One of the most confounding problems we face as faculty members is the “stunning level of student disconnection” that grew out of Covid and continues to characterize our classrooms today. Students “ghost out” of courses by week six. Discussion topics that used to trigger lively conversations now simply earn us blank stares and awkward silences. At times, the impact of that discomfort is muted, but only because so few students attend class.
Faculty members have been at wits’ end this academic year trying to come up with solutions. Teaching has always been a demanding vocation, but usually those demands are balanced with the gratification of seeing our work have an impact on students. In our present moment, however, teaching has become exponentially more demanding while the rewards have evaporated. It’s been hard to feel a sense of satisfaction in the classroom when disconnection and atomization rule the day.
There has been no shortage of proposals for how to fix this set of problems. Many take a “tips and tricks” approach (“here are three ways to improve participation in class discussions!”). That probably sounds like I’m belittling those strategies. I’m not. They are important and necessary — yet insufficient. The causes of student disengagement are structural, and require structural solutions.
But not all structural solutions are equal, and some of those proposed lately threaten to do more harm than good. Which brings me to the issue of “rigor.”
One of the more prominent strands in the what-to-do-about-disconnected-students discourse has been a series of calls to “return to rigor” or “restore standards.” The logic is seductive: During pandemic pedagogy, we abandoned things like deadlines and attendance requirements, and instituted pass-fail grading — all of which seemed appropriate at the time. But now that we’re “post Covid,” order must be restored. Moreover, structure seems to be a vital part of equitable course design, so shouldn’t we restore as much intentional and explicit structure to our teaching as we can?
No one is arguing that higher education should be a breeze, or that structure is a bad thing. It’s all too easy, however, to use “rigor” and “structure” as cloaks to hide practices that actually erect barriers to student success. And what is the point of pursuing “solutions” that exacerbate disconnection, disengagement, and low levels of student motivation, the very problems they are supposed to solve?
Broadly speaking, instructors looking to make their courses more rigorous do so in two ways:
- Logistically. This is when you rework a course to set strict deadlines and attendance policies, add more assignments, create examinations with a high number of questions relative to the allotted time for their completion, or devise grading curves aimed at minimizing the number of A’s. Irrespective of the actual content, the aim here is for the structure and mechanisms — the logistics — of the course to be difficult.
- Cognitively. Here the instructor makes a course more challenging via course content and pedagogy. A cognitively challenging course might ask students to question their prior assumptions or to engage with material that has a sophisticated, complex, theoretical bent. In a cognitively challenging course, we design activities to help students conquer what Lev Vygotsky called the “zone of proximal development” — that zone of learning in which the material is “not too easy, and just challenging enough that, with a little help from a more learned individual, we can master the material.”
The problem is that, too often, administrators, critics of higher ed, and even some professors mistakenly think that logistical changes will lead to cognitive improvements. They think the key to creating a cognitively challenging course is to overload students with work and grade harshly.
Even before the pandemic, we were warned — to give a representative example from The Washington Post — that undergraduate education was “broken” and that the solution was “rigor.” Much of the work in this genre cites Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s 2011 book, the go-to source for those who argue that higher ed has somehow lost the plot and only a “return to rigor” can rescue us from irrelevance (indeed, that’s exactly the tack of the Post essay, written by Jeffrey Selingo, a former editor of The Chronicle).
But usually, the metric for “rigor” boils down to things like the number of pages that students must read for class each week, the amount of writing assignments in a course, or the time it takes to complete a particular academic program — all of which, Academically Adrift claimed, were far too low. In other words, in this argument, logistical challenges make a course “rigorous.”
That conception of “rigor” continues to hold powerful sway in our present-day context, with a loud segment of the discourse on higher education lamenting a supposed collapse of standards. We’re told, for example, that “acknowledging that excellence exists and can be measured is the first step toward making American education rigorous again.” (The allusion to a certain campaign slogan is not accidental.)
Other voices construct straw-man arguments about the opponents of rigor — “the grace and compassion police” and the “performatively woke” instructors — who, it’s said, have undermined, perhaps fatally, the educational enterprise and kneecapped those who are heroically trying to restore its original luster.
When it comes to what the “return to rigor” looks like, however, these essays and the rhetorical strand they represent can offer only tired, vague admonitions to “grade harder” and “assign tougher work.” Yet no serious scholar of pedagogy would argue that learning occurs in direct variation with higher page counts or heavier homework loads.
And here’s the difficulty: The logistical version of rigor, so often deployed, is not correlated with actual learning. Instead, it’s nothing more than performative hard assery, meant to convince the public that a “real teacher” is making sure “the kids” are learning without being “pampered,” or “coddled,” or “let off the hook” from doing the real work of college … whatever that may be. Or, as one academic put it, “If an English professor is ever confused about what ‘rigor’ means … I recommend that they speak with someone in the sciences. I’m sorry, but we all know which fields have median grades at the A- or even A level, and it’s not any of the sciences.”
I see two key problems with that way of framing rigor: (1) It uncouples the notion of rigor from any meaningful act of learning, and (2) It serves to exclude, to gatekeep, to exacerbate the already profound inequities that riddle the entire structure of higher education in this country.
As a 2021 essay, “It’s Time to Cancel the Word ‘Rigor,’” argued: These “approaches privilege students who already have high academic literacy or who are already adept at managing higher education’s unofficial rules, routines, and structures.” For students who did not bring large amounts of cultural (or actual) capital with them to college, this performative, get-tough conception of rigor positions them as problems, defined by their deficits as opposed to their strengths.
Because they struggle with the logistical challenges of a course (students who work an off-campus job for 20 or more hours a week are not as well-positioned to pull an all-nighter in order to finish the problem sets as some of their peers might be), these students are often written off. They are deemed as not college-ready, as perhaps better off in another major, or — to cite the proponents of rigor — as “academically adrift.”
Too often, when we see a class full of students struggling in our courses, we decide their difficulties are cognitive. But they are probably struggling because the logistics of the course have created an insurmountable barrier. In other words, there is a fundamental misalignment between what we as instructors say we’re doing with “rigor” and what our students are actually experiencing in courses identified as “rigorous.”
Research into student and faculty conceptions of rigor illustrates this perception gap:
- When faculty members are asked to describe what makes their course(s) rigorous, the answers tend to run the gamut of cognitive challenges. We say we are disrupting students’ preconceived notions, asking them to sit with ambiguity rather than resolution, designing course material with “desirable difficulties,” for example.
- But when students are asked about rigorous courses, they point overwhelmingly to logistical factors. A rigorous course, in their perception, is one with a high volume of course material (irrespective of the type of content). It’s a course that their peers said involved a lot of hard work to meet the instructor’s requirements, or one that required a significantly higher amount of time to do the coursework.
One study of student perceptions of academic rigor found that, out of a list of 10 factors, the top five indicators students cited of a “very rigorous” course were all of the things I’ve identified here as logistical challenges (“the number of 20-page papers I am assigned” and “the amount of reading I am assigned,” for example). The cognitive challenges (e.g., “instructor expects students to make judgments about the value of information, arguments, and methods”) occupied the bottom five positions of the list, with markedly lower incidences of students associating them with a “rigorous course.”
It’s clear that, despite the heated exhortations of its proponents, rigor — as it is most often carried out; that is, in the logistical-challenge sense — is not the answer to the problems that currently beset us.
Higher education should absolutely be challenging. Indeed, using the term “challenge” instead of “rigor” would help us escape the trap into which so many of us fall, assuming we’re posing meaningful cognitive challenges to our students when, in practice, we’re simply loading them up with work and creating logistical barriers to their learning.
When you take steps to make a course more challenging, the ideal litmus test is simple: Does this advance learning? So as we define policies, expectations, materials, and assignments for our 2023-24 courses, we can avoid the pitfalls of a clumsily executed vision of “rigorous learning” by applying that litmus test:
- Does a nonnegotiable attendance policy genuinely advance learning? (It may, but we need to be sure of our answer before including it in our syllabus.)
- Does an inflexible deadline policy for all assignments strengthen learning?
- Is learning furthered by tests with a lot of questions and a relatively brief time limit?
- Does a pedagogical strategy that relies exclusively on lectures promote learning?
It’s time to abandon punitive and unhelpful conceptions of “rigor” and be rightfully skeptical of claims that being “tougher” is somehow the solution to student disengagement. Instead, think in terms of “challenge” — or, as Sarah Rose Cavanagh calls it in a recent essay in these pages, “compassionate challenge,” where structure and compassion balance one another.
As instructors, we can create both logistical and cognitive challenges, and it matters deeply which type we use in our classrooms. If we can model the type of critical discernment and self-reflection that we so often ask students to practice, we’ll be able to ensure that we challenge students in ways that promote, rather than stifle, meaningful learning and academic success.
