers need is an important driver of assessment.

Job Fair in Worthington Ohio

Now That's Accent on the Individual!

In a time when there are tremendous pressures on all sides for financial efficiencies, it is uplifting to hear that the idea of liberal education is still alive here and there:  

Sarah Lawrence prides itself on individualized education. Ninety percent of courses are seminars (maximum enrollment of 15), and if that's not personal enough, each seminar is built around biweekly one-on-one "conferences" at which each student in the course meets privately with the instructor to discuss progress, develop projects and so forth. Faculty members don't offer just grades, but a narrative evaluation for each student in each course.

This is from a story about how Sarah Lawrence College is developing a unique approach to student learning assessment. The approach is built on the premise that “It’s impossible for standardize testing to actually evaluate the real dynamic intelligence of students."  Some interesting ideas here at Insidehighered.com.

Is a Focus on Academics the Answer?

How about this for an idea - emphasize academic quality by hiring more full time faculty and shrinking administration? That is what Iowa State University has done, apparently successfully:

After all, it turns out that focusing on academics helps student retention more than climbing walls, anyway. That’s the good news out of Iowa State University, which, according to the report by the Delta Costs Project at the American Institutes for Research, is the only—only—institution of higher learning in the entire country to spend the last eight years hiring full-time faculty and shrinking its administration. ISU President Steven Leath explained to the Des Moines Register that ISU wanted to "run a very lean operation and put as much into direct support of students and faculty” as possible.... 

Here is the whole story in Slate.