Grades and learning

On our campus, there is discussion about more evaluation of teaching and learning. We recently got an email encouraging faculty to incorporate assessment of student learning and assessment of teaching improvement into our faculty evaluations. This is partly driven my accreditation agencies, who require us to create “student learning outcomes” for our department and for each individual class.

The response of many faculty: “Why do we need a separate evaluation of student learning? That’s what grades are for.”

Of course, many faculty will also bemoan that students who passed their English courses can’t write. They’ll complain that grad students whose undergrad GPA was more than 3.0 perform horribly on their preliminary oral exams.

There’s some interesting locus of control psychology going on here, I think.

External link

Measure it