The Irrelevance of Competence is so Passé: Preponderance of Incompetence is All The Rage
More on tank gunners and UMass Boston students
As we already mentioned on these pages,
…[r]esearch on tank gunners found that replacing a gunner who scores around the twentieth [ASVAB test] percentile with one who scores around the fifty-fifth percentile improves the likelihood of hitting a target by 34 percent.
—Rob Henderson, “Dropping the SATs Hurts Poor Kids”, The Free Press, March 6, 2023.
The analogy between the SAT and college readiness is obvious. Abolishing the SAT signals a belief in irrelevance of competence.
Labor Based Grading is a giant step further. The central point is that grading should be “based on effort rather than on a subjective evaluation aligned with a standard (sic.).” In plain English: the more incompetent you are you struggle, the higher your grade is going to be. UMass Boston’s Faculty Staff Union (FSU) is at the forefront of the movement, funded by an anti-racism grant taken straight from our union fees and aims to turn the irrelevance of competence to the preponderance of incompetence, and do it not only in university admission, but all the way to the entire coursework.
Fast forward. Our tank gunners are now way past the ASVAB placement test: it’s their “final exam” now, at a firing range. The best ones will be deployed to the most difficult albeit consequential hot spots, where the enemy is numerous and the ammunition is scarce. And the best ones, per the FSU, are those who aim the longest (showing labor) and miss their targets the most (showing persistence). With gunners like this no war is there to be lost.
Why stop there? some even say that labor based grading is does not go far enough because who are we to decide what labor is and what it isn’t? Better just stop grading altogether.
The idiocy of the Labor Based Grading has literally nothing to do with student career readiness. It is designed to make grades infinitely malleable. As such, it is one more step towards the lebanonization of our country, to a constitution that provides different rights and rules for different identities, specifically designed to quell the unhappiness of the masses. This policy is demeaning for the aspiring and disrespectful to the thriving. It needs to be stopped.