Opinion: We need to redefine academic rigor

Academic rigor is something that Reed as an institution prides itself on. Admissions materials promise that we have more of it than other schools. It's the justification for a number of academic policy changes. Yet unlike other guiding ideals, we don't have a clear statement of what it is, or what we strive for it to be. What is it?

Few students can agree on an exact definition, but there's a general sense that the more suffering involved in an academic program, the more rigorous it is. Though few prefer this definition, fewer would call it untrue. At the same time, defining it this way is clearly harmful. Some of the seemingly-better ways of defining academic rigor—like defining it in terms of volume of work or amount of difficulty—ultimately tie academic rigor to the sacrifices expected of students.

Conceiving of rigor this way has an important consequence: making things harder is always justifiable, but making things easier is not. To advocate for things getting easier is perceived as an admission that you aren't capable. Nor is it permissible to define an amount of suffering for the sake of academics as too much, even though realistically everyone has a limit of some kind. This results in an awful environment where the difficulty is constantly ratcheting up, people are dropping like flies, and those who quite reasonably fold under the completely unrealistic pressure are made to feel like it was a personal failing. It would be irresponsible not to mention that disabled and low-SES students are disproportionately affected, since they have a lower limit on how many sacrifices they can make. Meanwhile, everyone still in the game is barely getting by, for now. Eventually, the pressure will be raised to such a level that there will scarcely be anyone left. I believe this is one of the primary reasons for the recent decrease in student engagement.

Defining rigor as a direct consequence of difficulty or work throughput is where it becomes an issue of accessibility. Lots of people have expressed to me that they're frustrated with how difficult it is to get accommodations at Reed, or elsewhere in higher education. You need documentation and diagnosis, which requires expensive testing. If your documentation is judged to be not good enough, by criteria which are rarely standardized, you get denied. Rather than try to standardize the criteria, we should consider the underlying issue: Why are accommodations restricted in the first place? Because accommodations are perceived as making classes easier. Accommodations are thus considered a necessary evil, compromising rigor in the name of legal compliance and access. To minimize the threat of these accommodations to academic rigor, they are meted out only to the most needy. Someone who doesn't "need" accommodations, but gets them, has their academic rigor fully compromised.

This assumption is implicit in many of this institution's policies. For example, you must take a full course load while writing your thesis, even if you don't need the units. You are not eligible for financial aid if you take an underload, because you're not achieving the work throughput arbitrarily designated as sufficiently rigorous. Discussions with professors about accommodations-based extensions are about how many is "too many", rather than how many are needed to ensure the student's benefit. From these examples emerges the sense that it's more important to provide rigor than it is to provide education. The job of the professor becomes not to help students learn material, but to decide whether students are qualified to learn material.

Rigor, to me, is about quality of discussion, and the level of scrutiny that one's ideas are subject to. Rigor means open discussion, constructive criticism, and unpacking of preconceptions. It means no idea goes unchallenged, and no bias remains unscrutinized. It is wholly unrelated to volume of work, the abstract concept of difficulty, or student suffering. Under this definition of rigor, we are able to treat students as human beings with limits and needs. It doesn't matter whether someone "deserves" an extension, because the point is that they turn in quality work, not experience a measure of suffering, or perform a measure of work. It brings into focus what we should really be doing: maintaining quality of discussion while reducing the difficulty for students.

I chose to attend Reed because it's one of the most accessible colleges in higher education. What I've learned in my four and a half years here is that the bar is in hell. Whether or not we actually are the best for accessibility, we must strive to do better. Reed as an institution desperately needs to improve its accessibility, but is incapable of improving any further without critically examining and changing its own assumptions about academic rigor.