stimulant

One thing that always strikes me as strange about discussions like this about accreditation or credit is that all of these contortions are a natural byproduct of not having students do anything important: they end up without having anything of substance to show for their work. Instead, since classes (more broadly, schools) operate on this idea of students as bins that get filled up with varying amounts of knowledge and skills, the focus is on the student themselves and trying to tease out the integrity and extent of that knowledge. I’ve never seen more persuasive or comprehensive assessment than an in-depth project that someone has completed. For all the EECS students I know, the only ones whose skills impress me are the ones who build things.

What’s particularly strange about the discussion about credit and accreditation is that

It must be remembered that one of the reasons for the establishment of accreditation by geographical regions was precisely to provide assurance to accepting institutions that the credits earned at the “sending” institution were in fact “earned and comparable.” Within regions virtually all institutions offering academic coursework were known and a network of college officials worked together to make practical and usually fair transfer decisions.

which doesn’t question at all the model under which tihs assessment is happening. It doesn’t question what’s “earned and comparable.” Even some discussions of assessment that suggest project-based or portfolio-based methods often propose that skills and knowledge should be taught traditionally, then for the purposes of assessment, students should be given a project or set of assignments to create a portfolio.

When this happened to me in high school, the experience was a ridiculous one. The teachers resented the extra work and lost class time. The students resented the lost time, the tedium, the absurdly vague and wishy-washy language of the “standards” which our “portfolios” were intended to meet. In the end, everyone acknowledged the need to bullshit our way through the work, and so we did.

One of the reasons that [ac]credit[ation] and assessment are such difficult topics is that as long as the content of a student’s learning exists without a context, investigating the efficacy of their education is unavoidably going to confound their mastery of the school system and their mastery of the material. The exciting thing about real contexts and applications of knowledge is that they are valuable manifestations of learning that exist independently of school. Something you build or write or prove or make that calls on the skills and knowledge you’ve acquired is the truest representation of the learning process because it recreates exactly the object of the learning process. Tests are not the object of the learning process. Supposedly, their comprehensiveness makes up for their failure to provide context. But a comprehensive lie is worse than a partial truth. Seymour Papert once commented

Working with Michael [a “troubled” student who was constantly at odds, failing, in the public school system] has increased for me the troubling awareness that failure in school can be the expression of valuable intellectual and personal qualities.

How can we, in good conscience, implement a system that disenfranchises people by failing to provide for the exercise of their skills and capacity in a fair context, and in turn say that that disenfranchisement is to rectify precisely the dearth of skill and capacity we misperceive because of the system we’ve rigged?