The Blue Monkey Review

To begin with, I have two classes, two sections of American Civilization. The first “section” has just over 100 students, and the second has about 60 students. That is more students as I would have in a regular schedule of classes in a full year at Seton Hill University. I received an outline of the topics covered by the last teacher of this course, and I tried to match my readings and topics to the topics listed in the pre-existing program. But I also sat with my department chair, Janko Andrijesevic and worked out the details of the course “program,” that is, what assignments and assessments would shape the class.

I should say, here, that I teach first year students and that these students are the first to enter a system undergoing reform. So my course represents an important move toward a new approach to teaching here in Montenegro. I have already written about European reform, but I need to give a bit more background for this to make sense. In the past, students here have earned degrees by passing exams. Courses prepared students for exams, I suppose, but students could sit for exams apart from the courses. And if a student did poorly in the exam, he or she could repeat the exam, with no limit. My predecessor in this Fulbright position, Robert Sullivan, has written to me of a student who took his American literature exam five times.

The new system that I work under makes courses the primary means of earning a degree. Students still have a chance to repeat a final exam, but if they fail they must repeat the course. Janko and I developed a course that contained even more student work and assessment, so that everything would not depend on a single exam. I had the sense when we discussed the course that I was taking advantage of every new innovation. Yet the course that resulted gives the following weights to its various assessments:
Two quizzes: 3% of the course grade each
One homework: 4%
One mid-term: 40%
One final: 50%
The mid-term may be repeated and the final may be repeated (but students cannot repeat both).

Given this raw numerical material to deal with, you can make several assumptions about student work in the course. This provides students with very little incentive to do the work necessary for either the quizzes or the homework, and certainly does not provide motivation for hard work. And the possibility of repeating the two major exams can give students a very casual attitude toward them, especially the mid-term. This should provide a good guide to student behavior, but I apparently didn’t do this analysis prior to the beginning of the course and assumed that students here would work about the way students in the U.S. do. Now, of course, I have the blinding clarity of hindsight.

I only began to see these attitudes at work when my homework fell due a few weeks ago. I had assigned students to write a paragraph on one of the documents we had used in the first half of the course, discussing its relevance to either civil society or individualism. Students did well on this, with a strong majority receiving 3 or more per cent out of 4 per cent possible. I have posted some of the better papers on the American Civilization site as examples for others to follow. A surprising number chose to write about “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a text that I think is extraordinary, but even someone whose middle name is Calvin would find Edwards’ theology strange if not republsive. I expected my Orthodox students to see the text as totally bizarre and ignore it. Instead, many wanted to grapple with God’s anger. The least popular document was Alexander Hamilton’s “Report on Public Credit.” One student told me flatly in class that it was the least interesting document.

But I’m writing here about the students who actually did the assignment. On the day that I collected the papers I had two or three students ask if the due date could be extended. I pretended that I’d never heard of such a thing in my life and said I would have to think about it (and in the end decided that extending the deadline would reward procrastination). But when I collected the papers I realized that less than half of my students had done the assignment.

Another light bulb of realization turned on when I sat down to record the grades for the mid-term. The grades had the usual bell-shaped curve, with three students making perfect papers and a healthy number doing very well. But as I put grades into my spreadsheet I noticed that a fair number of names were new. These were students who not only didn’t do the homework but also didn’t do the first quiz. And, on top of that, I had a significant group who didn’t do the mid-term, taking for granted that they would do it later, on the make-up date.

So now, even though I have given three graded assessments, probably only a small majority of my students have three grades. But in reflecting on this I realized that a student cost-benefit analysis would determine that most of his/her time and energy should go into one of the two big tests, reserving less energy for the exam that will be repeated, and giving little or no attention to the relatively minor exams and assignment.

I had another wake-up call to rouse me from my cultural hibernation when I handed the tests back. I admit at the outset that the trauma a few weeks ago of giving the quizzes back by calling out student names changed me. For the larger class this job took far too long, and I garbled so many names even the students stopped thinking it was funny after half an hour. This time I put the exams in alphabetical order and told students to come up to look at their exam. [I know, totally illegal and unethical in the U.S.A. But when I asked Janko how I would inform students what their grades were on the final, he said to make a list of names and post the grades.] I’ve already talked about the absence of “standing in line” behavior here. Combine this with a weak notion of the concept of alphabetical order (one girl was looking through the first pile until I discovered her last name began with “R”) and with the common practice of having a friend find out your grade for you. The result looked like a crowd at Macy’s on black Friday converging on the Cabbage Patch Doll display.

The real eye-opener, though, came from student responses. Students who had earned high grades, B+ or higher (a small minority) were understandably pleased. But many students who received scores just slightly above passing were visibly thrilled. Clearly this came from having their negative expectations confounded. “I only studied an hour and a half,” one girl confessed. But she was giddy with delight that she had a grade that probably qualified as a D.

There is more. We discussed race in a recent class. But that has to wait until a later posting. Keep reading The Blue Monkey Review.