GOING AGAINST THE CURVE Ask peоple whаt’s wrоng in Americаn higher educаtiоn, and you’ll hear about grade inflation. Across 200 colleges and universities, over 40 percent of grades were in the A realm, a percentage that has grown over the past three decades. But the opposite problem worries me even more: grade deflation, when teachers use a forced grading curve: The top 10 percent of students receive A’s, the next 30 percent get B’s, and so on. The forced curve arbitrarily limits the number of students who can excel. If your forced curve allows for only seven A’s, but 10 students have mastered the material, three of them will be unfairly punished. It disincentivizes studying, creating an atmosphere that pits students against one another. At best, it increases competition, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game: Your success means my failure. Many people believe that the world is a zero-sum game, but as an organizational psychologist, I’ve found that they’re wrong. The time employees spend helping others contributes as much to their performance evaluations and promotion rates as how well they do their jobs. An analysis of 168 studies of more than 51,000 employees showed that leaders reward people who make the team and the organization more successful. My research studying the careers of “takers,” who aim to come out ahead, and “givers,” who enjoy helping others showed that in the short run, the takers were more successful. But in the long run, the givers consistently achieved better results. Takers believe in a zero-sum world, and they end up creating one where bosses, colleagues and clients don’t trust them. Givers build deeper and broader relationships — people are rooting for them instead of gunning for them. Like most people in business schools, my students were intent on networking, but they focused their efforts outside their classes and regarded their in-class peers as competition. I decided to change that culture. I started experimenting with grading schemes that would encourage community and collaboration, while still maintaining standards and assessing students individually. I began by writing unusually difficult exams. That was enough to motivate students to study hard. And I introduced a rule: No student will ever be hurt by another student’s grade. I promised them that I would never curve downward, only upward. If the highest mark was an 83, I would add 17 points to everyone’s score. Now one student’s excellence didn’t hurt another’s grade. But while that removed a level of competition, it didn’t address the bigger goal, which was to make preparing for my exam a team effort. How could I get students to help one another? I tried another approach. The most difficult section of my final exam was multiple choice. I told the students that they could pick the one question about which they were most unsure, and write down the name of a classmate who might know the answer. If the classmate got it right, they would both earn the points. Essentially, I was trying to build a collaborative culture with a reward system where one person’s success benefited someone else. It was a small offering but it made a big difference. More students started studying together in small groups, then the groups started pooling their knowledge. The results: Their average scores were 2 percent higher than the previous year’s. We’ve long known that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. In fact, evidence suggests that this is one of the reasons that firstborns tend to slightly outperform younger siblings on grades and IQ tests: Firstborns benefit from educating their younger siblings. I had been trying to teach this lesson through my research on givers and takers, but it was so much more powerful for them to live it. Creating an atmosphere in which students want to help one another also allowed them to benefit from another of the defining features of personal and professional relationships: transactive memory, which is simply knowing who knows best. In a work team you don’t have to know how to perfect PowerPoint slides if your colleague is an expert. When students take the time to find out who has expertise, they become smarter at learning. And that’s ultimately what we’re trying to teach, isn’t it? The mark of higher education isn’t the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It’s the skills you gain about how to learn.
Whо first used fоssils tо mаke а geologic mаp in England?
Accоrding tо the cоurse content, which of the following аre importаnt things to do when speаking to a camera?