Dartblog

No, that is not a picture of David Letterman in MIT finery. Rather, Professor Tom Cormen of the Computer Science department has written in to offer some observations and corrections to my comments about the use of data to drive decisions concerning the College’s writing program. By way of background, Professor Cormen directed the Writing Program from July 2004 through the end of June 2008; the program was renamed the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric early in 2008.

Professor Cormen has authored numerous, oft-cited articles on computer science, and earlier this year, he was named an Association for Computing Machinery Distinguished Educator (ACM is the primary professional organization for computer scientists). Professor Cormen is also the co-author of the leading textbook in his field: Introduction to Algorithms — now in its third edition. He informs me that this book is the second-most cited work in computer science, according to CiteseerX. GoogleScholar notes that the book has been cited in 20,327 other scholarly works (this figures in not a misprint). Introduction to Algorithms has been translated into Portuguese, French, Hungarian, Polish, Korean, German, Russian, Greek, Chinese, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, and Romanian (but for reasons unknown to Tom — I asked — not Spanish). All in all, a great researcher, by all accounts a fine teacher, and a truly impressive guy.

My comments on Tom’s remarks are in bold in the text.

Joe,

I’ll start out by saying that in many cases, I’d say that, given the information you start with, your analyses are often solid. The problem is that you don’t always start with complete information. I understand that complete information is not always available to you, however.

[A few too many qualifiers in that section for my taste. Damning with faint praise, perhaps, but I’ll take it.]

Today’s column is one such instance. I’ll start with your comments on eliminating the Writing 5 exemption. First, the criteria used were not just the AP English test. We also used SAT Critical Reading (formerly SAT Verbal) and SAT Writing scores. (I don’t know what we currently use, since I’m no longer in the Writing and Rhetoric Program.) Second—and here’s information that you did not have access to—back when we had a computer scientist directing the Writing Program, he *did* an analysis of our exemption criteria. He—I—correlated various standardized test scores with how well our students did in first-year writing courses, in an effort to determine which tests were best to use for deciding whom to exempt from Writing 5. The test that correlated worst: AP English! None correlated particularly well, but AP English was impressively bad as a predictor for who would get good grades in Writing 5 and First-Year Seminars. Subsequently, I convinced the Writing Program Steering Committee to stop using the AP English test as one of our exemption criteria. (It was not easy to convince everyone on the WPSC at the time.)

[The methodological problem here is that Tom was correlating the English/Writing 5 grades of the people who actually took the course — not the people who were exempted from it due to their superior grades on the AP English test. And this does not even get us to the question of the accuracy of grading by the adjunct professors (non-tenure-track, non-tenured) who, by and large, teach all of the sections of Writing 5. In the fall of 2009, grades in Writing 5 were all over the map, with 11 out of the 24 courses on the Registrar’s web site showing median grades of A or A-, and one tough professor putting up a median grade of B.]

Even without incorporating the AP English test into our exemption criteria, what we have is far from perfect. I doubt that any perfect system for deciding whom to exempt exists, or could exist. If Dartmouth had the resources to offer Writing 5 to all first-year students, I’d be solidly behind doing so. The problem is, and always has been, resources. In fact, I’d have thought that you’d be pleased that Dartmouth is not pressing ahead with eliminating the exemption, given the current budget situation.

[A curious observation from Professor Cormen. I certainly think that all students should take a basic writing course. This is the last thing that the College should cut due to the budget crisis. As Dartblog has pointed out ad infinitum, there is plenty of fat to be cut from the budget without touching bone — like undergraduate courses.]

Now, about your main point: my being elusive about how well our students write. You are correct that I did not have quantifiable data. The current director, Christiane Donahue, is working out an assessment plan. And she’s been working on it for quite some time, because she wants to get it right. Joe, writing is *notoriously* difficult to assess. It’s not like assessing math, where you can give problems and the answer is either right or wrong. Not only is writing difficult to quantify, but it is the *one* skill that spans *all* disciplines. It’s not easy to compare writing in, say, biology with writing in, say, French literature. And it’s not enough to assess writing at one moment; you need longitudinal assessments. So forgive me for not whipping up an assessment plan right away. I had lots of other things on my plate at the time. I recognize that assessment is important, but you know the saying that when you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s difficult to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp? At the time, assessment was the equivalent of draining the swamp, and I had alligators to deal with.

[There’s the rub. Five and a half years after starting the Writing Program, Professor Cormen and his successor still have not found a way to assess student writing. One of my favorite phrases applies here: “don’t let the best be the enemy of the good.” The faculty are virtually unanimous that student writing is poor or worse — despite all of those A- median grades in Writing 5 — yet the College still has not come up with any means to measure writing quality, even though our faculty routinely grade student papers.]

Tom Cormen

Professor and Chair
Dartmouth College Department of Computer Science
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~thc/