When Benedict College president Dr. David Swinton noticed the nagging underperformance of his students, he instituted a new grading policy, which has become controversial. But Swinton says the policy could save remedial students, putting them back on track
COLUMBIA, S.C.
Dr. David Holmes Swinton is a man of action. When he reported for work 11 years ago as president of Benedict College, he was appalled at the amount of litter on campus. So, he grabbed his children, and they organized a daily campus pickup. Before long, even the students joined in. Struck by the boarded-up and dilapidated houses in the college's Columbia, S.C., neighborhood, the Harvard-trained economist bought up the houses and started an economic development program that cleaned up the blight. Bothered by the shortage of males on the 2,900-student campus, Swinton air-conditioned the men's dorms and generally made the male students feel appreciated. Now Benedict is a rarity, a campus with a 50-50 split between Black male and female students.
But the boldest move was yet to come. When Swinton noticed the nagging underperformance of students, and especially the high dropout rates among freshmen and sophomores, he started shaking the trees for answers. Tutorials and counseling made some improvement, but scarcely cut into a disturbing pattern: A third of first-year students did not return for the second year, largely a result of academic failure. The drop-out rate was not wildly out of line with other open-admissions historically Black colleges in South Carolina, which ranged from 60 percent to 70 percent. But Swinton felt Benedict should break the cycle, or at least give it a strong try.
"Things were not going right, and we had to do something about it," Swinton told his faculty. And what he did two years ago was change the grading system for freshmen and sophomores, hoping to change student habits and give ill-prepared students some breathing room. It could give them a chance to stick around long enough to hit the academic stride.
College grading has never been an exact science. For every teacher who announced a stem, no-nonsense sink-or-swim policy, there have always been others who observed, weighed and counted every evidence of student achievement, from tests and papers to bright insights in class discussions. Some teachers grade on a curve, creating a ranking system and failing the bottommost students. Others sympathized with students with modest ability but boundless enthusiasm, allowing ambitious students to write extra papers, do projects and get extra credit from class recitations. In the end, all of the approaches contributed to learning.
Now comes the Swinton approach, an attempt at a campus-wide grading system that accommodates the deficiencies and unreadiness of many students, especially those from broken homes. Swinton, plunging in where angels fear to tread, has decreed a sweeping change in the grading approach in this 125-year-old private college. He formulated a system of grading in the first two years that purports to measure both achievement and effort. Colleges adapt to big changes much like cats take to a dip in the swimming pool--very noisily, if at all. And Benedict has been no different. The change has been controversial, propelling the college into the national spotlight.
Swinton's plan held that starting in 2003, freshman and sophomore grades were to be based 40 percent on standard achievement, and 60 percent on effort--as defined by regular attendance and willingness to augment grades with extra work. Under the program, called Success Equals Effort (SEE), students would be graded in the traditional way in the junior and senior years. In short, students get a lifeline in the early years, but to graduate they must meet degree requirements.
The program has been hammered by criticism from many directions, even from some students. Well-prepared students are annoyed at the idea of getting a grade in the same ballpark as a student next to them who obviously knows less. And in the new climate where schools live by national rankings, students and faculty are fearful that some observers will see the program as a dilution of academic standards. College instructors, who got their academic credentials the old-fashioned way, are challenged to think differently when it comes to assessing and grading students in the freshman and sophomore classes.
That is a challenge some meet reluctantly. And true to form, Swinton's new idea was met with a fair amount of foot-dragging and outfight hostility from some Benedict faculty and outsiders.
'PIONEERING IS DIFFICULT'
Two science professors, Drs. Milwood Motley and Larry Williams, were fired for public refusal to cooperate with the program. They and colleagues in the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) have raised academic freedom issues regarding the grading system and the way it was installed. Editorialists, and others in education, have piled on to criticize and heap scorn on Swinton's attempt at innovation.
"A terrible idea," says Dr. Michael Lomax, former president of Dillard University and now chief executive officer of the United Negro College Fund. "It is a mistake to abandon standard ways of measuring student success."
Dr. Walter E. Williams, George Mason University economics professor and conservative columnist, was more blunt.
"Dr. Swinton's policy borders on lunacy," Williams wrote in his syndicated column in October of 2004. "Imagine that a freshman gets an A for effort in his algebra class, but has virtually no grasp of the material, earning him an F grade. Under the SEE Policy, the student might be assigned a C for the course. What can we expect when the student takes algebra II?"
Swinton responds to critics on several levels. As an economist, he has worked hard on correlating economic success and effort in the Black communities, and he says he is certain that the emphasis on effort at Benedict will start to stabilize enrollment and will also strengthen, not weaken, the quality of graduates.
Benedict is an open-admissions college, open to virtually all students, including those with remedial needs. Students come to Benedict from every county in South Carolina, Swinton says. Traditional strategies, such as using makeup classes and providing tutors to help weak students catch up have not curbed the rate of failure at the college.
Swinton argues that much of the drop-out rate is attributable to younger students who do not understand the relation between effort and good grades. They do not appreciate the payoff for good habits like regular classroom attendance, turning in work on time, paying attention in class and following up on assignments. As Swinton puts it:
"The logic of the SEE Policy is simple. Student learning outcomes are positively related to two factors--student learning efforts and instructional inputs. In the past, most of our focus has been on instructional inputs. While we will continue to improve instructional inputs, we believe that significant gains in learning outcomes require significant gains in student inputs or efforts. Therefore, in order to improve student outcomes, all else remaining equal, we must improve student efforts. The more students work at learning, the more they will learn."
Though educated middle-class families and their children may take it for granted, he says, other students have not learned the relationship between academic work and success. Some think other students get better grades because they are just "smarter," or because they are conformist "suck-ups" to the teacher. Some Black students think learning comes naturally to White students. Black students who succeed are "brains," the rare and illegitimate offspring of Black society.
Swinton is gambling that grading on effort will be the catalyst for encouraging students to stay in school, and the positive results from trying hard will reinforce the new habits. What makes SEE difficult for faculty members is that it diverges from the traditional practice of grading by "objective" criteria such as scores on quizzes, essays, homework, semester exams and class recitation. The SEE program, with grades determined more by effort than knowledge, challenges teachers to look at students in a different way. Teachers in courses such as math and science, which build upon a foundation of knowledge, contend that "effort" may not substitute for knowing the equations and mastering formulas and techniques that are required in higher courses.
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In response, Swinton says, a "culture of effort" can not only save remedial students and get them on track, but it can also encourage even brilliant students to be unsatisfied with getting good grades with little effort. Instead, he says, they may be encouraged to follow the Army's recruiting motto and "be all that they can be."
"The SEE Policy is intended to increase the campus-wide emphasis on student effort and student responsibility to actively engage in learning activities," says Swinton. "If the policy is successful, it will result in significant improvements in student learning and graduation rates."
Like most presidents of historically Black colleges, Swinton has tried to focus on growing not only the institution but drawing and engaging more students, especially Black males, a reluctant student segment that has puzzled and challenged educators from the smallest colleges to the largest flagship state universities. Black males, proportionally, do worse in high school than others, are less likely to attend college and more likely to drop out before achieving a degree.
A central assumption in the SEE program is that wayward students can transform themselves. However, many doubters tend to agree with Dr. James J. Heckman, another economist and a 2000 Nobel Laureate in economics. "If disadvantaged kids do not learn life skills at an early age, it is difficult to catch up," he says.
"We know that adult remediation programs have a poor track record," he continues. "They are expensive, they work for a few, but not for most. They are not efficient."
The path is difficult, but it is not impossible. Heckman himself acknowledges the odyssey of Dr. Roland G. Fryer Jr., a 27-year-old Harvard economics professor, who sleepwalked through school and lived on the streets as a criminal before he gained his footing and became an academic star.
Swinton and his colleagues at Benedict know the size of the problem is daunting. "African-American children can fall behind as early as kindergarten," Swinton says, "and then wind up in slower tracks that never allow them to be on the main course to school success."
As the success of the community college system shows, young people can decide at any point that they want to get on track and learn to be productive. They manage to turn about and realize that education is the key to improvement.
"But to close the gaps and meet graduation standards, they have to run harder than everybody else," Swinton says, "and that takes energy and focus."
While others wring their hands, from the ivory towers of universities and the editorial offices of newspapers, Swinton has waded in with an idea. It is an idea that could flop, and simply move the drop-out bulge from freshman to junior year. But it could also retrieve perhaps hundreds of students who might otherwise litter the back benches of unemployment offices--just at a time when the Census Bureau confirms anew the value, indeed the necessity, of post high-school education and training.
Regardless of race or gender, a college graduate on average earns over $51,000, compared with $28,000 for someone with only a high-school diploma or equivalent degree, the Census Bureau said this spring. College-educated men typically made $63,000, compared with $33,000 for men with just a high-school education. Among women, a college graduate earned more than $38,000, compared with nearly $22,000 for a high-school graduate.
Even those who like the bold Swinton plan, or at least give it the benefit of the doubt, caution that the school must proceed with care.
Dr. James T. Rogers, executive director of the Decatur, Ga.-based Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, says the executive committee took a close look at the grading system. The association is responsible for the accreditation and standing of southeast colleges, including Benedict. The association's interest in colleges it regulates has mostly to do with financial procedures and whether the money is handled correctly. But the association also has the power to enforce educational standards, that is why it is looking at the Benedict grading procedures. At this point, the association appears to be taking a wait-and-see attitude.
"We applaud new and innovative approaches to education," Rogers says, "but we have written the school to offer suggestions and ask for more information on how the grading system affects all segments of students, including those who do well. We look forward to progress reports."
Swinton says Benedict had already planned the first of a series of progress reports at the end of this school year.
Dr. Edward Irons, who holds a chair in economics and entrepreneurship at Clark Atlanta University, is a friend and former colleague of Swinton's. He offers both support and caution.
"Pioneering is difficult," Irons says, "but we need new directions in trying to increase the interest of our young people and engage them, and Benedict's plan may move in that direction.
"If I have a concern, it is with what is left to judgment, with the possibility of widely uneven assessments that could be unfair to some students. But I certainly look forward to seeing how it turns out over a course of, say, five years," Irons says.
For the moment, perception is a problem for the SEE Policy. The only way to counteract that and gain respect is to follow the traditional scientific methods, by being open and willing to share progress reports, including problems. If that process points to success, it would make the program a model and beacon for other schools desperate for ideas to bolster classroom performance among African-American students.
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