SUMMARY ASSIGNMENTS
Assignment Description:
Write a 300-500 word summary of the specified article. This summary will consist of a few paragraphs
that summarize the main and supporting points of the article.
Texts:
Summary II: Andrew J. Perrin “To Fight Grade Inflation in the Humanities, Add Context”
Goals:
• Master pre-reading and reading strategies for different texts
• Understand how genre and intended audience shapes reading and writing
• Determine the logic to the ordering of ideas in a text and identify transitions as signposts to the
different parts of texts
• Annotate a reading by identifying main ideas and supporting evidence
• Recognize the effect of perspective and purpose on tone, organization, and vocabulary choice
• Summarize accurately
Process:
• Read and annotate the article, noting in the margins the main purpose of each paragraph
• Underline the main points of the article and number the evidence that supports it
• Try making an outline of the article
• Determine the article’s thesis (implicit or explicit)
• Make a list of what to include in your summary
• Evaluate the evidence provided. Is it fair? Does this evidence ignore important aspects of the
discussion? Evaluate the tone of the article and the effectiveness of the emotional appeals.
• Draft, paying careful attention to attribution of ideas and/or citations
Questions to Consider:
• Do you correctly surmise the thesis of the article (explicit or implicit)?
• Do you include all the main points for this thesis?
• Do you not emphasize interesting side points or interesting evidence?
• Do you differentiate (if necessary) between more important and less important points, between main
points and evidence?
• How clearly do you present the thesis of the article and the supporting points?
• Have you represented the author's arguments fairly, without including your own opinion?
• Have you used attributive tags to discuss the author's ideas?
• Have you evaluated the evidence presented in the article?
• Have you used your own words when you paraphrase? (avoid quoting, instead paraphrase)
Length: 300-500 words each,MLA citation,12 font, double spaced
The Chronicle of Higher Education July 21, 2014
To Fight Grade Inflation in the Humanities, Add Context
By Andrew J. Perrin
“You don’t understand,” the student said. “This is sociology. I took this class to increase my
GPA. It wasn’t supposed to be hard!”
It was my first semester on the faculty, and the student had come to my office to complain about
the grade she’d earned on the first paper for my sociology class: a B-minus. I had explained to
her why the grade was appropriate, and one she could feel proud of. (UNC’s official grade
system says the B range indicates “strong performance demonstrating a high level of
attainment,” and that “the student has shown solid promise in the aspect of the discipline under
study.”) But the student remained dissatisfied.
Alongside too many such conversations I’ve had, I’m happy to say that there have been at least
as many with genuinely curious students who want to explore the material and see where it takes
them. But the governing assumption—particularly in relatively humanistic fields like mine—that
merely adequate performance deserves an A makes it difficult to document or reward the
outstanding work of such curious young minds. That is why I became an advocate for curtailing
grade inflation and grading inequality.
I am an unlikely candidate to lead grading-reform efforts. The standard assumption is that the socalled STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are the “hard graders,” the
humanities and most of the social sciences the grade inflators. And my subfields—cultural
sociology and social theory—are particularly susceptible to the steady upward creep of grades
because their intellectual style is closer to the humanities than the sciences. I suspect this pattern
is due in part to the inherently subjective nature of evaluation in humanistic fields, in part to the
fact that students don’t complain when their grades are too high, and in part to the reluctance to
exercise judgment that has characterized the humanities in recent decades.
Whatever the causes, my experience is that grade inflation contributes greatly to the devaluing of
the humanities and some social sciences. In fact, humanists have, if anything, more reason than
our STEM colleagues to push back against the expectation of excellent grades for only fair
performance.
The emphasis on STEM in public policy and public discourse rests on the common (though
rarely demonstrated) claim that these fields will be more useful in the job market than will the
humanities and social sciences. Since STEM fields are assumed to provide the practical skills for
gainful employment, social sciences and humanities are there to accept the students who couldn’t
muster the effort for a STEM major and to pad the GPAs of those who could. Where could this
possibly lead except to condemning education and scholarship in these fields to irrelevance and
mediocrity?
The claim is not true, though. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s well-known study,
Academically Adrift, shows that the students who gained in critical-thinking skills were those in
classes where they were asked to read a lot and write a lot—and in which they believed their
professors had high expectations for their work. These intensive reading-and-writing classes are
the bread and butter of humanistic scholarship, particularly if we also communicate high
expectations. Whether humanities and social-science education is important because it spurs
broad intellectual exploration, because it helps students in their careers, or because it helps them
be better citizens, we have a duty to encourage and reward outstanding performance.
To fulfill that duty, we need to reject the role of the social sciences and humanities as second-rate
intellectual endeavors. We should expect every bit as much work, as much academic quality, and
as much difficult, sustained engagement with the material as our STEM colleagues do. And
rewarding only ambitious, excellent work with grades that reflect that excellence is an important
step in that direction.
Undeservedly high grades in humanities and social science are already resented by our STEM
colleagues because they penalize students who concentrate in their fields. They also hinder our
ability to document and reward outstanding student performance in humanities and social
science. Reducing grade inflation should benefit both groups. To do that, we need policy reforms
to reduce upward pressure on grades while respecting intellectual diversity and academic
freedom.
For the past five years, I have been involved in a series of conversations at Chapel Hill about
how to do just that. A 2009 report on grading practices found that “grades assigned in classes at
UNC-CH have continued to rise over time (with an average grade in fall 2008 of 3.213), are
more concentrated in the upper range of the grade distribution (with 82% of grades being A or B
in fall 2008), and exhibit disparities across and, in some cases, within departments.” As a result,
we developed a policy that will be implemented this fall: contextual grade reporting.
Beginning this fall, all undergraduate transcripts from UNC will include information about the
context of grades alongside the grades themselves. They will contain the median grade for each
class and the percentile range the student’s grade reflects. Readers of the transcript, including the
students themselves, will be able to determine where the student’s performance falls among her
peers. In addition, the transcript will feature the student’s “schedule-point average,” or SPA,
alongside the familiar grade-point average. The SPA—calculated by averaging the median
grades in the student’s schedule—can be used by transcript readers as a benchmark to evaluate
the meaning, in context, of the GPA.
The new information on transcripts will help reduce the upward pressure on grades by
documenting students’ relative success in courses with lower grade distributions. It will reduce
the benefit of students “shopping” for courses in which they expect an easy A, as my student
tried to do in that first class. In addition to classes that will increase their GPAs, students will
prefer those that decrease their SPAs: those that use the full grade range. This, in turn, will
encourage faculty to use that range to reflect accurately the range of students’ learning and offer
rewards accordingly. As graduate and professional schools, employers, and scholarship programs
learn to use this new information, they will no longer assume that humanities and social-science
classes offer uniformly high grades. Instead, they will be able to see those grading patterns,
assess students’ performance directly, and reward outstanding work in all their classes.
Contextual grade reporting alone will not solve the problems with grade inflation, but it’s a step
in the right direction. Other institutions following UNC’s lead can move further in that direction.
Humanities and social-science scholars should see this as an opportunity to inspire and reward
great work in every discipline.
Andrew J. Perrin is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
His most recent book is American Democracy: From Tocqueville to Town Halls to
Twitter (Polity, 2014).
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