A meditation on the grade of "D"

I love teaching: the preparation of lessons, the reading of assignments, dealings with students. I even enjoy grading papers--the work of it, once I get started (it's that getting started, though . . .). What I do not enjoy is assigning final grades for a student's performance in a course--especially "D"s.

As readers know, I'd recently promised this post because I recently had the unpleasant task of assigning a couple of "D"s for a just-completed course. And/But in a bit of serendipity at last week's mid-semester faculty in-service meeting, the president of the college asked us to consider whether, as our current statistical data on student preformance was indicating, a grade of "D" indeed does indicate "successful completion of a course." Good question.

"D"s limn a rather odd, and unpleasant, academic space. For those interested, this portion of a Wikipedia article offers some factual information my nation's A-F system. "D"s are, technically, a passing grade, but at my college they will not allow a student to advance to the next-highest class, and they aren't transferrable to other colleges as credit for a course. But here's what I really want to write about: what a "D", to me, represents beyond a numerical designation.

The first time I was introduced to the A-F system (during that troubled time known as "middle school"), all I remember of the explanation for the grades was how "D"s were explained: that a student had tried diligently to do the assigned work but just couldn't. To my mind, a "D" actually seemed worse than an "F". "F" could stand for the Spanish word "flojo" ("lazy"); that could thus be an assessment of character rather than of academic performance. "D" stood for "dumb."

I now think less pejoratively about "D" students, you may be relieved to know, but the fact remains that, to my mind, they still indicate, more so than does an "F", the student's basic lack of skills and/or ability for doing the assigned work in a satisfactory manner. At least, that's the conclusion I've come to because I allow students the opportunity to revise their work after I've graded it once. Like all conscientious teachers, I like to think--and, in my case, I all but promise my students at the beginning of the semester--that as a result of my instruction they will be better writers by the end of the semester than they presently are. And usually they are. But sometimes not. And even though, like all conscientious teachers, I do a little soul-searching at such times and wonder if I'm doing or saying something that's confusing to the student, I also recognize that several someones have been in charge of that student's formal education over the years, and I can't always fix whatever sins of comission or omission they might have committed over however many years over the course of a semester. But such things ARE fixable, though, and I tell the student so: the fault is not in themselves.

But in some cases I cannot explain a student's performance in my class by invoking his/her past (mis)instruction. At the open-admissions school where I teach, we occasionally see students who not only aren't ready for college work now, they will never be ready. It is in cases like this that I feel most acutely the tension between the terms "community" and "college:" some people in the community simply aren't "college material." That is not elitist; that is fact. And it is our collective duty not to perpetuate delusions.

Is it strange to say this?: The "Gentleman's 'C'" is all well and good for future presidents to "earn" while undergrads at Yale, but an utter disservice, I believe, to the populations my school serves. The "D", then, is as much warning as assessment. And I have to say that, in view of the fact that so many of my students feel their futures to be utterly contingent on getting a college education, being the messenger of that warning is most unpleasant.

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Education, Teaching, Grading