Eric Grosch, Letter to Dr. Morgenstern on LOR - Semmelweis ...

question.”
MIT Cal Tech and other high-prestige institutions have experimented with a pass-fail grading
system because they unders<strong>to</strong>od the inherent absurdity of grading-systems, with their arbitrary
cut-off points for each letter-designation. That represented a rejection of the very notion of
grading. I'm not certain of the status at those institutions at the moment. Maybe their graduates
have had difficulty translating their academic performance in<strong>to</strong> terms that other institutions, that
recognize grading, understand, so maybe they've gone back <strong>to</strong> grading.
4. Improper substitute for “where do I stand”
Coens and Jenkins deplore performance-appraisals and, by implication, also LORs:
At a recent quality conference, a CEO was questioned as <strong>to</strong> why his organization continued <strong>to</strong> use
appraisals after shifting <strong>to</strong> a quality management culture of system and process
improvement...“We think we owe it <strong>to</strong> people <strong>to</strong> let them know where they stand.”...(27)
What people really want is access <strong>to</strong> the knowledge and information that influences the
organization's pay, promotion, and status systems and how these affect or apply <strong>to</strong> them...People
are insatiably curious about Where do I stand? because, in most organizations, this query is
decided with a maze of unspoken rules, inscrutable political influences and other dynamics of
organizational life. Appraisal is not the system that drives pay, careers, and status; it is an
incidental effect of those dynamic systems. Appraisal is...the paper-shuffling that sanctifies
decisions already made.(28)[7]
The cognate of pay and promotion, in the corporate setting, is gaining acceptance in<strong>to</strong> a “<strong>to</strong>p”
(whatever that might mean) training program, in the medical-educational setting.
Too often, a trainee finds out, <strong>to</strong> his surprise or shock, where he stands only when he reads his
retrospective performance-appraisal/LOR and, by then, it's <strong>to</strong>o late <strong>to</strong> do anything about it. LORs
and performance-appraisals have an especially pernicious affect on medical students, at that
vulnerable stage in their development, but they're bad for any trainee and for any person.
5. Inaccuracy:
a. misapplication of the Likert-scale
“Likert” seems an unlikely choice for naming the method, since Likert used the scale in canvassing
members of population-samples <strong>to</strong> obtain aggregate ratings of their attitudes in his
1932-article[8], the presumed basis of the eponym. Likert, himself, had the good sense not <strong>to</strong>
apply such rating scales <strong>to</strong> important matters that could affect people's livelihoods, though his
predecessors already had and his successors still do. Likert[9] credited prior authors, Fechner and
Gal<strong>to</strong>n, without citing a reference, for the origination of such questionnaires, circa 1888. Scott
introduced the system <strong>to</strong> the United States Army in the early part of the last (20th) century[10].
Paterson, an employee of the Scott-Company, described a later adaptation of Scott's