Students Should Assign Their Own Grades
Spectrum Street Epistemology with Warren Smith
Should students be able to assign their own grades? Warren Smith joins me to discuss this question SSE style!
Would self-assigned grades motivate students to engage their education more deeply or could this contribute to grade inflation and further undermine academic standards?
There is a deeper significance to this question: With college enrollment in the U.S. plummeting, is the public becoming increasingly aware that universities are neglecting the importance of intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and the search for truth? Has the unbridled self-esteem movement put feeling good about oneself ahead of merit, hard work, and objective standards?
Thanks to Warren and the students for an honest exploration of this question.
The drop in college enrollment has nothing to do with intrinsic motivation and everything to do with the fact that from the late 1960s on, college has been nothing but a vehicle for leftist indoctrination of students. The fact that liberal arts degrees are worthless on their face has led to the unemployability of liberal arts students. A second factor is the war the feminist secondary teaching cadre has been carrying out against male students for over a quarter of a century. Read Christina Hoff-Sommers on
The War Against Boys. I had to raise a bright, gifted and talented son in that system and witnessed first hand what the feminists teachers did to undercut his self-esteem and academic performance. Grades have nothing to do with any of this. Work has to be graded if progress is to be made. And just as no one can trust today's students not to cheat, in the same way they cannot be trusted to assign their own grades. Standards must be imposed from the outside, and it is outside judgment that must determine whether these have been met or not.
I think it's a bad idea. Everytime we make an exception for verifying the merit of a student, we get closer to a non-merit based society. Most students neither have the maturity, the experience or the perspective (not to mention the skills) to assess themselves. That's why they're students.