Word: tfs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Unfortunately, current grading practices fail miserably at providing meaningful feedback on student work, and as a result, grades as pedagogical tools are ineffective at best and useless at worst. Because 86 percent of grades were B or better last year, professors and TFs were effectively limited to four grades—B, B-plus, A-minus and A—when evaluating all but the weakest student work. Not only are there too few grades to be precise, but worse yet, the meaning of those grades is utterly unclear...
...matter how many grades instructors have at their disposal, those grades are useless to students if no one agrees on their meaning. Individual TFs, professors and departments are forced to guess at the proper meaning of inflated grades. One TF’s A-minus may be another TF’s A or B-plus. In lieu of clear standards across the Faculty and even across TFs in the same course, interpreting a grade can be as challenging as earning it in the first place...
Professors and well-trained TFs are better judges of quality than statistics. Even if curves in some large courses happen to match the grades that would have been given on an individual basis, a little extra effort on the part of professors and TFs is a small price to pay for the confidence that grades correspond to quality, not arbitrary quotas...
Rosovsky also cited the increased reliance on TFs as a reason for rising grades. TFs receive minimal training—some are even hired the day before classes begin—and they often have widely divergent views of what constitutes top quality work. Because of these amorphous standards, TFs are susceptible to students who, due to growing competition for employment or graduate school admissions, pressure them to give higher grades. Unfortunately, TFs acquiesce because there is no incentive for them to grade strictly. In fact, they are actually encouraged to grade more easily due to the well-documented correlation...
...only be accomplished through a coordinated Faculty-wide effort to reassess and clarify Harvard’s standards. These standards should be based both on accumulating knowledge in a subject and reasoning critically about that knowledge. Along with higher standards, oversight is key to ensuring that professors and TFs are consistently adhering to those standards...