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Standards and Teaching
By Timothy Norfolk
To the Editor:
While reading the articles on the report of Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education in the May–June issue of Academe, I found my attention drawn to the unwritten premise of the American educational system. In political and social discussions of the system’s problems, teaching techniques are always assumed to offer the “magic bullet” that will help every student to succeed. In my opinion, this assumption is the main cause of grade inflation. After all, if failure of a student means “bad teaching,” what teacher is going to give failing grades?
During thirty years in higher education, I have seen my fair share of students with inadequate knowledge of mathematics or science. I have also seen a handful of students who started in remedial mathematics and went on to succeed. Some have even gone on to PhD programs in mathematics, science, or engineering.
What I have not seen is any evidence that we can overcome in any large measure the weaknesses that students bring with them. Mathematics ACT and SAT scores are very good predictors, on average, of college achievement, the heartwarming exceptions notwithstanding. My experience does not appear to be unique: no large American university with remedial mathematics courses has achieved better than a 50 percent pass rate.
Until American society accepts that any standard worth having will necessarily mean that some students cannot meet it, we will be condemned to mediocrity.
Timothy Norfolk
(Theoretical and Applied Mathematics)
University of Akron
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