BY ALEX SMALL
Breathe easy, everyone. We physicists have a strategy to help all students pass tough introductory classes.
Hear me out.
An administrator recently said that more students would pass freshman physics if faculty gave more frequent and early feedback. Students could study more effectively if they had some way to gauge their understanding before the first midterm. The term of art is apparently “low-stakes assessments” and it’s an emerging educational practice. So exciting!
Even more excitingly, STEM faculty, innovative to the core, have done this for decades, under labels like “homework” and “quizzes.” Virtually every physics class in the United States has weekly homework and lab reports, and sometimes quizzes as well. Chemistry, calculus (minus the lab reports), and other STEM classes are similar.
What can I say? Trail-blazing is how we roll.
Best of all, this innovative spirit is interdisciplinary—many composition instructors assign weekly essays. The whole campus is just one big Innovation Hub!
My sarcasm springs from pain and blame. For all the buzz around STEM, high failure rates in introductory classes often make us targets in student success workshops, where the accepted wisdom is that freshmen fail at physics because professors fail at teaching. The rigor that once carried prestige now makes us suspect. Equity-minded academics want more students to pass, and cost-conscious politicians want them to pass on the first try.
So, it is ironic that a fast clip of homework and quizzes is now hip. But, hey, if a 1985 Kate Bush song can top the charts again, why shouldn’t homework get a moment in the sun?
Still, while I appreciate plaudits for old-fashioned practice, I fear the buzz might be short-lived. After all, we have given homework and quizzes forever, but numerous freshmen have failed, nonetheless. Doing homework is crucial for mastery, but merely assigning it cannot guarantee mastery.
In fairness, the administrator talking up homework and quizzes agreed that merely giving assignments is not enough—we should also give timely and constructive feedback. There’s nothing to disagree with there, but there also might not be much substance to agree with. While grading is a professional responsibility, students have never needed to await graded papers to learn if they solved problems correctly.
Long before online homework existed, professors posted homework solutions on bulletin boards. Conscientious students huddled to examine and discuss solutions, and visited office hours to discuss confusing steps. Receiving a marked-up problem set is useful but is hardly a bottleneck if one examines solutions and asks questions in office hours.
The internet makes it even easier for motivated students to learn from homework. Solution manuals for physics textbooks are available with a couple clicks. Diligent students could attempt a problem, check their technique against a manual, and consult a second source if they still have questions. One might lament the ease with which students could get perfect scores on homework, but nothing is more scholarly than attempting your own approach and then comparing with multiple sources. I would have no qualms about A’s earned thusly.
Why don’t more students use such study strategies? Readers might feel obliged to discuss social capital and disadvantage, but we’re all adults here. Some of your college classmates surely had advantaged upbringings. Did these privileged peers make uniformly diligent, productive use of office hours and posted homework solutions? Were they all fastidious about searching the library for textbooks with example problems that resemble homework questions?
We all know that the answer was “of course not,” and the reason was less “society’s played them a terrible trick” and more immaturity and inexperience. We can assign homework, but we cannot make students take initiative. And now that these alleged digital natives can access solutions without visiting libraries or department bulletin boards, it’s even harder to argue that steep barriers stand between (most) students and useful study resources.
The key challenge that most students face is the timeless struggle against their own human limitations. (Incidentally, I wrote this to procrastinate from an urgent project. Just saying.) No, not everyone faces this struggle on the same terms, and yes, we should grade promptly (which every professor swears to do . . . next week). Still, I question whether adding even more “low-stakes assessments” will raise pass rates as hoped. Most of us already give homework and/or quizzes, and students already enjoy abundant opportunities to practice problems and test their understanding against solution manuals.
At best, administrators touting homework and quizzes to raise pass rates are simply naive to in-the-trenches reality. At worst, they seek cheap solutions to complex problems. Perhaps the silver lining is that next time they blame us for chronic problems they’ll urge even more quizzes and homework. Who wouldn’t want to hear administrators argue for higher standards when students fail?
Hey, don’t blame me; I already assign lots of homework.
Alex Small is a professor of physics at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. The opinions here are his own.
