College Teaching, Spring 2000 v48 i2 p42
"Tough Love" Teaching Generates Student Hostility. (Brief Article) Eugene H. Fram; Robert Pearse.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2000 Heldref Publications

"Tough love" confrontation is needed in more places than in interpersonal counseling. A lack of candor in our classrooms is undermining the rigorous training of our nation's future business and technical leaders, and we need to be concerned about it.

Conversations with colleagues around the country make it clear to us that being honest about students' performance in the classroom is growing more difficult. Paul Trout, who teaches at Montana State University, made the point in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay, "Incivility in the Classroom Breeds Education Lite." Trout cited comments on evaluation forms received by colleagues, ranging from "the instructor needs to lower her standards" to "it is really hard to come to class when every day the material is being shoved down your throat." Trout said such comments, "reveal the degree to which some students feel aggrieved when requirements and standards are not ... comfortable...."

There is a related more subtle issue that also deserves serious examination. So much emphasis, today, is placed on how students evaluate teaching performance that many professors can't afford to be candid about some of their academic work. How widespread a problem is lack of honesty? Consider the number of assistant professors in U.S. universities whose promotions and salary increases are tied to students' evaluations. In some institutions, those evaluations are the major or only report on their teaching.

Concurrently, grade inflation has become an unpleasant fact of life, even in Ivy League universities. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton school rationalized grade inflation to a writer from the Wall Street Journal with the comment, "You don't fail your customers" (5 December 1995). Faculty in a variety of programs report that although many students are doing creditable work in class, too many of them are not developing critical thinking skills.

We need to take student ratings seriously because they are an important venue for communication. But professors should not have to worry about what giving honest feedback to students will do to promotion and tenure. Nor should they worry about student backlash when they hold them to higher performance standards. Students are in the university to learn, and learning can sometimes be painful to the ego, even if the developmental feedback is provided in a gentle manner.

Business, today, spends about $55 billion a year for education and training. Much of it goes to reimburse employees for part-time university studies. Executives want many of these employees to develop visionary, emotional, and interpersonal skills and to be able to act effectively in complex situations.

Consider one painful example of low student performance, one that can be observed in many undergraduate and graduate classrooms. A student team presents a case analysis, and it is obvious to the professor that it is weak, with superficial analysis, despite the use of glitzy PowerPoint slides. Individual student presentations are fragmented. In addition, team members did not try to determine the outcome of the case, which is readily available from several sources. Finally, only one team member is responding to questions from the class.

At the finish, other students congratulate the participants on their presentation. Clearly there is a professional gap, the professor knows, between what the students think of the presentation and what is acceptable. How should the professor handle the critique session? Not so long ago, almost every professor would have used a candid approach, recognizing that to soften it would be a long-term disservice to the students. The message would have been clear: they must adopt a more rigorous, analytical approach, or they will not be prepared for this class or for the future. Of course, how the teacher subsequently counseled students would be important. Feedback must not be hurtful.

But today tough love evaluations are likely to generate team hostility. Moreover, others may interpret an honest critique as a public embarrassment to the team. Many students don't recognize that their personal standards and perceptions of quality are well below what is expected. Further, many students are balancing full-time work, two-career families with young children, and school. Those pressures leave too little time for developing the creativity, research, and thinking skills that graduates will need in a competitive global economy.

Many students feel that professors should lower standards. One recently said to one of the authors, "I have three priorities. My family comes first, then work, and school gets what is left over." The message was that he still expected to be evaluated highly regardless of the time he planned for studying.

The solution is threefold. Be candid in evaluating all substandard performance. That will take a major change in the academy--which may have begun, as a few prestigious schools have been attacking grade inflation. Next, redesign course evaluations as Trout suggests, "to encourage students to reflect on the value of a rigorous education"; not "to trash their teachers." Third, we should ask corporate executives and others to join us in advocating tough love developmental feedback. Without it, our graduates may not be able to compete.

Eugene H. Fram is J. Warren McClure Research Professor of Marketing; Robert Pearse is Distinguished Lecturer in Management, at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, N.Y.