Originally posted September 23, 2018, on LindaSuskie.com
A recent Inside Higher Ed piece, “The Contamination of Student Assessment” by Jay Sterling Silver, argued that behaviors such as class attendance and class participation shouldn’t be factored into grades because grades should be “unadulterated measurements of knowledge and skills that we represent them to be—and that employers and graduate admissions committees rely on them to be.” In other words, these behaviors are unrelated to key learning goals.
He’s got a point; a grade should reflect achievement of key learning goals. (That’s what competency-based education tries to achieve, as I discussed in a blog several years ago.) But I behaviors like coming to class, submitting work on time, giving assignments one’s best effort, and participating in class discussions are important. They fall under what I call professionalism: traits that include coming to work on time and prepared to work, dependably completing assigned work thoroughly and on time, giving one’s work one’s best effort, and managing one’s time.
Surveys of employers confirm that these are important traits in the people they hire. Every few years, for example, Hart Research Associates conducts a survey for AAC&U on how well employers think college graduates are prepared on a number of key learning outcomes. The 2018 survey added two learning outcomes that weren’t in previous surveys:
Self-motivated: ability to take initiative and be proactive
Work independently: set priorities, manage time and deadlines
Of the 15 learning outcomes in the 2018 survey, these were tied for #4 in importance by hiring managers.
So I think the answer is to add professionalism as an additional learning goal. Of course “professionalism” isn’t a well-stated learning goal; it’s a category. I leave it up to college and program faculty to decide how best to articulate what forms of professionalism are most important to their students and prospective employers.
Then an assignment like a library research paper might have three learning goals—information literacy, writing, and professionalism—and be graded on all three. Professionalism might be demonstrated by how well students followed the directions, whether the assignment was turned in on time, and whether the student went above and beyond the bare minimum requirements for the assignment.
Professionalism, by the way, isn’t just a skill and isn’t just an attitude. It’s a combination of both, similar to what Arthur Costa and Bea Kallick call habits of mind, which include things like persisting, managing impulsivity, taking responsible risks, and striving for accuracy. One of the reasons I’m not a fan of Bloom’s taxonomy is that it doesn’t really address habits of mind, which—as evidenced by Hart’s new survey—are becoming increasingly important learning goals of a college education.