F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed, “The rich are not like us.” In higher education, we have our version of the rich: well-heeled institutions that enjoy endowment values in the billions of dollars. Most of the time, such institutions are not like the rest of us, especially during budget-building season.
Perhaps it’s only natural to feel a touch of jealousy over such wealth. Jealousy is ugly, to be sure, but it’s also a common emotion.
The Germans have a nice word for the extension of jealousy: “schadenfreude,” or taking pleasure at the expense of others, especially when they are in pain. I suppose that the endowment declines of our wealthiest institutions have invited a sense of Schadenfreude at their expense. “Ah,” one might say with glee, “those hoarders! They have trusted in the abundance of their riches, but now they are struggling just like the rest of us.”
Is it fair to feel that way about reported declines in the values of the largest college endowments?
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6 Responses to A Little Schadenfreude, Anyone?
physioprof - July 16, 2011 at 4:17 pm
I am on our MD/PhD admissions committee, and almost every single one of the applicants we choose to bring to campus for interviews has a 4.0 average from an elite undergraduate institution. When a kid appears in my office with one or two A-s or B+s, I sometimes ask “What happened in Multivariate Calculus?” They *always* fail to detect that I am joshing around, and launch into earnest explanations of their “poor” grades.
Because of all this undergraduate grade inflation, we give a lot more weight in both MD/PhD and PhD admissions on GREs or MCATs.
jliedl - July 16, 2011 at 4:57 pm
At my admittedly humble, regional comprehensive, we use grades to screen who can or can’t do the senior thesis (students with a B- average or below need to take a regular seminar for those 6 credits as opposed to the thesis). I also give boatloads of B, C and even D grades (plus a fair handful of F marks). Students who don’t do the work, do some haphazardly or complete it poorly: these are common problems at a non-elite institution.
I wouldn’t mind a pass/fail option but I think we’d have to talk about what constitutes a “pass” in those cases. Would I be comfortable sending students onto our senior seminars knowing that they had simply skated along at an effective D- level? At my institution you’d find a lot more students seeking to do the bare minimum to pass since their anxieties focus somewhere far different than expecting a straight A average!
physioprof - July 17, 2011 at 7:51 am
“Pass/Fail” schemes are irrelevant, because they all end up incorporating “Honors/High-Pass”, “Pass”, “Low-Pass”, and “Fail” levels, which may as well be letter grades.
Tenured_Radical - July 17, 2011 at 11:46 am
@jliedl:disqus : you would be shocked, perhaps, at how similar those issues are at so-called selective schools; also, what you are describing would exactly correlate with the study, that faculty do give lower grades, in part because they are less likely to perceive all their students as inherently special, and also because their students are less likely to feel entitled to good grades.
@chronicle-06d30d8ed0b9f25c09fc2f76f69d23f9:disqus : You are right to cite these problems with p/f, although I would say that since most of the students you and I have regard C as failure, that this should be the standard. I would also say that even those humanities and social science faculty who create rubrics to produce numeric grading tend not to be able to produce a score in the way scientists do. Therefore, the young folk you see with a 4.0 are the ones that either never got a grade lower than A, or didn’t quit when they did.
Nicole Papaioannou - August 7, 2011 at 3:24 pm
I’ve been taking this great Writing Assessment grad course, and we were working on some assessment plans. One of them ranked performance as “not meeting (which I would rename), attempting, meeting, or exceeding” criteria. Those seem more effective to me than A, B, C, D, F. Even after 20 years of being a full-time student and teaching for a year, I have no idea what those letters really mean. And students never seem to care about my comments, which would actually help them progress, once there is a grade.
lauragibbs - September 1, 2011 at 9:20 am
FINALLY: an article about grading that is not total merde. Thank you!