I have thought a lot and over a long time (40+ years) about the goals and purposes of a university level education, and how some students appear to be ready for it right out of the starting gate while others are not. Why is that?

My first ideas involved generic notions of learning as a how-to activity. If students were provided with the right tools (resources) and strategies, then they could learn better. From there, it was clear that any given tool or strategy, such as “working with others” or “using an answer key,” could be done in either more productive or less productive ways, so the learning resources also needed a user’s manual.

I have studied the perceptions of students who have performed at both ends of the grade spectrum and looked broadly at the resources students use and how they use them. Addressing these issues has made a difference, but not that much. I was missing something.

During the immediate post-COVID period, 2021-22, student performance in our courses spread out more than we had ever seen before. The overall average was higher; there was one population of student who moved up (the A:B ratio increased) and there was one population who moved down. The “C” range was clearing out. Tracking this down is a complicated task and fraught with assumptions – but something was different. My best guess is that the post-COVID period exaggerated something I always suspected:  whether students might have wildly different abilities, based on their prior experience, when (a) they are in an unfamiliar learning situation, and in which (b) they have high autonomy for choices on how they approach their learning.

In the introductory organic chemistry courses at the University of Michigan, CHEM 210 and CHEM 215, two things are broadly true. First, new learning skills are likely to be needed. The subject matter and its organization are wholly unlike students’ past experiences in general science classes (General Chemistry, General Physics, General Biology) in that the course is an authentic introduction to an existing and mature subject whose topics are typically taught at the state of the art. Because we teach at a principled level, we test for application to new situations, and we are aiming for basic functional literacy.

Translation: We are not teaching or testing in a way where only memorizing items and recognizing when to write them in response to a prompt will work. The complexity and sheer volume of information in a real-world subject makes this impossible, and we are not at all interested in turning organic chemistry into a bundle of factoids that can be churned through with multiple choice testing. We are actually interested in something rather easier: For students to learn the subject.

After a successful semester, and certainly after a year, our students can go to the current organic chemistry and chemical biology journals or to a research seminar and understand a great deal of what is going on. This outcome is quite unlike what is possible after taking a typical introductory course.

Second, the only requirement we have in our courses is for students to take four examinations each term, with the inference that students should appropriately learn the subject in preparation for those exams. We offer a wide array of resources that can be used towards this end, and we do not do prescribe which of them you need to use —  precisely because individual students must discover which combination of them works most effectively at the level of an individual’s choice. Therein is a huge challenge: The student next to you might be achieving at a high level, and you think “surely, I should just copy that!” And as reasonable as that seems, it is not the way learning works. Learning is centered in the choices made by the individual to best match themselves with the resources that they will use most effectively.

We have created an educational environment for students in which they have autonomy around decisions on how they will learn. As implied above: Not every decision is a good decision. Because we have fairly high level learning skills in mind as the pathway to a successful outcome, namely, the application of principles to new situations, learning strategies that worked in the past may be inadequate. The freedom to make decisions that do not achieve the outcome we have in mind also means having the freedom to fail.

Elaboration: In their past experience with science classes, some students have found that only memorizing and repeating vast amounts of information (or other non-productive strategies) was treated by instructors as “learning science,” and so they believe it to be true. This belief is itself is based on a learned behavior, not an underlying fact about science. This belief likely means that this strategy was expected, and if it was expected too often – particularly in science classes – then a person can develop the belief that learning science is the same as remembering and recalling factual information. And if that person has been successful (i.e., getting good grades as a reward), then the behavior becomes a habit and a strongly held belief. What happens the first time this belief is challenged by a system where the previously tried-and-true strategy is not successful? Turmoil! Finger-pointing! Blaming! Denial! … as well as Change! Revelation! Enlightenment! The decision to not recognize and change a non-productive behavior in our courses (only memorizing, procrastinating, mis-using an answer key, binge- or distraction-watching recordings) is equivalent to making the decision to fail. Clearly, no one is thinking that they are actively making a decision to fail! This expression is used to wake up the idea that just because a person likes to memorize stuff, and may be quite good at it, does not mean that everything can be learned this way. It does not matter if every other science class has been structured to allow someone to get away with these strategies and end up successful, because that was a severe error in judgment by the instructors — in CHEM 210/215 we want to recognize and reward the type of deeper learning that we think has sustained value.

And while background in the subject matter can certainly play a role, the thing about organic chemistry is that the amount of background needed is real but miniscule. We have no evidence that background makes any difference at all past the first couple of days, and perhaps for creating a sense of general confidence about chemistry.

And that brings me to my original point. One way to think about the intrinsic value of a university education is to put students in a situation where they have more autonomy than they have had before (the freedom to make decisions about their education) with few regulations about those decisions (minimal guardrails). As a hypothesis, how well students are prepared to make useful decisions in the absence of direct rewards, regulations, and requirements would predict how well they might do in such a setting.

All it not lost if you have not been previously skilled with such decision-making, but it does mean that it is time to learn! Do it now and the rest of your education will benefit immediately.

This combination of conditions, autonomy with minimal guardrails, is quite characteristic of most professional careers, so it is a worthy goal. As a faculty member, I have policies and rules related to my position. But in terms of my work, I am nearly unregulated to pursue whatever kind of projects interest me – and the work only gets done if I plan it, plan it well, and carry it out against whatever deadline I have (which is also something I need to set). I have all the freedom in the world to fail.

As a student in CHEM 210/215 at the University of Michigan, you have autonomy, which means that the freedom to succeed is linked directly to the decisions you make in the environment we design and create. But, without a hundred guardrails telling you what to do at every moment, including someone who tells you to get up and go to class, to decide on what homework you should be doing and when, and that copying an answer is not the same as answering a question, autonomy also means that you have the freedom to fail.

Essay 1: You have autonomy
Essay 2: The learning skills you enter with
Essay 3: Post-COVID dialed up autonomy
Essay 4: Resources and their useful use
Essay 5: Practice explanation: Control over when you make errors
Essay 6: Testing: It’s called performance for a reason
Essay 7: Transformational Learning: Resistance is Futile
Essay 8: Grading: Scales are good; curves are bad.