Moron Grades

At the table in the kitchen, there were three bowls of porridge. Goldilocks was hungry. She tasted the porridge from the first bowl. "This porridge is too hot!" she exclaimed. So, she tasted the porridge from the second bowl. "This porridge is too cold," she said So, she tasted the last bowl of porridge. "Ahhh, this porridge is just right," she said happily and she ate it all up.

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In Taiwan's educational system, the catchword is quality, but the outcome is mediocrity. Why? Let's take a look......

Lately lots of words have been coming down to me from Those at the Top. At the beginning of the semester I was informed that I hadn't failed enough students. As several of us have noted before, the grading system in Taiwan is fraught with land mines that preclude the possibility of quality emerging from the system. This year my failure to fail was basically bad luck. I usually fail quite a few students in my writing classes but last year the word finally seemed to penetrate that I will fail kids who don't do the work, and so everyone did the work and passed.

But let's imagine that I had actually failed everyone who probably deserved it. I'd be getting the lecture that many foreign teachers have received over the years -- you can't fail too many either. At some universities it is understood that only a limited number of students will fail, and so many students simply do not perform, knowing they will get a grade anyway.

One result of this problem is the ferocious graduate entrance exams that Taiwan universities have. Two related factors are at work. First, students may have been passed through the system without doing any work, and so must be screened out somehow, since their grades at College X will only loosely correlate with their abilities and performance (more on that in a moment). Second, since failing out of a grad degree is unthinkable, there is an unwritten agreement that everyone entering a program will receive a degree. Hence the ferocity of the exam serves to include students who already know something.

Now a new problem with me has emerged. In addition to not failing enough people, apparently I gave two classes an average grade over 90. Not only can you not fail too few or too many, you cannot give grades that are too high, either. One class was the teaching internship class, for which students worked extremely hard; the other I was not told.

The upshot is that I am safest keeping grades within a certain range, between 80 and 89, failing a few to look good, and managing my average grades so that they do not stand out from those of other teachers. In Taiwan, where positive feedback is practically unknown, I am never going to receive any accolades for publishing more serious papers in the last two years than the whole rest of my department combined. However, any negative deviance from the norm will be noted, and pressure applied.

The result is, of course, a regression to mediocrity as teachers throughout the system adjust their grading and failing habits to reflect pressure from above, and an ever loosening correlation between student achievement and student grades. Furthermore, students know that they cannot be rewarded with high grades for good work, so they will refrain from putting effort into their work, merely doing enough to justify the mediocre score they will get anyway. And so the system continues to churn out mediocrity, and wring its hands about quality....

[Taiwan]