Learning is more than earning an A says Cathy N. Davidson, the professor, who recently returned to teach English and interdisciplinary studies after eight years in administration. But students don't always see it that way. Vying for an A by trying to figure out what a professor wants or through the least amount of work has made the traditional grading scale superficial, she says."You've got this real mismatch between the kind of participatory learning that’s happening online and outside of the classroom, and the top-down, hierarchical learning and rigid assessment schemes that we’re using in the classroom from grades K through 12 and all the way up to graduate school," Ms. Davidson says. "In school systems today, we’re putting more and more emphasis on quantitative assessment in an era when, out of the classroom, students are learning through an entirely different way of collaboration, customizing, and interacting."
the outsourcing loop becomes a diatribe against rubrics...
It's hard to see how either outsourced assessment or harvested assessment can be accomplished convincingly without rubrics. How else can the standards of the teacher be enacted by the grader? From there we are driven to consider how, in the absence of a rubric, the standards of the teacher can be enacted by the student. Is it "ethical" to use the Potter Stewart standard: "I'll know it when I see it"?
