The controlling syllabus
I recently attended a conference of college teachers. One of the sessions, which had an overflow crowd, promised to provide a stress-free method for “managing” students—an odd word choice that presumes students are like employees and we their bosses. Soon into the session, it became clear that the presenter’s idea of being “stress-free” was to create a set of rules so detailed that everything about assessing students could be quantified on a micro level. The presenter advocated an intricate structure of points and penalties to ensure that every possible excuse a student might present for not meeting a requirement could be dealt with by invoking the appropriate rule, thus avoiding having to make judgments that might be challenged by a student.
The speaker justified her approach by asserting that the syllabus is a “legally enforceable contract” (something one hears often these days) and so the instructor is almost obliged to make sure that it includes everything expected of the student and not to deviate from it.
The speaker seemed unaware that a detailed legalistic syllabus is diametrically opposed to what makes students want to learn. There is a vast research literature on the topic of motivation to learn, and one finding screams out loud and clear: controlling environments have been shown consistently to reduce people’s interest in whatever they are doing, even when they are doing things that would be highly motivating in other contexts.
Making judgments is time-consuming. A rigid, rule-infested, watertight syllabus might appeal to administrators whose preferred response to any situation is to invoke a rule. But why should teachers want one? The teacher–student relationship is a mentoring one. We should be modeling for them the exhilaration of the life of the mind. What does it say about us if we lay out rules and force students to obey? And what makes us think that we can make general rules to deal with every contingency?
I suspect that we have gotten into a vicious negative spiral, a kind of “syllabus creep” whereby faculty keep adding new rules to combat each student excuse for not meeting existing rules. Although faculty sometimes justify this by saying that students want to know exactly what is required to be done in order to get a particular grade and that they are merely responding to that need, college faculty (and administrators) also seem to be driven by the fear that students will take legal action over a grade dispute. But courts have traditionally shown great deference for the faculty’s professional judgment, intervening only if they feel the teacher or institution has been arbitrary, capricious, acting in bad faith, or violating accepted academic norms. It is sad that many teachers are willing to forego their autonomy and the privilege of making professional judgments about academic competence and, instead, transform themselves into rule-enforcing tyrants.
It is true that by the time students come to the college classroom, they have had over twelve years of education. They have been treated, except by a few exceptional teachers, as if tests and grades and points are the most important things and that learning, like medicine, is good for you but not enjoyable. Faculty may feel that students are so deeply conditioned to view learning negatively that resistance is futile, that we cannot hope to reverse it and must respond accordingly. It is assumed that we have to teach in an authoritarian manner because of the way students are. However, all the literature on student motivation has convinced me that the opposite is likely to be true: students act the way they do because we treat them the way we do.