Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Uganda Fulbright Blog
As Dad and I walk down to the track most mornings around 6:30 AM for exercise, we meet many elementary school children in neat uniforms headed for school. They walk purposefully and soberly but their faces break out into smiles as we greet them. “Good morning,” Dad says, “God bless you. God loves you. Have a good day at school.” And they beam with pleasure, receiving the gift as Dad intended to give it.

We see children outside the campus headed for school in deep purple, bright pink, yellow, orange or green uniforms. The effect is of a moving flower garden. The imagination fast-forwards 5 years, 10 years, and one wonders what kind of man or woman each child will be father or mother of and what kind of world today’s fathers and mothers will leave tomorrow’s. I especially wondered this as I spent a day this week doing school physicals on 43 girls ages 13 to 20 at a secondary boarding school.

Sometimes one sees uniformed school children headed back home at the beginning of the day. “Why are these children leaving school?” I asked Paul, our driver, one day. “Their parents have not paid their fees,” Paul explained, “and they are not allowed to stay in school without having their fees paid.”

The Ugandan system of education, like the British system, depends entirely on successful passing of final exams for progression to the next level. “There is a young woman working in my office,” said Mark, one of the expats at UCU, “who couldn’t afford the fees for secondary school. So she worked hard to earn enough fees just to pay for the time of final exams. She passed all of these each year but this means she got her high school education attending school less than 20% of the time.”

A student of mine did exactly the same thing for the same reason, missing 80% of scheduled class time all through secondary school but passing her exams and therefore successfully progressing to each level and finally graduating. This educational philosophy flies in the face of the American credit hour system, a system devised to standardize educational production much as time and motion studies were applied to standardize industrial production. The British system, in contrast, is heavily invested, not in hours spent, but in the final outcome of the program of study. Final exams at UCU in recent history were at least 70% of each course grade. It is only within the last year or two that the weight of final exams was reduced to no more than 50% of course grades.
In addition to the meeting the challenges of school fees and heavy examinations, public caning is common practice at elementary and secondary schools in Uganda. The student may be caned for misconduct of any kind but can also be caned for scoring poorly on exams or failing to answer a question a teacher asks. I’ve heard from several different sources that the caning is done publicly, in front of the whole school, and that it is male teachers who administer it.

Caning, of course, does not happen at UCU. I doubt that it happens at the college level anywhere in Uganda. On the other hand, adult students also face the challenge of school fees. Adult students in Uganda, as in other parts of the world, face juggling work, school, and family responsibilities. One student of mine wrote about finishing her BSN while expecting her second child, having to deliver him by “Caesar,” and then completing her clinical assignments, still healing.

Her burden was greatly increased because her “maid escaped mid-term” as she wrote to me, explaining her schooling challenges. Her hired house help went absent without leave and the young mother was forced to leave her newborn with a neighbor while she finished her school term. But finish it she did and now she is a graduate student of mine. I find this student to be exceptional in her thinking ability, confident, articulate, and determined to achieve her professional goals. If one is to judge a system by its products, the Ugandan system is quite capable of turning out exceptional graduates such as this one.

How is one to judge the quality and quantity of any educational outcome? How is one to determine how good it is and how much of a good it is? Of course, even systems like that in the U.S. which measure credit largely by time in class also measure outcome by examinations. And only the most gifted and determined students could progress from level to level with 20% of program instruction in a credit by examination system such as the Ugandan. I suspect, moreover, that online education has been quietly eroding the instructional time-credit model over the last few years and that the time is coming when we in the U.S. will have to re-assess how we measure educational units.

In addition to pondering what a “credit hour” signifies across systems, I’ve been wrestling with the Ugandan grading scale, also evolved from the British system, and, as an expat told me, existing in similar models all around the world except in the U.S., perhaps another example of U.S. “exceptionalism.”
Here’s how I’m trying to understand it. Our grading systems require us to judge student work by narrow criteria so that if a student meets the criteria, the student earns 100% of the grade. We use grading rubrics for this purpose. “You do the work, you get the grade,” I’ve often told my U.S. students. This one to one correspondence between a grading rubric and a grade seems to be foreign to the British grading system at least how it is practiced in Uganda. We Americans also conceptually tend to start from 100 and subtract points as we evaluate student work.

The British system views the 100%, not of a set of narrow criteria by which each assignment is evaluated, but of some stratospheric perfection, nearly impossible to attain. The student begins with zero and reaches for an A which is usually around 85%. Grades above 85% are reserved for students who go far above expectation, who excel into that barely reachable stratosphere of unusual excellence. The British system does not use narrowly constructed grading rubrics. If it does, it starts from quite different assumptions.

The British system instructor grading or “marking” student work asks the question, “How well did the student achieve an ideal (the stratospheric 100%) of this assignment?” and marks accordingly. The American instructor grading student work asks the question, “What did the student fail to do in this assignment (which began at 100%)?” and also marks accordingly. At first introduction, an instructor in either system is likely to think the other’s grading scales absurd just as I did.

“American egalitarianism and the need for the self-esteem of our students to be protected are mixed into the U.S. grading system,” said an American expat with a PhD in political science from a German university and with years of experience here at UCU. “We Americans do not tolerate the hierarchical differences among learners which the British grading system assumes.” It was a comment open for debate but at least worth one.

What I will have to do for now is to evaluate my students’ work by the criteria in the syllabus and then take about 15% off that grade to fit in with the university’s grading scale. It is one of the hardest cultural adjustments I am having to make living and working in Uganda.