Comments on: That’s Because You Can’t Bullshit Science

by: e

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:27:25 +0000

Luke Maciak said:

English is not my first language and on top of that I’m dyslexic.

Well, then I must commend you b/c you have a high level of proficiency in English (in your blog posts, at least, since we’ve never spoken). I wish some of my American students were able to piece together a short paper half as well as you write.

It’s always a pleasure to read your posts and thanks for frequently providing food for thought across a range of topics.

by: Adam Kahtava

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:30:36 +0000

one art teacher may thing your work is brilliant and innovative, while another may consider it shallow and unimpressive.

And another art teacher might think your art is brilliant and innovative, but not realize you copied it from another artist.

Great post!

by: Luke Maciak

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:05:23 +0000

First off, thanks for the clarifications from the non-science people. Good to know that a lot of people are taking the problem of grading things like “crativity”, “perspective” and “originality” seriously.

I still think that doing this requires a competent teacher and those are not always around.

@e - if we were graded on grammar and spelling my GPA would have been much, much lower. English is not my first language and on top of that I’m dyslexic.

But yeah, I’m sure that if I took few 300 and 400 (or graduate level) classes in humanities and non-science subjects I would probably see a much different picture.

by: e

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:19:18 +0000

What can I say, being on the humanities end of it? Work for our students is scored holistically and analytically. There is a good explanation of the two in my field presented in this link. Now imagine if your non-math & science teachers would grade your papers on grammar (the only thing you can grade objectively) rather than content and relevance to your thesis argument? How competent do you think people’s technical writing skills are? Dangling participles, homonyms (it’s/its; their/there; etc.), punctuation…ah, the list could go on. Also, a scary trend is that there is little differentiation for college students with respect to types of writing and audience (email to prof vs. text message to friend).
This does not exist for the sciences…there is no grey area in testing and other forms of evaluation. Plus, if you ever look at my syllabi you would immediately note, like @Alphast mentioned, there are so many components that comprise the final grade that evaluation is continuous simply because of how we score students. It should not be contingent upon just a paper and a final exam. (I hear my humanities and social studies colleagues screaming now that they have enough work to grade as it is…)
Just one last comment re your experience with the gen-ed course. You got away with it because of the audience to which the course was catered. If you were in a non gen-ed environment, that (I hope) would not have happened.

by: Matt`

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:40:15 +0000

I’ve always found maths/science easier because of the higher degree of precision - there’s an answer, I can work it out, when I’m done and the answer is right I get the marks. Sorted.

Things that require interpretation and opinions and arguments and all that kind of bullshitting around, I find harder to do. Less so as time went on, to the point where I was actually pretty proficient at picking out what point I wanted to make and how to use the sources to support it, but yeah… it was always bullshitting, I just got good at bullshit.

It’s a different skill set I guess… and if it’s marked more leniently then raise the grade boundaries to compensate, or lower the thresholds on the science papers to make them easier (would be better to make the humanities harder though - raise standards a little)

by: Alphast

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:27:54 +0000

I guess that what you mean is that “hard science” is actually a lot easier to assess than “human sciences” and art. So the grading puts a lot more work on the teacher and a lot less on the students in human science. It is true for instance, that assessing the knowledge, understanding and technique of a sociology student (or, like me, of a political science student) is a lot more difficult than for a math student. Especially if the teacher uses a multiple choice quiz. The topic is very hard and to make sure that the student got it right, the only way is to make him/her write an essay (in limited time), read it and assess it. But of course, that requires work (and a lot of it) from the teacher. Another good way (which was used in my University) is to include a continuous control all over the year, with a mark counting for the final exam. This way, the teacher gets a much finer idea of how the students are performing and understanding the topics. It also allows the students to show creativity, group skills and research skills (absolutely necessary in human sciences and a lot more absent from hard sciences). The teacher can see over the year if the students are showing progress, if they are just copy pasting text from the internet or if they are really grasping the concept and expressing their own ideas with their own words and arguments.

by: jenn

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:32:12 +0000

This was a great post title to wake up to!

by: Ian Clifton

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:58:40 +0000

It’s hard for me to be objective on this because I always did well in all subjects. Math was extremely easy for me because it was all procedure and no contemplation. Science was interesting (though many teachers/professors seem to put more emphasis on names of parts as opposed to functions, which seems backward to me), which is what made it easy. When things are fascinating (like my satellite communications courses were), I absorb every morsel of knowledge like some sort of sponge. In general, I’d say English teachers are more likely to be more lenient with grading, but they’re also more likely to be semi-arbitrary. I’ve had multiple English courses where I got an A on everything all the way through and then ended up with a B+ or A-. In a math class, if I earned an A on each test, I always got an A in the class.

The issue of subjective grading is a big one in English (and other subjects, I assume). It’s becoming more common at the secondary level to use rubrics for everything, mixing some objective goals with subjective ones. For instance, a specific poem type can be required to have a certain number of syllables, particular rhyme pattern, or specific focus, but there still has to be part of the grade on “ideas” and “content,” which aren’t so easy to grade.

In a way, that’s what makes English more interesting to me than math, there are many perspectives. During one of my teaching lessons I told all the students that I was going to perform an action and I wanted them all to write a short sentence saying what I did. I then jumped up onto a waist-high table and looked down at them. After the initial gasps, everyone wrote furiously. I called on students to share what they wrote and all of the answers were different. One even wrote “That was cool!” haha.

In a way, I’d say something like math is “harder” in the sense that you have to have a specific tool/knowledge set to approach the problem. If you come to class and don’t know what a polynomial is and you have to solve polynomial equations, you’re probably not going to do well. If you come to an English class and have to write a quick essay on a specific theme, you already have some background on that and can generate ideas from there, even if you missed the previous class that was entirely devoted to a discussion on that theme.