This post at Eli’s reminded me, I hate fairness.
I don’t have an analysis of it but conversations at work where appeals to fairness come up almost invariably make my insides squirm and involve some form of penalizing some students - it would be unfair to allow something for students who do not merit it to benefit in some way. I’ve gotten to the point where I tell co-workers and supervisors “I don’t care about fairness” because I have no patience for the practices of penalizing students or for people’s attempts to rationalize their role in these practices through resort to higher values. Fairness-talk, or at least the fairness talk that sets my teeth on edge, seems to me entirely about people with power over students trying to convince themselves that they are write to exercise that power in ways that are obviously unpleasant for the students on the receiving end. Not just unpleasant, bad for. (Unpleasant can be good for people, like being pushed to exercise or the bad taste of medicine.) To be clear, I’ve penalized students on occasion, it’s part of my job, I try not to make excuses or rationalize/moralize it in order to wash my hands. It’s one of the many things that suck about working in the diploma industry. People claim that those job rules are good and right, but I think largely on the basis of feelings that they need in order to maintain a sense of themselves - if the rules are unfair then my enforcement of them is unfair or cowardly. Unflattering, but true.
Where is meritocracy in all this? One link is that the standard of fairness is largely about merit. Some people merit higher grades. We can’t cut one student a break because then we’d have to cut all the students a break and then…. this neglects that many students with good grades and high test scores themselves caught a break socially.
Absolutely had an experience with this today (or at least a piece of it). I’m trying to figure out what I can do to help an injured student get through her semester so she can have surgery. She can’t withdraw or even get a medical exemption because she’s a transfer student who has worked very hard to get here and can’t afford to take summer classes to make up the time she loses. I heard myself suggesting things (extra help, ways to deal with lecture, not giving her a hard time about her incomplete work) that maybe aren’t “fair” on a blank slate version of these students’ positions. But if I had injured myself in college like this, there would have been family and institutional resources coming at me the second it happened. She has none of that, and is fitting this one paper for this one class for this one piece of her life (which includes a job, of course) in as best she can.
Comment by Emily B — April 28, 2009 @ 9:39 pm
The fairness question (’importance of fairness’ not the ‘is this fair’) is certainly valuable. I deal with it constantly in the intellectual space I reside as debaters argue about certain interpretations and which produce a fairer competitive environment. The problem with fairness in this space is that fairness often elides into laziness, which I found to be almost entirely consistent with my teaching experiences. I am not a rules guy but I find having and sticking to a previously announced policy is generally the fairest course and also the most callous approach.
In a similar vein the Supreme Court is hearing an interesting case to-day. A fire department commissioned an outside group to design a test for determining officer advancement. The designed test showed that non-white takers tended to place in the lower half. During that round of test taking three people became candidates for promotion, one of which was African-American. Based on the trends they disqualified the test and implemented a new standard, one where the same African-American did not qualify for promotion.
Comment by travis — April 30, 2009 @ 8:26 am
sorry I missed you too last weekend, but I hope your prelims turned out ok, etc. Anyway, perhaps this is an unfair (hah) reading, but I’m wondering (esp. in light of emily b’s comment) whether your critique of fairness is actually more like a critique of standards that masquerade as fair but are in fact merely uniform in such a way that they are unfair or prejudicial in practice. Take Emily’s transfer student: one bends the rules for students who are in dire straits because it seems unfair to penalize them because they’re facing obstacles that other wealthier, healthier students are not facing. I guess what’s not entirely clear to me is whether the critique here involves an appeal to some higher level or other domain of fairness — fairness of opportunity instead of fairness of procedure, perhaps. Or maybe it just involves a tacit appeal to some other principle (eg, radical pedagogy stuff which teaches for empowerment, emancipation, whatever). If one gives up on hierarchical, meritocratic ideals, then what standards of pedagogical evaluation remain available?
As for the fairness talk itself, yeah, my experience fits with your critique. Matter of fact, I often hear people saying “life’s not fair” at those moments where they are particularly going out of their way to screw you over. Have to think more about that…
stay in touch, eli
Comment by eli t. — April 30, 2009 @ 7:17 pm
I think I’m with Eli on this one, if I understand correctly. It reminds me of Murray Bookchin’s analysis (which I think he lifted from someone else, can’t remember who) of the distinction between the “equality of unequals” and the “inequality of equals” where the former describes Emily B’s approach while the latter describes the view of those who complained that her willingness to accomodate the student in question was “unfair.” I think “fairness” is used by both camps, and as a result I don’t find the term itself particularly helpful (though I continue to use it myself on occasion), but neither do I find the term as repugnant as you seem to.
Happy May Day!
Mike
Comment by MIke — May 1, 2009 @ 8:30 am
hey y’all,
thanks for the thoughts. I’m still neck deep so I don’t have much time or energy to reply in depth. I’m not averse to everything that people refer to with the category of fairness and in other setting than on the job I still use it. I think people have different standards. Off the top of my (currently foggier than usual) head here’s a few different standards or different contexts that the fairness stuff can get invoked in, all in academic circles related to grading and stuff, that go under the same name.
- comparing the treatment students get (having the same due dates).
- comparing the results of student work (this essay is better researched, better argued, more eloquent, etc and so deserves a higher grade)
- some calculus of student effort compared with current ability (the 4th year student who knows the field pretty well and turned in work which is good based on the students experience but suggests minimal effort vs the 1st year student who is new to all of this and has put in a lot of effort — another way to say this one is grading based on how much the student appears to have used the assignment as an opportunity to learn either skills or content)
- some calculus of student circumstances (students who need assistance due to learning disabilities as well as more informal stuff when people’s lives just hit a pot-hole)
I have a gut level version of the second, “this is just a better paper” type of impulse, while I work to take into account where the student is at. To my mind success in a class should be less about the quality of the product than about the quality of the process, as hard as that is to measure. A student who is new to all this stuff who flounders but who learns a lot of new skills and content has I think achieved more intellectually than an already highly capable student who achieved at an ‘objectively’ higher level but in a way that benefitted the student less subjectively.
I haven’t mentioned here that I think grades can have very real consequences for students lives and I think that should be factored in some place, a factoring which I’ve been told is unfair. Along the lines of “if someone raises a grade just because the student will lose financial aid otherwise then that’s unfair.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that so straightforwardly but I think it’s been implied. Sorry this isn’t clearer…
cheers,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 1, 2009 @ 9:29 am