On pass rates and academic standards

The English Department has heard that at least one school is scrutinizing pass rates of individual instructors in their composition classes. I’m not sure which school this is, and I don’t know how accurate the description of the college’s practice is–ah, hearsay!–but the department asked me to make our position clear.

The Yuba College English Department opposes any process that would pressure faculty — full- or part-time — to maintain, or meet, any kind of a pass-rate target.

There are a couple subtleties here:

First, we are not saying that we won’t examine pass rates in aggregate as a way to judge, for example, what additional or improved support we may need to offer our students. But we will not examine the pass rates of individual faculty. Pass rates won’t be used to single out instructors, especially for evaluations and/or rehiring decisions.

Second, we are also not saying that we have the authority to make sure that something like this would never happen at Yuba. There are processes whereby the college administration (and/or other faculty) could overrule us. But we are committed to bringing all our departmental (as well as Senate and union) muscle to bear to resist any such move. And our institutional muscle is fairly well developed.

To be clear: in all the college-wide, and even district-wide, discussions around the changes wrought by AB 705, I have never heard even a hint that anyone would want to call for this. Everyone, from the Board of Trustees on down, has been explicit in their support for maintaining academic standards. I’m writing this clarification simply because I have heard concerns raised in response to practices elsewhere. And we want to put our instructors’ minds at ease.

The reason for our position is probably obvious: it’s easy enough to improve pass rates, if we’re willing to lower our academic standards. But that is, in fact, our greatest fear about AB 705 — that we will lower our standards, whether consciously or not. And while data from across the country shows that pass rates remain pretty stable in post-AB705-like situations, this assumes that the students have been appropriately supported.

But how would we know if we’re appropriately supporting students if we lower our standards in order to skew our pass rates? We wouldn’t be able see if (or, more likely, how) we need to improve our support. No one can fix a problem (nor celebrate successes) with skewed data.

We want to make sure there are no incentives that work against that. And demanding that instructors justify their pass rates seems a particularly bad incentive.

Let me know if you have any questions about any of this. I’d be happy to talk about it.