U is for Undergraduates
by Alan MacEachern
|
|
Illustration: Amanda Woodward
|
Last week I sat down with some local high school social studies teachers to talk about preparing students for university. Realizing that they might be flashing back to their own time in university, as I was about high school, I put them at ease by dressing like a professor of the early 1990s (i.e., the same as always).
It turns out that our memories of our educational experiences are an issue, if not a problem. Just as I undoubtedly expect first-year undergraduates to have had high school years like mine, the teachers prepare high school students by telling about their own university years, unaware of what has changed. One teacher believed that you still can't use Internet sources for most university essays. None knew that the University of Western Ontario, the local university choice, has dropped its three-year degree program*. They spoke of helping students transition to frosh life by upping the word count on grade 12 history essays - even as Western history has turned to shorter first-year assignments, both in response to incoming students' skills and to ward off plagiarism.
* Clarification: I have since discovered that the three-year degree is still an option at Western, though fewer students find it the most appropriate choice.
One teacher took the fact that the average Ontario student's grades drop 16 percent upon entering university as proof in itself that high schools aren't preparing students adequately. I wasn't convinced. This might reflect faults in the university system, or just be a form of Stockholm syndrome: the more years you spend with a student, the more competent he or she seems. Still, much of our time was spent discussing students' transition from one assessment system to another. In Ontario, teachers grade all assignments on the basis of four categories (knowledge/understanding, thinking/inquiry, communication, and application) at one of four "levels" (demonstrating "limited," "some," "considerable," or "thorough/high" accomplishment in a variety of skills), so a student might receive a 2-, 3+, 1, and 4 on a single essay. Not until the final report card are all these scores sifted together into one percentage grade - the implication being that kids can figure out levels, but parents can't. I asked the teachers whether they thought it likely that in adding all those small scores, they continually gave students the benefit of the doubt and continually rounded up, contributing to grade inflation; they thought that was quite possible.
A few of the teachers found the levels system cumbersome - one called it "bizarre" - but most saw reasoning behind it, and believed that since the levels eventually corresponded to percentage grades, the system was more or less in line with the university one. More of the teachers expressed concern that students can only be assessed for skills directly related to curriculum expectations. What this means in practice is that teachers must accept all assignments, whenever they arrive. As one local school board states in its policy, "teachers are not to include such things as work habits, participation, effort, completion of work [!], punctuality and reward marks for handing in assignments on time in determining the report card achievement grade." As you might expect, kids quickly figure this out. The teachers debated how much effect this really has. The best students still submit on time, or at least submit good work at some point. But the not-so-good students, and particularly the ones not getting much guidance from their parents, don't. "We're not doing students any favour," said one teacher, "in telling them, 'It's due, but not really due.'" And the teachers as a group wondered how well students responded to the change when they hit university: they had already heard stories of students struggling with the realization that professors impose late marks or simply don't accept late work.
It's not that the university system is better than the school system. (The teachers, for example, thought it rather silly that some professors still give participation marks, and they're probably right.) Much of our discussion centred on how we dealt with issues we share, like plagiarism, the loss of grade integrity, and teaching in an era when, as in Lake Wobegon, all the kids are above average.
Rather, it's that we don't know enough about each other. One person I spoke to said that he had taught high school in five school boards, and had never spoken to anyone from a university. Maybe that's not surprising, in a province that has both a Ministry of Education and a Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities. But it's ridiculous, given that high schools are to prepare many of their students for university, and universities are so reliant on the job high schools have done.
One of the teachers has invited me back, so that we can grade photocopied copies of the same few essays and see how our marking compares. It's not much, but it's something. I hope it's a start.
Alan MacEachern is a professor of history at the University of Western Ontario.
