Participation: It was once considered to be the mere act of showing up and handing in your homework on time. But lost are the days of middle school. Along with milk breaks, recess and rewards of candy for doing good deeds, passively-earned participation points became a thing of the past when we arrived in college.
Sadly, I wish graded participation would have disappeared as a whole when I arrived here, as I consider it to be a childish and ineffective measure of a student’s abilities. It is impossible for anyone to effectively grade a person’s participation accurately because it is an ambiguous action that can be judged and forgotten in numerous ways. The only way to effectively grade participation would be to go around in a circle, ask each person to say a statement and then give a check mark once the statement, regardless of whether it is nonsense, is uttered.
The participation requirement, which seems to be a staple of this university, has several problems. Now, I completely understand participation is used to get students to attend class and speak, especially in discussions. However, if you’re not motivated by the fact that you’re dropping more than $5,000 every semester to get your ass out of bed to go to a lecture or discussion and say one thing relevant to your future, I fail to see why the 10 percent participation requirement of your grade would motivate you. If you feel as though you are so smart you can get by at this school without participating or attending classes, you should be allowed to skip so you can use your talents in other areas. However, if pure laziness seems to plague you, and you fail to be able to show up and try and then fail your class, your grade should reflect it. By requiring students to show up and participate, the participation requirement masks who the student fundamentally is as a person. Are students going to be employees who come to work because what they do its intrinsically important to them or are they just going to show up because they have to?
The second aspect of the participation requirement that makes my blood boil is that no one can judge participation consistently and accurately. Now, I have had my participation judged in many ways, and I will describe this in several levels – you may call this the evolution of participation if you wish. At the most basic level, several TAs and professors judge your participation simply by the fact they want you to show up to class, and grading on participation is an incentive to do so. This is probably the most effective way to judge participation because in this manner, participation is quantitative, and just about anyone at this university can count to 16, 32 or 48 if need be.
What becomes more complicated is the way participation is traditionally judged, which is by the number of times a student says something. The problem with this manner of judgment is that some things certain students say are simply more memorable than others. Sadly, I feel this rarely refers to the relevant and intelligent comments – any relevant and intelligent conversation becomes lost in a sea of unintelligible, incoherent questions and statements from people who have not even opened their books. Why should someone be rewarded for asking for information that they can easily get from reading the material required for the class? I once had a student in my class ask if a woman raped in a fraternity with a high likelihood of rape was “asking for it.” Is this really what we should reward as participation?
Lastly, several courses have adopted the practice of only rewarding students participation points for contributing intelligent and relevant discussion. However, this begs the question of what intelligent and relevant discussion actually is. It’s impossible to know what actually qualifies as intelligent and relevant as it is an objective quality that changes from person to person. Besides, all that happens when this requirement is enacted is that students polish the same incoherent and unintelligible thinking from the previous paragraph. Participation can literally be referred to as the golden turd of final grades.
Participation is a measurement that is beneath the University of Wisconsin. We are made up of the students who are committed to their education. By requiring participation, we undermine them and this university.
Jared Mehre ([email protected])is a sophomore majoring in political science, sociology and legal studies.
