harvard – Houghton STAR

The college has recently proposed a motion to relinquish the current grading scale in favor of a non-numerical rubric. The rubric would still retain quality points for determining GPA, but it would also establish value based on certain adjectives such as Excellent, Good, Average, etc. Each department would have the responsibility of maintaining grading criteria that are consistent across each discipline, the results of which would be funneled through the rubric.

The decision stems from multiple sources, the principal cause being the results of a faculty survey taken in the Fall of 2012. The results, collated from 68 participants, discovered that more than half of faculty members (54.4%) substituted the official grading scale with their own, and an even higher number (61.5%) reported that they did not believe that Houghton’s current grading scale was effective in portraying student learning.

Professor of education, Connie Finney, was especially critical of the current grading system, citing philosophical problems with its attempt to artificially create a normal curve. “With the current grading scale, you have a small A, a larger B, an even larger C, and a small D. This pushes students toward C, the largest category. What should be a naturally occurring phenomenon ends up getting manipulated.” She regarded the new rubric as quite an improvement, with the caveat that C’s are still defined as ‘average.’

Dean Mills Woolsey said that prior to the survey there had been a few discussions, but after the studies were done, it really helped bring the conversation to a place where they could act on it. “If it were like 10% of the faculty then you would say, ‘oh, we’ve got to get after that 10%,’ but if it’s that significant, it means that there’s probably a problem with the system itself.”

The decision has passed through the Academic Council, gained approval from the faculty, with the final step being to publish the new rubric in the 2014-2015 catalog. This publishing would stand as a contract to the New York State’s Department of Education, while eliminating discrepancies between faculty members’ usage of alternate systems and creating more flexibility within each department.

Another primary reason which Dean Mills Woolsey cited was behind the decision lay in some of the negative reactions that parents had to Houghton’s grading scale, especially in regard to their students’ eligibility for scholarships that are dependent on maintaining a certain GPA, as well as an extensive conversation on the Houghton Parents Facebook page, dated in March of 2012, revealed a parent’s concern that their child’s test scores, which would typically be higher in many other schools, was weighed down at Houghton due to the stringency of the grading system.

Dean Mills Woolsey said that Houghton’s current grading scale has had a long established tradition here, but she also said that many other institutions, especially those Houghton considers as sister schools such as Wheaton or Asbury, use a similar grading rubric. “The fact that most of the schools that we consider peer schools or that we benchmark with don’t use a numerical scale suggests that maybe we’re finally coming into some kind of a mainstream.” She cautioned against those who would claim it a dumbing down, saying that grading varies greatly from discipline to discipline. “Some disciplines are very quantitative and they lend themselves to that numerical scale, and other disciplines are more qualitative. You have to somehow translate what you’re doing into numbers in order to make that scale.” Mills Woolsey believes that the rubric’s implementation will eliminate many previous problems that they have had, and that this new change is the right step forward.

The U.S. government has troops deployed in over 150 countries in the world. We are actively engaged throughout the Middle East, North and Central Africa and some South American nations. In the 20th century alone, we witnessed two world wars and a handful of genocides including that of the Armenians, the Jews, the Tutsis and many more. Since the 21st century we’ve seen some of the worst terrorist attacks in history as well as the rise of the Arab Spring. Last but not least we can’t overlook the increase of mass shootings with Aurora, the Sikh temple and most recently, Sandy Hook.

Courtesy of http://www.theatlanticcities.com/

How many times have you thought something along the lines of, “What is wrong with humanity?” or said the classic: “Jesus is going to come back and judge this world.” But is the world actually getting worse? Is it even as bad as it always has been? Or could it possibly be that the world is actually becoming a better, more beautiful and peaceful place? Statistics are suggesting that the world is actually on the mend.

In a recent editorial about gun control I suggested that violent crime rates in the U.S. have dropped nearly 50 percent over the last 20 years. The U.S. is not alone in this positive trend. Crime rates have been steadily decreasing worldwide. According to Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard psychologist, statistics have revealed a dramatic reduction in war deaths, family violence, racism, rape, and murder.

Pinker states in one of his three books on the history of violence, “The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.” According to Pinker—whose findings are based on peer-reviewed studies—the number of people killed in battle per hundred thousand has dropped over a thousand fold since before the common era. In pre-industrial societies there was an average of 500 killed per hundred thousand. In 19th century Europe the death toll dropped to less than 70 per hundred thousand. In the 20th century, even with two world wars and numerous genocides, the rate dropped to less than 60. Currently there are less than three-tenths of a person per hundred thousand killed in combat.

Sixty years ago there were less than 20 democracies; now there are over a hundred. Authoritarian nations have dropped from 90 in the late 70’s to less than 25 today. Murder rates have dropped over all and especially within families; the rate of husbands murdering their wives has gone down from 1.4 to 0.8 per hundred thousand, and wives murdering their husbands have gone down from 1.2 to 0.2. Rape has dropped 80 percent over the last 40 years and lynching has gone from a rate of 150 per year to zero. Blacks, women, and gays are steadily gaining rights.

According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, the amount of undernourished people in the world is steadily decreasing. Life expectancy is higher than ever. Modern medicine never ceases to surpass expectations, finding cures for diseases and new ways for operating on the human body.

As a Christian, this seems to be a problem. Isn’t the world supposed to be on a steady decline toward another “Sodom and Gomorrah” situation? According to St. John’s Book of Revelation there will be wars and rumors of wars in the end times. In the streets, the blood of the martyrs will be running up to the necks of the horses. Then Christ returns and saves us all. This sort of talk is common in a Christian milieu. But what do we say when faced with the evidence of a world that is becoming increasingly better?

God vowed to destroy Nineveh, but when he saw them change he then changed his mind. At the time that St. John was writing the book of Revelation, Caesar was lighting his parties with human torches. Humanity was in a pretty bad place. Now we live in a society with unlimited food, education, and commodities. The trends are suggesting that the rest of the world is quickly “stepping out of history” as Fukuyama wrote. The world is becoming a better and more beautiful and peaceful place.

As Christians are we going to continue, as Jonah did, to beg God to rain down fire and brimstone? Or are we going to accept that the world is getting better? This is not to say that we live in a utopia; there is still a lot of work to be done. But it is nowhere near being beyond redemption.