This week’s Rose Cafe was an engaging conversation led by Dr. Cynthia Hill where we talked about how to best utilize the feedback we get on assignments from professors to grow and learn- not only to get a better grade next time, but to actually learn.

I think this to me was an important and refreshing takeaway from the talk. We are so used to working hard and have spent our whole life working towards getting good grades for important things like college that we have forgotten what the real purpose of education is. While grades are undoubtedly important, I think this talk reminded me about what what classes and college in general are actually about- to learn, grow, expand the mind and acquire important life skills like critical thinking and problem solving. It was definitely a refreshing reminder.

However, this also reminded me that learning shouldn’t stop just because you get a good grade- even if you get an A+ in a class, there is still potential to learn by trying to understand and meaningfully engage with the feedback you receive. Even a paper with a great grade probably has some feedback on it.

Another interesting topic we discusses was rubrics. In my opinion, rubrics can be useful depending on how the rubric is written, and depending on the class. For example, I took a Web Programming last semester where there was a clear rubric given out of 30 points and each point on the rubric was a clear instruction of a task we had to do in order to receive a point, such as “Validate code”. In this case, this is clearly helpful as I know specifically and exactly what to do to get points. However, in many humanities or writing focused classes I have taken, rubrics can often be vague and unhelpful, with phrases like “Uses sophisticated and effective language to convey an idea”. The problem with rubrics like this is firstly that they seem to convey things already implicit- of course I’m trying to write in a “sophisticated and effective” manner! In addition, phrases like this are extremely subjective and there is no way to know just by looking at the rubric if you got points for “effective” writing or not. I think for rubrics like these, it would be beneficial for professors to go over them in detail and give examples of what “effective” writing looks like in the context of the assignment and class.

Overall, this talk was extremely interesting and made me rethink my outlook on classes, college, self-growth and learning in general. In the future, I definitely want to try to shift my approach to homework with the goal of learning- rather than simply getting an A- in mind.