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In a meeting on Monday, the topic of academic rigor came up, as it does from time to time.
The context was a discussion of grade inflation and student success. In a nutshell, the speaker was cautioning that too much attention to student success can come at the expense of rigor.
There’s a sense in which that’s obviously true. If everyone gets A’s all the time, regardless of how well they’ve demonstrated that they know what they’re doing, then a college has crossed over to diploma mill status. That’s mistaking the reward for the point.
In fields with clear external criteria—the nursing board exams come to mind—there’s a reality check built into the program design. If a law school has a 10 percent pass rate on the bar exam, something is very wrong.
But many programs don’t have that kind of exam at the end. In those cases, most definitions of rigor are more capacious than pass-fail. Rigor can connote a minimum, but it can also suggest a need to stretch. A high pass rate doesn’t preclude a generous dollop of C grades, with A grades requiring more than just a passing effort.
Conversely, a high fail rate could indicate a high level of rigor, or it could indicate anything ranging from inaccurate placement to poor student preparation to serious student economic challenges to unhelpful instructional methods. From the outside, a low pass rate could mean any or all of those. There’s no simple seesaw on which the pass rate sits at one end while rigor sits at the other.
Measuring rigor requires first defining it. This is where I’m curious to see what my wise and worldly readers would suggest.
So, wise and worldly readers: In the context of higher education, how do you define academic rigor? (Please answer on Twitter—I’m at @deandad—or via email at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.) Thanks in advance!
