If you've asked the class to give a summary of something and fail them for doing exactly what you've told them to, I'd imagine that there'd be a huge ruckus.
That would not be an activity of failing a student for doing exactly what they were assigned. They were assigned to do two things. 1. Summarize 2. Critique. Lets say that each part is worth 50% of the grade. If they summarize without critiquing, the highest grade they can receive is 50% which is insufficient to pass.
Moreover, people would just google something semi-related and shove it in regardless of how tenuous the relationship is to the source material.
They shouldn't get credit for that unless they have an explanation with regard to how what they said is related to the course material. If they copy and paste from google, they should be flunked for plagiarism. For the very least, they would have to reword what they googled. This may not force the students to do original thought.
Here is how you fix it: hold an in-class exam where they have to answer an essay question. This question must be one that is relevant to the curriculum but one that they have not yet heard of nor had a chance to look up on google. Make this part of the test worth 50% of the exam. That way students who cannot produce anything original will fail.
How would there be grade differentiation based on that?.
The same way as with any grading agenda. Critical/creative thinking will be worth 50 percent of the grade and there is nothing subjective about what critical/creative thought is. It is defined as something very simple, namely something that is not a paraphrase of what has been covered in the in-class text.
It may very well be that it can distinguish the top students from the run-of-the-mill students, but it would be virtually impossible to distinguish between a B student, a C student and a D student. .
I don't see why not as because critical thinking will be such a big part of the grade, students who do show the ability to think for themselves will get significantly higher grades than those who do not. So, those who can't think will get a C- if they are lucky, those who can think will get As and Bs.
Moreover, this method of judging critical thinking is incredibly subjective. .
How? There is nothing whimsical about it. It is simply a fact that I can make a statement about our discussion that is a paraphrase of what has already been said and I can also make a statement that is original. The two should not be hard to distinguish from one another and doing so does not require any skills that are specific to a certain individual or a group. Such distinctions can be easily seen by any scholar with highly developed reasoning and reading comprehension skills. Most people who hold PhDs do have such skills.
Going by a rigid marking scheme, I already have students coming up to me to quibble about an extra mark or two. What do you think will happen if this highly subjective scheme was implemented?.
We can have a rigid marking scheme that includes critical and creative thought. The system would be subjective if I did not clearly define what creative/critical thought is or did not explain the rubric which we are going to use to grade students. The case, however, is far from such.
Again, it's not about logical fallacies. It's about what works in practice. .
A good theory is one that works in practice. That is the whole point of laboratory experiments that we use to test our hypotheses. If your thought experiment contains logical fallacies it likely will be internally incoherent and for this reason will fail the test of empirical investigation.
How do you decide which principles are unquestionable and which are not?.
The principles that are unquestionable are those that need to be in place in order to keep some order in the educational program. We'd need to have as few of those as possible.
If you are to teach people to think critically, how can you tell them what to think critically about and what to accept unquestioningly?
We can't, the best we can do is limit the number of principles that they are not allowed to question.
That is the underlying hypocrisy in the education system, and is precisely what the current system is attempting to do. It's simply that your personal standards of "thinking critically" do not fit the education board's.
Minimize the hypocrisy as much as possible by reducing the number of unquestionable principles. This is to be accomplished by making critical thinking/creativity a greater part of the grading agenda.
Yes, that is what most teachers try to do, to certain extents. But again, it's nice in theory, difficult in practice. It is usually much easier to lean on the conservative, more objective side and mark according to the standard. That does not leave you open to accusations of bias. As teachers, we seek to transmit knowledge, perspectives and help students to think for themselves. Unfortunately, we also have the role of ranking them so that they have a grade that they deserve... and students have the attitude of "I paid for this degree, therefore I should leave school with an A". As such, many of them haggle over every single mark, even if they are undeserving of it. By making the standards more subjective, you are leaving yourself open to this. At the same time, school standards will no longer be as well defined. It will be dependent highly on the personal standards and requirements of individual teachers. So students will not know what they'll be getting out of classes. How do you propose we solve these problems?
You seem to be making an illegitimate connection between the following ideas.
1. Introducing critical/creative thought into the grading agenda
2. Making the grading agenda subjective, poorly defined or plain whimsical.
I do not see any reason why critical/creative thinking cannot be clearly and consistently defined. We will just pick one definition of this term and stick to it. If we display consistency in doing so there should not be any room for subjectivity or fiat. This system would be every bit as rigid as the one that is currently implemented by the conventional instructors today. The only difference is that the rigidity of this system won't stultify the progress of students who endeavor to think in a critical and a creative manner.