Quality- Books, Grades, and Excrement

Quality. Quality. Quality. If I say it a few more times maybe it will make a little more sense. Quality. Quality. Quality.

When I type the word “quality” in to the all-knowing Google it spits out this definition “1. The standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind; the degree of excellence of something.” The etymology of the word links it to the Latin word qualitatem which is the accusative form of qualitas, which originates from the word quails meaning “of what kind.”

So what is quality? We have the definition and the etymology but really what IS it? If we say something, a book for example, is of high quality (according to the definition presented by Goggle) it is measured against other of a similar kind and found to be excellence. So it is a better book than other books but how much better? Does it have to be the best book? And most importantly how can you tell it has quality? Is quality a matter of opinion?

I feel like quality is a hard thing to define and nearly impossible to quantify. When you read a book, or watch a movie, or listen to a presentation it’s easy to innately know whether the book, movie, or presentation was good: if it was of high quality. It’s a lot harder to explain WHY you think these things have quality. Maybe the characters were especially relatable, or the music in the movie was especially dramatic, or maybe the speaker was especially entertaining, but these qualifications differ between objects and are not good universal qualification for ALL things of high quality.  

I am reminded of a scene from the movie Dead Poets Society which I will link a clip of below...

 

This I think is the proper response to trying to quantify the quality of poetry; just rip it up. Robin Williams realizes there is no way to graph the quality of art. You can't give it a score on a scale of one to ten. If you try what your going to end up with is, well, excrement.

This of course is a hard thing to realize as a student at a university because this is what teachers have to do every day. They ask us to write essays, poetry, to learn chemistry and math, and then they judge the quality of our work. In some classes it's easier. If you can memorize how to do the calculus equations and show your knowledge on a test it's easy for the teacher to judge the quality of your work. You got 95 out of 100 of the problems correct you did high quality work, and then you get an "A." But what about writing? What about poetry and art and music and things that don't have exact answers? How can you give a numerical score to these things? Their quality is dependent on the reader or observer. So either you are forced to write, present, and create things only that the professor (whose job it is to give grades) will like and deem as high quality or you end up with a lower grade. Personally I think this is (to use Robin Williams word) excrement! I don't want to only write what my professors will think is high quality; I want to write what I think is high quality. 

As a future teacher I know I will run in to this issue while grading English papers and creative writing assignments. I realize that I will have to create grading rubrics that ask for specific things to come up with a quantification of their assignments so that I am not one of those annoying teachers who only gives A's to the students who write in the specific way that I like. Hopefully this will allow for a little more creative and artistic freedom for my future systems.  

So what does this rant have to do with the legislation that is going to be written to address quality in a university setting? To be honest I tip my hat at the student government for attempting such a daunting task but cynically doubt it will do any good. Even if the student government does pass some kind of statement addressing how our university must meet some kind of standard of quality I doubt it will actually change anything real.  They would have to actually define what them meant by high quality in each department and then set standards that would be real and attainable for MSU students to do much good for the school. If what the student government wants is a new catch phrase then here it is:

MSU students are now striving for higher quality! If what the student government wants is actual change made by students... well that's going to take a lot more than one change in legislation.