I began this series on grade compression (which is what people who howl about grade inflation are actually worried about), because I was vexed by the doublespeak in last year’s Harvard grade report. This report, high on self-aggrandizement and low on self-awareness, disingenuously claims that grades can support learning for all students and simultaneously sort them by rank and achievement. I wanted to expose this doublespeak, and I believed (at most) three posts would suffice.
Things did not turn out this way. I had initially thought of compression as a Team Sort problem, because narrowed grade distributions impede the differentiation and ranking of students. But even writing the first post in this series, I realized that Team Support—i.e., my team—must at some point reckon with compression as well. And that made things way more complicated. So, three posts turned into (now) eight, and I have yet to unpack what it means for Team Support to take the threat of compression seriously. Our options are highly constrained, which is partly why I keep circling around that discussion.
I am struggling to reconcile Team Support’s utopian vision of education that prioritizes learning and growth for all students with the realities of our existing system. The sad truth is, when educators successfully cultivate learning for all their students, they are violating formal education’s prime directive. So, let’s grapple with these implications one last time before considering Team Support’s “compression action plan.”
A lot of this comes down to the pesky, often obnoxious implications of one inescapable word: rigor. Rigor, that is, represents the fundamental rhetorical wedge between how Team Sort and Team Support communicate their goals (and impugn the other side).
Take this ostensibly innocuous statement from the Harvard grade report: “We owe [students] an education that is meaningful as well as rigorous.” I want to be fair here: I believe all conscientious educators, including members of Team Support and Team Sort, want students to find their education meaningful. Definitions will vary on what “meaningful,” well, means, but I hope most takes would describe students as invested, curious, and/or highly engaged in learning, and thus motivated by more than the prospect of an A. Such meaning might emerge in a variety of ways: finding coursework interesting for its own sake or for its relevance to career goals, feeling connected to faculty and peers, feeling a sense of purpose beyond the self, or some combination of these or other reasons.
But what does it mean to owe students a rigorous education? This is where harmony breaks down. Rigor is Team Sort’s God term, an inherently positive concept they roll out any time they feel moved to justify the value of the education they are supposedly providing. They also tend to use the term vaguely, which upholds the illusion that grades can both sort and support students.
For Team Support, rigor is a far more contested and ambivalent term. This is because, as Kevin Gannon usefully explains, there are both logistical and cognitive variants of rigor. Of the former, Gannon writes:
This is when you rework a course to set strict deadlines and attendance policies, add more assignments, create examinations with a high number of questions relative to the allotted time for their completion, or devise grading curves aimed at minimizing the number of A’s. Irrespective of the actual content, the aim here is for the structure and mechanisms—the logistics—of the course to be difficult.
These are all great examples of what Jeffrey Moro calls cop shit. They are all about creating artificial grade scarcity, which serves education’s sorting function.
Cognitive rigor entails having students “question their prior assumptions or … engage with material that has a sophisticated, complex, theoretical bent.” Such courses place students in the “zone of learning in which the material is ‘not too easy, and just challenging enough that, with a little help from a more learned individual, we can master the material.’” This version of rigor both Team Support and Team Sort can get behind, in theory.
The key problem, Gannon explains, is that too many “administrators, critics of higher ed, and even some professors mistakenly think that logistical changes will lead to cognitive improvements.” In other words, for Team Sort, logistical rigor is what makes cognitive rigor possible. To put this still another way: without logistical rigor, there is no cognitive rigor.
Team Support believes this premise is fundamentally flawed. In fact, one could argue that Team Support’s many critiques of Team Sort boil down to attacking this premise. This includes interrogating the idea that logistical rigor, which is highly metric-friendly, measures actual learning rather than the performance of learning, as well as the behaviorist assumption that students must be compelled to work hard via logistical carrots and sticks.
To be clear: cognitive rigor is not necessarily fun, at least not all the time. Cognitive rigor has its fair share of slog, including monotonous and repetitive tasks that build foundational skills and knowledge. (The science of reading is a good example). Like the muscle memory baseball players develop through countless hours finetuning their swing in a batting cage, which prepares them to stand in against the sophisticated, complex nuances of a 90-mph curveball in a late inning comeback bid. Such rigor is meant to help students map out and traverse the route to higher levels of expertise and ability.
Not every student will reach the highest levels, of course, but support-coded learning environments try to ensure that every student reaches as high a level as they can, maybe higher than the students themselves believed they could achieve. Whereas logistical rigor tires to ensure that higher levels are blocked to all but a limited and arbitrary number of students.
Take artificial grade caps—standard cop shit—which are very much in the news following Harvard’s decision to cap undergraduate A grades at 20% (plus 4). This policy incentivizes teachers to create more hoops for students to jump through to receive an A, but those higher and narrower hoops might not indicate greater learning (or rather, extraordinary distinction, which at Harvard transcends pedestrian full mastery 🙄) so much as a greater capacity to endure cop shit.
Christopher J. Richmann and Ryan T. Ramsey explain that, historically, “Some instructors likely made it more difficult for students to earn high grades by requiring memorization of mountains of trivia or concealing assessment standards from students.” This is the opposite of what any conscientious educator would call cognitive rigor. Artificially restricting the number of As, then, will do nothing to ensure that the students who receive these As also experience the most meaningful learning.
Some members of Team Support want to abolish the term rigor all together. What I read in these calls is a deep frustration that, in practice, rigor almost exclusively means logistical rigor. This is particularly true when we talk about assessment—grades, rubrics, standards, learning outcomes, metrics, etc.
To summarize (with broad brushstrokes): As far as Team Support is concerned, a meaningful and rigorous education is redundant; by definition, cognitive rigor is part of what makes learning meaningful. Whereas Team Sort finds itself constantly trotting out that word rigor, and keeping its meaning vague, so they can claim it encompasses both cognitive rigor and the logistical rigor they need to fulfill education’s sorting function.
The idea that meaningfulness and (cognitive) rigor are natural siblings sounds great. In a system and culture built around this notion, students would attend their classes excited and motivated to learn, and teachers would operate largely as mentors and coaches facilitating the pursuit of enriching, skill-building, cognitively challenging intellectual work; we certainly wouldn’t pretend to be cops. Students would experience meaningful learning with a minimal imprint of logistical rigor. In the utopian extreme of this vision, we would do away with grades, which only apply to logistical rigor, all together.
In reality, support-oriented teachers struggle mightily to neutralize the stench of cop shit. We can try to design environments in which students experience cognitive rigor, but we cannot peer into their minds, which makes both learning and the thinking required for learning to happen difficult to evaluate.
Furthermore, Team Sort will always perceive the minimization of logistical rigor as an existential threat, even if the goal is to cultivate cognitive rigor. Again, logistical rigor is about creating scarcity; wherever logistical rigor wanes, grades will inevitably go up. This will over time lead to compression and, in turn, the kinds of backlash we are seeing now: alarms about educators (and whole institutions) becoming “soft on assessment” and “anti-rigor,” new policies like Harvard’s grade caps, etc. You know, more cop shit.
That Team Sort would never abide a system that elevates cognitive rigor over logistical rigor should be no surprise. But truly saddening is that I don’t think students would abide this either. The fact is, students are as committed to being sorted as Team Sort is to sorting them, even though they find the experience of being sorted miserable. Because, students are conditioned to believe that being sorted, a process they endure for 16-20 or even more years, is their primary role here.
Adam Mastroianni notes that the “most important lessons—in science, or in anything—are not learned. They are absorbed. And if you’re steeping in dirty water, you’ll absorb the wrong lessons, and then it’s almost impossible to get them back out again.” By the time students attend college, they have been steeped in so much cop shit that they expect it in every class they take. They may have trouble even imagining learning environments that are not steeped in cop shit. Enduring cop shit may not feel particularly meaningful—at least not in the sense of pushing beyond one’s current understanding, skills, and knowledge—but that’s what they are used to doing. So, as appealing as Jeffrey Moro’s manifesto to “expel cop shit from your classrooms” may be, teachers cannot eliminate logistical rigor from their courses and expect cognitive rigor to simply emerge in its place. Like the devil, it’s the cop shit you know…
What this means is that every time most or all students learn a lot in a support-oriented course, and they receive As based on the standards established for that course, their teacher has unintentionally contributed to conditions that over time threaten support-oriented learning. This is true even if every student in that class experienced robust cognitive rigor, which (in theory) is what both Team Support and Team Sort want. In other words, the rigor game is rigged.
Given this, what should Team Support do? What can we do? That’s the question I keep putting off, because our range of options is limited, and they all come with tradeoffs. What we really need is a society and an education system that is not built around precarious meritocracy. But we cannot create that world on our own, and we probably won’t see it in our lifetimes.
As we wait, ever so patiently, for the educational revolution, one thing I cannot recommend is treating rigor as the Word that Shall Not Be Named. While I sympathize with Rigor Refusalists, that term is not going anywhere; evasion only enhances rigor’s power as a cudgel for Team Sort to deploy against us. I suggest instead that we continue emphasizing the very different implications of cognitive and logistical rigor, especially to our students. We can also help students be more aware of which substances they have been steeping in, so to speak, and help them consider if they might want to steep in something else. More on this in the next post. Pinky promise.
Teaching Inquiry 