June 18, 2007

Grade inflation, where students routinely get an A for B-grade work and no one gets a C much less an F, is an embarrassing problem. If life is a beauty contest, then grades, like bodyweight, are a category where success is literally measurable.

It's rude to discuss such things and I know I'm wading into trouble here. But rude things are interesting. I read a rather good article about grade inflation in my local paper, the Toronto Star. Ironically, the Star has reduced its words (using bigger type and more white space) and will soon cut its size overall (allegedly to make it easier to open. Pardon?)

But it will not be lowering its price. In other words, it is quietly working for a B grade while proclaiming it deserves an A.

Thus, it was ironic to run a front-page story rightly attacking the phenomenon of grade inflation while celebrating its manifestation in that very paper.

But that's the problem. It is environmentally wise for the Star to use less newsprint. And it's probably a good thing to give students higher grades than they deserve if it stops them from bursting into tears in your office, as several professors recounted.

I like young people; indeed I have a wild maternal regard for them, and self-esteem will carry them further than most other qualities.

This may be guilt talking, but I was the kind of child who always got As. Teachers loved me, and my Grade 7 teacher once gave me the collected poems of Byron and Browning as a graduation gift.

But I didn't get As because I worked hard. I was merely living up to the rigid unspoken requirements of my parents who, I only realize now, had silently scared me out of my wits. It takes real talent to teach a child to follow the rules without ever articulating what they are.

'Imagine the pain of that'

If it was like this for me, imagine being a child who has genuine intellectual problems in school, who gets bad grades and is humiliated in class. Imagine the pain of that.

When Ontario got rid of Grade 13, it was faced with what was called the "double cohort," a flood of young people going to colleges and universities that could not accommodate them. Furthermore, an alarming number of students were dropping out of high school, which is a predictor of permanent joblessness.

The government, out of fine motives, wanted to keep kids in school and unintentionally pressured schools to produce graduates at any cost. They also began fudging the line between colleges and universities.

I know this is a predictable quote here, but Kingsley Amis's remark about the "red brick" expansion of British universities in the 1960s was dead right. "More will mean worse," he said.

And it is worse. First-year university students are regularly sent for remedial English classes by disgusted professors. It isn't fair for good, old run-down polytechnics to become universities, when the polytech would have enabled an energetic young student to learn a trade, but the "university" can't quite manage that.

University satires flourish still. Mil Millington's novel Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About is presented as a portrait of his relationship with his girlfriend, but it's actually about his relationship with the fictional University of North-Eastern England (its slogan is "We take absolutely everyone" and offers courses in "Eggs and stuff you can do with them.")

In real life, Millington worked at the University of Wolverhampton ("We’ll take every application on its individual merits"), which offers courses in leisure facility management.

I must concede, though, that a suburban branch of the University of Toronto is teaching resident first-years how to cook through the zappily named rezONE program. No, it's not a credit course.

A journalism degree should take a year, long enough to remove every trace of shyness from an aspiring reporter. I learned that in my first week of a two-year diploma. Now they spread it out over four years. Whose interests does this serve? (By the way, David Frum was right about one thing. A course in interpreting statistics should be mandatory.)

But it keeps them busy and what else do you do with young people? The dirty secret is that intelligence is a disadvantage in the work world. People resent you. You're better off teaching yourself affability, the quality that let Bill Clinton run the U.S. for eight years. Who doesn't like an affable colleague?

Look, I admit. I'm lying, to you and to myself. I secretly think that universities should be sacred places with rigid standards. (Funny the number of stupid people I know who went to Oxbridge, though.) Good universities will always get the best students, and everyone knows which universities are good and which are a blot on the Canadian teaching landscape.

Despite grade inflation, nothing has really changed. The cream will still rise to the top. But I'm not worried about the cream. I'm worried about what lies beneath, the kids who didn't do well in school but are now being given A grades. In a world where everyone writes online, their inadequacy will become instantly apparent to the world, not just to their boss.

You can see this online with endless blogs and commentary and reviews by people who can't spell or form sentences. It's not those who speak English as a second language — errors are perfectly reasonable in that case — but those who were badly educated. Their thoughts are childlike and expressed with great gumminess and a blind backhand effort at spelling rite.

I don't know if these people got an A in a dressed-up poly-college when they should have been kept back a year. But it does prove that your actual facility with words and ideas will be outed one way or another. Better that it be revealed early by one teacher than by thousands of people reading online and dismissing your offerings in the harshest, most public way.