At Benedict College, a historically black institution in South Carolina, faculty are required to follow a "Success Equals Effort" grading policy that prevents students who try hard--or, more precisely, who can convince their teachers that they try hard--from failing courses whose content they have not mastered. Mastery of content only accounts for 40 percent of freshman grades; "effort"--which cannot be measured, or even remotely accurately estimated in the absence of surveillance cameras documenting how many hours each student studies--accounts for 60 percent. The proportion shifts to 50-50 in students' sophomore year, and the effort grade is dropped entirely for juniors and seniors. The idea is to boost the confidence of freshmen, many of whom arrive at the noncompetitive college without the skills they need to do college-level work, and thereby to keep students who might otherwise drop out enrolled. In practice, the policy ensures that students doing solidly failing work will still pass courses. Essentially, "Success Equals Effort" is social promotion for college students.

Not all Benedict College faculty are convinced that a transparently nanny-esque grading policy more centered on retention than honesty is a good thing. Two untenured science professors were recently fired for insubordination after calculating spring grades solely on academic performance. The AAUP is investigating the matter--but Benedict College's president is on the record as saying he does not care. Perhaps he should, though: According to this editorial in South Carolina's newspaper, The State, Benedict College is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which requires its members to award credits based on "learning outcomes," not effort.

Thanks to Sharon Gaskin for the link.

Does no one at the college even comprehend what kind of harm this does? Good luck to the students in finding jobs where the employer cares about effort rather than results.

I can't think of a better policy to devalue a diploma, nor to ensure a dearth of quality student applicants.

The sad part is that this had to have been widely discussed in the administration. Are they all incompetent? Or merely yes-men?

I could easily see a grading proposal like this being floated in any English Department at a marginal institution and vociferously defended as the only moral, progressive, enlightened thing to do. Anyone who disagrees is a vicious, racist, baby-eating elitist who probably voted for Bush. Administration--desperate for more tuition dollars--would rubber-stamp the plan and claim the moral high ground if they thought effort-grades would improve retention and boost revenue in the short run.

Though the case at Benedict exemplifies social promotion run amok, to me it is more honest than the de facto social promotion in many colleges and universities.

For example, in my graduate years at Chicago I witnessed several cases of success by "successful examination" wherein the bar was set low enough so that there were no failures. Granted, effort per se was not rewarded, but neither was mastery of the material. In the cases where certain professors were gauche enough to award a smattering of low C's, D's and F's they were met with student hostility and intervention from the Office of the Dean. I do not think that Chicago is unique in this regard (and it probably has more stringent requirements than the vast majority of schools!). My friends at other elite schools have given similar anecdotal evidence.

Further evidence of de facto social promotion may be seen in the ridiculously high average grades at the better schools. Officials at Harvard often say that they admit the best students so it is no surprise that they (all?) do superior work (compared to whom?). If this were indeed the case, I would question the value of the Harvard education.......it seems that the acceptance letter would be enough to confirm one's success! ((Wink)). What does it take to fail at Harvard? The mere lack of effort, I suspect.

I do not mean to pick on Harvard, but it is a case with which many are familiar and on which there is ample evidence.

Here is another example re de facto social promotion at Chicago (please forgive me, for it is an anecdote):

A good friend of mine in the College took an advanced programming course that he needed in order to graduate. Over the course of the quarter he repeatedly told me that he was going to fail since he knew NOTHING about programming. He worked very, very hard on the material for this class and still failed the midterm. Following his final exam, he told me that he was certain that he failed........and his distance from the mean score justified his assumption. However, all told, my friend received--to his great surprise--a perfect A in the class. He suspects that his frequent use of the prof's office hours and his demonstrated effort won him that golden grade.

NOTE TO EMPLOYERS: my good friend is a writer and concentrated in English, so you need not worry that he will pass his programming skills off as legit.

Here's the obvious solution to the Benedict problem:

Grade on academic results, and, at their commencement ceremony, stick one of those little gold stars on the foreheads of those who "tried hard."

Those who flunked out can receive their gold stars by first-class mail.

I'm surprised no one else thought of this. Why is it up to me to solve all the thorny problems?

is this really very different from having "class participation" count for any significant portion of a course grade?

"I could easily see a grading proposal like this being floated in any English Department..."

Actually, no.

As harsh as it is, in retrospect there's something to be said for the practice of most law school exams, i.e., blind grading on a fixed curve.

I'm afraid that even surveillance cameras would not solve the effort-measurement problem. What is needed is computer chip brain implants.

Couldn't high levels of effort-making brain activity substitute for -- and be corelated with -- traditional grades as a measure of "learning outcomes"?

In general, the higher the level of a job, the more the person is judged on results rather than effort. The cashier is paid entirely by how many hours he puts in. The store manager is paid a salary plus a bonus based on sales. The owner is compensated entirely based on profit.

So: by taking this position, which category of position is this institution qualifying their students for?

Eric asked what it takes to fail at Harvard. As a recent Harvard grad, I can answer that one: a whole heck of a lot...in some classes. In general, as one might suspect, the science and mathematics departments are less willing to fall over backwards to pass 99 percent of their students. I once worked very hard and achieved a B in a statistics class, and my TF made no attempt to grade me on the basis of how frequently I attended her office hours. My grades in classes in my humanities major were awarded through some sort of combination of participation, academic merit, and perception of effort. The classes in Harvard's infamous Core program were almost entirely based on effort--how well you got to know your TF. If your TF thought that you were mastering the material with a little too much ease, they were likely to punish you with a B+. Grades were almost entirely based on how well your personality "meshed" with that of your TF, and a large part of that had to do with perception of effort.

A pretty bleak picture, I have to say. On the other hand, I encountered very tough, honest, critical judges, too...but they were few and far between.

Here's an interesting column on grade inflation and TAs at Harvard, written by an insider:

http://chronicle.com/jobs/2001/12/2001121301c.htm

BTW, I've seen effort-based grading defended in one English department by a popular professor who routinely gives As to all of his students who are, not surprisingly, going into education.

In 2001, 91% of Harvard's graduating class graduated with honors. This made headlines, and prompted Harvard to revise--or, more cynically, to seem to revise--its grading policies. I wrote about it here.

Re the Harvard story...I wonder how many managers who are hiring Harvard grads are aware of all this.

Someone should produce a user's guide to colleges for the benefit of those who are doing hiring, so that they can make appropriate judgments about what a degree from one of these places really means.

David, I'm sure few employers know and even fewer would care. Call me cynical having grown up around Harvard and even attended a summer school class there, but at least at the undergrad level, it's has been coasting on its name for decades if not (literally) centuries. That's not to say it's a bad school by any means--any school could probably do great work with an endowment larger than the GDP of many countries--just that the mystique, hype and cache are totally unwarranted, and orders of magnitude beyond what it actually is.

The people most likely to know of Harvard's undergrad grading situation are the admissions committees of its own graduate schools. I have no idea whether it matters to them, but my unfounded hunch is that the softer the discipline in question, the closer the Harvard name alone becomes to being an automatic in.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the old saying about "the soft bigotry of low expectations" before now.

I have to wonder about the student at Benedict who takes, say, a foreign language class (because it's required) when s/he already has proficiency in that language. (Note I use this as an example only; some schools don't allow students to test out of already-mastered requirements.)

Now, the student need put forth no effort to master the material -- s/he scores 100% on objective or subjective measures of mastery of the material.

That student, by definition, attains a 40% score in the class -- FAILING -- by virtue of not needing to put forth effort?

?????

The point about accreditation in the newspaper editorial is very astute. This is indeed a perfect test case for finding out whether the regional accrediting bodies are as complete a joke as many of us assume.

David J....I've hired hundreds of people, directly and indirectly, and I certainly care. And I think anyone who hires based primarily on school attended, without digging further, is a fool.

English departments may be the least rigorous, but ethnic and gender studies departments are close behind, followed by education departments. Not only at Harvard, but at just about any university. You simply expect persons with those degrees to be social promotions.

In a time long ago, I graduated from VPI(Blacksburg, VA). My question to Shannon (posted 25 Aug @ 11:06 pm)is :What's a TF? Believe it or not, we only had one instructor(my preferred term) or professor per class and we didn't call them a TF or a TA(I assume 'teaching assistant')though there may have been at least one BS artist in there. Hadn't heard of social or effort promotions at that time(I once had an 18 yr old in my 8th grade class - I don't remember whether he passed or not).And,Yes,it was uphill both ways and WE LIKED IT LIKE THAT!!

Wow, this makes me want to go to a Doctor that graduated from this college. Maybe he has no fucking clue how to do surgery, but hey, at least he attended classes, so I'll let him do my triple-bypass.