 Winter 2005 |
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Should Intro-Level Classes Be Hard as Ice or Soft as Feathers? Mark E. Walvoord |
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“Don’t you think that [average] is a little low for an introductory-level class?” A student asked me this just before our first exam in Introductory Zoology at the University of Oklahoma, after I explained that the first exam averages over the past few semesters have been between 65-72%. After an explanation of why I thought my questions and tests are fair, we moved on. But I have been contemplating the student’s question and its implications on undergraduate perceptions of class levels, the meaning of higher education, and what, if anything, I should do to change my testing or teaching strategies. So, without allowing my mind to wander to questions of grade inflation and effects of low grades on end-of-semester student evaluations, I asked, “Should entry-level, freshman, or 1000-level (at my university) classes be easier than upper-division classes?” First let me define how I conceive of difficulty. Certainly student background in the subject, student major, student study habits, student intelligence, student/professor interest in the subject, and student/instructor attitude would affect if students perceive a course as “hard” or not. But barring all those factors, I suppose I think of course “difficulty” as the amount of time and/or effort required to receive a given grade. (There also seems to be some element of the type of thinking that is required. Some courses require more abstract thinking, or may be more detail-oriented, but this may have more to do with the subject matter than the course level.) So my question became, “Should a 4000-level course in a certain department require more time/effort than a 1000-level course in the same department to earn a certain grade?” Using this definition of difficulty, I asked a group of Introductory Zoology students if they thought that 4000-level courses should be harder than 1000-level courses in the same department. Of the 82 respondents, 63 (77%) of them said “YES” that 4000-level courses should be more difficult, while 19 of 82 (23%) said “NO,” that they shouldn’t necessarily be more difficult. This question was asked only a couple days after they received their scores from their first exam (mean=68%). It may be of interest that only 7 of 38 (18%) students who scored below average on the first exam answered “NO” to my question, but 12 of 43 (28%) students who scored average or above-average on the first exam said “NO.” An informal polling of professors in my department seems to suggest that they would answer “NO” to this question. If we assume that difficulty is not the defining characteristic of an upper-division course compared to a lower-division course, then what exactly are the criteria? Higher education has the goals of teaching students how to think independently, to be broadly educated, and to be lifelong learners, therefore these characteristics should apply to college courses no matter the level. Further, many institutions use the rule “study 2-3 hours outside of class for each credit hour of class,” despite class level. Upper-division classes seem to be differentiated from other courses because of the content of the course. This content is more specific or in-depth than topics taught in lower-division courses and probably builds on other knowledge learned in prerequisites. For example, lower-division courses may teach a specific skill or subject necessary to continue, or just contribute to a general number-of-hours requirement to make sure the student has the academic maturity to take an upper division course that may require more independent or abstract thinking. As a result of lower-division courses having large student loads at many institutions, the evaluation of student knowledge may be different depending on course level. That is, more of the course grade may be dependent on multiple-choice exams in lower-division classes, but upper-division classes may assign more projects, papers, or essay exams to be graded directly by a professor. Some students may perceive the latter to be more difficult, but in reality, the amount of time studying the broader, introductory-level topics may be equal to the amount of time an upper-division student would spend studying and doing projects/papers on some specific or in-depth topic. Perhaps a better question for my students to ask before the first exam is, “What types of questions should I expect on the first exam?” (Mine didn’t ask this because they had old exams and knew what to expect.) The real comparison of introductory-level courses should be to other introductory-level courses in the same general subject. That is, my Introductory Zoology class should be compared to Introductory Chemistry, Introductory Botany, or Concepts in Biology. Though this would make a better comparison for students to focus on, there are still differences between subjects and among the testing, teaching, and grade-evaluation techniques of instructors. The bottom line for students, I think, is that they must trust that the instructor is presenting material that is necessary for some upper-division course, or is important for the subject, and that the instructor’s test questions are a good evaluation of their full understanding (not just recognition) of the material. Quite a few of my undergraduate courses were very difficult for me (i.e. lots of reading and studying time, exams that took up to 5 hours to complete in class, questions that I did not fully understand, low grades [absolutely speaking but not relative to other students]), but those usually ended up being the classes in which I learned the most and also liked the most in hindsight. It may not be possible to change student perception of difficulty, especially in some of the more detail-oriented or abstract-thinking subjects, but perhaps this isn’t necessary. Perhaps just taking to heart the responsibility we have as instructors to present the correct material, working hard ourselves to make projects/test questions that really test their understanding of the subject, and presenting to them the correctly-shaped grade distribution curve after exams, is all we need do to maintain our confidence that we really are helping students become lifelong learners about life on this planet. Acknowledgments: I appreciate my students bringing up this question for me, and the discussions I had about this topic with Nancy Blass, Dawna Nelson, and Drs. Jim Thompson, Mariëlle Hoefnagels, and Doug Gaffin.
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