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From: mjl@cs.rit.edu (Michael J Lutz)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Subtle Math Questions
Message-ID: <2301@cs.rit.edu>
Date: 29 Apr 91 17:26:54 GMT
References: <2731@ttardis.UUCP> <1991Apr24.142835.26475@mccc.edu> <11415@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
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In article <11415@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>, hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
> The situation is even far worse than this.  The "regular" math courses have
> also declined; even in a good school, the mathematics (or physics, or 
> chemistry, or whatever) department cannot really maintain standards. 

Actually, it's even worse than this -- the rigor and challenge of
most liberal arts courses is also on the wane.

> At Purdue, the mathematics department can legally maintain standards for
> prospective teachers, but what would happen if it did?  Purdue would turn
> out very few HS teachers, and they would have very little, if any, advantage
> over those turned out by other schools which do not have standards.  To the
> school superintendant, a C in an honest course on the foundations of analysis
> is bad, while an A in a course with 1% of the content is good.

I've tinkered with the idea of grading based on both achievment and
difficulty of material -- you know, like diving in the Olympics.  Courses
would be given ``degrees of difficulty (dod)'' (assigned by faculty in each
discipline).  Students would receive a standard letter grade for
achievement, which would be multiplied by the ``dod'' to arrive at a
cumulative difficulty rating.  I'd probably use the raw grades to
determine academic standing, but the difficulty rating of would
let prospective employers or graduate schools know whether the new graduate
was a belly-whopper or a Greg Louganis (sp?).

---------
Mike Lutz
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester, NY 14623-0887
mjl@cs.rit.edu