Grade Filing and the Educational System in Taiwan

Scott Sommers has recently posted on a topic that is near and dear to my heart: grading and grades. Quoth he:

At MCU, we have a final day on which all official grades must be submitted. Of course there's some flexibility in all this, but it is the day after which grades can not be changed.

And when I say can not be changed, I mean it. Even if there has been an entry or typing error, it is extremely hard to have this changed. I've never had this happen to me, so I can only report from hearsay what happens, but it is nothing less than Kafkaesque.

The year I started at MCU, one of the veteran teachers had had a computer virus damage his grades as he mailed them to the school. He spent a good part of the next year sitting at committee after committee explaining over and over what happened. He returned to the USA in February that year to take up a job offer he had received, but rumours persist to this day that he quit because of the stress of dealing with this problem.

The system has been stream-lined significantly since then. Apparently, there is now a single committee that has to hear explanations, but, I'm told, the president of the university himself sits on the committee.

It's not clear to many of the foreign faculty why such a system is necessary to vet through faculty grading errors. After all, in Canada university faculty can change grades for a year or two following the end of the course. It's not unusual for faculty to give students grades they plan on changing when the student completes some assigned task long after the final class has ended. Why wouldn't faculty have the same autonomy at MCU?

I have always suspected that it's to prevent corruption. For example, failed students could offer me money to change their grade. I suppose they still can because I tell all my students their final grade on the last day of class. Still, I am not entirely against such a strict policy because it does create a certain seriousness about grading. And, as I said, like most of the faculty at MCU, this has never been a problem for me.

At CYUT we have a very similar system. The initial date, at the end of the semester, is the day by which all grades much be filed. We then have a period beginning at the start of the following semester, during which we can file paperwork to change grades. The department has to pass it at a meeting. Then, a month or so into the semester, we have a big meeting for the whole campus.

To change a grade requires attending a large meeting. The committee, on which sits the President of the University or someone of similarly high administrative rank, faces a large meeting room. There all the teachers who want to have a grade changed must state, publicly, the reason for the change. In front of everyone. This creates formal impediments to a grade change (paperwork must be filed, and the meeting must be attended in person) and informal impediments -- who wants to announce that they've made an error publicly? Especially in front of peers. Changing grades is also discouraged because it reflects negatively on both the teacher and the department.

Because there is no civic culture, no culture of good faith, in Taiwan, everything must be governed by bureacracy and rules, or else it will become corrupt. Hence, the system is very rigid. This grade change system has at least three pernicious effects.

First, it can drive student grades up. Students may put pressure on teachers who give them a failing or poor grade, to change it. The first year I was at Chaoyang I taught a general English course, and gave one student a 65. She didn't like that grade, and attempted to use her advisor to put pressure on me. Fortunately the department backed me 100%. Another time I zero'ed a student who had not come to class or given me any homework. Several of her friends bombarded me with emails and cornered me in hallways. Every time since, when I have contemplated failing a student, and the resulting pressure I might receive, and then the troublesome grade changing system, I may quail at failing them.

Second, because the grade change system is so embarrassing for the teachers and the department, and paperwork-heavy, teachers who do make errors may be reluctant to correct them. Consequently, students may not get the grade changes they deserve. The more cynical readers may infer that at least one reason the grade-changing system is so cumbersome is to reduce the amount of grades changed.

A third effect of the system, like so many in Taiwan, is that it punishes people who are conscientious and work hard. Only conscientious teachers will feel the need to change grades and thus they impose even more work on themselves. Further, it punishes people who have heavy courseloads, since they are more likely to err, given the greater number of students they face. For example, in my economics class, with 120 students, if I give 6 quizzes and tests, that is at minimum 720 times that I face the possibility of an error of one kind or another, and many kinds of error are possible. Perhaps to reduce the possibility that students will spot errors, many teachers retain student work over the semester and do not return corrected work to them.

The system rigidity manifests itself in every aspect of the grading system. Yesterday I got a phone call from our department secretary. After one has entered the grades in the university computer system, one has to press a button that automatically prints the page out. I had done so, but it had printed out the previous screen each time I tried. The two screens are identical, except for a line at the bottom. After three failures, I signed the hardcopy, as we are supposed to, and turned it in to the department, along with the other seven classes, which were all done correctly. The department secretary had called to inform me that even though the printout was almost exactly the same, and had the same information with the correct grades all printed and signed by me, it was nevertheless unacceptable. When I explained that the computer wouldn't print it, the secretary, who had been at Chaoyang a semester, told me I had pressed the wrong button (that is usually the next move -- an error is always the victim's fault -- the dirty little secret of ren ching in Taiwan is that, like water in California, it always flows upwards toward money and power) as if I hadn't just handed her seven correct forms and hadn't been here ten times longer than she had....

[Taiwan]