Making the Grade

The Academic Side of College Life

Howard S. Becker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138527492
• eBook ISBN: 9781351507639
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Based on three years of detailed anthropological observation, this account of undergraduate culture portrays students' academic relations to faculty and administration as one of subjection. With rare intervals in crisis moments, student life has always been dominated by grades and grade point averages. The authors of Making the Grade maintain that, though it has taken different forms from tune to time, the emphasis on grades has persisted in academic life. From this premise they argue that the social organization giving rise to this emphasis has remained remarkably stable throughout the century. Becker, Geer, and Hughes discuss various aspects of college life and examine the degree of autonomy students have over each facet of their lives. Students negotiate with authorities the conditions of campus political and organizational life--the student government, independent student organizations, and the student newspaper--and preserve substantial areas of autonomous action for themselves. Those same authorities leave them to run such aspects of their private lives as friendships and dating as they wish. But, when it comes to academic matters, students are subject to the decisions of college faculties and administrators. Becker deals with this continuing lack of autonomy in student life in his new introduction. He also examines new phenomena, such as the impact of -grade inflation- and how the world of real adult work has increasingly made professional and technical expertise, in addition to high grades, the necessary condition for success. Making the Grade continues to be an unparalleled contribution to the studies of academics, students, and college life. It will be of interest to university administrators, professors, students, and sociologists.

Chapter 1
Studying College Students: The Nature of Our Problem

What is it like to be a college student? Most of the people who read this book will have had the experience themselves, yet (unless they are very unusual) their memories will be dim and spotty. A few high points stand out, perhaps: a favorite professor, an exciting idea, a political triumph, a young romance. But the everyday experience of college—the background against which these emerge—will have faded beyond recall.

It is because we cannot remember our own college lives, perhaps, that we find it so difficult to understand and deal with college students. For we do find it difficult. Everyone recognizes how little we understand them when they flare up in what appear (to the outsider) to be irrational mass protests. Fewer people realize how much of the failure to achieve the educational goals colleges set for themselves results from the same lack of understanding. Still fewer see that, after all, students do make a life for themselves in college and that the kind of life they create is the most immediate influence on them; what teachers and administrators do influences them only as it is filtered through the network of their own culture and social arrangements.

Everyone writes about college students. Many people have studied them. Yet in all the vast literature that has accumulated we find very little that gives any sense of either the overall dimensions of college life, as students see them, or of the ordinary, routine everyday character it has for them. We can learn, from the literature, a great deal about the psychological and social characteristics of students: their personality traits, their attitudes on a variety of subjects, their social class, religion, and ethnicity. We can learn how these attributes are related to one another and how, taken singly or in combination, they correlate with students' academic performance in school and their adjustment in later life. But we will not learn much about what they do, how they feel about it, what they think they are doing and why.¹

Well, why should we? In a way, the volume that follows is our answer to that question, for we think that the analysis it presents will show what is to be gained from knowing college life as students see it. But, to answer briefly here, we should study students' views of their own experience because, we think, it is the best way to find out what influences those features of student behavior we are interested in. If we do not see it as they do—as a dense network of social relationships, institutional demands and constraints, and temporally connected contingencies—we will not be able to understand what they do.

We began our study of undergraduate life at the University of Kansas with that conviction, and our experience during the time we gathered and analyzed our data strengthened it. It has led us to organize our report in the way we have. Students typically divide college life into three major areas, and we have made these three the main foci of our work. First, they see the area of academic work: courses, grades, readings, term papers, examinations, and all the other paraphernalia that surround the college's core work of educating students. Second, they see an important area that revolves around campus organizations (both residential and "extracurricular") and campus politics. Finally, they recognize as a third area that of personal relationships, both friendships (usually samesex) and those of dating and courtship.

We found, to our dismay, that the analysis and presentation of material on all three of these areas, desirable as it would be, cannot be achieved in one book-length report. It would be desirable because the three are linked in so many ways, both objectively and in the students' eyes; to present them separately makes it difficult to justify some aspects of the argument, which more properly belong in a place devoted particularly to that topic. Thus, we can hardly understand how students deal with their academic work without knowing something about its relation to campus politics. We have solved the problem by using the conclusions from one area of our study in the analysis of another, hoping that readers will tentatively accept those conclusions until they are given a full analysis of their own.²

Be that as it may, in this, the first volume to appear from our study, we concentrate on the academic side of student life and give relatively little attention to organizations, politics, and personal relations. We speak of these matters frequently, whenever some understanding of them is needed for our discussion of academic work, but their full analysis is delayed until later publications.

Academic Work

Research on college students deals mainly with their academic performance but ordinarily takes a direction very different from ours. Most of this research has a little of the character of industrial research designed to improve the efficiency of some production process. It asks whether the educational job is getting done: Are students learning? How much? What things? It asks under what conditions the job is done best: In large classes or small? With lectures or discussions? Under what kinds of college organization? It asks how the character of the materials used affects the product: Do the intellectual, attitudinal, emotional, and social traits of students influence the efficiency of the educational process? Or, more subtly, does the combination of students of different kinds in one campus population influence the result?³

These are serious questions, of course. But they are teachers' questions and administrators' questions. They are not the questions that suggest themselves for study if we look at academic work from the students' point of view. From that point of view, much that seems important to others becomes trivial and, conversely, what teachers and administrators think trivial comes to have much more importance.

We shall have so much occasion, in the course of this volume, to list the kinds of questions about academic work students are concerned with that, to avoid being tedious, we do not begin the listing here. Suffice it to say that they are questions of this general order: What is it that is asked of me in my academic work? What is it that I myself want of that work? How do I go about satisfying these demands? What will happen to me if I succeed, or if I fail to meet them?

Though we look at the area of academic work from the students' point of view, we do not simply ask their questions, providing perhaps a bit more rigor, breadth, or wisdom in the answers. We are, after all, sociologists, and we approach these questions as one aspect of the thing we are studying. We study people who spend some of their time asking themselves such questions, trying to answer them, and acting on the answers they achieve. Our job is to make sense of that phenomenon, and we do this by seeing it from our own, sociological perspective.

A Sociological Context

So far we have spoken only of our area of interest in this volume—academic work—without specifying the problem that we, as social scientists, propose to study. An area of interest becomes a scientific problem when it is put into a theoretical context, and the kind of problem, obviously, is a function of the particular theoretical context used. Ours is sociological and, within that broad category, it is a theory based on the concept of symbolic interaction, as that can be found in the work of Dewey, Cooley, George Herbert Mead, Park, and others.

Mead begins his analysis of human conduct by noting that people have the ability to view their own behavior from the standpoint of another. They can imagine what their actions will be taken to mean by others and thus are able to organize what they do, even as it is being done, so as to take account of the anticipated responses of others. This is the import of "symbolic" in the term symbolic interaction, for actions acquire symbolic value as they achieve, through this mechanism of "role taking," the quality of having the same meaning to both the person who performs them and the person or persons with whom he is interacting. Insofar as the meanings of actions are in this fashion shared, and people organize their own activity with reference to those shared meanings, the possibility of collective action arises. Individual actions take shape as the person attempts to mesh what he does with what others around him are doing, so that the nature of the collective action he is participating in becomes a major explanation of what he does.⁴

Sociology, from one point of view, consists of the study of collective action: the forms it takes, the conditions under which they arise, and their consequences. In speaking of collective action, it should be clear that we do not refer to such instances of elementary collective behavior as the crowd or the mob, but rather to more stable forms of joint endeavor—what are usually referred to as institutions, organizations, or establishments. All social structures, after all, consist of a large number of people joining their various and differentiated lines of individual activity into some kind of coordinated collective activity.

Collective action takes place in an environment or situation, which is simply to say that it goes on under conditions set by the physical world and by the network of other forms of collective action in which it is embedded. Whatever the participants in the action may want to do, they are constrained to choose among those alternatives that the situation allows them. Collective action is thus a function both of the desires, individual and shared, of the actors and the conditions under which they act.

We use the concept of perspective to analyze the collective actions of relatively homogeneous groups—homogeneous with respect to their social position in an institution. We have elsewhere defined a perspective as

... a coordinated set of ideas and actions a person uses in dealing with some problematic situation, ... a person's ordinary way of thinking and feeling about and acting in such a situation. These thoughts and actions are coordinated in the sense that the actions flow reasonably, from the actor's perspective, from the ideas contained in the perspective. Similarly, the ideas can be seen by an observer to be one of the possible sets of ideas which might form the underlying rationale for the person's actions and are seen by the actor as providing a justification for acting as he does.⁵

Perspectives, though they are used by the individual to organize his activity, are a group phenomenon, coming into being when the members of a group find themselves sharing common or similar goals in a common situation. (We analyze the concept at greater length in Chapter 3.)

The formula for our analysis, then, is that under given conditions, which we may expect to be largely socially created, groups work out collective modes of action or perspectives. We can thus transform our area of interest—academic work—into this scientific problem: What kinds of perspectives do college students create to deal with their academic work under the conditions of college life? The same formula will allow us, in later writings, to raise similar questions about the areas of organizations and politics and of friendship and dating.

Conditions of Student Activity

We studied the forms of collective action found among students in a residential college. Since they live in a small college town, the college and its supporting institutions constitute the main setting for their lives as students. For the most part, what college authorities do structures their situation. These authorities—the faculty and administration—set the terms for a large portion, though not all, of student activity. They determine what students will be required to do and, similarly, what they will be allowed, though not required, or forbidden to do. They provide as well the resources available to students out of which and around which they can shape their collective action. That is, where they do not require or forbid behavior, they create the conditions in which that behavior will take place.

College authorities do not, of course, exercise as complete control over student life as they might. In some areas, students are free to escape the college and its surrounding town and go elsewhere for their activity. Furthermore, we do not imply that college authorities are free to set whatever terms or create whatever conditions they wish. They, too, are subject to social constraints and must work with the resources available to them. We have focused on the collective activities of students and the conditions under which they arise, but a similar study could easily be made of college authorities themselves. One point, in particular, needs to be noted: In some areas of student life, students become sufficiently well-organized and powerful to set for themselves the conditions under which college authorities act, so that, in some measure, students and authorities set the conditions for one another's action and constitute an important part of each other's environment.

We must distinguish two connected levels of analysis, both of which we make use of. We have just discussed the collective action students take in response to conditions created by others, by nonstudents. We also attend to individuals and student groups as they fashion their own lines of action, focusing on the constraints they exercise on one another's actions.

For example, we may analyze the fraternities as part of the collective response of students to the problems of finding a residence and organizing themselves for action in the conditions set by university authorities. But when we analyze dating or campus political activity, we must take the existence of fraternities and their characteristic activities as part of the conditions under which dating and political activity take their characteristic forms.

Although we concentrate in this book on the area of academic work, in the remainder of this chapter we consider the conditions of student action in all three areas of student activity. We do this because variation in the conditions surrounding each area of activity leads to differences in the student perspectives associated with those activities and, though we cannot complete the demonstration of that proposition in this volume, we want eventually to be able to do so and thus want to make the basis of the argument clear.

Academic Work

Faculty and administration set almost all the terms and conditions of student activity in the academic area; their control is here most nearly complete. They decide what students are to do, when they are to do it, something of how it is to be done, and what rewards or punishments will be given to those who do or do not meet the standards. The terms they set are largely contained in the system of courses, credits, examinations, and grades described in every university catalog. They are further contained in all the rules and regulations in which performance in the academic area is made a prerequisite for some other kind of activity or privilege.

The relation between students and university in this area may reasonably be called one of subjection. We must understand, of course, that the term does not express an unfavorable judgment. We use it as a technical term, to refer to a hierarchical arrangement in which all the decision-making power is in the hands of the superior group. The faculty, of course, believe, with a good deal of reason, that this is an appropriate pattern, since they, after all, know a good deal more...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• 1 Studying College Students: The Nature of Our Problem
• 2 The University of Kansas
• 3 The Grade Point Average Perspective
• 4 Definition of the Situation: Organizational Rules and the Importance of Grades
• 5 Definition of the Situation: Faculty-Student Interaction
• 6 Information and the Organization of Activity
• 7 The Pursuit of Grades
• 8 Bases of Judgment and Evaluation
• 9 Evidence for the Existence of the Grade Point Average Perspective
• 10 Conclusion
• Index