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And June means we meet again for our annual ABLE conference! Check out details about the upcoming conference at http://www.ableweb.org. The 2009 conference will be held at the University of Deleware and will be full of interesting workshops, great poster sessions and fun excursions in and around Deleware. For those of you who have never come to an ABLE conference, consider joining us! Visiting another campus and its surroundings is a great way to meet new people and see new sights. And the workshops are a perfect way for us to share our lab ideas with each other.
Since I don't have much to report on other than the upcoming conference in this issue, I would like to briefly comment on a topic that I've been thinking about for the last year. My job not only includes running intro biology labs and teaching, but I also do some informal and formal advising. During these times of meeting with students, I often hear "But I got all A's in high school and I don't know why I'm not getting them now," or " I worked on this lab report for hours and feel like I didn't get the grade I deserved." It seems that many students I meet have this feeling of entitlement - that we give them the grade rather than them earning or making the grade. At first this made me feel as if I was a poor instructor, but after looking at how much I had provided my students in lecture and lab with supplemental material, access to powerpoint slides and tips on how to study, I decided it really wasn't me. For various reasons these students truly felt they were owed a higher grade and were surprised to receive something other than what they expected. A colleague of mine sent me a link to an interesting article from the New York Times about student expectations and grade disputes http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/education/18college.html?_r=1&em. After reading this I felt a bit relieved about how I was teaching and assigning grades, but I still am not comfortable about the sense of student entitlement. The article points out that unless we as teachers are clear about the goals of our classes and how students are graded, then this kind of grade disputing will continue.
In large introductory lab courses, complaints about grades are common since students talk to students from other sections. They compare their lab reports and tests and see which TA is a "better" TA based on the grading. Even with our standardized grading system, there is some variation in grades, but students still feel entitled to a good grade if they just did the assigned work. They don't understand that they are held accountable for the work they do. The article talks about how and why this feeling of entitlement has come about.
I wonder how others feel about this issue and if it affects you and your colleagues. Do grades seem to be inflating at some schools because of student expectations?
There aren't many changes to the Winter 2009 issue of Labstracts. Article submissions trickle in more in the fall than they do in the spring. Maybe everyone is doing spring cleaning and just too busy to write an article! If you would like to read more about Biology, have an opinion about something such as grade disputes, or you would like to learn about what others have learned at ABLE, write an article and send it to me! I'd be very happy to include it in Labstracts. We'd all like to see more articles in these issues rather than just new pictures!
In this issue of Labstracts you will find a calendar of events, news, and information about past and upcoming meetings. I hope you enjoy this issue and feel free to write an article for Labstracts at anytime! Just send it to me at bstegenga@bio.unc.edu . See you in June!
Barbara Stegenga
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