Good Job

Here at Berkeley, I'm doin' pretty well for myself, at least academically. Socially I couldn't interact my way out of a room with no walls, but that's fine.

The instructors at Berkeley, in my experience, are members of the increasingly-widespread social movement that increasingly focuses on providing personal feedback to each student, especially in the more writing-oriented classes. The idea here is that, if each student has feedback specifically targeted (at a fine level of detail) to their individual work, their individual learning and construction process will be more significantly benefited than if a simple percentage score or letter grade was presented.

I really like this idea, especially for classes in the humanities or other disciplines where things can be a little more interpretive or subjective. Seeing the grader's reasoning is, in a very prosaic and materialistic way, very helpful in terms of figuring out how to tailor your assignments to get better grades. Additionally, having their logic laid out at various points means that, should you disagree, the two of you can have a specific point from which to establish a constructive dialogue about how to improve your writing or make your interpretation of the course content more clear to the instructor. That is to say, "if no like grade, can point at spot, say no, talk more."

Now, this is all about improvement, which is lovely. After all, that's a big part of what learning is about. Making mistakes happens to everyone, and the point of a university setting is to make them in a (relatively) safe and (mostly) non-judgmental environment and to learn from them for the future.

The "improvement" focus puts a major positive slant on most of the feedback; criticism is meant to be "constructive," and avoid being harsh to the point that students are afraid to try again. At some point people started to realize that the "rap on the knuckles" approach was giving young people complexes, and so we decided to go about education with a perspective more focused on improvement. In our society that praises virtues like confidence and boldness in adults, it wouldn't do to have sharp censures for mistakes and only the most grudging of praise for successes from an early time in life.

This is all good stuff, in my opinion. People have a right to helpful and honest feedback about their work so that they can improve it, for their own good and the good of others.

Uh-oh, it's that catching point that comes up in all my posts. "Honest." Oh, no.

The problem with the approach I described above is that most instructors are actively trying to be nice to their students. "But that isn't a problem! Being nice is nice." Yeah, it is, until it hinders any sort of progress.

I think this issue only really affects people who reliably score well on things (or maybe just me, because I'm horrible), but it bears consideration. There are those of us who are extremely used to getting good grades and have been jaded by the experience, succumbing to narcissism and coming to believe that they've attained the best level possible and can simply continue the way they are, breezing through things. These are the people who will likely, in later life, "have people to do that." They'll also have destructive cocaine addictions and a home life full of carefully-concealed domestic violence, but that isn't the point!

Those people, however, are considerably in the minority (I might say roughly 1%, if you get my drift) even among people who get the high scores. The rest of such people are still aware of their own human imperfection and, moreover, still definitely concerned with improvement.

So, the issue: our feedback rarely has anything meaningful or useful to say. For example, my anthropology midterm went really well and I wound up with a 99. The test was mostly comprised of essays, so I turned to that section hoping to see some feedback about strengths and weaknesses, and so on.

What I saw, in reality, was a lot of "good" and "good job" with various little bits underlined, with a little "fantastic!" written at the end.

I had rhetoric papers last semester that had the same sort of issue. I put a lot of energy in, and got an A on both of them, but the feedback was comprised entirely of terms like "wonderful!" and "well argued!" Now, I'm obviously happy about my grades, and receiving praise is lovely. I think the problem is that, when I perform well on something, I expect the feedback to slide up to that standard too.

That's vague, so let me explain. If I write a paper with some serious grammatical problems and plainly misinterpreted (or didn't bother to do) the readings for a course, those are problems that can be easily pointed to as things for me to improve and get into a better place with my work. Even if my work is already in a better place, I want feedback that reflects that; sure, point out where I did well, but I absolutely guarantee that there are places I can get better.

Part of being academically "smart" (I already talked about that word in another post), in my opinion, involves being emotionally mature enough to accept your own imperfection. I don't care if you have a higher amount of computational brainpower than most people if you can't descend from your cloud long enough to clearly state your sandwich order in terms we mere humans can comprehend. There's no longer any such thing as an intellectual elite, or at least not one that implies friendship or peership between its members. In a tossup between a snooty brainchild from a certain -County- in California and an honest, down-to-earth person of less "intelligence," I regret to inform one (and, presumably, one's parents) that one's AP test scores and your 2000+ on the SAT just isn't going to cut it for being a human being. Go forth and seek humility, thou baggage!

I am not one of those airy "intellectuals." I know I make mistakes, and I'm at least emotionally developed enough not to come screaming to your office if you disagree with me. Respect me enough to give me feedback that seriously considers what I wrote through the lens of constructive criticism, no matter what "score" I got.

TL;DR It's a "smart" person-rich environment, for God's sake. Give us all some useful feedback.