Notes from a room of skeptics

The first question was: "Are you here to tell us this is inevitable?" It is a fair question to ask a visitor, and the honest answer is no. Plenty of it is optional and some of it is a bad idea.

Three objections came up that day which I now put in my own material, because I could not answer them and have not since found anyone who can.

• The workload objection: every proposal so far moves effort from students to teachers, and nobody has funded that move.
• The equity objection: the students who benefit most are the ones already able to evaluate an answer.
• The trust objection: a policy the staff did not write will be enforced unevenly, and uneven enforcement is worse than none.

I have stopped treating a skeptical room as a room to be won. The skeptics have been in the building for twenty years and they know which changes survive a February.