CU:

A Colorado Challenge

As we enter the 2004-2005 academic year, I would like to raise a topic for formal discussion in the College and in your unit. The past academic year brought us a number of events that threatened the reputation of the institution that many of us have labored most of our careers to enhance. One of these was Princeton Review's evaluation of CU Boulder as a party school.

The Princeton Review ranking1 is subject to methodological challenge. However, it raised questions and stimulated discussion in many quarters about whether or not our undergraduate population was being sufficiently challenged in their studies. Too many students reported to Princeton Review that they read and study less than their peers at other institutions. The most recent Princeton Review publication has identified another university as its #1 party school2, but findings related to our academic rigor are largely unchanged. Lending some credibility to these results are related findings by the more rigorous National Survey of Student Engagement, which compared us to many of our Public AAU peers in two studies completed in 2000 and 2002. The NSSE 2002 Study, available on the PBA website3, suggests that students (both seniors and freshmen) perceive our emphasis on academics to be significantly less than do their peers at most other Public AAU institutions. Similar perceptions were reflected in the 2000 NSSE study. It appears that although we assign an average amount of reading in our courses relative to other AAU institutions, respondents from CU did not feel challenged to do their best, nor did they think that CU placed as heavy an emphasis on studying as did students at our peer institutions.

First, let me recognize that the surveys are not perfect, and from your own scholarly perspective you may reject some aspects of these studies. I don't want to have a College debate about survey methodology. Accept for the moment that despite each study's flaws, there are indications from multiple surveys that student perception of academic rigor here may not be what we as a faculty profess and desire it to be.

If there is some validity to these results, what do these student perceptions mean for us as custodians of liberal arts education at the flagship university in the State?

A Colorado Challenge

A university faculty promotes the highest levels of intellectual growth and creative achievement from their students by setting the bar of expectation high enough that all students are challenged to work harder than they expected. We offer an AAU caliber curriculum. My own unscientific survey of courses around the College suggests to me that we do not have to apologize to anyone for the content of our courses or the amount of reading, writing, and rehearsal that we assign. But when we come to assessing our students' performances are we letting them off the hook? Are we demanding that our students rise to the occasion and perform at the caliber of an AAU student? Our students are brighter and better prepared academically than they have ever been, according to their admission test scores and class rankings. Perhaps now is a good time to adjust our expectations to match their apparent merit.

I would like our College to develop a stronger expectation, on the part of our first year students in particular, that they will need to apply themselves to succeed here. Adopting this attitude and philosophy will not require, for the most part, that we change what we teach or how we teach it. I believe that we can accomplish this if we expect from our students a deeper understanding of our material and a greater capacity to synthesize and organize what we've assigned them to read and write. We should continue to reward AAU caliber performance when we see it, and we should call performance that is below that standard to the attention of our students. As a faculty, we have received more awards and honors per FTE than most of our AAU peer institutions. Being an AAU institution means to me that we should strive to be among the Nation's best in all that do. We hold ourselves to a very high standard, and I believe that our students can rise to our challenge and perform similarly.

What might you consider in your departmental or committee deliberations of this suggestion? Every unit's curriculum is unique in several ways, so I do not presume that I can provide a list that is at the same time complete and relevant to all disciplines. I will not try. For starters, though, encourage your colleagues to evaluate their own expectations for grading assigned work. To the extent that grades motivate scholarly behavior, we should investigate our unit's grading traditions. Consider whether the "A" you assign is really for a superior product from an AAU caliber student. Pay particular attention to your freshman and sophomore introductory courses. These courses set the tone in the College and guide students' expectations concerning our demands and grading standards.

This is not a call simply to grade more harshly, or to examine only our introductory courses. Consider the rigor and sophistication of the questions asked in class, and on exams. Do we assign reading but test primarily from lecture notes, allowing students to take outside reading assignments lightly? Creating small classes where large ones now exist would help a great deal, but our College and the entire University are currently funded at levels that preclude substantial new investment in the short run. However, we might consider how units can create a culture that emphasizes study and analysis of the material. Organize study groups in courses, encourage undergraduate participation in your faculty colloquium series, or facilitate undergraduate-graduate student interactions ­ whatever seems to apply. To demonstrate our commitment to the importance of study and learning, we must refrain from shortening our classes or accepting work of a lower standard. We must not shrink from fully using the instructional week, and the days before holidays and breaks.

How might our students respond to such a challenge? If they are like their peers, they will quickly adjust their own expectations for their performances and change their behaviors accordingly. The students whose goal is an "A" will adjust their efforts and their commitments to their studies, just as they do now for a "hard" versus an "easy" course. A few students may not wish to rise to "The Colorado Challenge," but overall our University will be a better learning environment.

A concern that arises whenever issues of academic rigor are raised is how students will respond on their faculty course questionnaires. This concern is legitimate. What if students evaluate a course instructor more harshly because they are challenged to perform at a higher level? Does the faculty member possess less merit? In an ideal environment where we adjusted our expectations in unison, this would matter little, of course. Are only "A" and high "B" instructors worthy of merit or promotion? I cannot conclude that a colleague is a poor teacher based on his or her FCQs alone. I don't believe that any discriminating member of a merit or promotion committee would either. Why must our departments rely so heavily on the FCQ at times of merit review? Any unit that would like to adjust its student expectations but is concerned about a negative FCQ effect can easily solve this by placing greater emphasis on a teaching assessment tool of their own design, and I welcome College innovation in this area.

This is a call for units and individuals to reflect upon whether or not we are still providing an AAU caliber challenge to the high achieving and motivated high school graduates that we now recruit as freshmen. This is a suggestion that we examine whether or not our assignment and grading practices encourage the learning and intellectual life that we strive to create here. I look forward to discussing these issues with you when I visit with your unit this fall.