Failure to Fail
Why are students no longer flunking university? Is it their brains, or their wallets?
by Jay Teitel
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/print/2008.04-education-academic-failure-to-fail-jay-teitel/
My son, our middle child, graduated from McGill University recently, and one day just before the ceremony, when we were sitting down to breakfast, he started regaling me with tales of university idleness and duplicity. His alma mater's reputation as the "Harvard of the North" was somewhat dubious, he pointed out, given how easy it was for a shrewd student (not him, of course) to wrangle accommodations from profs there — to procure extensions for essays, to retake tests, to basically get by. It wasn't the first time he'd talked about the subject, and, boys being boys, soon we'd come up with an idea for a reality show called The Bum's B. A.
The Bum's B. A worked like this: four students (preferably male) share an apartment on campus and compete to see who can do the least work possible and still pass his year. Independent observers would tabulate relative idleness; hidden cameras would make sure no secret cramming was going on. Other subtleties: any efforts in pursuit of academic success would count against you, but not labour in pursuit of idleness — e.g., if you borrowed "a girl's notes," the reading of those notes would count as actual work, but the borrowing wouldn't. Plus you could recoup the studying penalty by going to a movie, say, or getting drunk the night before an exam. The more we talked, the more enthusiastic we got.
"We can't do it till I graduate, though," my son said. "No, till they mail me my diploma."
The university would have to be in on it, of course, I said. As a kind of sociology experiment.
He gave me a look. He was right, I conceded; if they knew, they'd probably just flunk out everybody in the apartment.
His look grew stranger. "What are you talking about? Nobody flunks out at McGill."
I wasn't sure I'd heard him right. "Come again?"
"I don't know anybody who's ever flunked out of McGill. Dropped out, sure, but not flunked out. They don't let you flunk. They put you on probation, or give you extra time, or let you take your degree in six years instead of four. I know one guy who took seven years. That's even better for them — more money."
"But why would a university do that?"
"The tuition money and the government funding. Plus they've got a ton of students coming from the States they make a fortune from. They don't want them thinking there's a risk that they'll get thrown out if they fail."
"But I thought the whole thing with McGill was the high standards," I said. (I may have been getting shrill.) "How hard it was to get into."
"Right. Hard to get into. Harder to get kicked out of." He looked at me. "Seriously, I can't think of anyone who ever flunked out."
Breakfast and the conversation frittered away at that point, but I couldn't shake the sense of scandal. It wasn't just that this derailed our reality show (if nobody flunked, how could you pick a winner? ), or the thousands of dollars we'd spent ourselves sending him to the "Harvard of the North." It was the larger principle involved. If it was impossible to fail, what did passing amount to?
ot that I was an innocent. I'd read Ivory Tower Blues, by James Côté and Anton Allahar, two professors at the University of Western Ontario who had chronicled what they dubbed the crisis of "credentialism" at Canadian and American schools. They'd argued that the new sense of entitlement among undergraduates, unchallenged by college administrations, had resulted in a proliferation of empty degrees, inflated grades, and professors cowed by student evaluations (not to mention calls from parents and threatened lawsuits) into easy marking and buying cheese Danishes for their classes. I knew about David Weale, the University of Prince Edward Island history prof who, facing an overcrowded class, had promised students a 70 percent grade if they agreed not to show up or do any coursework at all. (Weale had twenty takers, and was subsequently "asked" to resign by the upei administration.) I knew that Côté himself had tried the same experiment at Western and found that guaranteeing students a mark of 80 percent was enough to convince virtually his whole class to walk out. And I was aware that these stories were viewed as symptoms of something deeper in the culture — a reluctance to judge today's students negatively, to have them fail, which meant that they were being "deprived" of an important life lesson in dealing with the kind of setbacks they would eventually have to face. But I'd always thought that all this breast-beating over the "failure to fail" was largely metaphorical. I never thought it meant no one flunked out anymore.
The next morning, I sent out a simple query to every person under thirty on my email list, some fifty people: did they know anyone, or know anyone who knew anyone, out of all the students enrolled in Canadian universities (815,000 in total) who had ever flunked out? By that afternoon, I had nine answers, all remarkably consistent. The first came from the son of a friend, who had graduated from the University of Manitoba the year before and was now living in Winnipeg with a fellow graduate. "Shannon and I are stumped. It's weird. No one comes to mind right away. We'll ask around and let you know if we can find anyone." The second email was from a fourth-year phys. ed. student at Waterloo. "At lunch I told a lot of my friends about your email. We all know kids who have taken extra time to graduate, and who have goofed off to the point of doing zero work, and of course some who've dropped out. But nobody who was actually told to leave." The third email was from my niece, a third-year psychology major at York University: "It is very difficult to get kicked out of university. They put you on academic probation and continue to take your money. I do know one kid who took off a year because of the situation. But he didn't flunk out."
At which point I started talking to people.
I spoke first with William Barker, president of King's College in Halifax. King's — officially the University of King's College — is a tiny, largely autonomous institution tucked into a corner of Dalhousie University. If there is a Harvard of the North, it's more likely King's than McGill — although a better analogy would be a cross between Harry Potter's Hogwarts and Camp Wanapitei in Muskoka. With their registration packages, freshmen receive a black academic gown, which they all wear to monthly formal meals, complete with candlelit tables and pipers.
"Oh, sure, students still flunk out," Barker told me in the living room of the president's residence, which adjoins the Edwardian main administration building. (I was wearing cargo shorts and a T shirt; typical of King's, he was dressed the same.) "It might be rarer, and there's a process they go through, academic probation, etc. But you can still flunk out."
Out of his school, specifically, kids flunked out?
"Uh-huh. I think what you're encountering is the increased rarity of it, particularly in an institution like this, which reflects a change in thinking when it comes to student admissions. Twenty years ago, the idea in Canadian schools was, we'll take in a huge student body, because we don't know what's out there, and then we'll just get rid of a third of them — you know, the old 'look to your left, look to your right' idea.
"I know exactly what he means, because exactly that direction was given in my own first political science class, at Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto, back in the dark ages. Our professor told us to look to either side of us, then to imagine one of those students not being there in a year — a certainty. He said it with a detached smugness, making it that much more ominous, I remember, but also kind of thrilling. To the miasma of books and sex that was higher education was added the tantalizing possibility of doom.
"That model doesn't hold anymore, certainly not at schools like ours, or McGill or U of T or ubc ," said Barker. "We're taking in students with quite high high school averages — our average here for first year is 87 percent — and to see someone like that approach failing, which is rare in the first place, the question becomes, what went wrong? What you're calling an unwillingness to fail people is a function of the fact that the system is set up today not to take in people you would normally think of as risks to fail out. So when it happens, the institution has to ask itself, what did we do wrong? Or where did we make the wrong choice?"
But in the majority of emails I'd been getting from current students and recent grads, I pointed out, the perception was that money was the main reason universities weren't flunking kids out: the schools needed to retain both tuition fees and government funding to stay economically viable. Were they all mistaken?"
It could look as though in Canadian universities, which are largely government funded, the rarity of failure is a gambit to keep students in the system. But it doesn't hold for us. I went to Dartmouth in the US. I always remember, when I failed chemistry in my first year, the sense of shock that went through the entire system. How could this student, who had gotten in with decent enough marks, have failed in a system that was set up to take him and bring him forward? Dartmouth certainly wasn't concerned about losing tuition fees . . . but to flunk a student out meant that it had miscalculated. It meant admitting that the admissions process was flawed — and so was Dartmouth's notion of itself.
"It has an epistemological ring to it: the argument from institutional pride. But what about Côté and Allahar's charge that the failure to fail kids resulted in part from the influence of student evaluations of professors, which were now de rigueur? What about pressure from independent student scorecards, such as ratemyprofessor.com? Wasn't it possible, I asked Barker, that professors looking for tenure became lenient with marks because they didn't want to risk negative assessments from students?
He crossed one sandalled foot over the other. "First, concerning Côté and Allahar's book, one of those comes out every other year. The last one for Canada was No Place to Learn, by Allan Tupper and Tom Pocklington. They looked at how much evaluations mattered, particularly in universities where everyone gets 75 percent or higher. And these schools exist. I'd have to say that student teaching evaluations do not yet play an overwhelmingly significant role in such matters as promotion of professors. It's part of the whole package, but, especially in the bigger research institutions, it's research that's important. I don't think evaluations are enough to jeopardize a career, but a terrible evaluation early on will sink someone."
So the fact that I can't find anyone who flunked out of school has nothing to do with, say, student evaluations?
"I can't see it."
And students do flunk out?
"Definitely."
I still don't buy it.
I should clarify. I buy what Barker says when it comes to his school. And as far as his description of the much smaller turnover in today's universities in general goes, compared with the weeding-out systems of the past, the facts support his analysis. At three of Canada's top universities, McGill, U of T, and ubc, the return rate from first to second year in arts and science courses averages 90 percent, meaning only 10 percent of students don't show up for classes in second year. But that still doesn't mean that 10 percent of freshmen flunk out or even drop out — anything but.
"To try to equate retention rates with failure rates is to compare two things that don't compare," says U of T registrar Karel Swift. "All we know is that 10 percent of students from first year don't show up, because they don't want to; they don't complete enough courses and decide to do a different program; they reduce their course load to something other than what we think of as full time; or they transfer institutions altogether. There's no way to measure who's come from where or who's where at a given time. Same with our graduation rates, which after six years hover around 75 percent. The other 25 percent could be failing to finish their degrees — or finishing them somewhere else, which is more likely."
More important, adds Swift, when administrators say "flunk out," it's not a simple concept. "In the old days, you could be unsuccessful in a year and be asked to leave. Today the policies and procedures for a student in academic difficulty are quite different."
The process today at U of T when someone is academically floundering (a similar progression exists at most Canadian universities) is arcane enough to qualify for its own postgrad course. This is partly because it is predicated on marks, and marks are no longer what they once were. Three decades ago, marking systems at Canadian universities were Canadian and/or British derived — the familiar A, B, C, or percentages, 80, 70, 60 — but today those marks have been translated into the four-point American grade point average. The best reason I can find for the switch is that it was intended to promote a uniform continental standard, the same reason given for getting rid of Grade 13 in Ontario, or holding campus-sanctioned events where eighteen-year-olds get so drunk they need puke suits. To be fair, in some cases the change in marking scales was salutary: until 2005, when the University of Alberta switched to the four-point system, it used a nine-point system, in which the nine marks stood for, in descending order: superior, excellent, very good, good, fair, pass, fail, fail, and fail. "There used to be three ways to fail," says Heather Zwicker, a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at U of A: " 'You failed,' 'You failed, asshole,' or 'You never had a chance.' Two, you'll note, was the most spiteful grade."
The now-universal four-point system roughly equates to A, B, C, D in the old system. Hypothetically, the road to flunking out at U of T entails navigating the four-point system this way: for a student to have his or her standing assessed in the Faculty of Arts and Science, the student must complete four courses within the space of twelve months. To avoid academic probation, the student's grade point average in those four courses must be 1.5 or higher. Since 1.0 is a D, to avoid probation you have to be averaging a D+ or higher. Or a C– or higher (only an American knows which for sure). If you average less than 1.5, you're on probation; this means that when you come back the next year you have to average slightly higher, a 1.7 (C not-so-minus), to get back into "good standing." If, however, you fail to hit 1.7, you can, can, be suspended for a year. It's possible for this entire process to be repeated three times — three probations, three suspensions — at the end of which a student may, may, be refused future registration, i.e., may flunk out.
The catch is the can. Concedes Swift, "It's very rare" — rare and fleeting. If the university regularly loses track of 3,000 students, the 25 percent who may or may not be graduating elsewhere every year, how am I supposed to find the one hopeless loser who failed?
The reason I don't completely buy Barker's arguments is that King's College is an exception, and the kind of resistance to the forces of cultural cynicism you can observe there don't extend to the system at large. In the following weeks, as I talk to more people from that system — as the bemused, apologetic emails trickle in ("I know this guy who sort of got kicked out, but no, maybe he left on his own . . . Yeah, he was pretty stoned all the time, too . . ." ) — it becomes evident there is a weird sort of disconnect going on. On the subject of whether funding and student's professor evaluations might play a role in grade inflation and leniency, the administrators deny that these factors have a significant impact, while the professors categorically suggest that they do.
Here's what Walter Sudmant, director of planning and institutional research at ubc, has to say, for instance, about the insidious effects of student evaluations: "There's a fair bit of evidence, from studies in the US, that the notion that students give better evaluations to teachers who are easier markers isn't accurate. Independent observers in classrooms tend to match student evaluations, and there's no correlation between the difficulty of a course and student evaluations, which staff worry about. What students really appear to be grading is whether they have learned things from the professor. By and large, our students at ubc are here to learn. Students recognize that if everyone got good grades, those good grades wouldn't be as meaningful."
contunued.....
( Walrus)
Published April 2008
Jay Teitel was an editor at Toro and Saturday Night and is the winner of fourteen National Magazine Awards. He co-invented Therapy the Game, now available in Canada.
