Class participation is counter-intuitive

Raise your hand in a classroom with 70 students and chances are you will not get called on. Raise your hand in a seminar with 15 students and chances are much better that you'll get called on.

So if I told you that class participation counts for 25 percent of your grade, which class would you rather take?

Rewarding students a percentage of their grade for class participation is a great way to encourage lively class discussion. But many professors fail to realize that there is a hard limit to the effectiveness of class participation grades: In lecture classes of 50-70 students, large class participation requirements are both unfair and detrimental to quality class discussion.

Despite their differences in size, there is a bias that exists in both the seminar and lecture settings when it comes to class discussions: Professors tend to repeatedly call on the same person.

Just ask Ray Win, a Wharton senior who spent several semesters as a teaching assistant for "Business in the Global Political Environment," a large lecture course with a class participation requirement. Every time a student raised her hand, he would mark it down on the class participation sheet and award points for the quality of the comment made.

"There is that tendency for professors to call on the same people, but it is not done purposefully. The professor sees their hand go up while everyone else is silent, and it just happens," said Win, who recently dropped a Finance class partly because he did not want to deal with its overbearing class-participation requirement.

At other times it may be because the professor has a clear favorite in the class -- a student with whom she is working on a project or has had prior contact. No matter what the reason, though, the bias exists.

And it hurts.

When, on a good day, 20 out of the 70 people get called on in your class, it is unfair for the professor to let the guy in the front of the room talk three or four times -- especially when 25 percent of your grade is at stake.

That's when you hear the age-old "How about someone who hasn't spoken yet." One of my professors said this last week and, as soon as he did, he went on to call on a student who had already spoken twice in class that day. Hence, this sort of affirmative action hardly corrects the problem.

Furthermore, the sheer size of class participation requirements only makes it worse. When it's only a subjective wild card or a mere 5 percent, it's no big deal; but when it counts for 25-30 percent of the grade in a lecture hall filled with ambitious minds, it encourages a rat race more than an intellectual class discussion.

You know the rat race mentality: Raise your hand and say something -- anything -- just to get your points in for the day. That's when you get profound classroom comments that are simply regurgitations of previous comments, followed by some kind of tangent.

Small wonder, then, that in both of my large lecture classes in which there were 25-percent participation requirements, we ended up having discussions halfway through the semester about why the quality of our class discussions was so poor.

Very simply, it's because having a TA count the number of times people speak up in class results in a preference for quantity over quality. Even when people are rated on the quality of the comments, it is exceedingly easy to game the system: If a quality comment counts for two points while an average comment counts for one point, just keep raising your hand over and over again to say gibberish, and you'll end up on top. Thus, even though professors say they prefer quality over quantity, their grading schemes often send the opposite message.

Clearly, class-participation grading schemes are not scalable to a large classroom environment. They work well in foreign-language classes and small seminars where it is easy for the professor to keep track of faces, names and comments made, but there is a limit. So perhaps it is best to keep class participation requirements small or as wild-card measures when applied to large lectures.

And if you agree, then raise your hand -- you might get some quality participation points for bringing this topic up for class discussion.

Cezary Podkul is a junior philosophy major from Franklin Park, Ill. Return of the Salad appears on Tuesdays.

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