The College offers a number of honors designations as motivators for high academic achievement. These include general Latin honors and departmental honors common to most higher education institutions. However, Dartmouth gives its students a unique accolade: citations. These individualized honors supposedly add a more personal touch to the College’s otherwise egalitarian, albeit sometimes cold, grading system.
On its website, the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning, a teaching resource for College educators, says that “students prize citations,” making them a “very effective motivator.” While in theory citations are highly valued, in practice students do not care about them. In this sense, citations have failed to achieve their purpose. Citations have the potential to be effective motivators, as intended. However, for that to happen, it is necessary to fix them.
The problem isn’t that citations are worthless, but rather, that it is impossible to discern their worth when every professor awards them by different standards. Some professors may opt to award citations only to students who earn As. Others may opt to recognize the most improved students, regardless of their final grades. Currently, the means of acquiring citations is ambiguous, more often than not ascribed to luck rather than to any definitive action or motivation.
To address this, it is necessary to define the means or criteria for potentially receiving a citation. I would argue that technical performance strictly belongs to grades alone, and citations should fulfill the role of more personal honors, as they are intended “to indicate an appreciation of special efforts and achievements obscured by the grade.” Through clarification, a citation will become more meaningful.
Furthermore, citations cannot be evaluated because they remain unquantified. While other honors are rewarded to a defined number of students, the number of citations awarded each term remains a mystery. To be frank, in any competitive environment — Dartmouth being no exception — the value of any honor is also contingent upon rarity, and when rarity cannot be determined, recipients are unsure of the worth of their designation.
In order to address this, the College should publish the number of citations awarded per term and by department each term, as it does with course medians. This would provide transparency in the distribution of citations by subject and reveal how frequently citations are awarded.
Out of this situation, though, what I find most amusing is one specific line in Dartmouth’s explanation for citations, intended to be taken at face value: “Students prize citations.” It would seem as if there is a slight discrepancy here between the administration’s perspective and reality. In their current form, citations are broken. Without a modest sense of standardization, citations lack intrinsic value. And without definitive numerical rarity, citations lack extrinsic value. But through these fixes, citations could be revitalized, if not legitimized, as a needed personal touch to academic achievement. As a liberal arts college, Dartmouth should further this sense of personalization and motivate students to succeed academically. These little fixes could polish Dartmouth’s academic assessments.
