As one who was absent for this discussion, I want to say thank you, first, for the degree of detail in these minutes. This is a real service.
One aspect of the Cum Laude business that seems to be tying us in knots is the strict limit on the numbers that can be admitted, i.e., the 10%/20% rule. It is obvious from the minutes that we are struggling how to define that top group in a way that is simultaneously objective, subjective, fair, and precise. Did I mention transparent? Some of the apparent difficulty of the task might be eased if we had more flexibility in the numbers. That thought leads me to question the assumption that Hawken will continue with Cum Laude.
Are the feelings about the Cum Laude tradition that strong?
Does Cum Laude mean anything beyond graduation?
What are the alternatives in terms of other honor societies with which Hawken could affiliate? What are their rules?
Could Hawken perhaps go it alone, either with its own honor society or simply not have this sort of thing? I am not advocating the latter, but just put it out as an extreme option.
As an example of how different a home-grown model could look, we could say that eligibility for HHS (Hawken Honor Society) requires a minimum GPA of (pick a number) as well as evidence of good character (list possible criteria) and love of learning...or whatever...(list possible criteria). Everyone who qualifies is in.
Among other advantages:
1. Students are competing against a standard, rather than against one another.
2. The standard is known in a way that allows students to assess where they stand.
3. We could make a flexible standard that encourages students to risk taking more challenging courses.
4. We could make a standard that more heavily weights more recent courses so that a student's chances are not necessarily ruined by a bad grade early on.
5. We could set up something for which underclassmen are eligible (a junior honor society, perhaps) so that academic achievement can be recognized at all levels.
Your thoughts?
Doc M.
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Reaction from Nate Baker.
ReplyDeleteHi Everyone,
Unfortunately, I believe we will run into the same problem regardless of whether we continue with Cum Laude or adopt a different system. We will still be required to make a difficult cutoff between students who are accepted into the society and students who are not. Even if we set the cutoff at the beginning of the year we will have perfectly deserving people who miss the cutoff by tiny fractions of GPA points. Cum Laude is a flexible structure. We have the ability to decide who is accepted and on what merits. The only thing that we do not have control over is the 10% admittance rate. I believe it is best to stick with a nationally recognized program.
It may also be difficult to develop a check list for good character.
Thank you both for your thoughts. I know, from personal experience, that for some students, membership in Cum Laude is indeed a meaningful honor, providing a sense of belonging to a select group far whose membership extends nationally. Given that the Cum Laude society gives us broad lattitude to weight issues of character and behavior as heavily as we want, I don't think the society is the problem. Nor do I think the 20% cut off is too small a group-- more than that begins to dilute the honor pretty thinly. I do think we need a way to acknowledge academic acheivement, effort and improvement in other ways that Cum Laude-- perhaps the Dean's List proposal (the one that cllaed for quarterly form letters with a tiny bit of personlized commendation) can be resuscitated.
ReplyDeletePersonally I feel that, although it would be nice to incorporate character more into the selection process, it would be far too impractical to base a decision on those really ambiguous qualities of a person. Secondly, I feel that allowing more people to be inducted into a Hawken Honor Society would lessen the meaning of recieving the award.
ReplyDeleteOur system now isn't bad, but I think it could use some work with respect to the process of selection. I like the idea of a small committee that can look at all the records of a student without breaching confidentiality about the student. Perhaps they should be at both ends of the process to ensure that they feel that the best candidates are well presented at the beginning and that the committee can make a more thoughtful selection at the end.