The Michigan Doily - Friday, May 9, 1986 - Page 7 'U' stifles student voice By Kery Murakami A report in the mid-1960s on the role of students in University decision-making said, "College is not a preparation for life. It's life itself." This above all else, reflec- ts the importance of students having influence on the policies of the institution. Not token, rubber- stamping power, but the actual ability to make decisions. A university is life itself, and students do not need to be sheltered. The issues one hears on the Diag are not training-wheel issues before entering the "real world." They are real issues. Blacks are really dying in South Africa and the University's in- vestments do really help support the apartheid regime. A courageous man named Nelson Mandela is really rotting in prison, and an honorary degree from the University might have expedited his release. Research done by University faculty for the Department of Defense really produces weapons and the very real potential of death. So what better time to begin con- fronting the hard realities and moral dilemmas of modern society? The first and foremost obstacle students must face in this Univer- sity is the secrecy that shrouds much of its policy-making. The University's executive officers disappear behind closed doors every Tuesday afternooon to discuss tuition levels, program cuts, honorary degrees - issues of more than superficial interest for many students. The honorary degree policy is so hush-hush that a large group of students who worked on urging the University to give Mandela a degree did not find out he was ineligible until last month. The policy is so secret that members of the Board of Regents never thought to tell the students of his ineligibility even when students spoke to them at their meeting. In fact, it took a sit-in before ad- ministrators decided to discuss the matter with students. Ad- ministrators are fond of talking about academic freedom, especially when conservative speakers are met with protesters or when students disrupt military research on campus. But they hide behind closed doors when setting policy. And then there is democracy. Students study it. We are told by speakers how wonderful it is. Yet, the University is hardly a Murakami is the editor of the Daily's New Student Edition. democracy. The University President has the power to overrule any law, including the guarantee that the Michigan student assembly ratify any codes of conduct that have nothing to do with academics. Students' main channel to ad- ministrators are the five minutes a limited number of speakers are allowed to have once a month at the regents' meeting. These speakers are often greeted with blank expressions, and rustlings of paper by the regents. The only way, it seems, that .students can raise an issue on campus is through political protests. It was not until a group of students sat-in on Vice President Henry Johnson's offices last year that the University began acting to prevent rape. What kind of a democracy requires its citizens to get arrested to raise issues, to hold sit-ins to learn information, to sit in the cold of night to protect a shanty because campus security won't protect one wooden structure on the middle of campus, to wash racist graffiti off the walls of the graduate library because the University never bothered to do so? The 1968 report on decision- making stated, "A University should be the center for creativity and innovation, criticism and challenge, debate and dissent. The vigorous assertion of dissatisfac- tion and demands for change, and efforts to influence both the inter- nal policy of the University and its posture and role in the larger society are indicative of an in- tellectual vitality the should be welcomed and fostered." Unfortunately, this is not true of this University. An intellectual vitality does not exist behind closed doors. One step towards restoring this vitality would be to put a student on the Board of Regents. It would only be one per- son to represent student interests but one more voice in policy- making than students now have. Another step in the right direc- tion would be to re-evaluate the regents' reaction to three studies on students in decision-making done in the 1960s. There is no set policy to guarantee students input, although the regents were kind enough to say student par- ticipation is a good thing in one of their bylaws. Without a set policy, the Univer- sity has a system of in loco paren- tis democracy, where ad- ministrators can grant student participation when it serves them, yet restrict input when it does not. Students of this University should not remain passive in a soporific preparation for life. This is life. WE :AUSRINS4GARE ~Uf~e A~ov'r CHRR6eS tHAcrWALDHElPAWAS RA NA~ZI WAR C RIMINALL 'NI 'THESE SCRoIES STIRiQUP' UHAPP MEt*PiES AND MAKEALL AUSTRIAN4S Lok BADt KURT IS 0U2 COUNTQRA, AND WE TIEY'RE ~44E WOW OF T\E PUSHY KNOW TE ACCUSATIONS AAINST Sc}j MN&, \LEN&EFUL Prof. praises RC evaluations By Carl Cohen Faculty members have the duty to evaluate the intellectual per- formance of their students. Partly this is for the sake of the Univer- sity in whose name degrees are awarded, and partly it is for the sake of the world without, often in need of an impartial report on the achievements or capacities of students. Principally, however, it is for the students themselves. For a .host, of reasons judgments about the quality of work done by students in the courses they take at the University is essential and valuable. What form should they take? In the Residential College, here at the University of Michigan, we long ago decided that, where it is feasible, the standard grading system (A, B, C, etc.) should be replaced by onesrelying chiefly upon evaluations. I aim to ex- plain why we made that decision and have consistently reaffirmed it. First, however, the workings of the RC system must be explained. In most Residential College classes formal faculty reports on the work of students have three parts: 1) Pass or Fail report; a P or an F is formally recorded in the student's record. 2) Evaluation, long form; a full single sheet of remarks, in English prose, is prepared by the faculty member for each student at the end of the course. Typically it will describe the nature of the course work done, the quality of written work submitted, the nature of the student's participation in class Cohen is a professor of philos- ophy in the Residential College and the MedicalSchool. This is the first part of a two- part series. work, and, in general, the strengths and weaknesses of the student's performance in that course. Copies of this long form go to the student and to his RC record; but it stays in house and does not become part of the formal transcript later prepared. 3) Evaluation, short form; an 8 to 10 line paragraph, summarizing in prose the quality of the student's work in that course, is submitted in additionto the long form. This short evaluation (which goes to the student also, of course) becomes part of the RC student's formal University Tran- script. Grading systems vary in the degree of bluntness, or refinement, with which their categories permit evaluation. The normal "pass/fail" system is much blunter than standard letter grades, offering two categories rathersthan five or (with pluses and minuses) thirteen. The Residential College system, although using Ps and Fs, is in many ways the polar opposite of normal pass/fail systems, since its extensive use of English prose permits, indeed encourages, categories of evaluation unlimited in variety of intensity. The RC system plainly does not bypass or simplify the task of student evaluation; on the contrary, it complicates that task by vastly widening the range of evaluative possibilities; it is a highly refined system for the evaluation of student work. The merits of evaluations, as contrasted with standard grades, are easy to identify, and they are appreciated with enthusiasm by Residential College students. Two major faults of the standard system are overcome: a) Letter grades, even with the use of plusses and minuses, oblige the instructor to amalgamate all dimensions of evaluation into one. A student's work may have been creative, even brilliant at times, and yet erratic; or it may have been pedestrian, and yet meticulous and solid. "B -" may be the report in both cases, but the opportunity to sort out the dif- ferent respects in which perfor- mance has varied is denied by the standard system, simply because, for the record, one and only one letter category is permitted. Prose evaluations overcome this problem completely. b) Letter grades, even with plusses and minuses, are unhap- pily uninformative; they com- monly fail to tell the student, or the outside reveiwer, what he very much wants to know. "I gather that you found my work to be good yet not excellent - but why?" "Although this student plainly did fine work, did she show aptitude for wholly independent study, or for research activity in that sphere?" The answers to such questions (although they may be conveyed informally or by letter in some circumstances) remain, so far as the official University record is concerned, permanent mysteries. The RC system using evaluations overcomes this shor- tcoming completely. Systems relying upon evaluations may therefore be seen, without a doubt, to be: a) more refined than those using standard grades, because all the richness of English prose may be found in expressing judgments: b) more just than those using stan- dard grades, because they are able to attend to the varied aspects of student work and C) more in- formative than those using stand- ard grades, because they are able to express what single categories in a linear series cannot.