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Rigorous teaching standards vs. self-preservation?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I have a permanent, non-tt position at a state school. My position is teaching-oriented (4/4 load), and I teach a lot of gen-eds and lower-level classes. The threat of budgetary cuts at my institution concerns me, but I've been assured that my position is secure (I'm on multi-year renewable contracts). In spite of this, I'm still feeling a lot of pressure to maintain high enrollment in my classes and get strong student evals (lest I begin to appear expendable). I'm not cynical enough to think that the latter can only be gotten by compromising standards, but I do sometimes feel like my desire to impose rigorous academic standards and my desire for professional self-preservation are pulling me in opposite directions as a teacher. Does anybody else feel this way? Any tips on how to deal with it?

These are good questions. Recently, Eric Schwitzgebel catalogued some data on grade inflation, and it seems to be a progressive and ongoing issue across the academy. What's to be done? I don't know. It's a collective action problem which, as the OP points out, puts individual instructors in a bind.

How do you all handle these issues, and how well does it work?

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10 responses to “Rigorous teaching standards vs. self-preservation?”

  1. Rosa

    It’s been really helpful for me to switch from thinking about the quality of my courses in terms of high standards for the work done, and instead to think about whether the way I am setting up the course requires them to learn a lot in order to do well. For me, this has involved “padding” my grades with lots of assignments that require them to practice skills, but are graded on something closer to a pass/fail basis (things here include Perusall, self-reflections and backwards outlines on papers, and metacognition activities where they think about what is helping them to learn and do well and what is getting in their way). For more major assignments like papers or exams, I have relatively high standards, but I also make earlier assignments worth much less than later assignments, so that they can mess up on the earlier ones and still do well in the class by applying the skills they have developed along the way on later assignments. This seems to make students happy because they feel like grading is fair and not too punitive, and it makes me (and often them, based on anonymous evaluations I do!) happy because I feel like they are actually learning. And re enrollment, students have seemed to be happy to do things this way even if it requires more work for them – the enrollments for my courses are 2-4 times what they were before I started teaching them.

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  2. anon

    You should feel totally fine about prioritizing self-preservation. If rigor decreases, there is no sense in which you are at fault. Rather, the situation is entirely your employer’s fault, as they have brought it about through hiring too few permanent workers, as well as assigning unrealistic workloads to their workers in general.

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  3. Bill Vanderburgh

    In intro classes for sure, I’d say rigor is not the point. Ideally, intro classes should give students the opportunity to discover that they like a field, to find problems and solutions they hadn’t considered, and to be exposed to new ways of thinking. Hopefully the general excitement for learning this fosters, the motivation they develop from having a good experience in intro classes, causes them to want to study the subject more deeply later. Model rigor but create excitement.
    Similarly, gen ed classes don’t exist as a way of ensuring a rigorous education. They are a way of promoting well-roundedness, of exposing students to ideas they might not have otherwise encountered, and of promoting general curiosity.
    When students have a bad experience with a class or subject (which is often the case if they are held to rigorous standards that they cannot meet either because of a lack of prior preparation or because it is not rational for them to invest the effort given all the other things they have to do), they are unlikely to take classes in that subject again, and they are more likely to drop out of university altogether. Neither of those are things that promote the interests of the department, the university or the students.
    The fun thing is, when you change your orientation from enforcing rigor to creating excitement, more students learn more.

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  4. OP

    @Bill Vanderburgh: thanks for your comments. I didn’t mean to suggest that my primary goal at the intro/gen-ed level is to enforce rigor. I strongly agree with the need to create excitement/interest in the discipline, esp at that level. My worry is more like this: I’m feeling a lot of pressure to maintain enrollment and get good evals in all of my classes (even those not at the intro/gen ed level), so much so that it almost feels like the guiding ethos for instructors at my institution is something like “keep enrollment high and get good numbers on the evals”. This is not a good ethos for higher ed, imo, but it feels like one that I have to contend with if I am to stay employed. Also, in my ~10 years of teaching, I would estimate that the percentage of students who actually get excited about philosophy – even when I’m at my very best – is probably 10-15% (this could be the result of my own limits as a teacher, but it still seems like a minority of students would actually take to the discipline even in ideal circumstances). For everyone else – the vast majority of the students that I teach – I have to try to figure out a way to run my courses where there are meaningful standards and expectations. What would you suggest doing when it comes to students who aren’t receptive to my efforts to foster enthusiasm and excitement, who don’t do the readings, and who don’t participate much in class (or who perhaps don’t even attend that often)? The reality is that, I have a lot of students like this, and I don’t feel comfortable just handing them As and Bs for their lackluster efforts. However, if I do the right thing as a teacher (i.e. if I give them a C or a D) I feel as though I am jeopardizing my career.

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  5. The Real SLAC Prof

    OP: Have you ever talked to your colleagues about this? You report feeling pressure to maintain good evaluations, but it isn’t clear that you have explicitly been told by your philosophy colleagues that your job security hinges on this.
    I ask because grade inflation causes real problems in my department, and the professors who have inflated grades the most have, historically, been non-TT professors, presumably motivated, at least in part, by the idea that their job security is tied to keeping the customers happy. But here this was not actually the case: the department would have preferred, and gone to bat for, professors who did maintain reasonable expectations and did not inflate grades, even if this resulted in somewhat lackluster evaluations. In recent years, we have made our expectations more explicit, but I’ve noticed that some still seem to believe that they’d be better off inflating the grades, even though this is not the case in my department, and we have directly communicated that to them.
    Perhaps at your institution your philosophy colleagues really do want you to keep the expectations low and the grades high, but I just wanted to mention that this might not actually be the case.

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  6. OP

    @The Real SLAC prof: I am the only full time philosophy faculty member at my institution. I’m in a dept with faculty from a wide range of different disciplines. My position is renewable (multi-year contracts). However, there are budgetary concerns at my school, with talk of possible “restructuring” across the institution. Also, my annual review is primarily based on the strength of my student evals. So, unfortunately, I don’t have a group of tt philosophers to go to bat for me, and I’m operating in an uncertain institutional context, especially in the long term.

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  7. Anon

    In your position I would just give most of the students As. Embrace the grade inflation. It’s not your problem and the playing field was never level anyway so it’s not clear what of value a high grade is tracking.

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  8. Bill Vanderburgh

    To the OP: 10-15% of intro/gen ed students getting excited by philosophy sounds about right to me. And if your institutional mandate is really “keep enrollment high and get strong evals,” well, do that. If that is something you can’t stomach, moving to another institution is a possibility (much easier said than done, of course).
    Is there a faculty development or teaching & learning center on your campus? Getting involved with them could give you a sense of how other faculty on your campus deal with these issues. Generally, just do what other instructors are doing. There’s no point in being the lone voice for standards, and the best way to get poor evals is to go against what students expect from their classes given the institutional context.

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  9. OP

    @Bill Vanderburgh: yes, I have consulted with the teaching center at my institution. The prevailing message I tend to get is: “be accommodating to the students”. I’m certainly not opposed to being accommodating, but (as my above posts hopefully make clear) I do worry about declining standards and the possible adverse effects of imposing (what I take to be) meaningful and reasonable expectations (e.g. poor evals and low enrollment which will, in turn, be an issue when it comes time for promotion/review). I feel like some of this push to be (excessively, imo) accommodating is a lingering effect of the pandemic. It’s hard to shake it, but it’s important to do so, I think. A number of my students are lacking when it comes to fairly basic skills (organization, planning, independence, communication, etc.), and I can only be so accommodating. However, as I’ve noted, there are a number of institutional pressures which – combined with the leftover culture from the pandemic – make it difficult to hold students accountable. I agree that this isn’t my cross to bear, but I do struggle with this sort of question frequently.

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  10. Kapto

    I find that tougher grades tend to affect my evals far less the more transparent and objective the criteria I use. They take it less personally and hold me less personally accountable. So instead of essays, I use multiple choice tests, and otherwise short-answer (roughly 1 sentence) question sets with clear rubrics and very obvious reasons why wrong answers are wrong. This means the assignments and test — though not necessarily the lectures — focus on aspects of the material that are fairly cut and dry. Stuff like identifying and distinguishing different types of arguments and views, supplying missing premises, counterarguments, critiques and counterexamples, giving short samples of something or other, etc. Not perfect for teaching, but manageable without sacrificing standards or evalautions.

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