tion of universities as-the "cooling out" process. An apparatus of records, grades, and intervieWs with univer— sity counselors and pro- fessors is utilized over a four or five year period

to select the distinguished, the~mediocre, and the fail- ures, to condition the less successful to a more or less cheerful acceptance of their lot) and --through a mechan- ism that can only be compared to Communist brainwashing—-to

,9 g%ia

destroy the morale of the stu- dent whoSe aspirations appear to be higher than his ability. As the French sociolisti Jacques Ellul observes, what is said to be education is , really a technique for making men happy in a milieu that normally would make them un- happy, if they had not been worked upon, molded, and processed for just this ' milieu. "The world is filled with people," writes Profes- sor David Bakan of the Un- iversity of Chicago PSy‘ Chology Department, "who carry permanent psychological scars from their youthful experiences,with grades and Whose effectiveness as adults was made less rather than more. ‘

Some commentators such as the business journalist,

Peter Drucker, contend that #his "Cooling out" process

ls indispensable in a complex

THE CADRE, Tues., Oct. 16/73

society where there are many competitors for middle ,and upper level ranks, re- wards, and responsibilities. I strongly disagree. In my judgment this use of grades for an ostensibley education- al but actually punitive fun- ction is socially disorgan- izing, psychologically alien- ating, and morally evil. As Sorokin says, it "mishapes the minds, and distorts the' souls" of those whom it

. touches.

No one has summed up the matter better than the in— imitable Thorstein Veblan when half a century ago he wrote that higher educat- ion has become a marketable commodity, to be produced on a piece—rate plan, rated, bought and sold by standard units, measured, counted, and reduced to stable equivalenaa by impersonal, mechanical test§;,.The work is hereby reduCed to a mechanistic, statistical consistency, [with numerical standards and units, which conduces to perfunctory and mediocre work throughout, and acts to deter both students and teachers from a free pursuit of knowledge, as contrasted with the pursuit of academic credits. ‘

Examinations and grades are usually rationalized by university professors and ad- ministrators as a carrot and stick device to reward achiev ement in the learning process and to coerce underachievers to do better. Without the stimulus of grades, it is said, students will not lean} what the professors in their wisdom think is essential for them to learn. It is sometimes added that in a highly competitive society, the aggressive struggle for grades is a salutary intro— duction to the real life struggle for money and status "the good old principle of “victory in competition with

-others," as one professor

has written.

A study in the early 1960's by a team of sociologists at the University of Kansas suggests that most students take precisely this view of grades, regarding them as a kind of currency that can 'be converted into good aca- demic recdrds assuring future success in their careers. The most admired type of student at the University of Kansas when this inquiry was

made was the man who was \ efficient and cunning in the pursuit of good grades. Such a person was considered to be mature, in contrast to

the immature student who took a serious interest in an academic discipline or read books other than those as— signed for courses.-

This Kansas study confirms what most of us know from

_ personal experience, that

examinations and grades, which professors misguidedly View as devices to facilitate learning, actually take the place of learning altogether. In fact trying to learn may seriously interfere with the much more serious business of improving grades. A student who becomes absorbed in a particularly fascinating course may fall behind in his four or five other courses, thus weakening his grade average. The overwhelming majority of students observed at the University of Kansas, bright, average, and dull,

Vtook a minimal interest in

their courses as learning experiences but a great deal of interest in developing personal strategies for ach- ieving good courses grades. The tactics with which we

are all embarrassingly fam- iliar—~rote memorizing of , textbooks and lecture notes, pre—examination cramming, copying and cribbing during exams, plagiarizing term papers, flattering suscept— ible professors, electing one or two "Mickey Mouse" courses were assiduously planned and perfected.

A Columbia University re— searcher published a paper hi 1964 asserting that at least half the college students in the United States engage in one or more forms of academic dishonesty such as cheating and plagiarizing, little of which would probably happen if grades were abolished. Most students believe cheat? ing is morally wrong, this investigator concluded, but the pressure to obtain ac— ceptable grades is so strong that they feel they have little choice. Many of the student participants in the

‘Kansas study admitted that

most of what they had al— legedly learned was forgotten within hours of the examina- tion, a finding confirmed

by numerous other studies by educational psychologists. As one Kansas student graph- ically put it,

You put it all down on paper everything you've memorized, and then you forget it. You walk out of class and your mind is purged. Perfectly clean. There's nothing in it. Someone asks you...next week what you learned...and you couldn't tell them anything because you didn't learn anythingi There are a lot of guys around here who are very expert at doing that. They take a Course and learn what has to be learned and get through the course with an A.

Despite such overwhelming evidence to the contrary most professors continue to put great faith in examinat— ions and grading as important

CON”? 9age 9