College Students Want to Eliminate Grades Below 'C' and Written Exams

At Oberlin and elsewhere, the liberal establishment is crumbling beneath a new wave of student activism:

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) May 24, 2016

Study: A Third of Millennials Live With Their Parents

A recent piece in The New Yorker examines the effects of a new wave of student activism at Oberlin College, a small, private liberal arts institution in Ohio, and it's pretty eye-opening.

According to writer Nathan Heller, Oberlin is "at the center of the current storm" of activism on college campuses, with students heavily involved in issues including classroom diversity, safe spaces, racial inequality and social injustice.

Due to the intense focus on those issues, many progressive students are dropping out.

They claim that their activism is getting in the way of their studies, and other students, the faculty and the administration have made it impossible to live on campus.

Heller spoke to self-identified “Afro-Latinx” student Megan Bautista, who said that she was upset that the school refused her demand to erase any grades below Cs.

Protest surged again in the fall of 2014, after the killing of Tamir Rice. “A lot of us worked alongside community members in Cleveland who were protesting. But we needed to organize on campus as well—it wasn’t sustainable to keep driving forty minutes away. A lot of us started suffering academically.” In 1970, Oberlin had modified its grading standards to accommodate activism around the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings, and Bautista had hoped for something similar. More than thirteen hundred students signed a petition calling for the college to eliminate any grade lower than a C for the semester, but to no avail. “Students felt really unsupported in their endeavors to engage with the world outside Oberlin,” she told me.

A student from Chicago named Zakiya Acey complained to Heller that some of his professors would actually make her take in-class exams as opposed to simply discussing the subject matter.

"Because I’m dealing with having been arrested on campus, or having to deal with the things that my family are going through because of larger systems—having to deal with all of that, I can’t produce the work that they want me to do. But I understand the material, and I can give it to you in different ways. There’s professors who have openly been, like, ‘Yeah, instead of, you know, writing out this midterm, come in to my office hours, and you can just speak it,’ right? But that’s not institutionalized. I have to find that professor."

insider.foxnews.com/2016/05/25/oberlin-college-student-activists-want-eliminate-grades-below-c-and-written-exams/

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Read the full New Yorker piece

Letter from Oberlin May 30, 2016 Issue
The Big Uneasy
What’s roiling the liberal-arts campus?

By Nathan HellerOberlin

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges/ * Very Lengthy Article *

what a Bunch of Monkey-Pukes!

nobody cares what a bunch of whiny, college kid liberals want... the government needs to seriously secure the borders for a few years, to set things straight...

no more grades????? hoooray!!! wait will I still get my degree?

yes, just stand in that line over there, and they will hand you a degree, whatever you want...


i want to be an astrophysicist, so i need to find out what line to stand in to get it...

Grades are a tool of the Patriarchy!!

The motto of those college students is . . .

Thinking is backwards..get educated FIRST then become an activist...you know AFTER you know something.

Problem today is no one wants to learn anything, they'd rather just b! T ch about things their still very empty brains don't understand

One of the companies I work with,
won't hire college students, or recent grads.

Why?

See original post.

I like their thinking... pass or don't pass. Progressive, fresh I like it!

This really ticks me off. I mean really I have a granddaughter that starts the University this fall and I tell you what if it went like this. I can bet my paycheck her mom would stop paying..

If you want to be an activist fine and dandy after you get your education..
Really..
I wonder if their boss if they get hired someone is going to give a tinkers damn if they don't like something.. NO...

With some of the college grads I've met it probably wouldn't make a difference.

One was a guy who used to "host parties" on another site. Supposedly he had a bachelors degree and was an engineer. Someone was complaining about the number of men compared to women who were attending a party. He told them the "racial" instead of "ratio" would improve...freaking idiot.

My Advice To Those Students?
"You Really Really Really Don't want To Do That!" Lmao!

Wayback in the wayback machine, I attended a small university in The US [New College, Sarasota, Florida/ Link : https://www.ncf.edu/about/history/] that patterned its grading system after the undergraduate programs of Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the UK. The expectations of the instructors & work load were incredibly intense & much more demanding than any school I'd ever attended in which a standard grading system was employed. In order to be prepared for the "weekly-discussion-topic" where one was grilled, questioned by the instructor & fellow students which required one to read uncountable books/publications[take notes, ect] in addition to the numerous textbooks assigned for the class. Weekly written essays were also required by many of the instructors to check for student understanding in addition to the discussions & the mountains of compulsory
readings. Undergraduate degrees were awarded in a 3 year time frame after the successful presentation of a detailed thesis on a specific area of study. It was no wonder to me [& other fellow students] that this tiny University had one of the highest percentages of suicides of all the Universities in the country!
*
Assessment
Students at both Oxford and Cambridge are assessed informally throughout their course by producing work for their tutors/supervisors for tutorials/supervisions which usually take place weekly. Formal assessment is almost entirely based on examinations although in the final year of many courses one examination paper can be replaced with a dissertation.
At Oxford the final degree classification result is usually based on the examinations taken at the end of the final year. Cambridge students, in contrast, are assessed through examinations in more than one year of their course.
What is Cambridge University's grading system?
https://www.quora.com/What-is-Cambridge-Universitys-grading-system

It's Garbage!

Sounds like a sort of made up problem. One of those "if you go looking, you WILL find whiny people who say crap like this" deals.

I've been hearing this exact same story since I was a very little kid. It gave me hope when I was six, that I might eventually find school to be a lot easier, but of course, nothing ever came of it.

There's ALWAYS a group of people who decide to protest this or that, and who an outraged media-type decides to spotlight, because they know it will rile the rest of us up.

It's the leading cause of a seemingly endless repetition of the classic old codger rant that goes "the kids today are a bunch of wimps!"

That Crap has been festering since the Sixties!

So for the past 2-3 years, colleges & the media have been exaggerating or lying ... just to make new minority Progressives, look like whiney brats.

There is NO real equally, (in all things, for everyone), nor should there be. That never was & will NEVER be the REAL world. And these ADULTS need to put their big boy pants on.
And face consequences.

If they want to feel equal, they can run home to mama & hear her say,
" I love ALL you kids the same "

the problems start with "participation" trophies... nobody has to try, just have to show up...