[487] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
pass/no-record
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (asarahm)
Thu May 3 12:13:28 2001
Message-Id: <200105031613.MAA14182@hammock.mit.edu>
To: mit-talk@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 03 May 2001 12:13:04 -0400
From: asarahm <asarahm@MIT.EDU>
jonathon white (smoove) wrote :
>We learn that students like yourself tend to care more about maintaing
>the Pass/No Record system in tact than seeing a faculty and graduate
>community that mirrors the diverse undergraduate population.
wow! pass/no-record!
personally, i care about both more or less equally (i.e., i think
they're both important) but i think i can do more about p/nr than
about increasing diversity in the faculty (since one is a policy
and the other a trend).
more to the point : in the tech article on the recent faculty vote
to change the current p/nr system in the second semester, a faculty
member was quoted as saying that students need grades to motivate
them to do their work.
personally, i care very little about grades. but i'm not trying to
get into grad school. to me, all of MIT is p/nr - either i get
my diploma or i don't, and my grade is a communication to me of
the quality of my work in the class.
i work because i want to learn the material, because i respect the
professor, because i'm interested in the material, because i like
learning. this has been the case my _whole_ life. i have never
worked for grades.
a pet peeve of mine is the attitude that some (definitely not all)
professors seem to have that we MIT students (and frosh especially)
are just trying to get away with as little as we possibly can.
if i were trying to do as little work as possible, i would have gone
to UVM with half of the kids i grew up with. granted, there are
some classes (department/MIT requirements that one might not
be specifically interested in) where the other incentives for
working are lacking, and so grades might be a motivating factor,
but i think that is a larger problem, and will not be solved by
changing a grading policy.
also, looking a peer-institutions, and based solely on anecdotal
evidence (so take it with a generous amount of salt), in the
three harvard classes i have taken, harvard students seem to
much more concerned about what they have to do to get an A.
so question to you all - why do you tool? for the grades? for
the learning? for the professor? and how might we convince
professors who think we are all lazy that we wouldn't be here
if we were?
take care,
-asm
______________
Sarah McDougal
Environmental Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
asarahm@mit.edu
