Author: Glen

Puncturing Inflated Grades

I just read a great essay: How to End Grade Infla­tion by Michael Berube (prof at Penn State).

He humor­ous­ly iden­ti­fies the prob­lem: Eng­lish depart­ments have basi­cal­ly worked on the A/B bina­ry sys­tem for some time: A’s and A‑minuses for the best stu­dents, B’s for every­one else and C’s, D’s and F’s for stu­dents who miss half the class­es or threat­en their teach­ers with bod­i­ly harm.

And then pro­pos­es a clever solu­tion: What to do? If we so desired, we could recal­i­brate grades at Penn State, at Prince­ton or at any col­lege in the coun­try. The prin­ci­ple is sim­ple enough, and it’s cru­cial to every div­ing com­pe­ti­tion: we would mere­ly need to account for each course’s degree of dif­fi­cul­ty.

Every pro­fes­sor, and every depart­ment, pro­duces an aver­age grade — an aver­age for the pro­fes­sor over her career and an aver­age for the dis­ci­pline over the decades. And if col­leges real­ly want­ed to clamp down on grade infla­tion, they could whisk it away sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, sim­ply by fac­tor­ing those aver­ages into each stu­den­t’s G.P.A. Imag­ine that G.P.A.‘s were cal­cu­lat­ed on a scale of 10 with the aver­age grade, be it a B‑minus or an A‑minus, count­ed as a 5. The B‑plus in chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing, where the aver­age grade is, say, C‑plus, would be reward­ed accord­ing­ly and assigned a val­ue of 8; the B‑plus in psy­chol­o­gy, where the aver­age grade might be just over B‑plus, would be grad­ed like an easy dive, ade­quate­ly exe­cut­ed, and giv­en a 4.7.

I have to say, I like it. I don’t think any uni­ver­si­ties are going to go for it, but I wish they would…

The Dark Side of Sororities

This is not par­tic­u­lar­ly relat­ed to Stan­ford, but it is relat­ed to uni­ver­si­ty life in gen­er­al.

Alexan­dra Rob­bins went under­cov­er as a soror­i­ty girl to fig­ure out what life is real­ly like in the mod­ern Greek scene. She dis­cov­ered a world of dys­func­tion, and she writes about it in her new book Pledged: The Secret Life of Soror­i­ties.

If you’d like to learn more, read an eye-open­ing inter­view with the author.

Excerpt: NEWSWEEK: Why did you go under­cov­er?
Alexan­dra Rob­bins: Orig­i­nal­ly I was open­ly going to be a re­porter in a house on a spe­cif­ic cam­pus. I had been to some meet­ings, and I had start­ed to bond with these girls. Then one day, the advis­er of the soror­i­ty sat me down and she said some­thing like “I can’t let you be here unless the nation­al office allows you, and I real­ly don’t think they’re going to.” And then she said, and I’ll nev­er for­get this: “And if they do let you in, I sim­ply can­not allow you to write about the drugs.” I called the nation­al office, and it turned out that the 26 nation­al Pan­hel­lenic soror­i­ties had insti­tut­ed a media black­out because they were upset with the MTV show “Soror­i­ty Life.” It turned out that the only way to get behind the scenes in a soror­i­ty house was to fly under the radar.

Religion By Major

Check out the results (or see some detailed data) of a nation­al sur­vey of 3,680 stu­dents by UCLA’s High­er Edu­ca­tion Research Insti­tute [which] found that reli­gious com­mit­ment runs strongest among fine arts, edu­ca­tion and human­i­ties majors and low­est among biol­o­gy, his­to­ry and soci­ol­o­gy majors.

I found one excerpt fas­ci­nat­ing: In addi­tion, Astin found that arts and human­i­ties majors were twice as like­ly to exhib­it signs of “spir­i­tu­al dis­tress” — ques­tion­ing beliefs, strug­gling to under­stand evil, wrestling with reli­gious upbring­ing — as busi­ness or com­put­er sci­ence stu­dents.

Still, Astin said it is pre­ma­ture to label all sci­en­tists or com­put­er whizzes as spir­i­tu­al­ly hol­low. Most of these aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­plines sim­ply don’t prompt or pro­mote spir­i­tu­al reflec­tion, he said.

Implic­it in there is the notion that stu­dents who don’t exhib­it signs of “spir­i­tu­al dis­tress” can be sup­posed to be “spir­i­tu­al­ly hol­low”. Inter­est­ing. I won­der how much of that is Astin’s real per­spectve and how much of that is the byprod­uct of the inter­view­er’s line of ques­tion­ing.

Also of note: Stu­dents who par­ty fre­quent­ly are more like­ly to stop attend­ing reli­gious ser­vices, and “spir­i­tu­al­ly com­mit­ted” stu­dents gen­er­al­ly earn high­er grades.

Stu­dents who score high on mea­sures of spir­i­tu­al com­mit­ment gen­er­al­ly are health­i­er, hap­pi­er and more involved in com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice.

Thanks to World Mag­a­zine blog for unearthing this link!

Ordination

First the baby update: Dana is doing well. My mom (who is cur­rent­ly vis­it­ing) has dressed her in an out­fit that I appar­ent­ly used to wear, and that’s rather charm­ing. Any­way, there are new pho­tos online.

Now for the per­son­al news: Mon­day evening at 6:30pm I’m going to be ordained as an Assem­blies of God min­is­ter.

In case you’re curi­ous about the admin­is­tra­tive back­sto­ry, this means that I’ve now maxed out my min­is­te­r­i­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tions. I’ve been a licensed min­is­ter for a num­ber of years, and I’m now being upgrad­ed to full ordi­na­tion. It’s like going from a mas­ter’s to a Ph.D., except that I did­n’t have to write and defend hun­dreds of pages of aca­d­e­m­ic dri­v­el.

Instead, I mere­ly had to defeat three nin­jas in armed com­bat. Pret­ty stan­dard stuff for a col­lege min­is­ter, I have to say.

Ordi­na­tion does­n’t real­ly change any­thing for me as far as my min­is­te­r­i­al func­tions (the Assem­blies of God has been erod­ing the dis­tinc­tions between licens­ing and ordi­na­tion) or legal stand­ing (I could offi­ci­ate at wed­dings, for exam­ple, before this), but it is pret­ty cool.

Get­ting ordained reflects a sort of com­mit­ment to the move­ment. It’s not the same thing as going from being engaged to being mar­ried, but that’s not a hor­ri­ble anal­o­gy. Con­tin­u­ing the metaphor, it’s a bit unfor­tu­nate from a com­mit­ment per­spec­tive that the Assem­blies of God can be a bit of a tart…

Seri­ous­ly, it’s a great move­ment (with some admit­ted­ly deep flaws) and I’m proud to be receiv­ing my ordi­na­tion from them.

Who Are the People In Your Neighborhood?

I stum­bled across this ear­li­er today while get­ting a satel­lite pho­to of my apart­ment. It’s a demo­graph­ic sum­ma­ry of my zip code. You can do one for yours as well. Inter­est­ing stuff.

Great Meeting Last Night

Last night’s Chi Alpha meet­ing was off the charts–Curt Har­low spoke and did an excel­lent job!

That would have been encour­ag­ing enough, but we had a high-water mark in atten­dance (all the peo­ple who some­times show up showed up at once, and we had six first-time guests). That was extreme­ly grat­i­fy­ing. I try not to be dri­ven by num­bers, but I def­i­nite­ly like hav­ing more bod­ies in the room…

Changed Message Archive Format

I went nuts today try­ing to fig­ure out a prob­lem with this website–I could­n’t cre­ate an entry with a link to Den­nis’ mes­sage. For some rea­son Mov­able Type (the soft­ware that main­tains this site) would­n’t save any­thing with the link text in it. It drove me up the wall!

Any­way, I wound up recon­fig­ur­ing the entire way that I archive mes­sages on this site before final­ly decid­ing to change the text direct­ly in the data­base.

I men­tion all this to explain why the front page is all links to past messages–a tem­po­rary byprod­uct of the afore­men­tioned recon­fig­u­ra­tion. It will pass as new con­tent is added.

Ministry With a Baby

First: Paula’s in charge of upload­ing pic­tures now, so if there’s a delay in new pho­tos be sure to send her an email to keep her on track. 🙂

Sec­ond: We’re very for­tu­nate: Dana was born over Spring Break, so I was able to com­plete­ly devote myself to help­ing Paula that week. After that, we had guest speak­ers sched­uled for the first two weeks of the Spring Quar­ter, so I haven’t had to obsess about mes­sage prepa­ra­tion. Most peo­ple don’t real­ize this, but prepar­ing ser­mons takes a LOT of time. I’d say I spend 15–20 hours a week pol­ish­ing up my mes­sage for Chi Alpha, and I should prob­a­bly spend more. Any­way, the bot­tom line is that I’ve real­ly been avail­able to help Paula out and still keep on top of all my min­istry respon­si­bil­i­ties.

We’re very blessed to have Dana–she sleeps a lot and does­n’t cry too much. Some­how I wind up get­ting the sleep that I need. Woohoo!

On a com­plete­ly unre­lat­ed note, this com­ic made me laugh out loud. I rarely read Get Fuzzy, but on a lark I swung by their web­site today. I’m glad I did.