Small Minds vs. Real Thinkers

What mindset are we encouraging in college?

Modern online graduate school is very interesting. Problematic, but interesting. It also is an interesting experiment in different personality types.

I recently had a peer review project graded for one of my instructional design courses at EdX. One student gave me 8 out of 8. The other marked two of the eight items as 0 because I didn’t answer every single little question in the rubric, even though the rubric was more of a “did they do this or not” grade.

I notice that some students really revel in their peer-grading power. Fancying themselves to be mini-professors, they earnestly go through each project and write up voluminous comments while grading far more harshly than the real professors would.

This student missed the point: The multiple questions in the writing prompt were potential starting points, not meant to be a straightjacket.

This is a case of following the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law, and one reason why I’m not a fan of how rubrics are typically implemented. The literal-minded person will presume that every single question brought up in the assignment prompt must be answered, even if it is entirely unfeasible to do so.

As such, my tendency now with all assignments is to try to answer every little thing literally if possible, even if it is awkward and a bit dumb to do so.

If you want to know why students are graduating with advanced degrees but don’t know how to think for themselves, now you know part of the reason.

This is small-minded bureaucracy thinking.