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JustinChungFirstPaper 4 - 17 Aug 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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*note- I couldn't figure out what I wanted to say with my previous topic, so this is something completely different. | | | The steps needed to fulfill the second goal are clearer and easier/more likely to be taken than those for the first. An immediate drastic overhaul is neither necessary nor realistic. While the curve and letter grades seem firmly entrenched, there are other possibilities for loosening the restraints. Smaller changes like having half your grade be determined from assignments given over the course of the semester or requiring that some group work be a part of the evaluation are already in place in some courses/clinics available through the school and are generally praised as being conducive to learning. It would not be too much of a stretch to apply these changes to larger survey-type courses. Baby steps like these need not even be implemented across the school and would send the message that both the students and the faculty are at least thinking about ways to enhance the system.
The first problem is more complicated and would seem to require a more fundamental shift in approach by both teachers and students. It would take acknowledgement from both that the relationship should extend beyond the current class and subject matter and that success could likely only be recognized a few years down the road. An evaluation system that looked at the future career satisfaction could provide good information, but would be difficult to make work. Ideally, recognition and discussion of the issue would lead to changes without the addition of any major carrots or sticks. | |
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> | * Veblen didn't help here. Your points are straightforward
and not very interesting, even to you, but trying to dress them
up as though they came from The Theory of the Leisure Class
doesn't help. If you are interested in what Thorstein Veblen
thought about these issues, you might want to look at his book
The Higher Learning in America (1919).
- So far as your argument here is concerned, you have married a statement that is true (whatever teaching effectiveness is, teaching effectiveness is not the primary objective of Columbia's law professors), with the unactionable proposition that it should be different, and the practical claim that "the grading curve and the anonymity requirement completely detach individual growth and response to teacher input from the evaluation process," which is false. Taken together, the result of the analysis is a few petty suggestions that you don't even suppose could be uniformly implemented. It doesn't come to much.
- Getting the details realistically right perhaps doesn't matter. Anonymous grading is a fiction here, because once it is announced that class participation counts, teachers can and must review the roster before grades are released. So it's not the so-called "anonymity" that produces the decoupling, it's an issue of individual instructor behavior. The curve, for reasons I have already given too many times, is a paper tiger hollow army charming fiction complete irrelevance student bogeyman utter bullshit. But in the end, you're really only making a couple of unquestionably sensible proposals about how to change the way large courses work, and in doing so you're only asking for a few hours of instructor time to be reallocated. This would be a sensible thing to ask within the context of an individual course, in the construction of each semester's workflow with each teacher. In particular, because I am already offering you that sort of workflow, you would think it would have made sense to take advantage of it by writing and learning something about law, rather than doing more complaining about law school.
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