THIRTY YEARS AS A TEACHER: THINKING OF ASSESSMENT

In a couple of days I will be celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of my career as a university teacher. I was hired as a youthful 25-year-old and time passes that fast. I believe it is an important anniversary, though I am not sure yet what sort of watershed this is. Until the 2008 crisis (I think), university teachers with 30 years’ experience were allowed to retire with a full pension, provided they were at least 55. This privilege is now long gone and since retirement for my baby-boomer cohort will most likely be at 70, this means that I am only two thirds into my career, which may extend up to 45 years. This is a daunting thought. If I think 15 years into the past, then I go back to 2006, the pre-crisis world that belongs to another era. This is when I realize that 15 more years –climate change willing– are still very many to go.

Having got rid of these melancholy thoughts, I must say that I do not wish to use this post to reminisce about the first 30 years in my career. This is not an uncommon figure for my demographic or older and I am sure that the recollections of other persons are juicier. I would like to consider instead the devaluation of experience and the overvaluation of innovation, though, as you will see, I will soon enter into other matters, the main one being assessment.

I am certainly an experienced teacher but students –who, as a friend said, get younger and younger as we teachers age though they are always the same age– are a constant reminder that teaching experience is only relatively valuable. A long experience means that each session –seminar, lecture– takes less to prepare but since our audience is different each year experience does little for the finetuning of mutual communication. Students are in some sense eternally the same, and in many others very different, as corresponds to members of different generations. My first students are now nearing 50, the ones I’ll start teaching tomorrow are about 19. When I started I was only 7 years older than my second-year students, I am now 36 years older, and the time might come when I am 50 years older than my ever young students. My case, which is absolutely very common, means then that the more experienced teachers of my age group are, the more disconnected we grow from our students. Teaching innovation is supposed to bridge that gap though no doubt the greatest innovation would be going back to hiring full-time 25-year-old to teach undergrads. Currently, the average age of Spanish university teachers is my age, 55.

The problem with the concept of innovation is that it does not really address the nature of education in depth. I think that I am entitled to say after 30 years that what is wrong with education is assessment. I don’t know how Aristotle or Socrates taught their students but, somehow, I don’t see them marking papers. Or worrying about whether a disciple was copying from another disciple’s exercise. Everyone understands that a romantic relationship in which one of the partners never loses from sight the possibility of cheating is unhealthy. In contrast, higher education assumes that students will and do cheat. This is supposed to be in the nature of students, those devious creatures!, but it is actually part of the nature of education as it is now. In romantic relationships monogamy tends to be a hurdle if one of the partners does not believe in it (I read in the paper that a surge in infidelity is expected, now that employees are going back to the offices after the worst of Covid-19 is over). Likewise, assessment is an open invitation to cheating because who can really agree to being assessed all the time?

Assessment is the opposite of education for the very simple reason that it is not a mechanism to check the advance of learning but to prevent students from cheating (= doing as they like). Let me give you an example. In my Cultural Studies course I want my students to read and study independently David Walton’s extremely informative Introduction to Cultural Studies: Learning through Practice. This is the only book they need to read, as we will be working with pop songs, and texts such as opinion articles, reviews and interviews. To make sure that students do read Walton’s book, I have valued this part of the course with a hefty 25% of the final grade. For me to assess that students have studied the book, they need to submit a 500-word essay based on the passage they prefer from the whole text. Well, I have already had a student ask me whether they need to read the whole book, in an attempt to open a negotiation about how much really they need to read. I am simply not interested in this kind of negotiation and I have, therefore, decided to avoid assessment and make students responsible for their self-assessment (using a rubric I will provide) for the whole subject.

This is not the first time I leave assessment in the students’ hands. In the past academic year I invited my MA students to self-assess, also on the basis of a rubric, and this worked very well in the sense that nobody cheated and gave themselves a higher grade than they deserved (in my view). The tension always affecting this aspect of teaching evaporated and we could focus on what really mattered, which was producing a book together. As I return again to project-oriented learning with this new BA class, it makes more and more sense for me to educate students into being responsible for their own work. If a student decides to resist my efforts to educate them, then they should be responsible for awarding themselves a fail, not I. I do not think a person is led onto the path of adulthood by teachers’ assuming the burden of assessing students who refuse to do their best. I want my students to blossom into responsible adults and this should begin by their understanding that trying to cheat on me or any other teacher either through actual academic offence or simply by not being sufficiently involved is immature and, well, childish. Not what undergrads should do.

In the last ten or eleven years I’ve had second-year BA student self-assess their grade for classroom participation (meaning actual involvement, not just attendance), which usually amounts to 10% of the final grade. This has worked well and in the last five years, more or less, I have hardly ever altered any of the grades. I must explain that rubrics are essential for self-assessment. A student may believe that they deserve, say, an 8/B+ but when faced with the description of the learning results actually deserving of an 8/B+ they will think twice. I’ve had students having to painfully acknowledge they deserve a 0 (is that an F?) and others proudly claiming they did wonderfully, but I have never had a student question this practice and tell me that my job consists of assessing them. Actually, the time I don’t waste in assessment is time they gain in other types of attention from me (for instance, last year I made myself available online one hour a week just for chatting about the books we were reading – I loved those sessions!). I do not know if I am going too far this year by having third/fourth year students self-assess all their exercises, maybe I am, but I just don’t want assessment to interfere with teaching.

I am well aware that what I am saying here cannot work with all degrees or subjects, and works best when the whole class is involved in a common project. My worry right now is not who will pass and who will fail but whether I will be able to convince my 27 students in Cultural Studies that our common aim is not filling in 6 credits but producing a book. None of my students can fail, for all need to be good enough writers to participate in our project, which means that I will use most of my time to correct and edit their work in at least two versions (I use rewriting all the time). This method, of course, has nothing to do with cramming in, say, Medicine or Law Studies and with the need to constantly test whether the future doctor or lawyer has advanced enough to be able to engage in increasingly specialized knowledge. I have a woefully poor knowledge of how other disciplines work, including the Linguistics area in my own Department, but I have this total certainty, based on my experience, that assessment is too important in higher education and needs to be either limited, or altered, or abandoned for ever.

Suppressing assessment possibly sounds wonderful to the laziest students (and teachers!) but I am not speaking of a free-for-all by which you end up earning a degree by doing nothing except registering. No, what I mean is the opposite: assessment has all this protagonism because we don’t trust our students to really want to learn, and need to push them around so that they learn enough stuff to at least pass assessment. Carrot and stick, stick and carrot. As I know, both as a former student who did well at exams and as a teacher who hates exams, assessment is not learning. I am still assessed regularly as a teacher and as a researcher, and I can say for good than the highest pleasure of learning usually come to me when I work on activities which escape assessment –including this blog. Perhaps for you, dear readers, the conclusion is that I have learned nothing in 30 years of teaching and that resisting education is part of education, which makes assessment necessary. The way society is structured, assessment operates at all levels to weed out slackers and incompetent employees, and to reward the most brilliant minds with money for their research or prizes, yet this only replicates what we face from day one in kindergarten. Isn’t it time we change tack?

I wonder what students think about this – or are they the first ones to defend assessment?

I publish a post once a week (follow @SaraMartinUAB). Comments are very welcome! Download the yearly volumes from http://ddd.uab.cat/record/116328. Visit my website http://gent.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/