UGC says girl’s appeal had valid reasons and highest Z score
August 14, 2014, 10:12 pmThe Island
by Dasun Edirisinghe
The Federation of University Teachers’ Associations (FUTA) yesterday asked the University Grants Commission (UGC) to explain why a student had been admitted outside the laid down procedure on the basis of a letter from Hambantota District MP Namal Rajapaksa.
Addressing a media conference at the Colombo University Faculty Club, FUTA executive committee member Dr. Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri said that the UGC had admitted a student who had applied for admission one year later to the Ruhuna University just because she had a letter issued by MP Rajapaksa.
"According to the UGC procedures, it was a totally wrong practice," he said, adding that it was very pathetic that university admissions were being influenced by politicians.
Dr. Dewasiri called for an impartial inquiry.
Annually hundreds of appeals were submitted by students, but the UGC did not consider those appeals even when they were submitted within the stipulated period, but in the particular instance it had been considered even after one year, Dr. Dewasiri said.
The senior academic said that the FUTA had called on the authorities to reveal all details pertaining to the selection of students to universities.
UGC Chairperson Prof. Kshanika Hirimburegama, contacted for comment, said that the student concerned had one of the highest Z-score marks in the Arts stream, but she had not been able to apply for university admission due to her mother’s illness.
"All details in her appeal were found to be acceptable and the Commission had approved it," she said, adding that Dean of the Ruhuna Arts Faculty, too, had agreed to admit her.
The UGC had not done so on the basis of a politician’s letter, Prof. Hirimburegama maintained.
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I reads this and ask how you make this relevant in university classes of 200 plus
I still use – with half TA grading and half my own grading – short-answer tests but the idea of writing detailed comments on 200 papers seems unrealistic
Maryellen,
I read your Faculty Focus articles and frequently pass them along to faculty here @ JHU. I would offer this as part of the 'grading on a curve' topic. Grading on a curve defeats the entire purpose of mastery education. If grades reflect levels of mastery and you grade on a curve; either up or down (usually up only) some students who have not mastered the material will be represented as having done so, while the level of mastery for all involved is inflated.
If students are consistently (year after year, semester after semester) failing to master content in a course you (or anyone) teaches, there are probably only a couple of possible causes. 1. The course is attempting to cover or teach more than is reasonable. 2. The class is being poorly taught. 3. The assessment strategy does not accurately measure what students are learning, or 4 (and the most likely answer) some combination of all three of these root causes.
Addressing failure to master content by inflating grades eases the immediate problem of having to explain how the majority of students failed a given class, but it does not address the underlying or root causes of these failures. And of course, the students still do not know that they are supposed to know.
So true. I wonder if you've tried using exam wrappers in place of instructor comments. An exam wrapper is a tool that helps students themselves identify some of the trends, etc. that an instructor might otherwise identify for them in a comment on test performance). I learned about exam wrappers from Susan Ambrose, et al, in their book, How Learning Works, but if you just google "exam wrapper," you can learn a lot more about them (and see examples)! Just a thought for the start of a new year …
I'm wondering how you can possibly escape from the clear — though unstated — conclusion of this article: Grading is counterproductive and destructive. The "accurate" answer to "questions this central" can only be: find ways to get rid of it. Yes, it's difficult to imagine education as we've constructed it over the last couple of generations without it — but let's try.
What I found interesting about this article is the alternatives to grading suggested. The alternatives ease the grading workload and produce room to implement active learning strategies in the classroom. Often active learning strategies are perceived as having an increased marking workload. By questioning the educational value of grading and offering alternative approaches to marking, authors Schinske and Tanner are offering us a way out of the marking and grading grind enabling us to implement active learning in our courses. Kudos to the authors of this great article.
In light of the significance for success in work and life of such things as attitudes, motivations, and relationships (the "affective" domain, or if you like "social and emotional intelligence") grading becomes even more problematic. In point of fact grades only work well for the lowest level of cognitive learning – repetition of knowledge. Grades for analytic, synthetic, evaluative, and creative work are highly subjective, and grades for non-cognitive learning are largely meaningless. Thank you, Maryellen, for more "grist for the mill"; and great suggestions in the referenced article.
If we remove grading then how does a student fail a class? For some students will not master the content, nor do the work, and so cannot be allowed to pass on. If you have a class with only P/F grading, how will an instructor defend a student's failure? Sounds great until you're the adjunct or lecturer getting fired for a dispute.
If the only, or central, justification of this profoundly destructive practice is that we need to be able to fail people, we are in an extremely indefensible position. (I don't quite understand the point about P/F: with ABCDF or 100-0%, how will an instructor defend a student's failure? What's the difference?
I just reread the conclusion. "We grade students to give them feedback, to motivate their learning, to see how they compare with other students, and to measure their learning—all reasonable purposes." What's strange about this is that you don't mention the _real_ reason we grade: to certify the students' level of knowledge or competence to others, and to facilitate categorizing them. We can achieve all those goals with other practices — but the reason we don't is that we're required to label students with easy, one-variable categories (GPA, for instance). "“However, much of the research literature [reviewed in this article] suggests that these goals are often not being achieved with our current grading practices.” That's really because "grading practices" aren't suited to those purposes. They're suited to other purposes.
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