Stupid Rubrics: The Sad State of Higher Education
Simultaneously expecting too little and too much at the same time.
In my brief foray into higher education at the advanced age of 54, I can honestly say things haven’t improved much since I graduated college in 1992…and in some ways they are worse.
On the positive, I can now get a master’s degree from the comfort of my living room. One of the reasons I didn’t get one much earlier was the issue of location and travel. Online education can be a great thing. The problem is, it’s rarely done well.
In taking courses from a variety of schools both directly from universities and indirectly via EdX and Coursera, I’m dumbstruck at how, frankly, ridiculous most of these courses are.
First is the weird structure of 8 week “compressed” 3-credit college courses that expect you to read 100 pages per week or more while writing up a bunch of lousy papers…as opposed to learning practical things that might help you be better at what you’ll ostensibly do with the degree afterwards.
I get that MOOCs and online college courses started back in the early 2000s before we had reliable streaming video conferencing. But there’s no excuse today for not having full lectures via video. The argument now given is that people with bad internet connections (particularly in third world countries) can’t access the videos.
Well, there’s this magic thing called a transcript that can now be generated in one minute via AI. I also don’t think American schools should be reducing the experience for all students just to help out the occasional student from Swaziland or Tuvalu.
Beyond that, 8 weeks is a ridiculously short period of time to actually learn anything of value. You can’t get depth when you are racing to cram books in your head and hand in assignments week after week. Whatever happened to the standard 15-week semester?
I mean, great, I can now get 32 credit hours done in a flash, but have I actually learned anything beyond speed reading and dull report writing?
Rubrics Mania
Then there are the rubrics. Rubrics were not a thing when I initially went to school. They became all the rage in the mid 1990s.
When I first heard this term “rubric” in the context of online courses this past year, I had to look it up. What do they mean? Well, someone at the school basically puts together an arbitrary list of things you are supposed to do in order to get a good grade.
The idea is that a rubric standardizes what is expected of students. It’s also meant to keep professors on the same page in grading. This is also likely necessary because online courses are often run by assistant professors or wannabe PhDs, and there isn’t just one subject matter expert with tenure running the course.
The problem with rubrics is that they are usually filled with stupid metrics that, once again, have no bearing on a person’s ability to do a real job in a real world.
When a rubric gives you 10 extra points simply for having a properly formatted title page, the rubric has gotten to be pointless and silly.
Rubrics are also used in peer grading, which is another idiotic "advancement” in online education thanks to technology. This means your mercurial peers, some of which aren’t that bright, are supposed to grade your work by checking your work against the rubric.
Sometimes, you don’t see the rubric until after you submit your homework.
Here’s an example. In a supposedly college-level course on Coursera recently, the instructions had a ridiculous, childlike 3-step answer process for simple questions.
To simplify, let me say it went sort of like: “what, then what, what’s next.” I followed the guideline in crafting my responses, but didn’t actually separate the content out into sections, since that wasn’t explained in the instructions.
After I submitted my busywork homework, I realized the rubric wanted actual sections for the whats and the what nexts. Thankfully, the one person who graded me only took 1 point off instead of half, so I was able to get my certificate without having to resubmit.
The long and short of it is that we don’t have active professors who are actually teaching anything in these courses. The actual course content is typically thin, and much of it is culled from other sources or books in a reading list.
The student basically teaches themselves by reading content from other sources. The “professors” are basically glorified course sherpas who do some, but not all, grading by checking off boxes. But they don’t actually teach.
This can’t be very satisfying for sincere teachers either.
The end result is that this format favors students who can read quickly and navigate online course backends with ease.
It favors students who are detail-oriented and can precisely format the paper in the exact criteria set out by the rubric.
It favors writing skills, but not really, because if your main assignment is to simply cite other works and paraphrase them with citations, then you’re not doing any creative thinking either.
Meanwhile, I’m finishing up my “MicroMasters” in Instructional Design via EdX. These courses are actually fairly decent in comparison to others, but they suffer from a lack of lectures and a compressed timeline.
In the third course of the series, students were tasked with creating multimedia content for an online course, including a handout with an audio version, a video with slides, and an animated video, among others. I have no idea how a complete newbie would have learned all that in 8 weeks. I already knew how to create and edit audio and video before going into the class.
Still, I accidentally missed the last deadline for a weekly submission due to time zone confusion by about 2 hours, in part because I was coming back from Thanksgiving and a bit discombobulated. The professors refused to budge on this. Fortunately, my grade was high enough that the missed assignment had no impact.
But thanks to the magic of rubrics and online course cutoffs, professors and the students have become performing robots with no quarter.
The irony here is that a ton of research and thinking has gone into what makes for good online course design, and even the instructional design courses fail to meet these best practices on many levels. In the Coursera instructional design series from the University of Illinois, the quizzes are spaghetti nightmares of multiple answer multiple choice questions that even test experts have complained about in their forums.
But things never get improved.
Once the course is online, the schools don’t have the time, money, or will to improve things.
Thus we are left with a bunch of half-baked courses that mainly meet the needs of a small population of people who are, excuse me, anal retentive enough to check all the rubric boxes.
My problem is, while I am pursuing instructional design to ostensibly get some work in the field as a consultant or otherwise, I can already guess that if I blew into one of these universities and told them their courses suck and need to be fixed, all I would get would be stonewalling and resistance.
Oh well, I guess.
Stephanie, You have underscored an issue that is far more pervasive than just education. In health care, doctors used to develop a relationship structure WITH EACH PATIENT based on that individual patient's characteristics, how that intersected with what the physician knew/understood, and how both intersected with the current (and accumulated) patient problems. I still begin every relationship with a new patient by telling them "You are your own science experiment. I know lots about diseases and other patients that have had problems similar to you. But I guarantee you will not be the same and figuring out how that is true will guide us in trying to make things better".
But today's rubric is checklists (most completely unrelated to anything important and essentially selected because they are "easy to measure" NOT because they are relevant to this particular patient/physician/disease axis. This has reduced physician thinking by 90% (the covid debacle is the most recent and obvious example, but examples abound) as people just followed the rules rather than doing the right thing. (And, sadly, sincerely believed that following the rules WAS doing the right thing...even though almost all of the rules were wrong.)
When you are going to drive things by computer rather than by thinking, this is the end result -- the end of thinking. AI is not intelligent in the least -- just correlative. So that further reinforces pattern matching to some desired pattern...not seeking the truth (which AI would not recognize anyway).
It is not clear what should be done about any of this, but it is not good for science, education, health, or, for that matter, life.
because it is so hard to fnd holistic - where in the world are you?