Benedict fires two professors bucking effort-based grading (Greenville News -AP)
Benedict College has fired two professors who refused to go along with a policy that says freshmen are awarded 60 percent of their grades based on effort and the rest on their work's academic quality.
Benedict President David Swinton says the Success Equals Effort policy gives struggling freshmen a chance to adapt to college academics. He expects students to improve - the formula drops to 50-50 in the sophomore year and isn't used in the junior or senior year. But he says he's "interested in where they are at when they graduate, not where they are when they get here." Students "have to get an A in effort to guarantee that if they fail the subject matter, they can get the minimum passing grade," Swinton said. "I don't think that's a bad thing."
Science professors Milwood Motley and Larry Williams defied that policy and Swinton dismissed them. Neither had tenure, which could have protected them from firing. Motley, a veteran five years at Benedict, said he didn't like concept from the beginning but went along with it grudgingly. Then he faced an academic dilemma of passing a student he thought had not learned course material. In his case, giving a C to a student with a high exam score of 40 percent was too much. "There comes a time when you have to say this is wrong," he said. Motley said he started in the Spring awarding grades strictly on academic performance. But the historically black college "told us to go back and recalculate the grades, and I just refused to do it," he said. A letter in June, informed Motley and Williams they were fired. Williams would not comment to The State newspaper for its story on the situation.
A faculty grievance committee voted 4-3 vote to reinstate Motley, but Swinton overruled that, dismissing Motley's claim that his academic freedom had been violated.
Well, clearly, this isn't an academic freedom issue; this isn't a debate over contending theories in science. It is, however, a manisfestly idiotic policy. Indeed, aside from a student's performance on exams and other graded events, it is not clear to me how it is that a professor would assess "effort." Further, effort is an entirely meaningless concept if it doesn't translate into performance.
If the goal is to encourage experimentation and remove penalties for failure early in a student's academic career--reasonable goals, I think--a more honest approach would be to remove grading altogether. I know that years ago MIT had graded freshman classes on a Pass/Fail basis. The would be a much more honest solution than this one.
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