A+ for everyone!
Denis Rancourt has been in the news a fair bit lately. He’s even been made the editorials, being the subject of a scathing New York Times op-ed.
On the surface, it seems the U of Ottawa physics professor wanted to shake up the teaching methods by announcing at the start of a recent term, that everyone would get A+’s. Peering more deeply, he seems fiercely determined to rouse students into activism against oppression — a positive thing, surely — but at the expense of teaching what he has been contracted to do.
He even called out Noam Chomsky (!) as a “non-activist intellectual” who “serves to deepen the pathological pacificism of neutralized mainstream movements“. Mind you, Noam Chomsky never converted a linguistics course into “Introduction to Activism” as Professor Rancourt has apparently done.
The situation brought Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to mind, because in the book, Phaedrus announced to his technical writing class that he would withhold their grades throughout the term. The effect was that the students became self-motivated to learn, as they were no longer able to ‘outsource’ the gauging of their understanding of the material, to the teacher.
At the end of the term, Phaedrus asked the students to write an essay supporting or opposing the new system. A-students generally preferred the system while middling students were split, and poor students unanimously opposed it.
Phaedrus concludes that the better students were interested in the knowledge and so didn’t care much about the grades. Since his system enticed them to learn, they supported it. The worse students weren’t interested in the knowledge, though; they wanted grades to tell them whether they were putting in enough time to just get by at their desired level. Without that feedback, they were required to invest the time to develop the confidence they understood the material, or risk failing.
It doesn’t seem like Rancourt’s situation is the same as Phaedrus’, and based on the information I’ve read I’d probably side with the university. However, I think there’s tremendous merit to the idea of reforming the grading system — if it was simply a matter of him handing out A+’s, I’d almost certainly be on his side.