Chapter 1: Why do post-secondary students need more room to mess up?
neutral zone, where every perspective gets diplomatic immunity. This is The Last Show with David Cooper. Universities often preach that failure is the most useful teacher, that failing is a part of learning, a noble right of passage. But try telling that to a first-year student whose GPA, whose scholarships, and whose future plans can implode after one bad midterm.
Are we designing universities where students are too scared to fail? Probably. And I'm here with John McLaughlin, an earth sciences professor at McMaster University in Ontario to discuss this. John, welcome to the show.
Hi, good morning. Thanks for having me.
Teachers, universities, anyone advising a student would probably say failure is a part of learning. But how that actually plays out with kids, there's a bit of a breakdown. What do you find when you tell students, hey, it's OK, you got an F on that midterm?
For so many students, we bring them through a system where there's no structure for failure. We tell them all the time, you need to fail. We tell even little kids, you need to learn through failing, try and try again. But in reality, when they get to university, all of a sudden, it might be the first time they've truly failed at something that impacts them.
So all of a sudden, we have these many students, the first time they've ever truly failed something is at a university level. And it just impacts them. It brings forth anxiety. It brings forth these things that are fear that's really understandable considering the stakes that we've put on marks and grades and all these things.
But isn't facing consequences and shifting plans and your life not going the way you wanted it to go, isn't that a part of the learnings of failure? Isn't that maybe like a good thing? Or is the argument we just wish they'd experienced that before that first bad midterm?
No, I think the idea is that they need to experience failure. I think you're 100% correct. But I think the idea is that we want them to experience at a time and a place where they can recover from it.
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Chapter 2: How does failure impact students' mental health and academic performance?
Why should some small piece of failure impact them for a permanent amount of time? Think of how we have students working now. They want to go to medical school and they need essentially a perfect average. They want to get into engineering at a good school like Toronto. And all of a sudden, they need to have a near perfect average.
And they live in this fear and this idea that if they screw up once, they're not going to get into those programs. And that's really difficult for them and their families.
And that feeling of not being smart enough, not being good enough, that's probably not the right attitude to take when you fail. A better attitude or a better frame might be like, oh, I need to try something different. I need to do something differently here.
100%. And sometimes we have to remember, they just have a bad day. We've all had bad days. You show up to a midterm, something has happened, you didn't get enough sleep, and you just didn't do that well.
Chapter 3: What are the consequences of failing for first-year students?
find a final exam maybe they've worked through and they should be a little more prepared but things within the middle these formative studies things that you're kind of learning this progressive learning should we be failing that should we give people the chance to see where they need to get better before we start assessing their mastery of something like are they really good enough to do it if i got an engineer building a bridge i just wouldn't be able to build the bridge at the end i don't really care if he failed a calculus test in first year so how do we get there
I was reading an article that you wrote and there was this line in it, this idea of like needing to learn how to fail well. What would that look like in practice? Teach me how to fail well.
I think the idea of learning to fail well is using failure to understand where your weaknesses are. If you're doing any sort of chemistry experiment, you go, I'm really not good at mixing with reagents or using the pipette or any of the fancy equipment. And you do your experiment and you don't do it well. Well, that's great. Now you know you didn't do it well. And that's fine.
But should we allow students to try again? Say, okay, you've learned what you're not good at. How can we get some mastery of that? So next time you're better. So how do we help them understand what they're failing and get better at it as opposed to saying, well, you failed that. Now let's move on to the next thing.
Is the fear of failure for students today worse than it was, say, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago? Like, is it uniquely bad now? And if so, why?
It is uniquely bad now simply because we have online learning. We have all of these different things where now we're assessing people almost entirely on grades. And we always consider students now, a student now compared to 20 years ago is more likely to have an outside job, is more likely to be taking care of family, commuting. We always have this ideal of students from like movies.
They're all kids that are living in residence and they're having a great time. But in reality, that's not the case. They're students that have all these extra pressures in their lives. So now they're doing that. They might have socioeconomic pressures where a scholarship is the only reason they can go to school.
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Chapter 4: How can universities create an environment that encourages learning from failure?
And now a slight failure, even in high school or university, takes that away from them. Their families can't afford it. They can't afford it. Or it puts undue pressure on them.
And with more and more people applying to universities, and particularly in Ontario, I can't speak for the rest of the country necessarily, but funding being cut, the pressure is greater and greater for students to get those scholarships, to get into those important schools, and failure becomes anxiety-inducing.
So let's talk about fixing this. Would you encourage provincial state governments that hand out scholarships to rethink, oh, one bad grade doesn't mean that it should be taken away? What would you change?
Yeah. We talked to a lot of our university administrators, like the people really high up in the universities. And we asked them, they all go through this going, students need to be able to fail, but it's not their fault. They don't have this. No individual has the structure to fix the whole system. They have to fix the whole system.
And what we need is this idea of formative work through classes and for scholarships. What else can we ask them to do? Can we have interviews? Can we talk about their life experiences? Can we add things that go beyond a simple grade or a simple multiple choice midterm in a classroom? It's a controlled environment. What have they done in their lives and how can we use that to help support them?
Would you change the way students are assessed? Maybe like dropping the lowest grade or just like little tricks like that to allow students to do badly? Or do we need to like punish them, but make sure that those punishments aren't on the record forever?
I think that's a fair way to put it. I think we can do things like drop the lowest grade and we need to work with those students that really want to get better. Allow people to take a similar idea of a test again, not the same test, but understand, can I show that I got better at this over time?
If they've done something poorly at the beginning of the semester, but they show they're really good at the end of the semester, what are we more concerned with, that they did poor at the beginning or that they know how to do it at the end? So can we assess their ability to do something as opposed to their path to get there?
Now, is teachers sharing their stories about their own failures to students at all helpful? Like, you know, there's an anecdote about a professor showing their own bad grades on the first day to the students. Like, is that kind of stuff help?
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