Your professors don’t trust you.
Sure, you may get your homework in on time, you may have a perfect attendance record, and you may even be top of your class. They might write you a recommendation letter. But when it comes down to it, your professors don’t trust you to make a fair decision.
That was the message the University Senate sent to undergraduates Wednesday when it voted not to allow undergraduates a seat on the committees charged with reviewing potentially unfair grades.
When a graduate student contests a professor’s grading decision, two graduate students are allowed to sit on the committee. But undergraduates? Faculty members will entirely comprise their committee, leaving students with no representation or say in the outcome.
The decision was part of a senate update of the university’s arbitrary and capricious grading policy. The update, on the whole, is worthwhile and contains new protections for students: Professors can now be forced to change grades that are determined to be unfair, and there is a suggested deadline for solving grade disputes.
But an amendment proposed by students to allow undergraduates a seat at the table failed, with 32 for and 47 against the provision. Opponents of the measure argued students on the committees would be inherently biased toward the student in the dispute. But following that logic, should we not worry that the professors on these committees would be predisposed to side with the professor in the dispute?
Charles Delwiche, a biology professor who led the Academic Procedures and Standards Committee, which crafted the update, said creating “a committee that’s too large, with too many conflicting constituencies” would “run the risk of breaking the structure of the committee.” But only two constituencies are involved, and only two are conflicting: students and faculty members. And only one of those constituencies is allowed to make the judgment. In what universe is this a fair structure?
Professors said it was their work being judged, so only their peers needed to be represented. This is transparently false. In a grade dispute, both the student’s and faculty member’s work is evaluated. And if only professors need to serve on the committees for them to be fair, why are graduate students allowed to serve on committees?
“I really believe in student representation. … Faculty take grades very seriously, and we’re pretty tough on each other,” said Martha Nell Smith, an English professor who serves on the committee. “We’d be tougher amongst ourselves.”
Smith’s statement would be easier to swallow if the senate wasn’t voting for the second time in a year to prevent faculty members from being held accountable. Last March, the senate overwhelmingly rejected a bill that would have established review procedures for tenured faculty members. As with this amendment, students voted for the proposal and faculty members opposed it.
In both cases, the number of professors affected would be small. The vast majority of university faculty work hard at their jobs and take great care when grading. But there is always a small minority who use tenure as a way to earn $100,000 a year for nothing or assign grades based more on their personal feelings than an objective assessment of a student’s work.
The senate is the university’s greatest display of shared governance: Students, faculty and staff come together to make decisions about the university’s future. But lately, faculty members — who make up a majority of the body — have used the senate to protect their own instead of improving the academic quality and fairness of the university.
Faculty members would never allow the administration’s decisions to go unquestioned, a paper to be published without peer review or students to receive an A without proving they deserve it. But somehow, allowing others to judge their own work is out of the question. Faculty members wouldn’t allow a student to take this stance in their classroom, and students shouldn’t allow faculty members to take this stance at their university.
