The Ethics of Weeding

I want to state up front that I have no issues, ethical or otherwise, with removing invasive and unwanted plants from your lawn or garden; this post isn’t about that kind of weeding. I refer here to the practice of using test questions, homework assignments, or other class/program requirements to remove unwanted students from the pool of candidates for a specific degree. It’s an article of faith among students at all levels – not just slackers, but average and good students, too – that teachers do this to reduce their workload (they get paid the same for grading 8 exams or 80), and that schools do this to increase revenue (if you fail something, you may have to pay to take it twice). It wasn’t until I became a teacher myself that I learned that this practice is far less common – and far more controversial – that most students imagine. I also realized that the ethics of weeding isn’t as black and while as I had believed…

On the one hand, every student who has met the entrance requirements, paid the fees, and been admitted to the school or the program has a right to be there; if they don’t deserve to be part of the school then they should not have been admitted in the first place. Some schools will take students on a provisional basis pending the completion of remedial classes, but that isn’t a weeding process; every one of those students knew they were being admitted with conditions, and would need to meet those requirements or leave. And most college programs require that students learn about and/or gain proficiency in certain areas in order to progress; that’s kind of the point of having a school or a course of study in the first place. But testing someone on any knowledge or skill that is not part of the entrance requirements or part of the curriculum is stupid as well as unethical, and obviously can’t be supported…

On the other hand, any experienced teacher can tell you stories about students who were given comprehensive instruction in a subject and informed well in advance of what the passing requirements would be who not only failed to achieve the required proficiency but demanded to be passed anyway because they had paid their tuition and were therefore entitled to the degree or certificate promised. Admission to a school isn’t intended to be a guarantee of success, and neither is paying your tuition; you still have to earn the degree (or certificate) by completing all of the work in an acceptable fashion. In that sense, every exam is intended to “weed out” those individuals who are unable to learn the material, or unwilling to put forth the effort to do so. And in many cases that weeding is necessary; an engineer who can’t pass elementary mathematics is a very bad thing, and so are a doctor who fails biology and an illiterate attorney. Especially if they were admitted with that shortcoming and have resisted all efforts to help them overcome it…

Educators will tell you that this paradox is one of the great mysteries of their profession, but from a business standpoint it looks more like a direct conflict between antithetical requirements – which leads me to ask the question. Do we have a responsibility to make sure that any student who can pass the entrance requirements, do the work, and pay for their tuition will pass and receive their degree? Do we have a responsibility to make sure that any student who we feel is fatally unsuited to their field of study (literally, in the case of the healthcare professions) does not complete the program and go on to do (perhaps dangerously) substandard work? Or do we set out the requirements, tell all of our students exactly what we will expect them to do, and the performance they will need to pass, and let them sink or swim as they see fit?

It’s worth thinking about…