Brené Brown

Adjust manageable difficulty.

I mean, it's supposed to be describing a challenge that's right at the edge of your capability so that it pushes you, it stretches you, but it doesn't overwhelm, overload, or injure you.

And I think we seem to be increasingly living in a world that is afraid to confront those kinds of challenges.

And I think our universities are responding to that right now by saying, well, we can't ever tell students they didn't do good work or else they might feel bad.

Oh, no, it doesn't, right, because we have to please the paying customer who signed up for our classes with an A, right?

Yeah, we can.

Well, first of all, does everyone, do our listeners, do they know what happened?

We can try.

Well, I mean, this, this conversation has been going on since I was an undergrad.

There was a, there was a professor named, uh, people called him Harvey C minus Mansfield because he gave a lot of C minuses and he, he would, he railed against great inflation constantly.

And I thought this was a paradox and I still do.

On the one hand, if everybody's getting A's, you can start to wonder if the class is too easy and if people are being challenged enough.

On the other hand, I think more than 20% of Harvard students are A students.

And so setting an arbitrary bar, a limit, a ceiling on how many can excel in a given class seems ridiculous to me.

And frankly, as a professor, I want as many of my students as possible to master the material.

And so the way that I've navigated this in my own courses for years is I give extremely hard exams.

And the mean on them is often a 65 or 70%.

But then I curve upward so that the student who does best is at 100.

And then everybody is adjusted from there.

And that creates a real distribution based on who has really learned the material of the class.