Perhaps you've seen an
article like this at
The College Fix saying workshops are being held at universities trying to encourage professors not to grade on merit, that is, not purely on the quality of the individual student's work. These normally go under a title like "Inclusive Teaching Means Inclusive Grading, Too."
If you are outraged, you aren't alone, I share those feelings. On the other hand, I understand what motivates the workshops. The public university I taught at did a reasonable job of recruiting minority students, but it did a so-so job of retaining them.
Each fall there'd be a quite a few brown and black faces as the term began, half would be gone before the fall term ended. More wouldn't return for the spring term, and by May when that term ended, only a few would be left. This pattern went on for maybe 20 years before I retired, to some extent it probably continues.
As the number of Asian and white students declines, university administrators see too clearly that if they can't retain and graduate brown and black students, the university will shrink, campuses will be closed, and people will lose their jobs.
It is not my purpose here to parse all the reasons why non-Asian students of color tend not to complete degrees, I do not believe it to be caused by professorial racism. That hardly exists.
The workshops encourage professors to pass students who cannot, or will not, do college-level work. To employ different (lower) standards for students of color. The reasons given explain lowering standards with a variety of system-blaming excuses.
The unspoken subtext is this: do it to keep the seats filled, the doors open, and dollars flowing from the legislature. Do it to survive, to keep your job.
Sorry, but that strategy won't work. If we graduate students who have learned little, employers will not value our degrees and won't hire them. Seeing that, the students will stop coming, and the shrinkage the administrators thought to avoid will happen anyway.
Graduating smart, skilled graduates whom employers want to hire is higher education's only route to survival. It may be that doing so will result in fewer students than previously. Decreasing birth rates suggest that is so.
