I think often about how to make school less of a pain. It became clear pretty quickly when I arrived at university that it wasn’t going to be quite the enlightened community of learners that I had imagined in high school. The general approach to undergraduate engineering education (I can’t speak for the humanities, but I get the impression that there are similarities) seems to be the old “throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks” method. The buckshot technique. The first two years are basically an extended vetting process, breaking the spirits of the students to prepare them for a life that will supposedly also consist of meeting deadlines and being rigorously evaluated over and over.
Certain personalities thrive in this environment. Certainly anyone who is willing to dedicate all their efforts to meeting exactly the institution’s criteria will do well. Those who can follow instructions to the letter and execute strictly defined tasks are in the right place. However, should we really be rewarding that behaviour so enthusiastically? Is obedience the only metric that matters when we evaluate a student’s competency? As far as I can tell, the deck is stacked majorly in the favour of people who are excellent at doing what they’re told.
Perhaps there’s a different way to evaluate students quantitatively. One thought that I had is to give complex marks instead of just real-valued ones. If you don’t know, there is another world out there of numbers that come from taking the square root of a negative. We call these complex numbers. Often we encounter phenomena – like periodic motion – that can be described with a quantity that has both a real and complex part. So what if we apply some very simple complex analysis to the grading of students? It might be interesting to see a report card with a graph of a student’s complex grade instead of the standard letter or number. The real axis measures practical competencies, i.e. the ability to solve specific mathematic problems, performance on quizzes, and meeting deadlines. The imaginary axis measures the conceptual and creative competencies, i.e. the originality of work and ideas, open-mindedness, independence, and adaptability. Students would have to pay attention to their slope or angle rather than their GPA. A well-rounded individual might have a theta of approximately pi/4, or a slope of 1.
Really, though, this might just be a token gesture, a way of seeming more fair without having to actually change very much. Complex grades on their own don’t do the trick, you need to have educators who understand their students qualitatively as well as quantitatively and are willing to spend some time with them. Building good relationships between teachers and students is made especially difficult, though, when you have hundreds of students in every class.
Anyway, just a thought. In a perfect world we would all get gumdrops and hugs instead of grades and our teachers would all be unicorns, but maybe this is something worth thinking about. I know, it’s a bit silly, but there you go.