Last week in the News-Gazette there was an article Demand for mental-health services surging on UI campus. Many students appear to be under a high level of stress. I'm seeing it in the one class I still teach. The issue appears to be national, perhaps global. Indirectly, you might imagine it a consequence of the rising inequality in society, fueled by the belief that those who get near the top have done so....because they earned it.
This meritocracy view puts added importance on GPA, or so it would seem. Students then become single-minded regarding their own motivation. In my class, where students write a weekly blog post, the last post is a review and critique, of the course and of their own performance. This student post, particularly the second paragraph, did a nice job of describing the ethos among the students in the class. And the comment that followed, in response to my comment, makes particular mention of the grades culture as the primary culprit. So, one wants to know whether the surging demand for mental health services is a byproduct of the grades culture and, if so what can be done about it.
I gave a pretty thorough analysis of these issues back in 2015 in a post called, The double-edged sword we refer to as 'high expectations'. That semester was the first time I saw the lack of intrinsic motivation manifest in a large fraction of my students. Before that, I actually had pretty good success with the methodology I employed. Since then, however, not so much. And what I'm concluding is that it's pretty hopeless to try to address these issues at the course level only. At the course level, one resorts to incentives, requiring attendance for example, that reinforces the grades culture. A more systematic solution is needed, one that gets students to step outside their current habits with regard to school, so they can experience what intrinsic motivation feels like.
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I was a freshman in college in fall 1972 at MIT. At the time, MIT had the unfortunate distinction of leading the country in the suicide rate at universities. They were ahead of the curve in regard to this issue of student stress and mental health. So, they took some steps to address the issue head on. The one that I remember the most was moving to pass/fail grading during the first year. Instead of grades, students would get a written evaluation at mid-semester and again at the end of the semester. The instructor had to produce these evaluations.
I seem to remember that the pre-meds were somewhat upset with this system, because certain courses that were taken during the first year would be important for their application to medical school, and they wanted to report the grades they received in those courses. For example, the first semester chemistry course I took was part typical college chemistry for that time but then also part organic chemistry. And in the second semester, you could take organic chemistry, which I did. Organic, at that time, was the make-it-or-break-it class for getting into medical school. So, the compromise MIT opted for was to have "hidden grades" in the evaluation document, which partly defeated the purpose, but maybe was as good as they could do at the time. There were some other odd consequences of this policy. I took a probability course in the spring semester. They wouldn't let me sit for the final exam as I had already amassed enough points via the midterm and problem sets to pass the course. If testing is purely assessment of what has been learned, then this makes sense. But if some learning happens even during the exams, this seems an odd outcome.
No doubt a variety of issues would have to be worked through to change the grading system in this way. I want to make a different, but related point. Almost surely there would have to be concomitant changes that require devoting more resources to the first-year experience. For one, we should take seriously the recommendations of the Boyer Commission Report. Every first-year student should take at least one seminar class taught by a tenure-track faculty member. Twenty years ago the university had the Discovery Program that aimed at something like this (though Discovery classes could be taught as a lecture if the instructor so desired). Owing to various rounds of budget cuts, those classes dwindled. It seems time to consider restoring them, in light of the mental health situation on campus.
Still, most first-year classes would be large lecture courses. If it were the TAs who would write those evaluations, they would need to have a manageable number of students to be able to perform this task, which means either reduced section size or fewer sections per TA. Further, they'd almost certainly need training in how to write effective evaluations of this sort.
So, I'm not holding my breath till the campus moves ahead with this. But, seriously, if the mental health crisis with students is the canary in the coalmine, we should be asking how to address the root cause. This seems like a reasonable first conversation to have about that.
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