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Grade Inflation in Higher Education
ProfBooty writes "A recent Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post on grade inflation by a Professor at Duke. Obviously this guy doesn't teach engineering courses. Quite honestly, I can't understand why science and engineering majors are held to one standard for grades and academics versus humanities majors even in the same school. Perhaps it is because people's lives hang in the balance when they interact with the products and structures designed by science/engineering students. Perhaps it is because they aren't worried about hurting students self esteem? It really is too bad the media doesn't report enough on education from the technical side."
since...
since...
this one
Liberal arts majors have the social skills to negotiate higher grades.
;-)
Engineers don't.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Arts majors are more subjective, while engineering degrees are objective.
If an English major answers a test question on an interpretation of some poem, it's going to get a high grade because it's based on opinion and ther eis no "right" or "wrong" answer.
If an engineering major gets a formula wrong, it is wrong and that's that... no gray area.
higher...then we won't have a bunch of idiots running around thinking they know everyting becasue they got an A in english.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Can we moderate the post as 'Flamebait'?
This kind of 'cos there's no right or wrong answers, humanities must be easy' crap is just illiterate carping.
Liberal arts degrees are rated for scholarship and insight. Yes, grade inflation's a problem, but don't blame the subject matter.
Grade inflation is rampant in engineering too; don't get ahead of yourself. Here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the engineering courses are just as affected by grade inflation as any liberal arts class. The only difference is that people assume that since the classes are stereotypically harder that the grading is difficult as well. You have to genuinely try to get below a B in most computer science course here, for example. The number of people failing classes is obviously inadequate, when you see how completely unprepared several students are once they reach upper-level courses and obviously have no command of the prerequisite material.
With most math or science, you're either right or you're wrong. There isn't a lot of gray area. With something like writing there's a LOT of space in between. For example, my freshman year, my first semester college writing professor gave me a C+, and the next semester, a different college writing professor gave me an A. My writing didn't improve magically over Christmas break. The only difference was the person grading my work. (And, for the record, most of my previous teachers had been in line with the A.)
Whatever you do, be sure to take ANY class taught by "Stuart Rojstaczer"! You'll get an "A"!
There are real criteria that can be used to discover whether an engineering student knows his stuff, or doesn't.
Contrast that with almost everything else, where it's all basically bullshit. Almost any answer can be seen as being correct.
Ergo, grade inflation. We want our schools to do better, so the rabid idiots in charge dole out higher grades when they can, which is easy to do in the liberal arts, but next to impossible in engineering (at least without engaging in outright fraud.)
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Just look at my report cards for proof. Lots of D's
and Fs (and Cs too). Only got 2 As so far in all my classes.
Guess that's the life of a CS student who actually has a
life or something (or prefers to work on own projects instead
of the stupid class project ideas).
because a real engineer like me gets A for engineering courses but B for humanities. ;)
Science actually...from the Duke site:
Name: Stuart Rojstaczer, Ph.D.
Affiliation: faculty
Title: Associate Professor
Department: NSOE & Earth Sci - Earth & Ocean Sciences
Department: Civil & Enviro Engineering
Just some food for thought...
Grading schemes are crazy. Half the time the prof who didn't speak much English, would put things on the test which no one even heard of...I can't tell you how many times we all wanted to blow up the Engineering building after exams!
Uhhhh, yeah, thath dithgustin. [The lady's man]
at dartmouth, where i go, they put the median grade for every class you take on your transcript, in addition to your grade. it's pretty obvious when there's grade inflation (it's not too rampant here, actually).
in the early 80s I got a 28 on a Quantum test. That ended up being a C+. Do you know anybody who has ever gotten below a C in any Arts and Crafts class?
Schools are just increasing the amount of cry-babies that are out there in the world. It pisses me off about how many people don't want any responsibility for their actions and just want to be told what they want to hear.
I already work with enough slackers as is, this is just producing more.
He recognizes the harm in what he does, but will not stand up and do what is right. He is part of the problem he is complaining about. Who does he expect will fix it?
The irony here (other than me being an "Anonymous Coward") is that he is standing up and telling it like he sees it. That takes some courage.
I've noticed at my school that the average GPA for a student in the college (usually liberal arts majors) is a 3.3 or 3.5, while students in the engineering school have the average GPA of a 2.7. That is a big difference. No, the engineering students aren't just dumber or lazier.
One sneaky trick some universities tried to do was grade on a 5.0 scale rather than 4.0. I've never gone to a school that had this kind of grading scale, but I remember reading about all the disclaimers when transfering your grades from one university to another. So, while colleges wouldn't count your B average as an A, I seriously doubt an employeer would know the difference.
The University of Texas School of Law gives a 4.3 on the 4.0 grade scale for course grades of 97% and up. Great way to save your 4.0 after ditching a class. You can make up for that "F".
This happens everywhere and I'm sure for different reasons. My dad told me of a frightning story he had last year:
My father teaches middle school and had one student who was good and got an honest to goodness B in her class (History I believe). Needless to say when the report card showed up the parents went nuts. Had a meeting with my father and demanded the child get an A (their excuse, top colleges were already looking at her and this would mess up her chances at going to them... RIIIIIGHT). My father politely declined, stating that the grading was fair, the girl deserved a B and that the B wasn't anything to be ashamed of.
Not good enough. Parents went to the vice principal with the same story. The vice principal had looked at my dad's books, found them fair, sided with my dad.
Not good enough. Parents went to the pricipal with the same story. Principal buckled (without even looking at any of the girls work) and told my dad to curve EVERYONE's grade in his class so that the girl got an A.
I'm sure there are pressures from parents, students and school boards to keep the aformentioned happy (and thus paying tuition), but there's a point where you ruin your reputation as a well respected learning institution.
I want to go to one of those schools. I'm tired of working for my Bs.
As a philosophy major and a computer engineering major (yes, I'm strange), I can assure you that your rant isn't quite justified. Just because humanities courses don't have discrete answers to many problems does not mean make them any easier.
It varies from teacher to teacher, in any course, whether engineering or otherwise. I've had professors in philosophy classes who had no qualms giving out C's and D's on papers. I've had EE profs that curved grades so that the majority of the class easily broke 85%.
Sure, there are weed-out courses. Sure some classes are tough. However, I would agree that, on a general level, grade inflation is a problem. Maybe it's to make up for the complete lack in teaching skill that we students (who are paying big bucks for our education), are finally starting to complain about.
Also, don't forget the social sciences, which are clearly more objective. I've had tough philosophy courses that I'm sure rival some higher engineering courses.
The reason the media doesn't report on tech majors is because there aren't many of them. After all, that's why we have the H-1B and L-1 visa programs... there aren't enough tech majors.
(Pssst... ignore the 700,000 unemployed techies... they don't count. They're all too stupid to do the hard work of H-1Bs such as code ASP and run InstallShield.)
At one of the best Technical / Engineering schools which I attend, C's are given out just as frequently as the A's and B's. It is not uncommon for a class average to be ~70 in courses such as University Physics, or higher math. Of course, with liberal arts courses, if you do the work, you get your A.
I can't understand how they can't hold students to the same level of success across the board though. I have friends who do nothing, get 4.0's and are in a major that is regarded as being simple (read: IT). Then again there are the engineers (read: me) who need to be perfect in everything they do, or get low grades. You say they need to be correct, but what about doctors? What about people who operate things the engineers create? Don't they need to be held accountable for their accuracy?
Maybe I'm biased, in fact I know I am, yet it seems as if something needs to change in this system.
"Perhaps it is because people's lives hang in the balance when they interact with the products and structures designed by science/engineering students."
Oh no, it's much simpler than that. In English, history and many other courses the standards are mostly subjective. If you write essays and do projects with a viewpoint that matches the professor's political bias you'll get a good grade no matter how bad your work really is.
In astronomy, math, physics and other hard sciences you either know the facts or you don't. There's much less wiggle room for a sympathetic professor to pad your grade.
Insert witty sig here.
I suspect it is (now anyway, as opposed to say, vietnam era) an outgrowth of the way middle and high-schools function.
My son is currently in fourth, going to fifth grade next year. (School change.. lower to middle) and he has "learned" that he doesnt really need to take in his homework, complete his assignments on time, etc, simply because the way this lower school runs, it is next to impossibe to fail. (well, except for the inanely subjective questions they keep asking in written assignments.. like "Why do you think the hippo in the picture is sad" and they answer they want is "because he is brown, not gray" and the answer you give is "because his land is being taken by slash and burn agriculture" and it gets marked wrong.. "). But his teachers let him finish (or totally re-do) his work in class. THey even go so far as to totally not-count homework in the total grade.
But next year, he will be in a school with no such qualms about failing people. They have pretty much taught him to slack because "someone else" will do it. (Either in his in-class study group, or his parents, after I or my ex-wife get the threatening letter sent home by the school, aimed at us, not him).
He's screwed next year, right? Wrong. In this school, kids cant be in "special" (remedial, rather than short-bus special) education for just not studying.. they have to be in the class with all the other kids. Now, my son is not stupid.. he just hates doing homework. But he is going to be stuck in a class with a bunch of kids equally intelligent, but who do their work and shouldnt be held back due to people like my kid.
This extrapolates itself to the real world.. the guy at work who doesnt do his work, because he knows someone will pick up the slack. The kid in college who is there on a grant or scholarship, but sleeps through classes and passes anyway.. etc.
Grade inflation exists because no-one is willing to tell Johnny to get off his ass and actually WORK because he is dragging everyone else down with him. And when you have parents shelling out 100 grand for an education, they certainly dont want to hear that Johnny doesnt want to do his work either.. its pervasive, and it sucks, but until schools get straightened out so that the kids actual education is the important part, rather than placement test scores, SAT percentages per school, or sports teams.. its going to continue.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
...in the early 90's Umass Amherst's Eng program didn't have any problems with bad grades, I worked my ass off and still got screwed...all they cared about was exams and how well you did on them midterms and finals were so much a componet of grades that less than a B on either was certain disaster, as far as staying in your major or moving on in your major. I can aquire knowledge and respected as one of the most intelligent people where I work, I just don't test well on it.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
You know, after having been in college for WAY too long, I've had my share of both natural sci, social sci, liberal arts, performing arts and technical classes. I've seen grade inflation in *every* field and engineering is NOT exempt from this. This paper may not study that or come to that conclusion, but trust me, after explaining to third year engineering students how to use a Texas Instruments calculater, the grade inflation is apparent.
The thing that amazes me is that in almost every class I had that was a science field, at some point in time we had to explain the scientific method and how to write a research paper. How do you get into college and pass ANYTHING if you don't know those concepts?
Wow, now I can have any grade I want! Now if only my english teacher could understand that...
YarrRrr
Maybe you're just a poor student?
we see this problem, but it's at the high school level. Our first year student consistantly cannot do simple math let alone the complex contructs that we are attempting to teach them. As an effect of this 25% of first years are required to discontinue (ie flunk out) in their first year (50% of those by christmass)
Grade inflataion only hurts the students in the long run when some one expects them to use those skills they were supposed to learn!
Seen here amongst other places.
As a liberal arts major (anthropology and religious studies) I find that Liberal Arts majors generally get the grade they deserve. In upper level liberal arts class, you actually have to *read* and *understand* long, boring books (not articles). It is immediately apparent if you didn't read the assigment and you go to turn in your paper. By contrast, all the engineering and comp sci students I hafve talked with say that cheating on tests is rampant. You seemingly can get away with cramming the night before on a test. No such luck on your 15-page analysis of three works. It tends to be self-selecting. Those who 'get' mathematics fast take engineering, and do okay because of natural ability. Those who can read and write volumes study liberal arts. The most amazing classes to me are pure mathematics. Students will get all of the questions wrong, get a C on each quiz and midterm, and then get a B because of what they've learned and how they attempted to answer questions. Sheesh. Talk about warm and fuzzy.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Yes the capacity to teach university skills is disappearing fast and it has indeed tremendous effects.
I have to use other means to get them to learn: I have to cajole, to gently persuade.
How sad that professors have to con kids into doing work. If you don't want to do it, fine- just don't expect to get rewarded.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Are we talking about grade inflation (the liklihood of giving someone an 'A'), or the fact that two 'colleges' on the same University campus will be more stringent about GPAs and probation? I didn't really see the professor talking about a split between fields in grade inflation, though certainly many universities apply stricter academic standards to engineering than, say, humanities.
What isn't specified, though, is whether engineering courses suffer from the same sort of inflation. Since the article isn't specific, I might assume it's true for both fields.
Journalists generally have a liberal arts education, and liberal arts students (and faculty) basically think engineering colleges are trade schools, not real higher education.
I currently am enrolled at the University of Washington. Having been here a few years, I've noticed a few things about college grading systems.
1) Hard science courses are definitely more strictly graded than more subjective courses, such as English, Psychology, Philosophy, Sociology (insert next humanity here). This is mostly due to the fact that if you take an objective test in Math, Physics, or Mechanical Engineering you have little room for subjective interpretation. If you got it right, it's right, if not, it's wrong. In English, though, teachers can be afraid of giving out a C, and can consequently say "While that paper is probably C work, I can justifiably give a B with no one noticing"
2) Schools that grade on the A,B,C,D,F scale seem more prone to grade inflation than the system that the University of Washington and a few other schools have. In our system, your grade is exactly mirrored based on a numerical system of distribution. For example, if I got a low A in my Chemisty course, I will get a 3.5 on my transcript, not an A. This prevents everything from being categorized to four or five letter grades. This reflects everything inbetween. There are many times that I wish I had the letter grading system, because my low A's or B's would not be a 2.6 and 3.5, but instead an B and a A, which would be equivalent to a 3.0 and a 4.0 respectively.
Anyhow, those are my two bits.
My little sad piece of the internet: www.mtndewd
I don't think it's fair to say that all science/engineering/math people are held to higher standard. Different standard, definetly. Subjectivity means we have to do things a little differently because there isn't necessarily a "right" answer. More often than not, it's how you express yourself and whether your opinion has any merit whatsoever. As a result, it may seem less rigorous than the "right or wrong" nature of the sciences, but at higher levels it all comes down to original, creative thought. If Science were really limited, as schools conventionally teach in lower-level courses, to "right and wrong" the earth would still be flat, the center of the universe and 6000 years old. These ideas fell by the wayside becuase scientist did the subjective thing of coming up with an opinion and subjecting it to empirical tests. When you're talking about English, History or other subjects, empirical testing is difficult. Instead, we hone our skills in making sure our opinions are separate from our biases, personal assumptions and problems. It is through that process that we come to appreciate academic rigor. While it may seem easier or less important, it is none of that. It's just different, and should be held as that before ridiculed.
Perhaps it is because people's lives hang in the balance when they interact with the products and structures designed by science/engineering students.
Well, I don't know about that. It's always dangerous to make comparisons between graded work at university and actual work in the real world ... after all, when you design a bridge, they give you more than three hours to do it, and they let you talk to other engineers, unlike in an exam.
It's a lot easier to justify a D in engineering than it is to justify it in the humanities, because in engineering we can always fall back on the fact that the answer is wrong -- not much room for interpretation. The flip side of this is that it's a lot easier to get 100% on an engineering exam than on a history paper. I've found that the mark spread in my engineering courses is quite broad, with people scoring anywhere in the range from below 50% all the way up to the keeners at 100%. Humanities marks may be inflated, but they all seem to fall in a narrow range from C+ to A-.
Furthermore, since engineering is a professional degree program (meaning it's usually the student's final degree, and not a springboard to other programs, like law or medicine), there is less temptation for students to whine for marks, although it still happens to some extent.
As a teaching assistant I have had to mark my share of brutal engineering exams (which, incidentally, are no more fun to mark than they are to write). The philosophy seems to be that an easy exam results in a class where most people score very well, since the correct answers can be easily obtained, which doesn't give a good indication of knowledge. A hard exam will sort out the good students from the bad students, and if too many fail it can always be belled up later. Sort of a "kill-em-all" attitude.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Posting anonymously, for obvious reasons.
Recent undergrad course I taught at Duke had this breakdown:
A: 11%
B: 57%
C: 20%
D: 11%
I do not think, but haven't checked, that my previous section of this course was much different. This is a normal course, about middle of a student's career at Duke.
The real stumbling block for most students is a so-called "C-wall" course. If you don't get a C or better, you can't move forward in your curriculum, so a C is effectively an F in that course. It seems to me that the basic tension is between a standard like that and a grading system that is consistent across all courses and curricula.
The really surprising thing to me was a grad course I recently taught. The undergrad students were amazing compared to some of the graduate students. The undergrads are clearly some of the best students I've ever seen while the grad students are potentially from other schools for which the environment wasn't nearly so exacting. If all I ever saw was those kids, the ones that had plowed through Duke's undergrad curriculum and were taking grad courses until they graduated, I'd probably be accused of grade inflation too. (Many of them did A-grade work.)
But it is true that having nuclear or civil engineering students in your classes tends to remind you that you don't want to have standards slip too much ;-).
At the college I just graduate from, each class had a GPA range that the teacher was suppose to follow. The average grade for most classes was around a 3.2. But this didn't include anyone who dropped the class because they were failing.
Also, the school offered a database of each professor and course that listed corresponding grades. So a student could see which professors gave higher grades before they took a class. You could also see the average GPA of students who took the class in previous semesters.
I think the problem of grade inflation might be worse at ivy league/private schools not large state colleges.
I have heard that it is true that engineering is graded much harder than other disciplines even in the same school, but in MIS, that is not true.
I recently taught two semesters at my local college and you would have thought that I suggested bayonetting baby girls the way the students bitched when I promised I would fail anyone who did not submit a final project.
I was later taken aside by the departmental chair and told that my role was to help the students succeed, and his vision was of a department where every student got at least a B in every class, because recruiters don't want to come to a school with a 2.5 average GPA.
I tried to explain to him that programming is not basket weaving, that not everyone could get it, and that I didn't know if I could respect any IT/IS program that wasn't flunking at least a certain percentage of their students in some of the core classes. (I mean really, even if everyone there is really bright, then you should raise the bar so that you can GASP! _challenge_ the students.) Needless to say, although I received the highest teacher evaluation of any in the department that year, I no longer teach there.
Widen the range. Parkerize the scale. Nobody is going to give half the class 90/100 if they have the ability to seperate the 93s from the 85s.
Despite what people seem to be saying here, it's pretty easy to inflate grade in an engineering class without appearing like the proffessor is just cheating. All you need to do is make sure all your tests and asignments are too hard to use a traditional scale of 100-90 = A, 90-80 = B, 80-70 = C, etc. This makes it reasonable to scale the grades in the class in some manner. You then set this scale such that the average student gets a B+ and the lowest will only get a C+ or B-.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
How many geeks are borderline illiterate? BSEE, BSCS, MSCS, MSEE, MCSE, H1B-just-off-the-boat, it seems to make little difference.
I'm sure the liberal arts majors have just as many derrogatory comments about the science/engineering majors.
Why isn't this a violation of his contract? He explicitly states he gave B's instead of C's to students. That's acidemic fraud.
Here is his home page. Wait - he wrote a paper about it so he can mark it up to acidemic freedom in research.
What a crock.
Does your school or alma mater allow science majors to fulfill distribution requirements by taking a course designed for non-majors? Do they even offer "poetry for scientist?" But I bet they offer "Introduction to science for poets." Why the double-standard? If distribution requirements are usefull, shouldn't poets be made to take real science classes (and be graded on the curve against science majors in the class)? Otherwise there is no reason for distribution requirements. They're just a waste of everyone's time and effort.
I've read about this before (perhaps even on Slashdot). Many college professors are indeed upset about grade inflation, but I think not completely correctly.
What professors don't realize, in their ivory towers, is that grades can have an incredible impact on liberal arts students. A few points can mean the difference between a top tier and a second tier graduate program, or between a bottom tier one and none at all. Students' futures are at stake.
Also, I can't help but notice that our technical and engineering industries, which do not have as much grade inflation, tend to lag behind those of countries such as Japan and the Netherlands (home of Philips). Meanwhile, our grade-inflated literary and historical output dominates those of other countries. Perhaps it is the very grade inflation that allows us to excel in the liberal arts, even as we struggle in technology.
If we can harness the power of grade inflation and put it to our own use, we might triumph in the end.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
a required class...and got an awful grade. The Prof. said "Tough. I hated math, but I had to take it anyway."
End result? I now paint by numbers. (Oh, just shot my karma to hell. -3, bad pun)
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
So long as administrators judge the quality of faculty teaching only on the basis of student surveys, faculty will have no choice to put inflate grades.
This is a much larger problem in high schools than in college, for two reasons:
1. Many high schools have already gone to a 5.0 system, giving extra credit to students in Honors or AP classes (that B in honors is worth as much as an A in a normal class)
2. Colleges actually care about high school grades and use GPA in their admission process... how many times applying for a job have you been actually asked what your GPA was? (Excepting academic positions, grad school and such)
Employers tend to just not care about the level of academic achievement, only its existence (as proof that you could follow through enough to get the diploma).
I am currently a freshman at Duke and can attest to the fact that there is not grade inflation of any type. In my humanities classes they give out D's, F's and whatever else happens to be earned. First year calculus is the most failed class at the University.
Barring the fact that there have been a slew of articles both at duke and about it published in various newspapers, its still easy to see why any such claim is wrong. In this day and age it is getting harder and harder to get into the "good" colleges. Duke is ranked as the number 4 national university in the country. So, the people applying and gettiing into Duke are very bright, very qualified, motivated students. These students go into classes and EARN high grades. They are getting a B+ at Duke when they could easily goto a top teir national public university and earn an A.
The people who would be earning the lesser grades aren't even attending Duke anymore. The travesty is that some people who work hard, do great work and have earned a high grade are sometimes forced to fail a class because their teacher has been accused of grade inflation and must now enact some arbitrary grading system.
I will not deny that some professors inflate their grades and some departments inflate their grades. Other professors deflate grades, make arbitrary curves, or assign nonsensical course material to get a curve more to their liking.
Here at Duke, I am an Econ/Physics double major, working my ass off. Some jaded professor not even working at Duke currently writes an article for the washington post and we're all supposed to take note? He doesn't teach at Duke, doesnt know whats going on there. We have more important issues, like rising tuition, an administration out to destroy social life on campus, and a certain department having a terrorist come and speak on campus. We don't need to worry about the fact that really smart people are working hard and getting good grades.
"Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble."
XNEW=10.0*SQRT(XOLD)
where XOLD is the OLD mark and XNEW the new mark. So if you originally got 0 or 100 you still got the same old mark but a losing 49 turned into a 70!
Having taken MANY classes where the average on all exams never topped the 50s, I think that this is a "normal" disparity in grading between engineering and liberal arts. I once got a 17 on an exam. It was a B, due to the curve.
On the whole, I think that the "traditional" engineering (i.e. not CS) curriculums need to change, or at least the exam techniques. Having 3 questions, open-book, partial credit exams does not enforce learning. It enforces getting good at that exam type.
you'd better be damn good to get an A, specially in Computer Science. The course averages for math and comp sci are nearly always in the C-,+ zones.
the point of the article (I know, weird, actually reading the article) is that this is a trend, with A grades that used to be given out rarely becoming more and more common. So, did there used to be "right" answers on English tests, but now there's not?
Do not read this sig.
this is mostly because the majority of journalists are people with arts degrees (if any) and are most comfortable with what they know.
i mean, really, how many people decide, after sweating four or five years to get an engineering degree, to become a journalist when better paying and more challenging jobs are available?
Well, exams perhaps, but not course work.
If you completed the work perfectly, you would get 70%. A very good mark on the scale we worked on. To get the other 30%, you had to go above and beyond what was asked. Essentially, show an interest in the topic, work out what the further implications are, and do some work to investigate that.
An example would be a maze solving algorithm using the left hand rule. 70% if you solve the maze, and explain how the program works fully. You could get some of the other 30% by suggesting optimisations for the naive algorithm, or discuss expanding it to 3 dimensions.
This is why schools get reputations.
In Ontario it is rather well known by the Universities which schools inflate and which don't.
I went to a school that didn't inflate, I got in well below the cut off for my program.
This crap only hurts the good students.
That being said, there are WAY too many whiners in post secondary education. They don't work, they don't try, they just complain when things don't work out.
I went to The University of Texas at Austin, and in the electrical engineering program there was little room for the grade inflation the author talks about. I think every single course was graded on a curve. To get an A, your grade had to be the class average plus the standard deviation. To get a B, your grade had to be the class average plus half the standard deviation. And so on. This made it a lot harder to grades to be inflated.
My wife teaches biology at a local community college, and she said that many of her students wouldn't put up with the system I had to have in college. The problem is, for many people today getting anything less than A is unsatisfactory because high grades are so important (rather than actually mastering the material).
There are "A" students who cram before tests, get old tests and memorize them, and hound the professor for higher grades, and there are "A" students that know the material so well, they could actually teach the class. In a perfect world, the former would get a B or C, and the latter would get the A.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Although I doubt this will ever happen on a wider scale, I've always believed that for most liberal arts (English, Music, Art, etc.), qualitative evaluations (like a paragraph or a page describing the student's strengths and weaknesses) are a much better solution than quantitative measures. For example, Bennington College provides a genering "pass/fail" grades for all disciplines but it is always accompanied with a thorough description of how the student *really* fared during the semester.
I graduated with an English major and I never did understand how professors could assign letter grades to papers...
I saw this first-hand as a Biostatistics TA (in Biology, no one expects to do math and this class is compulsory, so students hate it).
I was reviewing a student's test. He didn't do well (60%, or a low C). I explained his mistakes and why he got 60%. He stared at me blankly: "Bbbbut, I *paid* for this class! You *have* to give me a good grade!".
I will never forget the look of despair on his face. He was part of that "yuppie kid" generation that had everything spoon-fed (given enough money). And that was in 1992.
And I've noticed one thing about a lot of people at my (large, public) University.
...says the girl who almost threw a fit last semester over her one A-.
1. We're allowed to drop classes up until almost mid-semester. Guess what? A lot of people will stay in, fail the first two tests, then drop. They don't get a failing grade because they aren't there, in the end, to *get* an overall grade.
2. I see plenty of people getting C's. Maybe not necessarily plenty with D's and F's--see the above, most of the ones who can't do it end up dropping--but C's are common, at least from where I'm standing.
3. Our instructors, anyway, always set the grading scale in the syllabus. It's usually pretty normal. Sometimes a little skewed to give people a little more room to pass with a C, but some of them require a full 95% or better to get a full A. If people do 'too well', it's the material that's the problem, not the grading itself.
4. People who are C or lesser students do not necessarily stay in college, period, much less in one class. They also generally are not going to Duke. (We're excepting sports players, here, as a general thing. I won't even go into that.) You see a lot of them in the low-level classes, but if you're looking at an Honors English Composition class like I had last semester, no, it's *not* going to be a proper curve by a long shot. The people who are there are there because they're good.
It's a matter of money. When you're paying for school, no, you're *not* going to be happy to get a D or an F. The solution among my classmates is to either not *take* the courses they don't think they can manage well in... or to drop so that, if they still have to pay, at least they aren't destroying their GPA over it, which can lead to getting kicked out of their program entirely.
At a place like Duke, does it even occur to this guy that he's not *getting* the students who really are complete academic failures? That he doesn't *see* the ones who are completely incapable of writing a comprehensible paper, the ones who can't find a standard deviation in statistics even when handed a calculator that does it for them?
I suspect if he saw some of the work *I've* seen from the classmates who later drop, he'd start understanding it more. Maybe they're lackluster in terms of attendance and participation, but I suspect *his* students are, overall, intelligent and competant.
As far as tech vs. everyone else? I don't know why things would be different. It may have more to do with job-market competition than anything else. If you start looking at humanities majors who're looking to go to the doctoral level and want to get into good grad schools, you start to see the same level of perfectionism, I bet.
Just as people have come to expect high grades, they've come to expect degrees. The UK government has decided that they want 50% of students to attend university... the only way to accomplish this is to hand out degrees for attendance.
A few decades ago, a typical question on a university entrance exam for someone reading science (chemistry, physics, math, whatever) would involve solving a system of partial differential equations. How many students now could solve those problems before their third year?
People need to wake up and find a new method of evaluating their educational systems. High grades do not make a student intelligent. A university degree does not make a student intelligent. Telling universities that they must increase their student intake makes the overall education of the populace worse, not better.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Ok so one comment I remember from my High School Honors English Lit teacher was something like "just because it's written like that in a newspaper by the author of the article, doesnt meant its gramatically correct...just another reason why you should make sure to note it's a quote from the article and not you."
So the forementioned article on Grade inflation makes this comment clearer.
Also I remember reading that Asimov to some extend was criticizing this kind of trend/attitude in the Foundation series, reflecting his view of what he perceived was happening in the US and elsewhere. You know every generation being more decadent than the last thus leading to the fall of the Galactic Empire.
Ok so that was sci fi but Asimov probably had some points after all good sci fi is partially about warning us of possible futures.
- codeonezero
.... ... }
int main (void) {
That's not one thing. That's four things.
I had a 7:45 class this morning and had to leave at 6:30 because the driving was bad. Lack of sleep makes me somewhat less coherent.
I took engineering in undergrad and was basically asked to leave at the end of 2nd year, so I switched to physics.
Anyway, I was looking at my transcript the other day and I have numerous classes where I got a "D" or so and the class average was an "F". These are classes with 50 or more people. Something seems wrong to me with this.
Either the school should have:
1. Tougher entry requirements to ENG
or
2. Get rid of the mythical requirements for the course and get the average mark so at least half the class passes.
It's ok to make engineering hard, but when they are making it so most of the class is failing that is just crazy and doesn't serve any purpose, but to waste the students time and money.
If ENG is really that hard make it so that the entry rquirement is A+ out of high school.
/ end rant
I'm a college grad, and I think grade inflation is a blessing. After all, its all arbitrary anyway, and I'd rather walk out with a 4.0 then a 3.0 anyway.
...you know how your kid is behaving, and you let him get away with it...your the problem not the school...its your job as a parent to make sure your kid has all his homework done everyday...not the school's...if you let your kid get away with that behavior your just setting him up for the big fall later on...good study habits need to start early.
I'll grant you the school should also be giving him and automatic F if the homework isn't done when its supposed to be.
In his own defense if he does well in the class without doing homework, maybe he doesn't need too...but then again perhaps he isn't challenged and belongs in a higher level class...I've always firmly believed any student that gets C's all the time might be because they don't care and are bored, make things harder, but by the same token stright A's mean the same thing...schools should aim for C's, NOT A's. C's mean the Kid is in the proper difficulty environment, if you can make it harder and they still get C's then you have done the right thing. A's mean its too damn easy...
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Perhaps you haven't noticed WWI WWII Korea Golf War I etc etc. Do you suppose those came about due to a poorly optimized routine or a buffer overflow?
Fernando
That's how most of my CS professors decided the curve for a class, and it seems like a pretty good way to do things. You pick the average grade (mean? median? im no mathemagician) and make that the cutoff for a B-/C+ and make the grade scale based on that number. Often in the upper level classes you could get a 65 and have anywhere from a B to an A. This way the students are not punished for a test that was poorly written, or just plain too hard. In the ideal world no test is too hard, but tell that to any college student and watch them laugh at you (humanities majors don't count, i was one for a year...).
My Sig is Sauer.
There was a class at my university that had a grading scale resembling 80-100 A, 60-80 B, etc... After seeing everyone getting A's, the president of the university ordered that the class be made harder. What did they do? The department head made the scale 94-100 A, 87-94 B, etc... Not terrible if you're majoring in subject of the course, but that wasn't the case with the majority of the students in this class.
Grades are suppose to be a basis by which to judge performance, if we arbitrarily change the values required for certain grades they become completely meaningless. Class-wide grading curves are a necessary evil to counteract poor teaching, poor text book, etc...
I'm a faculty member in the social sciences. The dirty secret behind grade inflation is that it is a direct result of the emphasis placed on student evaluations of teaching by a department. One of the easiest ways to get high evaluations is by loosening grading standards. In a department which places a significant weight on student evaluations, individual faculty members will often achieve high evaluations by passing out high grades. The reason for high evaluations is rarely investigated in such departments, those who receive strong student evaluations are simply praised as effective teachers. My experience suggests that natural sciences and engineering departments rarely place a high weight on student evaluations (they're far more interested in research grant success of individual faculty, i. e. outside $$$$$). As a result, faculty in such disciplines don't "buy" high student evals with high grades. They don't need to. I know this sounds a bit cynical, but I think this is how this stuff works.
And talked a lot about the grade inflation, especially in the more well know institutions. They do not want to turn out C students, nor does anyone want to got to (insert random Ivy League school) and be a C student, except maybe both of the choices for President in 2000. He was not afraid to give a D or even an F if that is what the student earned in the class. He was a sciences teacher, FWIW.
I recently had the joy of being denied grad school because some courses I took 19 years ago, in which two professors skipped class (one showed up the first and last day) and the other was committed to a psych institute, both resulted in C's for me because the administration never followed through on either complaint (I got the C's because I complained - everyone else in the classes got F's). Anyway, those two C's brought my cumulative GPA down (never mind my more recent degree in hard sciences and complete overview).
The only joy is that the same program called me back this year begging me to apply because their program had been put on state academic probation because they had such a high fail rate on that certification exam. Seems they looked back and realized those of us who had high GREs would have been the better candidates to pick, basing it less on GPA.
So, standardized testing, when applied properly, might be the answer to these "scammers" who get easy grades.
But, either way, I still find it horrid that I competed fairly years ago and now have to compete with young "whipper snappers" for grad school when they can't figure out the first thing about their "area of expertise." (BTW, life experience got me no where because that was not taken into account during the admissions process and there was no personal interview.) Strictly grades-based admission. Oh, yeah... MUSC.
If it were inflation then the lowest grade would be a B, but the highest grade would be a A++++ or something.
When inflation occurs the prices of everything don't become equal, the rating measure insteads shifts.
There's a pretty easy way to spot grade inflation at a school, simply look at the GPA required to make Deans List. At any of these pansy Liberal Arts schools (cough cougch IVY LEAGUE cough cough), it is often in the 3.6+ range. At my school, which I won't name but rhymes with Torgia Speck, deans list is a 3.0. A 'B' average is the cutoff to be considered a top student here. They say we have one of the lowest average GPA's of any school out there. Perhaps they are the only ones keeping realistic grades (Really, you DO want to know when you have a C-student building a bridge you're gonna drive over!).
Standards of teaching are getting better?
Or just that more people google?
Though I'd hate to be downgraded because I didn't copy work I found on google, because others have.
Fortunarly there is this, and I can be pure again.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I'm afraid that the net effect of grade inflation will be to further stratify higher education -- leading to a situation in which one can no longer prove oneself and move up.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
...at various klevel (school, high school, university) we had a Gaussian of note as it should be. Depending on how the class was and how well the subject was udnerstood the guassian middle was 9 to 12 (C- and D+ to C+). I never saw or heard of an average being aside those note. oh sure there is a slighty difference when you go to some exam level like baccalaureat 8which is worth nothing and is overgraded not due to kids getting better but govt wanting better grad. All other level stay the same.
Maybe other people will offer another picture or maybe somebody can offer link to public study on france but I doubt the insight will be different on many ground.
First the way we note and make exams is different as far as I can tell (never heard of Multiple Choice exams until I saw an US film on high school). Second enrollement at Uni is handled differently making professor and course about as independant to note and grading as you can make it be.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I think it's extremely unfair to hold engineering students at the same GPA scale as students majoring in business, dance, history, or some other "humanity" based major. At Georgia Tech, so many engineering students lose Georgia's HOPE scholarship because they dip below a 3.0 gpa. I could major in business and have a 4.0 and not be worth a damn to anyone in the real world, or I could take the extremely difficult courses and barely pull a 3.0. That doesn't seem fair at all.
Classic! So, *I* worked hard for my grades, but everybody *else* is obviously getting a free ride.
Yeah, right.
--Bruce F.
Here in Austria (no kangaroos please ;-) at my university you couldn't say that the humanities are getting inflated grades and the CS people aren't.
I've got a few colleagues who after 3 years still can't write a basic program in any language. Yet they've managed to pass most of the classes because you can get by with learning the stuff by heart. But basically there's not much grade infaltion in the CS department.
The psychology studies are different. The courses are pretty simple, you can get points for nearly everything. Of course there are a few courses that are hard but most are simple.
The history department is different again. The people there tend to receive As or Bs (1 or 2 in Austria on a scale of 1..5), but they tend to be really dedicated and work a lot for their studies.
I guess it's basically impossible to say that humanities are just plain easier to pass than the engineering studies. It depends more on the lecturers than on the area of study.
He is a professor in engineering: Professor of Geology, Environment & Engineering. His homepage
Dear ProfBooty,
I see three possibilities for you:
1. You are a good student getting grades you don't deserve.
2. You are a bad student getting the grades you deserve.
3. You are a bad student fully taking advantage of the inflation. Without it you will be getting all F's.
Based on your comments to the effect of "engineering majors are not enjoying the grade inflation", I think you are number 3.
Grade inflation is rampant in science and engineering, and so are whiners.
Pardonne
This is exactly what they should do. You want to design tests so that no one gets a perfect score, and with high enough granularity that you can distinguish between all your students. Think about it. The prof doesn't care about exact letter grades. His goal is to distinguish and rank the students as accurately as possible. To design a test that yields a perfect gaussian distribution about the 50% mark with 1 sigma stretching between 25% and 75% is almost ideal.
If the liberal arts majors are smart they'll keep their comments to themselves. Otherwise they can do their own damned math homework.
There is an FE, CE, SM, PM field for each job rating, but what differnce does it make you can work you ass off in the IT department and then get told, Oh no one ever gets and FE(Far Exceeds)...mean while people you know in other departments (like marketing/sales) get handed reviews that have FE in every catagorey.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Being a comm major, i kind of agree with the grade inflation statement. I work hard, but not the same way an engineer does. I work for TV news, getting stories, talking with people, asking questions a certain way so that people don't want to kill me, and all the meanwhile i have to be able to explain concepts of technology to an 8th grade reading level? I know some geeks (like myself) can do it, but i wan't to see you try and hop on a newscast, reading something completley cold (never read it before) and sound interested in this weeks olive garden opening on riverdale road. Seriously, its harder than it sounds.
its difficult, but people don't die if i screw up (other than my career). I completly respect engineers and all the hard work (not to mention schooling) they go through.
"Martha Stewart can lick my Scrotum......do i have a scrotum?" -- Sharon Osbourne
Your syntax makes this sentence very difficult to parse. This leads me to believe that you are not one of the aforementioned "science or engineering students."
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
We didn't have "grade inflation" or any kind of inflation except for Jimmy Carter's inflation. We got the grade we got and we liked it! We liked it fine. The teacher would line us up against the wall, give us a letter grade based on our height weight, and how ugly we were, then beat the failures around the head and neck with a broken bottle, and we said thank you ma'am, may I have another, and when we got home, our dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt.
We didn't have any of your fancy vedeo games, we had to make up our own games, like chew the bark off the tree. There were no winners, we were all losers! And we liked it, we liked it fine.
And nows a days some punk short kid with a fat belly can take a major in TV watching and get some fat government grant for cultural studies. Fliberty-Floo!
Or you can write an OS that MUST be rebooted every month, or you can write it right. They still work, still compile.
Even though there is art in code, there is still metrics and obvious concrete methods on evaluating code that works.
Fight Spammers!
Anyone who is interested can take a look at two economists' (I am one of them) view of grade inflation, as well as a little bit of data:
r s/ HIER1996.pdf
http://post.economics.harvard.edu/hier/2003pape
because the society he lives in has stigmatized brown as a bad color to be. Talk about a warped sense of self/ethics.
Here's the comics search. Note they're in reverse order.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
told my dad to curve EVERYONE's grade in his class so that the girl got an A.
if your father had tenure (which i'm assuming he does), she should have politely told the principal to stuff hsi academic dishonesty where the sun don't shine, told the girl if she wants an A she can earn it, and gone back to class. hell, even if he didn't have tenure, he should have stood up for what was right - what would the school do, fire him and have the whole story come out? intructors need to stop caving like this.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Okay here is where I rant a bit...
I am an ex arts and sciences major with a double major in The study of Religion and Semiotics. My alma mater, the University of Toronto, has a specific system on which they mark grades. In the arts faculties, C means "has read the material" B means "has read and understood the material" and A means had read, understood and is capable of doing original work in this area. The grades associated with those letters are: 50 - 60% is a D (graded failure), 60 - 70% is a C (pass), 70 - 80% is a B and 80 - 99% is an A. Does this mean I got an education?
The answer in my case, I would like to believe, is yes, but only because I persued topics that I considered basic to North American culture. I actually read Homer on purpose and Dante and Shakespeare. But it is possible to take so called 'bird courses' from professors who are known to pass students based on their pulse. I avoided those courses and still ended with a 4.0. Most students do not and most University, in my opinion, is glorified day care.
Is this the fault of the students? Is it the fault of the professors? Is it the fault of administration and parents? It is simple to blame the parents and students, since they are the consumer, but quite frankly if you offer people something with substance, they will take it! If you offer them pablum, pablum or pablum then don't blame them for chosing pablum.
It is the administration of the colleges and universities, who think they are running a business (note their salaries and bonuses) rather than a school of higher education. These problems do NOT happen in the profesional faculties because they have better funding (from endowments and kickbacks). It is in the administrator's interest to keep the GPAs high and standards low in the general science and arts faculties. It is not in the student's
Well sure, "At Duke, Pomona, Harvard and elsewhere, D's and F's combined now represent about 2 percent of all grades given.", but everyone seems to forget that in College, if you get those grades a few times, they kick you out.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
They have pretty much taught him to slack because "someone else" will do it.
No, YOU taught him to slack.
The only thing more frightening than modern schools are modern parents. What's incredible to me is that you post all this with absolutely no shame at your own failure to discipline your kid.
I dont think this trend as reached North Dakota like a lot of other things. Working towards a BSME I have had a C or two, and looking back on them I know it is because I didnt really have the proper grasp on the subject then. However, I have also been shafted a few time cause I think the teachers are bitter that the winds blows from north to south. Here in Fargo most of the facility is located on the south side of campus. While the animal arena (Where they make the best darn Cow-Pies this side of Mississippi) is located to the north. Pa says you can smell them bakin' from miles away.
Speaking from the Canadian perspective, I think that skewed grades are more a problem in the high schools then in University. At the University of Toronto, where I am currently attending, I find that most classes are curved judiciously so that the most classes have about a 65% average. A straight-A student is highly respected here and should be (at least in the sciences).
My worries are rooted in the schools that feed my institution. Watching my sister apply for university this year reminds me of how unfair the whole system is and how skewed most high school's grades are. I would have less to complain about if the grades of different high schools were weighted somehow but the universities don't do it!
I remember friends of mine who would start at my high school where they were getting low 80s and transfer to another school and be pulling high 90s. The end result is that my brilliant friends who went to a good high school for the sake of a good secondary education got passed over in the admissions process for these wannabes in, too put it bluntly, shitty high schools.
I've seen several people in my university come in with high 90s and almost flunk out in first year and others come with less auspicious grades and do phenomenally. I find it hard to believe that this is the "luck of the draw;" my friends from my alma mater are generally doing better than most who had their admission averages. I know that grades can often be a lousy indicator of overall understanding, but surely they should indicate something, especially if they determine our futures!
Despite the fact that there is a consistent, government-mandated curriculum across all of Ontario, we still have gross discrepancies. Different high schools have too much leeway in deciding their students' achievement. I'm so thankful that my decent, but unremarkable Ontario grades were supplemented by the internationally standardized testing of the International Baccalaureate.
Just saying that yeah Duke is nice and all, but mostly from an Arts and Sciences area. Go look at some technical institutions like MIT, NJIT, or even Drexel... Places that focus on engineering and hard sciences... Even some of them might have a double standard, I know Drexel tends to have this, with engineers all taking classes that say "for engineers" and in most of these cases getting less credit while doing more work at the same time.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Looks like liberal arts professors are getting laid more than their colleagues over in the engineering department.
My guess about grade inflation, based on the article and the response, is that these problems come because of the focus on grades.
In the end, the focus is on getting a good grade. Not knowing something. Not necessarily demonstrating knowledge. Getting a grade since grades are important (to getting into programs, etc.).
Therefore, the focus is upon getting the grade, not what the grade is supposed to represent. Over time, grades become separated from what they represent.
End result - grades can be virtually meaningless, but they are still valued if only for what people assume they mean.
I work with a variety of people in IT. Pretty much I look at knowledge.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
The average college student retains about 15% of what they learn in college, which is mostly liberal arts. Liberal arts stuff is not used to much in reall life, and grade inflation poses no serious risk to society.
HOWEVER. Science and Engineering knowlege is not there for esteem and show, most of it is dirrectly used in the real world. If a degree in engineering does not live up to its standards, it won't mean much. In addition, things like science and engineering like stated, are fields where wrong moves can cost lives.
I went to Bucknell University. My senior year, I took a class with a guy named Ben Marsh. It was a physical geography course. On the first day of class, he walks in, goes up to the board and draws a gigantic bell-shape. On the left side of it, he writes 'F'. On the right side of it, he writes 'A'. He turns to the class and says, "I don't believe in grade inflation. I don't curve. Most of you will get Cs. A few will get Ds or Bs. Even fewer of you will fail or get an A. If you don't want a C, leave my class now, because you'll probably get one. The class was HARD. He was a really cool professor, though, and I've had the utmost respect for him ever since that day.
After taking a test for my first engineering class I was certain I done miserably on the sucker. In fact, the class average was a 55 which until then I thought it a solid F, until the wonderful bell curve came out. Cant have a class of over 100 failing can we, I had an 83 which turned out to be an A. So, they may have higher standards for engineering classes but they also are prepared to give you a stepping stool to boost you over the wall.
This isn't even a setence, but I'll give ProfBooty an A!
Trying is the first step towards failure.
As a teacher assitant, I have been extra careful to mark fairly - ok, maybe a little harsly - but I feel that students get more out of it, and may get better this way.
Nothing in life come easily. Get students to work harder, and they are going to learn more!
I don't know about you guys but at my university the class average is usually around 65. If we have a higher than usual average going into finals the prof. will just end up making the exam unfinishable so he can bell curve the marks up to a 65. If the lowest marks you get in a class are B's then you got it easy. I'd love to be in a school where the profs are that nice to us. And no the students in my class are not stupid we are all very accomplished students. Any other schools out there follow this marking scheme?
One time we had a 84 class average and the dean of the Universtiy had to have a meeting with the faculty of engineering to figure out why the mark was so high. It was a project course so go figure eh?
"I believe in everything in moderation. Including moderation." -Dean DeLeo, Stone Temple Pilots
I've witnessed a lot of the phenomenon known as the "bell curve" in my engineering courses (and I've seen/heard of the same in other universities in Ontario). Since sci/engineering courses are mostly right/wrong (with part marks here and there), your mark is basically what you get, it's not a subjective mark from the prof.
However, a lot of universities will try to maintain a certain average for the class, usually in the 65 range. Which means that if the average is really low or really high, they will curve the marks to get that average.
Maybe you got a 45 on a test, but the whole class did relatively bad (50 average). The prof curves the marks up to get a 65 average, and suddenly you passed. Of course, I've seen it have the opposite effect, too. Get a 60 on an exam, but the whole class got an 80 average, which is obviously way too high, so curve it down, and suddenly you just failed the course.
Speak before you think
At the college I went to, there was one advance physics class where the teacher said: "Most tests check that you understand the base 75% of the information. I don't. I assume you know that and test you on the other 25%." It was not uncommon to get 50% on his tests and still have a B average.
I don't see things in black and white; I see the gray. Heck, I actually see in color, which makes things more difficult
I teach computer science courses part time at one of the local colleges. It is amazing how many students feel that good grades "just happen." I grade to my syllabus and I have given F's. One of my students even had his visa placed in jeopardy because of his lack of effort (boo hoo). The administration completely backs me and I have never had my grades reversed. The point is that technical sciences are pretty "black and white" and I believe that...an A is for superior effort. I also believe that "overall" University's are dumbing down their programs which we will regret as a society rather soon.
No, YOU taught him to slack.
The only thing more frightening than modern schools are modern parents. What's incredible to me is that you post all this with absolutely no shame at your own failure to discipline your kid.
A couple of questions. Do you have kids of your own? Do you have any ADD/ADHD children? Do you have any idea what the FUCK you are talking about?
Im just curious, see, cause its REAL easy to sit there and bitch about "parents today" when you arent one.. its a bit more difficult when you actually are one.
See.. I make sure his homework is done! I help him with it.. many hours are spent trying to get him to read the book they assigned.. 20 minutes of reading to about four hours of fighting and arguing about it.. what are you going to do? Tape it to his face? How would YOU go about making sure it gets turned in? Its done.. but it ends up on the floor of his room, not in his assignment folder. Or I find it blown up against a hedge between my house and the bus stop.
Sure.. I could probably hand carry it into school with me every day, and personally deliver it to the teacher.. but that kind of defeats the purpose of TEACHING doesnt it? At some point you have to take a step back and realize that eventually, he is going to come up against the results of his actions, and its going to suck for him. It will be painful, and it will be awful to watch, but I dont plan to be driving his lunch to him when he is 33 years old at work and forgets it even though it is right next to the door at home.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Perhaps it is because people's lives hang in the balance when they interact with the products and structures designed by science/engineering students.
;)
I know you were supposing but...no. Just as many scientists/engineers are working on evironmentally destructive industrial technology, weapons, harmful Union Carbide byproducts for personal use, etc.etc. then are working on bridges, emergency systems, roads and otherwise saving the world.
Engineers/scientists are not destined saviours and their lives and work are no more important than your average hardworking arts major.
Just ask any Iraqi chemical engineer how many pablum formulas they've worked on this year!
Go Terps!
:-)
Can't wait to play you guys in Cameron Indoor!
-- bearclaw
Why on earth are you reading slashdot? Don't literate people have their own website?
How many geeks are borderline illiterate? BSEE, BSCS, MSCS, MSEE, MCSE, H1B-just-off-the-boat, it seems to make little difference.
Maybe I'm missing the joke, but that last bit is Xenophoic and rude. H1B's have skills (or they wouldn't be here). Not knowing English that well doesn't make one illiterate - it makes them non-speakers of English. My Spanish sucks, but it would be a mistake to call me illiterate.
"My son is currently in fourth, going to fifth grade next year. (School change.. lower to middle) and he has "learned" that he doesnt really need to take in his homework, complete his assignments on time, etc, simply because the way this lower school runs, it is next to impossibe to fail."
School didn't run that way for me, but I still managed to squeak by while not doing the homework. You better do your job as a parent and try ot help him curb this. I was like this in middle and high school, and it carried on into college. I managed to get my degree, but it took me a little longer than it should have, and I spent a bunch of money retaking some classes that I shouldn't have had to retake. Sometimes I just didn't feel like doing it, sometimes I didn't have time, and sometimes I would just say to myself "It's too late, just retake it next semester".
Maybe this is a little premature for your child, but depression can also cause this.
Oh, and don't assume your kid is going to coast through. The article is NOT accurate for the majority of schools.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
"if your father had tenure (which i'm assuming he does), she should have politely told the principal to stuff hsi academic dishonesty where the sun don't shine, told the girl if she wants an A she can earn it, and gone back to class. hell, even if he didn't have tenure ..."
;)
I missed the part about his dad being a transvestite.
Grade inflation at Harvard University is rampant. It's so bad that, in a couple of the smaller humanities majors, everyone graduates suma cum laude.
I was a teaching fellow for a laboratory class that catered to both graduate and undergraduate students. I recall one student who skipped most of the labs, didn't turn in several of the homeworks, slept through the final and then was incensed because we gave them a "C". By all rights they should have failed.
Giving a student a failing grade at Harvard is next to impossible. The instructor has to jump through many bureaucratic hoops, including sending a written warning at midterm, before they are permitted to give a failing grade.
hey guy -- don't argue with us about your kid. somehow other parents have not had this problem.
you are personally ruining your child's future by
letting him know that you and everyone else will carry his ass
but I can see this is all my fault and the teacher's fault, and definitely not yours or your stupid kid's.
get used to people calling your kid stupid.
When I was in grad school at Columbia, I taught one of the undergrad Microeconomics courses for a few semesters. All of the students griped about the fact that I graded against a B average instead of the B+/A- average that was common in the economics department.
But nothing topped the reaction of one of the students I had given a D to. First he came and pleaded with me. Then, he came and basically threatened me. When I still refused to change his grade, his parents got involved and contacted the head of the department. He refused to overrule me since my grading formula was very objective.
After that, they went to the dean of the school and tried to have me brought before the faculty senate on charges of bias against members of the football team. When that didn't go anywhere, they tried to wear the department down by calling a few times a week to complain. The mother's phone calls became a running joke around the department.
Things finally came to an end when a work-study in the department answered one of her calls and told her "I know your son. He never studies and totally deserved that grade". She was so embarassed that she never called back again!
It certainly didn't happen where I went to school. The professors felt it was their duty to fail as many students as possible before senior year. I had one test where every person in the class missed a particular question. Instead of admitting that perhaps the question wasn't related to material presented in class or outside reading, the professor called us all stupid and made no adjustments. Heck, I even had one professor whose policy it was to never curve grades up but if one or two students did very well, we would curve the rest of the grades DOWN!
Several professors started the term off by telling us there would be no curve and no grade adjustments because they didn't want to die when we graduate and can't properly write an air traffic control system or our programs cause the national power grid to explode.
As a result, all the "I like play with 'puters" students got weeded out. Senior year was actually a breeze since we all really knew our stuff by then and the professors knew the slackers were weeded out and started to relax a bit.
In the sciences: I've often heard student graders complain about how guilty they feel when they give some poor kid a failing grade. But then they say, "I couldn't help it, he got X number of problems wrong."
In the humanities: I've also heard students (sometimes the same students) complain about their grades: "I worked really hard on that essay!"
See, there's a pervasive attitude that there's a scientific right/wrong, but that humanities are a matter of interpretation. Its not a far step from that to students complaining; preofessors questioning their own judgement..
My wife used to be an English prof. but got tired of kids bringing in their parents to argue grades. She finally quit after too many "requests" by the Dean to change grades for people who threatened to sue the school over grades.
... sometimes there are bad.
In my undergraduate institution (Valparaiso University), there were a good number of C's and lower given out, especially in the lower level science classes. Yes, there were often more A's and B's given out, but those were because the distribution tended to be skewed to a majority doing well. (Bimodal distributions were common, so the top group got A's and B's while the other got lower grades.) And yes, in some of the higher level classes, not a single C or lower was given out, even in math classes.
Grading systems SHOULD be subjective in nature. It's an argument of a professor trying to say how good a student is in that particular subject.
I consider all the grades I've gotten to be fair. I've considered the grades that friends of mine have gotten in the same class to be fair. Yes, even in the classes without a single C, those were fair. In those cases, the class often worked together... we were all about the same in our understanding and comprehension of the subject matter. There were some that were a little better and some that were a little worse, but many times it was tough to say that one of us was truly better than the others. So, it only made sense that we all got about the same grades; I think the final distribution was 1 A-, 2 B+, 3 B, 1 B-.
One thing that people forget is that in many majors in many schools, the students tend to be similar in their aptitude. It's due to the admissions tendencies of the school and the interests of the students. By the time you get to the higher-level classes, the only students taking them are the ones who tend to be good at the subject anyway. Is it really fair to give an F to that one B- student who answered most of the questions in class with a good understanding of the material, just a little less than the rest of us, just because the "lowest" student should be given an F?
So, it only makes sense that sometimes (and frequently in higher-level classes) a classroom will be filled with students who all understand the material and show potential. A professor just can't toss out an F or D if people all seemingly understand the material and have obviously learned it. How did they fail?
Then, you get to graduate schools like the one I'm in (Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University). It is understood that a C is almost never given out in a class here. Why?
First, the graduate school has this policy that any graduate student must hold a 3.0 GPA at all times. Since our department pays for the students' tuitions, we represent an investment for them. So, unless there is a reason to give out a C (like an obviously sub-par student), it is foolish to give out those low grades since it ends up being a waste of money for the department. They've put money into each of us, so why should they disqualify us by holding the "average student = C" mantra over us? It makes no sense because of that silly graduate school 3.0 GPA policy.
That doesn't mean that C's aren't given out. But they're all about sending messages to the student... "Are you sure you should be doing this kind of work?" Since the department pays for the students to take classes (and our advisors pay us off their research grants to do research also), they expect us to pass those classes. B's are now the "pass" grade, while A's are the "good" grade. C's (and D's) are the "message" grades. It's just shifting everything up to make sure that any money spent on students isn't wasted.
This whole "story" smells of nothing but a reporter trying to make a story out of a subject that looks simple, but is SO much more complex than it looks. In other words, this reporter needs to do more research into the real reasons WHY grades seem inflated. Frequently, in a case-by-case basis, there are good reasons for every grade that is given out. People need to remember that the "average student = C" idea isn't bad, but that "average" is a subjective idea.
-Jellisky
Appears like U.S. university education has picked up "quality problem" from K-12 school system. Can it go the way of domestic auto industry? One can see why many high tech employers might like imported graduates or take work abroad (See the recent 60 minutes program)
My university (University of Waterloo) generally only belled grades *up* if it was deemed necessary (eg. only one person had a passing mark). Profs were usually satisfied if the class average was somewhere in the low 70s. If it was higher than that then the profs usually figured that the exams they set were too easy. However, they would never bell marks down. Oh, this was in Electrical Engineering - other departments may have differed!
I do recall one great prof quote from my first year algebra class:
"The final exam will have 10 questions. 7 of them will be reasonably straight forward and if you've paid attention and done all the tutorial questions, you should have no problems. Of the remaining three questions, 2 are for people who think they are brilliant and the last is for those who truly are brilliant."
Grade inflation has been around for a long time; this is not news. The standard excuse is that if you have a very selective admissions process, the students are far more likely to get good grades, because the admissions office screened out the marginal players. The problem is that a student who can pay full "list price" tuition (without financial aid) can get admitted to an amazing number of top-name schools, even if their grades & test scores are not all that hot. It's almost like a Sprint PCS commercial: "I thought the chancellor said to screen out all the marginal payers!"
The reality is that low grades elimintate current tuition-paying students, and discourage potential students. It certainly doesn't help the student loan default rate! It costs money to give low grades. Lost money means lost job security, and the profs don't like it, not one little bit. There is already a problem with schools that add required courses simply because certain departments need the enrollment. Students may tolerate some gratuitous requirements, but not if their transcripts are going to be "polluted" with low grades from courses that should not have been mandatory in the first place.
It would not be all that hard to convert the grading system to pass/fail. Grades, inflated or otherwise, have little meaning after you get that first job (and sometimes not even then). If you think about it, grades are of value to the school that issues them. The only real decisions to be made are as follows: (1) The "yes/no" decision to allow a student into a major, (2) the semester-by-semester "yes/no" decision about allowing them to stay in that major, and (3) the final "yes/no" about graduation.
I have hired a fair number of people for a variety of positions, and I have never chosen candidate X over candidate Y based on who had the better GPA. Grade inflation makes that comparison even more meaningless than it would be if the grades were "honest".
I don't think the quality of instruction has declined all that much, but the perceived value of grades or even a degree has been diluted. I think the education industry will address the problem with mere PR lip service, because they really don't want to accept the economic reality of fixing the problem.
Yeah, this bugs me too. Way back when I was in high school, we used the 4.0 as the top attainable - no matter what or where your class - AP, at the college, whatever. Today's kids say "So what, I have a 4.4 average - I'm smarter than you were." Bull-fucking-shit. Why do you need a cash register to figure my change?
[pet_peeve]
Last year, as a high school student, you may have been 'prospect' for Duke.
This year, as a freshman attending the institution, you may offer a 'perspective'. You actually had a lot of good things to say, but from the subject alone I would assume you were a 'prospective' freshman considering attending the university.
[/pet_peeve]
I read an interesting article stating that our obsession with self-esteem is a factor. Current grade-school grading systems are geared to make the children feel good (ie. "needs improvement" instead of "If you don't buck up you'll fail this course"). Then they get to college believing that the sun shines out of their asses and are suddenly offended by being given a realistic C grade. I don't care how friggin special every single person is - if you don't know the material you don't deserve the credit.
Sounds like the prof in the article is just too lazy to stick to his guns and maintain his authority over the brats.
Something i've noticed in highschool (i'm a senior this year) is that teachers are pressured to produce students with higher grades. But instead of producing better students, they make things easier for the kids. I've had a few teachers (VERY few) who have really demanded thigns of their students. What happens? People drop the class because they're afraid it'll ruin their GPA. Parents threaten teachers if the student doesn't recieve the grade he/she wanted, and the administrators typically bend to the will of the parent/student. My class of 400 kids has 14 students viable for validictorian - all with 4.0s.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
I'm a first-year law student after just graduating with a degree in Electrical Engineering. I think there was some grade inflation, obviously there were average students who made above C's. But what's average??? It's hard to say, because nowadays everyone is special in their own way.
When I applied to Law School, the LSDAS who processes transcripts and reports my percentile against other law applicatants, compared me against every student who graduated from the same University regardless of their major. I don't know for sure, but I would guess my grades were in the upper echelon of the Engr school, but in the bottom half of the entire school. I had some schools that looked at my major before they looked at my grade, and I had some schools that just looked at my grade.
Overall, I think the policy my law school has is fairer. Their policy is the average for all classes is a 3.0. Half the students get above a 3.0 and half get below a 3.0. That means regardless of the classes you take, everyone is graded on a similar curve. Smaller classes can vary from the average more than bigger classes, but grade-inflation would seem to be eliminated somewhat in this way.
This is not really a problem any more or less in the sciences than any other study. The reason is that grades as we know them were created to foster a hierarchical caste system loosely organized as a meritocracy. From Indiana University to Columbia Teachers College, philosopher kings of the late 19th century planned a social system for the future, with funding from the industrial captains and financiers of the age.
Indiana University focused more on pure scientific eugenics, ie sterilization, breeding plans. Hitler referred to his own national sterilization plan as the "Indiana Plan". Schools like the Univeristy of Chicago and Columbia Teachers College focused on the Brave New World stuff, ie psychological manipulation and organizational conditioning. It was during this era that forced schooling began a national obsession and studies like psychology, sociology, and education were born. The funny thing about these new masters of society was their pseudoscientific outlook on their essentially baseless studies. Sociologists today still have a hard time admitting their discipline was created to CONTROL the masses, not help them.
In any event, scientific folks hold true to these arbitrary guidelines, and will apply the system of measure without giving any thought at all. Humanities folks grasp slightly that the need to grade people is inherently flawed, so they bend the rules as much as they need.
I know this will come as quite a shock to most people here, and I might even get some flames. But suffice it to say, the evidence is overwhelming that despite whatever benefits school MIGHT have, it was created to foster submissive behavior, conformity, respect for managerial authority, acquiesence to bureauocracy, and ultimately to inhibit the sense of wonder which is at the heart of true learning, creativity, and entrepreneurship.
It was believed that technology would make most humans irrelevant for productive purposes and it would better serve society to make them as stupid and dependant as possible.
Anyway, grades are not the problem. SCHOOL is the problem. School is working AS DESIGNED. All the original proponents of modern schooling would be quite pleased with the system we have in place. Even grade inflation is irrelevant. Grades were never intended to truly determine who was "best". They are there merely to induce competitive behavior and condition free men to crave meaningless accolades rather than true purpose in their lives. If you are really interested in the history of schooling, an excellent book can be found here. I guarantee it will be an eye opening experience.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I remember my NA 201 midterms. After the exam, I felt like throwing my calculator down the stairwell because I knew I had done so badly. Turns out I got a 46%, second highest in the class.
-MDL
Who used a slide rule as a freshman in college.
Happy meals fund terrorism
It taught me that your grade is largely dependant on who the teacher is and who the other students are. By taking several classes at the same university more than once I got to see this in action in a major way.
I took a CS logic course three times with three *completely* different experiences. Same books, same material.
The first class was taught by a new teacher and the class was mostly below average CS students, I stopped going to the class halfway through the semester and did not attend the final exam, to my shock an amazement I actually got a D. I completely expected an F. I always wonder what I would have gotten if I had just showed up for final.
The second time around it was taught by a real battleaxe of a teacher and there were a lot of above average students. It was much more demanding, I worked harder this time but eventually stopped going and got the big fat F I deserved.
The third time around I got an easy going teacher who scaled everything to death and a group of average students. I ended up sailing through the course.
I had a similar experience with a Calculus course, the first teacher had a small class and ruled it with an iron fist. The tests were dept. standardized and he didn't teach what was on the tests! The second time I took the class it was a big class and the teacher actually taught what was on the tests.
The only experience I had where a class seemed the same both times was when I took a physics class twice. Both times it was a large lecture class with dept. standardized tests.
The other funny thing is that once I asked a math teacher at the end of the semester after the final to give me a C (I had a D/F) so I wouldn't go on academic probation. He obliged!
I tried this with a CS teacher and he refused, and he refused to give me any leniency. I ended up leaving school to start a software company and never looked back. Best thing that ever happened to me.
It's such a shame that grading is so arbitrary for the most part...
At least, not at RIT, anyway. Recently, we had a bit of controversy surrounding grade DEflation. The specific incident revolves around the College of Business and its grading practices; professors were actively encouraged to give "A's" to no more than 15% of the students in any class, regardless of actual performance. As you can imagine, this caused quite a stir.
Now, when it comes to the sciences and engineering, I haven't actually seen any real grade inflation either. True, I've had my fair share of professors that give insane curves (for instance, the Microbiology prof regularly gives tests where the average is around a 40-50, and yet people still pass), but I've also had my fair share of rules sticklers who have a rigid grading scheme. Hell, just today I got back a Physics tests where fully 1/3 of the students received "F's".
All majors are not created equal, and this is something that many universities have lost sight of. Call me biased, but I'd say that a Science or an Engineering major is probably far harder than, say, a Literature major. That's the way it goes; I don't think it's possible to hold every major to the same standard, but that's what this grade inflation practice seems to be doing.
"It never got weird enough for me." - HST (RIP)
I guess this all comes down to what is *average*? What I mean is this - a mark of C on an A,B,C,D,E scale is meant to represent average grasp of the material. So right away, most people should fall into that category. That's why they call it *average* after all.
Now, if a professor curves a class, fine. You are still being compared against the people in your class - I don't see a problem with that. The big problem comes when another professor teaching the same course curves differently. They you have Billy Bob from Professor Joe's class getting an A and you have Jill from Professor Mike's class getting a C. Meanwhile, Jill really knows more than Billy Bob.
So why not do something like releasing the ENTIRE average for the class during the year you took it? So when you show your transcripts to someone, you can show them how you ranked that year when you got a C in fluid mechanics or something.
Is a C average meant to say you have an average grasp of the material, or that you have an average grasp of the material as compared to your classmates?
-- bearclaw
Most lawyers come from humanities backgrounds. Their jobs sometimes involve defending people who might get the death penalty. How's that for lives hanging in the balance?
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
So what's the right way to grade students?
There's so many strategies that one can employ as a means towards an end: forced distribution, statistical centering, curve/no-curve, pass/fail, etc. Setting aside all of the subjective factors that come into grading, such as preferrences and mindset(s) of the grader(s), shouldn't there be some goal to work towards, some methodology to ascribe to?
I honestly think there should be some consistency amongst a given institution (e.g. your university), and further some consistency amongst institutions (e.g. all undergraduate programs).
I am currently in a graduate program at UNC-CH. One of my fellow students, who is an ROTC instructor at Duke, told me in great detail how Duke inflates grades. He got into hot water with the administration when he started giving grades below a B. The instructor was told in explicit terms that giving out low grades was not desirable even if the students can't cut it. Basically, the parents of these kids are paying for junior's GPA.
The grade inflation problem is quite interesting. A few years back, I participated in the NSA's mathematics modelling prize competition. The problem that they supplied to use was one of grade inflation. The problem was this: At a given university, grade inflation had run rampant. The average GPA of students had risen to X% (I forgot the number, but it was basically an A-). The problem was to determine and create an algorithm that accurately assessed and awared merit based scholarships based solely on GPA.
The problem itself is interesting from a mathematical perspective. What is even more interesting are the other uses for such a solution. NSA typically uses thinly veiled intelligence/war problems for this math competition. The grade-inflation problem is no exception.
A grade inflation solution would have many purposes in the area of Satellite surveilance. As satellites *all* become more accurate at gathering intelligence (aka high grade = high accuracy), how do we detect which intelligence is the *most* true (highest accuracy)?
I forgot the other uses for this technology, perhaps a fellow slashdotter can fill in more details. I remember that we had about 5-6 uses for grade-inflation from a military standpoint.
I've had professors who encourage people to resubmit an essay even if it was good to encourage students to push themselves. Now this is a rare case and only happens in small classes or graduate level courses. Most of my classes were a mix of undergrad and grad students, so I was lucky enough to get lots of individual attention. Even if I wrote a kick butt paper, there were always questions and comments about content, structure, analysis and other approaches. The point of most upper level literature courses isn't "get a good grade."
A lot of the comments I've read seem to be saying the equivalent of "maybe this is happening in those worthless liberal arts, but it's not happening in Engineering (or Computer science or the "hard" sciences)".
t ml).
But in fact, the author of the Washington Post editorial is a professor of Geology and of Civil and Environmental Engineering (see http://www.env.duke.edu/faculty/bios/rojstaczer.h
So I would argue that if you accept his argument that grade inflation is occurring, than you have to accept that it's probably happening in all disciplines.
Alright, I forget to add in to this statement
I will not deny that some professors inflate their grades and some departments inflate their grades at some universities.
And as to the rest I got into a few top national universities, and I'm at Duke because it is a small, private university with a beautiful campus. Most of my friends are at public universities because they are great schools, just not quite as good as Duke, or some of those other private school-elitist ones you point out. Also, because they're giving me almost a full ride. So, I'm paying less for my degree than you, I got A's in calculus in high school, I'm getting A's here. Last semester I got an A+ in advanced physics.
It was pointed out in one of the other comments to my piece that I have no validity as a freshman. And would like to say thank you, I am aware that I am a lowly freshman, who can only read the articles, talk to his friends, his professors and provide an opinion backed by alot of research into the subject.
Lastly but obviously not least to the crowd which reads slashdot, thanks for correcting my grammar, sometimes my word usage is slightly off. I hope no one has trouble reading my posts.
"Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble."
I'm all for grade inflation. The lower the value of todays diploma, the longer my 1991 diploma will be worth something, and the longer I'll be able to hold back the new kids on the block from taking my job.
... the informal college league table for University of Cambridge in UK, for example, have the women-only colleges, which have more students taking humanities subjects, averaging lower than the colleges with higher science students.
Of course we're starting to see ridiculous grade inflation in UK as well; some of the newer universities are so desperate for students (their funding depends on the intake, so there) that you can do a course in mathematics if you get a C grade at GCSE level (taken 2 years before the end of secondary school)
YMMV...
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Everyone has one. The vast majority of undergrads in these majors don't even have any discernable passion for what they're studying: They're just in it because they know they won't have to do math.
One of two things will happen:
1. Universities will start making advanced calculus a part of every curriculum to seperate these "High School II" students from the ones who really care about what they're studying.
or
2. LA degress will quickly become what high school diplomas were in the seventies. They'll keep you out of McDonalds but you won't be living comfortably off of them unless you are extremely lucky and/or charismatic.
at my college (small Catholic primarily liberal arts), I had an economics professor who felt curves depended too much on the actions of other students - if you had a given grade, how well you did depended on how well or badly other student. His solution: stretch the grades so that an 85 or above is an A, but don't curve.
Some of the people found the class fairly tough, but I did rather well. The end result was that when I calculated what I needed on the final to get an A in the class, it was a 59.
I have blog like everyone else
Worth a read, here is a Working Link
Help fight continental drift.
Just because this guy is too much of a spineless sycophant to give out average or even failing grades does NOT mean that the entire academic world is degenerating into huggy everyone-gets-an-A daycare system.
I go to a cheap state school in Denver (Metropolitan State College) and while it's not been too terribly difficult for me to hold a 4.0, it's still been a LOT of work. I've always been a good student. I see people in my classes getting B, C, D, and even F grades. Just about every class I've had has a Gaussian distribution of grades. (Except organic chemistry where over half the class failed or got a D)
My girlfriend was a TA for Sociology at Denver University, the local rich-kid babysitting college. The entire sociology department made those kids bust their asses for A's, (most got C's, many failed) even to the point of some of them calling their lawyer parents in to bitch at the professors for not giving them good grades automatically.
The academic world is still working as intended. Some professors are easier than others for various reasons, and I suspect now that this douchebag's class enrollments are going to rise at Duke once word gets out that he doesnt give grades below a B.
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As a current mechanical engineering senior at the University of Texas, here has been my experience with grade distribution in my classes:
Oftentimes, test grades in the class average 50-75. In general the tests are challenging and meant to be so. This sometimes amounts to an average class grade at the end of the semester of 60. The professor then applies a curve to bring the majority of grades to B's with a nice spread of A's and C's, and D's and F's for slackers. This is the best scheme because it rates your performance in the class against those of your peers, which is exactly what happens in the real world. Makes sense to me.
The purpose of grades is to provide feedback to students on their level of performance. Instead, it has become coopted for purposes such as starting salaries. Remove the inappropriate economic component, and grade inflation won't be a problem. Otherwise, we should not be surprised that grades are subject to market pressures.
Hmm this might be why the U of Calgary introduced an A+ just this year. It counts as a 4.0 (same as an A) towards the GPA but shows up on the transcript as A+. One of my instructors said students with a 98% or higher on everything would get an A+ in the course. I think an A was 90% (possibly 85%).
In first year (a few years ago) I had a calculus prof who explained that a C was "good", a B was "really good" and, an A was "exceptional". I had to evaluate two (Comp Sci) teams at the end of a course last semester. I didn't give out a sigle A or A- (about 24 team members overall).
My reasoning was I hadn't seen anyone who was "exceptional", a couple of "really good"s for sure but I didn't give out an A.
This month I ran into someone from one of my teams. This person recieved a C+ from one team. That was below average so their mark was dropped down. To me a C+ is someone who showed up, worked enough and was willing to participate. I guess I'm behind the times a bit or maybe too critical.
Frink
I pulled a straight 0.0 for 3 semesters before they kicked me out.
Best Slashdot Co
Quite honestly, I can't understand why science and engineering majors are held to one standard for grades and academics versus humanities majors even in the same school.
/.'er is unfamiliar with the concept of the grading "Curve." This phenomenon, enountered universally in college science/engineering/math courses, allows students to recieve an "B" on their test even when acheiving only 20% correct scores on their tests .
It seems our intrepid
Granted, the "curve" is still a Bell Curve and as such is not as skewed as inflation you find in the humanities. However, the conclusion that engineering students are necessarily competent - in light of the aforementioned "curve" - is one which arrives stillborn.
The same applies for the suggestion that Math/Science majors are involved in life/death situations later in life. If that's the case, then I think - based on the number of product defects and accidental deaths due to poor design each year - we have ample reason to raise their grading standards ten-fold!
My point is this: I wouldn't want to drive over a bridge designed by an engineer that got 15% on the final exam - but got an acceptable grade (B) because of a "Curve."
DOWN WITH THE GRADING CURVE IN ENGINEERING!
In most of the engineering courses I took at Oregon State University, professors did not want students to score high on tests (in fact I recall a term of Digital Logic Design where the class average was 26%!)
The logic behind this was that the tests were there for the professor to gague what the class had actually learned, and that seeing mixed scores gives them more feedback than a bunch of 100% (or near 100%)
What sucked was when they then did not apply a curve to the grades people got. (i.e. in a class of 70+ handing out less than 10 A-C grades, efectively failing most of the class.
(In the OSU College of Engineering, a D is a failing grade for core courses.)
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
I graduated last year from an ivy league university with a BA. Most of my studies were in English, acting, or CS. Different types of grading in each one.
I had about 30 credits of CS when I graduated, and all of it was with the same professor (fortunately for me). So I learned early on what he looked for, and it seemed quite fair. A lot of people have been saying 'in Engineering/math/physics it's RIGHT or WRONG and there is NO ROOM FOR ARGUMENT beyond a regular curve/standard deviation.' In a perfect class, this is true. Another CS professor who taught the same class that mine did (CS 100, Java Until You Can't Java Anymore) had a lot of in-class tests where you had to write out your java code by hand. My professor had those as well (required by the dept.) but he weighted them much less, and weighted our homework and projects much more, because he could tell from those things how much effort you were putting in and what you were getting out. So you could take these two identical courses -- same syllabus, books, assignments -- and perform precisely the same way, and get a higher grade in my class than you would have with the other professor's. Is this grade inflation? I don't think so. It's simply a different means of measuring a student's success.
In all of my English courses, it came down to (surprise) paper writing. Some English courses like to take a history class approach and just see how many facts you memorized from each book/play/scroll you read that semester. I personally don't do well with the regurgitation method and lucked out because none of the courses I took had that, although several others did. It has already been pointed out by other posters that grading an English paper is subjective, but it's certainly not just opinion; it is often as easy to tell when someone has cobbled together an unsupported, juvenile argument as it is to tell when they've declared that 2+2=5. But like the CS grader, it's the weight that counts. I've had professors who would fail your paper if it had certain 'grade school' grammar and mechanical errors because he didn't feel that was appropriate for an ivy league institution. Others dismiss those unless they are really debilitating and give 99% of the weight to your arguments. Still others don't care about your arguments unless your conclusion is well done. Consequently, you will find English majors hanging out before grades are released who have absolutely no idea what they're going to get, while the Engineers are already either partying or packing their bags.
Lastly, my acting courses are the best example of a 'huh?' approach. Talent-based classes such as acting (and singing and playing instruments, to a lesser degree) simply do not fit into the academic model of 72% versus 86%, et cetera. For my first three years, the theatre department had what I thought was a good method for evaluating your performance -- to progress into the next course, you had to audition, regardless of the grade you got. So your actual grade for the class was dependent on things like whether or not you studied the material (a lot of reading, and it was easy to tell who could talk about the technique and who couldn't), whether or not you'd spent appropriate time rehearsing outside of class, and your general preparedness for your final scenes. It's a fine line, though, but it's not terribly difficult to tell the difference between an actor who is completely unprepared and hasn't put in any work and an actor who simply may not be an excellet performer. The department's view was that you can't help how talented you are, but you can help how much you improve.
During my last year, though, the theatre department came under fire for handing out a lot of As, because their system was working. People who didn't cut it or didn't care enough didn't make the audition into the high level workshops and classes. So in those higher level courses, you had small classes of people who really cared and were going to put in the work, so you had a lot of As. And having ninety-five percent of your class get an A apparently sets of alarms there, because my school was sensitive to the grade inflation that Harvard was doing (something like 80% of their graduates graduated with honors, as opposed to 10-20% of ours).
I don't agree with professors who are afraid to give out Cs because it's 'not expected' any more than I agree with professors who fail their entire class. That's a sure sign of very poor course design and I am always glad when those professors go. I remember that I got a D on an English paper once, though, and it was one hell of a wake up call. I wouldn't want to have the writing technique that went into that reinforced with any mark of approval...
Grade inflation hurts me in a more direct way than most:
I am a student at the claremont colleges, which are a small group of interconnected schools that share many resources but all have their own grading policies. While I'm registered at one school, I take virtually all my classes (and am majoring through) harvey mudd college, which has managed to stave off grade inflation with an average grade of B-. This puts me at somewhat of a disadvantage as my class rank is determined using HMC grades against the other students of my school, most who have A's. Yay, me.
Sometimes it's reassuring to know that no matter how hard you try, you're going to graduate in the bottom half.
The College of Engineering had a problem with grade inflation in the 80's. They had a simple solution. Classes are required to have a 2.5 exit GPA for the class. They don't make professors grade on a curve, and don't alter grades of professors that exceed 2.5. However, if a professor consitantly gives a distribution of grades that exceeds 2.5, they are reprimanded.
...for both the college and the professors. As simple as that.
The more kids that they keep enrolled, the more money the college collects. At $25k+ a year per student, that shouldn't be a mysterey.
Another factor is how the professor is perceived. If kids don't pass, their parents get irate and call the Dean of whatever school they are enrolled in and harass them. Then the only thing that can save the prof is how much grant money they can pull in to offset the annoyance.
I've seen excellent professors denied tenure because they spent too much time on lectures and with students. If they couldn't crank out the papers and bring in the money, they weren't wanted. I've also witnessed the worst professor I ever had awarded tenure based on 36 papers in 3 years and a $500k grant. Never mind that nobody understood anything he tried to teach. Since everybody got passing grades, he must be doing a good job, right?
The whole system is a farce anyway. Grades have been relegated to a pointless anachronism. People have come to believe that they are *entitled* to a college degree, and most universities can use the money.
(I say humanities because liberal arts isn't a cirriculum so much as a theory of education)
I had a math prof who would give A's, but refused to give a 100% score even on an exam where a student solved each problem perfectly.
Her reason? "Only God is perfect."
A bit out on the stupid end of extreme cases, but such things happen.
It's interesting seeing some of the posts on this article. Once a system has been created, it tends to stray in unpredictable directions. This is part of the natural evolution of human systems. Sometimes the only way to correct these deviations is to get a new system.
As a new approach, let me describe my own experience. I had professor in school. He actually ended up being my Comp Sci advisor for a while. He taught Comp Sci with compassion and dedication. He believed that anyone could learn to program. (A novel concept considering this was the Eighties and the easiest language taught was C.) Given this philosophy, he decided there were only three natural grades for programming classes. An 'A' if you finished the criteria and everything worked, an 'F' if you finished and could not make everything work, or an 'I' for incomplete if you needed more time because everybody learns at different speeds. He called this system of grading the binary grading system. I loved it. If you learned the material, you got an 'A'. If you didn't get the material on the first or second iteration, he stuck with you until you got it by extending your class with an 'I'. Only if you gave up on him and the material did anyone every get an 'F'. I learned more from this man than any other technical teacher I've ever had.
Personally, I would love to see something like this system accepted in technical schools and classes, but I doubt that traditional education would find this system liveable. After a while, many students in his classes were getting 'I' and he failed almost no one. Everybody else got 'A's. This really pissed off the Registrar. In the end, he had to leave because the school wouldn't let him teach with his preferred method.
Oh well, stagnation is part of the evolution of a system as well.
tims
"Ahhhh, best laid plans of mice and men... and Cookie Monster." -- Cookie Monster, Sesame Street
I suspect the extra F in Ffrance is a Freudian slip.
Help fight continental drift.
I had an EM Theory class where the professor was notorius for never giving anything below a C. The subject certainly wasn't my cup of tea, so I let it slide.
So, simply said, it means that most As given in USA's universities are worthless, only meaning that the student took part in the course and achieved the minimal requirements. Great: how can they discriminate, then? By using comments, like in France for example (comments range from acceptable to oustanding, with several shades, given for the same grade).
:)
Here in Quebec, grading is done as follows:
A > 90%
B > 80%
C > 70%
D > 60%
E 60% (That's F in the states).
I'm not saying this system is perfect... But it gives a good idea about the student's results. Grading should not be done in order to boost the student's ego: it should be realistic and sort the students from best to worst. Simple as that.
Just my 0.65 X 2 cents
Very common at ALL levels and probably the single most important problem in education today. In the end the responsibility for this comes down to the parents. They demand that their children pass. If they don't pass, they won't pay.
I teach Computer Science at one of the top US colleges. Here's my breakdown of student grades over the past year in a C++ course:
A - 30
B - 67
C - 109
D - 41
F - 21
My grading style is considered strict compared to most other professors here. I am a younger (33) than most of my colleagues.
I get a lot of complaints from students who don't understand the value of working to get a good grade. Most people just view this as a stepping stone to making big corporate bucks and don't want any stray marks on their record. I'd estimate that almost half the students I have are not really that interested in the Computer Science field for any reason other than to make money and have a comfortable living - which is the absolute wrong reason.
The bottom line is that I refuse to reward people who don't put in the effort because ultimately it is not helping them with their future. My hats off to those students who do try hard and who do push themselves to excel in their field of study - I for one will not mock or belittle your efforts.
...COMPLETELY
In college, my professors graded on a curve, as they did in grad school. That being said, when I was an undergrad, I hated it. After some time in the real world, I've learned that life is graded on a curve. When I was in grad school, I liked it. It separated the better people from the average people.
FOR EXAMPLE...
The difference between two lawyers' argument might be trivial, but there is always a first place, and a last place.
The same is true for resumes. The difference between being on the top of the stack and being the second in the stack is a job offer.
If schools graded on a curve, the professors' work would be much easier, more objective, and more appropriate to real life for students. All a professor needs to do is rank order the exams, and apply some shape of bell curve.
Better colleges and universities (not necessarily the same as the name-brand ones) enforce a bell curve by college or department, which all professors must apply.
My favorite professor taught grad school economics, and rank ordered every question individually. Tthere were only 5 questions on a 3-hour test, and ALL the best students were there for at least 2.5 hours, while the worst students left after 30 minutes. When I got my test back, I knew how good my answer was for each question relative to the 100 other grad students.
Interestingly enough, I had a class from him in undergrad. I enjoyed the material, but did not like him or his grading. After a dose of the real world, I came to appreciate his perspective, and became a better student because of it.
-Mark
When I went to Louisiana Tech, I took a 400 level art class with about a hundred students in it. I have never taken a class that was so easy to pass, yet I was (a) the only non-art student in the class, and (b) the only student in the entire class to receive an A. Apparently, the course was very rigorous and "unfair" to my fellow classmates who apparently had never
A childhood acquaintance of mine at Nicholls State had a very low GPA in Engineering Technology and decided to enter into Mass Communications. This guy was FUGLY, drooled like a maniac, and stuttered. STRAIGHT F'N A's, BUDDY!
Apparently all you need for most liberal arts degrees is a pulse on the day of graduation.
Montessori schools don't give grades. In fact, the philosophy of teaching is very similar to what the author described, "Persuading, Cajoling, Being a learning partner and instigator."
Of course, the kids that come out of the Montessori curriculum are either going to be world leaders, or pure dumb-asses. See, if the kid has any intellect at all, the Montessori system will stress that and make it bloom... to it's full potential. Grades are no longer a reward for achievement, rather the act of learning and progressing itself is. If the child has absolutely no intelligence, as unlikely as it may seem, the child would do no better in a regular school.
Granted, Montessori depends almost wholly upon the teacher. If the teacher cannot stimulate the children to learn at the rate at which they can... The children will suffer. In the current academic system, we have children that are pushed through, getting by with a "D," progressing into the next step... before the previous step is fully understood. Whether the teacher is good or not is irrelevant, because they can let people get by with a "D".
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
The normal grade should be C.
You should get A only when you do something
really outstanding.
Do you have kids of your own?
I have two kids, one of which is an incredibly active three year old boy. He is an incredible challenge. So my situation is not exactly like yours, but I did do a lot of research before I had children.
minutes of reading to about four hours of fighting and arguing about it..
To be honest, and I'm not trying to make any of this sound easy, but I think that's your problem. Why are you spending four hours fighting and arguing about it? That's giving him the control over the situation. Your kids responsibilities should not be a negotiation. You give him the assignment, and he either does it, or he sits in his room. If he still doesn't do it, you start taking things away. If he still doesn't do it, take the door off his room so he gets no privacy.
I'm tell you, eventually when he sits in an empty room with zero privileges, he will figure out it's better to do the work. No, it's not going to be easy, and you're going to have to live with a lot of screaming and crying and temper tantrums. But eventually, he WILL figure it out.
And when he does figure it out, you give plenty of positive feedback to go with the negative feedback.
Sure.. I could probably hand carry it into school with me every day, and personally deliver it to the teacher
That's exactly what you DON'T do. I'm saying don't do a damn thing for him, unless he asks for specific help. The point of this is not to hold his hand and move the pen for him, the point of this is to instill the discipline that he needs to do the work himself and will suffer consequences if he doesn't.
At some point you have to take a step back and realize that eventually, he is going to come up against the results of his actions, and its going to suck for him.
Exactly! But what are you waiting for? YOU'RE THE PARENT. You hold an immense amount of power to make his life miserable.
Look, I'm not saying any of this is easy. But this really is "modern parents disease". Everything is a negotiation, and parents are too intimidated because they might be thought of as "mean parents".
Seriously, I probably should apologize for coming off too strong in my original post (I was the original poster), but your post just really pushed a button. I also don't mean for this post to sound glib, like the solutions are easy. But there really are right ways and wrong ways to deal with this, and it sounds like you might want to do some more research. There is a lot of information on the web about dealing with "slacker" kids. One of the best is the Tough Love web site.
Seriously, good luck.
We arts people have to deal with WAY lower marks than the engineers. Weird how it's so diff at every place.
Having kids too late is just as bad as having kids too early...a 28-year-old parent usually doesn't have the guts to hassle teachers and principals to get their kid's grades inflated. A 45-year-old parent has no problem with this. A 50 year-old-parent who's a partner in the firm actually enjoys raining grief on faculty & administration until they get their way...
As a first year engineering student I have a mixed view on grade inflation. In our first year calculus course 75% of the class fails, and it is 'graded on a curve'. The actual grading is far more complex then that, and in order to pass the course you do need to pass the final. Grading on a curve can both be good and bad, they give us work that is way too hard for our level (pushes students to near breakdown) and then the majority barely pass before the curve is applied. The results of this are that we become better at what we are supposed to do, we can still get the grades to go to second year, even with scholarships, but once you have had a low mark on your paper you know you have to work your ass off and not make mistakes. This is very important, especially for engineers. Would you rather travel in a boat built by the engineer who managed to hang in by the skin of his teeth in a tough program, or by the engineer who glided through an easy engineering program...say one where they let you make a bit of error in your bending moment and shear calculations and diagrams?
Why are you spending four hours fighting and arguing about it?
Oh! I forgot the most important thing: NEVER argue with him. Never raise your voice. Just implement the punishment. Getting into a fight about something is just giving away your power.
In the interest of honesty, I have to admit this is something that I have a HUGE amount of difficulty doing with my three year old. :) But there is no question that instilling discipline is much more effective when it's calmly implemented.
Let's face it, the majority of the reporters and editors out there started out with an education in an arts field. Given that people write about what they know it should be no surprise this kinda slant happens. The fact is some educational pursuits require more of a student than others. I have two degrees. A B.S. and a B.A. and I can state for certain that it was far simpler to obtain the B.A. The general difference, in engineering courses there are definate right and a wrong answers. In english and writing courses there exists only a measure of how well you express yourself.
We are a product of our experiences and so a journalist is likely to find grade inflation where a scientist may not.
-2 cents
Not that I'm disagreeing with the results, but did you notice that this washington post article appears to be based exclusively on content googled out from the web? Check out the raw data sources at the bottome on the page[hostcompany100.com].
Most are links to student newspapers, some are random documents, all are bare links. Not even in MLA, sheesh. But it certainly looks nice once extrapolated into a pretty graph.
Did you have to try to get your GPA that low? And did your finicial aid boot you after the first semester?
It seems like alot of work to try to do so little..
Tibbon
tibbon.com
At Cornell we experience a type of grade DE-flation. Esp in engineering, over 1/3 of the grades given out are below B-. For Physics 214, the professors ARTIFICIALLY set the mean of the curve to obtain a C+ : i.e. you get a C+ if you manage to beat just half the class. Only 8% of all students qualify for honors, versus 92% at Harvard??
At Cornell Engineering you make Dean's List with a 3.4. That's the AVERAGE gpa at Harvard. If so, what does Dean's List mean anything anymore?
So people claimed that our GPAs are low because we don't study, but if they looked at a recent ranking by PrincetonReview, we were ranked Top 10 for "their students never stop studying".
I had a teacher once explain his grading to the class for an engineering course.
A = you already new it
B = You have been exposed to many of the ideas already
C = You are new to this and working your tail off.
D = You are new and overwhelmed, take it next term to get a B
F = you didn't do shit.
I worked like mad in that class, got a 73%, and I was proud of that "C" I help students study for that class that is now taught by a different (much easier) teacher, they are getting "A's" and struggling, i took it 2 years ago before changing majors, haven't touched on the subject since, and i'm helping them. Funny how my favoritte teachers are the hardest ones....
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
The author of this piece maintains this website http://www.hostcompany100.com/goneforg/gradeinflat ion.html
Lots of people are saying "It's not happening here." Take a look at the site and see the numbers for yourself.
Chances are it is happening there, and you just don't know about it, or you're part of the problem.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
College? That's nothing. Wait till you meet them in the business sector! I was an IT guy at an engineering firm. Half the engineers acted as if they've never used a computer before. These aren't a bunch of crufty old guys from the stone age, but young enough to have used them when they were in college and high school.
My father teaches middle school and had one student who was good and got an honest to goodness B in her class
I don't see this issue being a big deal. The idea of giving objective grades (as opposed to subjective evaluations) for higher education is a new idea in the big scheme of things, borrowed perhaps from primary education. It used to be (200 years ago and longer) that you debated your peers to show ability, disputed your professors instead of taking an exam, and then had to convince a review board that you knew your stuff to graduate, and after that you had to use your knowledge effectively and not just cite it on your resume on your way to the corner office. None of that was graded other than "well argued". I imagine there is nothing more terrifying than a half dozen old people glaring at you over their bifocals and asking you tough questions and barking at you when you faulter.
So is life after the fall of objective grades a horror? The writer of this op-ed bit says that he is not sure he or his peers are up to the task of educating without tests and grades. I wonder what that really means? Does it mean that he is not ready to talk to students in small groups and engage them intellectually? That he is not ready to challenge each mind individually in a setting of peers? That he is not able to evaluate a student's progress just by knowing them as a person and their work as a whole?
The factory method of teaching (which is what he is lamenting as it passes) had serious flaws. Students never really did buy the notion that periodic test scores and grades meant squat (and rampant cheating didn't help.) The factory method might have had its place in recent centuries when we needed so very many "learned" workers to support our exploding industrial revolution. But does that still hold? Does any of this matter now?
If grades are dead then let them be buried. If students need a motivation to achieve, let the marketplace provide it as once it did, when a person of letters stood out on their talents and not their papers. The future belongs to the smart ones, and we can all tell who they are just by talking to them. And the rest? Back to the fields.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
When I was in college, I found myself in classes with many other students that just did not understand the material well. Sure, plenty of them did--some naturally, some through hard study (a combination of both for me). But many of those students who were poor performers, either because they were lazy or their brains just weren't up to the task, were getting relatively high grades.
On the plus side, it wasn't easy to go from a B to an A, but on the other side, it wasn't too hard to get a B. And many poor students were getting A's anyhow, somehow.
Now that I've been out in the industry for 6 years, and my work history can speak for me, it doesn't bother me so much, but when I first got out of college, I was very frustrated that an employer couldn't distinguish my A's from someone else's.
Inflating grades is bad for students and employers. It's bad for the students who ARE smart and willing to work, and it's bad for employers, because they can't use grades as a way to evaluate people they interview.
I was a TA for data structures, and I was looking for elegant solutions and software engineering principles. I was also HIGH off the power of being a grader. Think: BOFH- except its Bastard Grader from hell.
Asking for a re-grade was tantamount to saying "My grade was too high, can you take a few MORE points off?"
My comments on why I took points off were meticulously detailed in my own notes. However only the problems (and my fabulous solutions) were written on the works I was grading; I never wrote how many points I took off for each infraction. This was intentional: I loved eliciting those "Why did I get 20 points off?" e-mails, CC'd to the professor. I would simply open my text file, search for the entry with "OMG! This kid can't fucking code!", look at my rationale, and then quickly 'reply to all' about the students short-comings and failures infront of the professor.
The only explanation for this cruel behavior: I must have a small penis.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
There's also grade deflation - in my HS, the girl most likely to graduate top of the class didn't plan to go to college. The English teacher thought that if you weren't going to college, you didn't deserve to be valedictorian, so she gave her a lower grade.
This got out because she told another teacher, who didn't share her opinions, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. The girl ended up graduating second.
Give me non-subjective classes any day - even if the prof doesn't want girls in engineering, he can't lower my grade to get me out.
We cannot afford to take this attitude in engineering. A C in a class tells the recruiter that the graduating engineer has the minimum amount of competency in the subject material to be functional as a practicing engineer. The effect of graduating an engineer with inflated grades and who can't perform after being hired by a company is that the school ends up looking bad. In todays tough, competitive environment, this may result in the company deciding to no longer recruit at that school.
Here at the University of Cincinnati they are violently combating grade inflation in the engineering school by force curving almost all engineering classes. They are doing this with the mean at C. Now, this hurts all UC engineering graduates because it means that when we apply to grad schools and our first jobs out of college we will be unfairly competing against students from schools with grade inflation. Now, it doesn't seem right that UC should just "go along" with the rest of the schools and inflate their grades too, but it doesn't seem like there is any other option.
I also think that that curving is quite possibly totally unfair to begin with if you use a normal curve. In the engineering school you start with a skwed populace, it's hard to get into engineering school, and then in the first two years half the students drop out. So is it still fair to make the mean a C when you've lost the bottom half of the population, or maybe should you move that mean up a little bit to compensate for the loss. Maybe it doesn't make sense to use a normal curve at all in the first place. I'm sure the same could be argued for an ivy league school.
You couldn't flunk at the getto school. Thier budget comes from the state, not property taxes. So poor academic performance(i.e. low GPA's) means less money from the state. So all students pretty much had C's or better. And I never was assigned homework. In PE, we watched movies. And all the text books were falling apart and printed in the 50's (this is middle 80's). The school was dilapidated and had very little extra-caricular activities.
At the yuppy school, they get money from property taxes. And taxes on $300,000+ homes is a lot of money...so the school had no qualms about flunking students. They also assigned homework and had new books, and everthing else you can imagine a school having (gym, playground, extra-caricular activities, band equip...etc).
Point is, your sons school budget is tied to academic performance not geography. So, they don't challenge the children to learn. This is the biggest difference between "white" schools and "minority" schools. Quality of education, IMHO, is the main factor driving racial divide.
Interestingly, at the getto school I was one of 6 white students at a school of 2000+ blacks and hispanics, and I never got picked on...not once. At the yuppy school, I got picked on daily for wearing second hand clothes. I hate rich white kids.
A parent's ability to influence the daily scholastic life of his or her children is drastically reduced when the two do not live together or otherwise associate on a daily basis. I am assuming that this is not the case.
Divorce does this sort of thing. Also, from the "100 grand" comment, I assume that this is a private school. In all truth, the father is doing everything that could reasonably be expected. He cannot be held accountable if he does not have custody.
Man, I don't understand why, out of all other aspects of life, some profs get the idea that 100% on something in the context of class should mean "utter perfection".
What if it worked everywhere like that?
"Hey, I was supposed to make $18/hr, but I got my paycheck and only got $15/hr."
"Well, only God is perfect and deserves 100%."
"Hey, waiter, you took my dinner away, but I didn't even finish it!"
"Well, only God deserves 100%."
And I don't care if the prof said that in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way. I remember one prof I had who said she almost never gave 18/20 on our weekly essays, and maybe one 19 every few years, never a twenty. "That's just my quirk! I just can't give perfect grades." *wink* Yes yes, very entertaining, I'm glad you get to indulge in your eccetricities... just please don't do it to *me*.
If you want to have your own grade scale because you have this unique outlook on the world and you want to express your views through your grade scale then that's fine. But then, when you turn in the grades, please translate them to something that will mean something to the other people who will have to interpret them without your explanation.
Otherwise, please tell me why grades are officially recorded by the institutions and not only given out privately to each student to gauge his or her own progress.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
I wish I had gone to Harvard, I could have slept all day and received all A's.
:P.
As it was, I worked my ass off at WPI and still got a few C's. WPI uses A/B/C/NR where NR is a failing grade that does not appear on your transcript (in theory to let you experiment with classes outside your field, and "punt" them (fail) if you sucked, or something). Thus, if you failed all your classes you received a blank report card - a "snowflake." Many a student snowflaked. I only knew one person who got all A's.
Even in grad classed our teachers had no fear of handing out C's. The majority of my cryptography class got C's, many failed, more than got A's (you get F's in grad school, not NR's). I got an A
A relative of mine, a psychology teacher at a New England school, insists everybody inflates grades, thus everybody has too or students wont attend your class. This seems to me like herd mentality, or peer presure, or circular reasoning, and many other things that ought to make a psychologist speak out. I mentioned my school doesn't seem to inflate grades, especially in crypto, but my data was dismissed as "everybody does it" and crypto was probably a "weeder course."
Oh well.
I may be the victim of my own apathy, but who knows
Welcome to the University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, offering a first year philosophy and literature program where people struggle to achieve a B minus, and any paper that might possibly warrant an A minus must first be reviewed by the program director.
I got a 32 that scaled to a B+. When we got our grade for that exam, I freaked, went to the Dean of Arts and Sciences and changed my major from Computer Science to English with a minor in CS. There was no way I was going to suffer another two and a half years of that. I was weeded out even though I was somewhat above average.
Why did I do this? I don't need elitist professors in any academic discipline to tell me what I don't know. I went to college to find out what I could learn, not identify what I could not.
In my logic class (along with others), we had daily homework assignments. Those assignments were checked and corrected, but we got a point or two no matter how much we got wrong. The idea was to grade the amount of effort, not the amount of correctness. Homework is for learning, tests are for evaluating what you've learned.
Sounds like your class worked this way, and that might be a good thing too.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
I was an Engineering student in the late 70's. I took an elective course in the Geology Dept., about fossil fuels. About 10 or so of my fellow engineering students also took the course. As a result, I NEVER went to a regular class, and just asked them to tell me when the mid-term was coming up. I went to the class for the first time on the day of the mid-term, & got an 89. (I DID have to read the textbook) The lowest score among the engineering students was an 87. The average score in the entire class was in the low 70's. We all joked about the fuel crisis, because evidently the Geology majors are too dumb to find the oil!
""heald"?! Oh. man! That's beautiful! "
Yeah, apparently, my 53 humanities credits(i graduated with 33 credits more than required, all 33 were extra credits in humanities) didn't teach me anything, then again 32 of them were in the japanese language. I have a BS in Electrical Engineering and a minor in the Japanese language.
Blame the fall of spelling in informal communications due to laziness and too much use of a spell checker, rather than ones intelligence or education. If this was formal communication, for example, as part of a design document,such a mistake would not be easily forgivable, but in a conversational informal environment, I fail to see the importance, or in particular how it lessens a persons arguement.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
My kindergartener brought home his first "report card" yesterday. I'm thinking a lot about these issues right now. Parenting is damn hard. Anyone who says otherwise isn't doing it right.
...and a good engineer isn't always a good student.
I tried this one on a few hiring managers to up my entry level salary.
I graduated with a 2.3 out of CU-Boulder in ECE. Most of my friends had much better grades, and most of them are also unemployed. Some argued with profs to get better grades on tests but can't hide the fact they are slow, get frustrated and have a big mouth. [I almost got in a fight with a kid because I made fun of him for not understanding P=IIR = IV in circuits 3 (3000 level,)]
I have increased my earnings/wages because my managers found that I can do much more than my grades told them. If my grades were spectacular and I sucked at my job they would have noticed this too (unless I was a manager.) All grades do is get your foot in the door.
It is up to the student to learn and if they don't they will fall rather than fly.
Look, Grade "inflation" is a waste of your collective bile. Your continual insistence on outrage is also causing mine to rise. Here are my thoughts on the matter:
1) Grade inflation, if it exists is performed on a teacher by teacher basis. as a counter-example to grade inflation, my friend was at one point given a B+ after consistently performing work that was graded at 95% correct, because the teacher was REQUIRED to have a class GPA of 3.2, and since EVERYONE got above 90% on the homeworks, and finals, he had to grade down. This was due to the fact that he was a good teacher, not the fact that he created easy questions. The grade is subjective.
If school work has no practical application to the real world (Book review essays in Humanities, abstract math problems in science), it doesn't even matter what your grade is, because you will never use the skills on which you were graded.
So, in brief: GET OVER IT.
hmmmm?
First, kudos to your father and the VP for standing their ground -- at least, for as long as they could.
I'm long past middle school, but perhaps these parents should meet my parents. My folks are the type where I could bring home a 98% and their response would be "What happened to the other 2 percent? Stop reading storybooks and study more!"
If I so much as hinted that a teacher was unfair, I'd be smacked for it. "Stop blaming the teacher. Blame yourself. Study more! Work harder! You're going to go to a good university." (Not that I thought my teachers were marking unfairly. Some of them marked brutally hard, but they marked everyone hard.)
As far as my folks were concerned when it came to school marks, the only thing not good enough was me.
While I ultimately think that my parents' no-nonsense attitude was (in the end) good for me (or at least my work-ethic), whenever I hear stories like this about parents like this, I can't help but think "Must be nice."
I can spell. I just can't type.
Ultimately, I don't think they can have it both ways. Either "good" schools should have similar grade distributions as "lesser" schools, or their graduates shouldn't get any benefit of the doubt when, say, companies or grad schools compare GPA's. Right now, they do. I do believe grade inflation is worse at liberal arts schools (based both my experiences and from the majority I have read here so far), and that inflated 3.2 counts for a lot more than it should when they go to get a job.
Hopefully, grad schools and employers will wise up to this - there are good students who go to state schools, if for no other reason than they didn't want to go massively into debt, and I would say that a 3.9 from a state school beats a Harvard 3.5 these days.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
It'll be just like in the good old days, when every job had an entrance exam. And maybe, just maybe, degrees will stop becoming a perfunctory sheet of velum on the wall, and go back to being a foundation for future learning.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Humanities students tend to be more lax about policies like this, and tend to be more flexible in their grading policies in general. There's always room for an argument.
My entire class argued with a numerical methods prof for weeks to adopt some sort of curve or something, because almost the entire class was failing. His solution was to make the final count as 85% of your grade, with the understanding that it 'might be' curved.
I was a teaching assistant at Cornhell while in graduate school. The only thing a degree from Cornell means is that you were a promising high school student. Even in the sciences, it is extremely rare to see a C or lower grade, despite the fact that many deserved it.
In my brief (yet all too lengthy) experience there, I witnessed the following horror stories:
1) Student was allowed to graduate despite a) threatening a TA and b) having absolutely no knowledge of the material. Why? Cynics involved with this particular individual suggested his status as a minority played a role.
2) A student cheats on an examination and nothing happens to him. Why? He whines to the professor that he was under a lot of stress to prepare for his medical school admission test. Do you want this guy operating on you?
3) A student once complained to me that a question I gave on an exam was unfair. I said it was fair because she and her classmates all got the same question and they were consistently graded. She whines to the professor, he ups her grade.
The system is flawed. You see the results of it in the workplace and in society in general. Until someone starts standing up and not obsessing over the little darlings' self esteem, we are in for a world of trouble.
The reason for grade inflation is people like these weenies who don't have the backbone to give realistic grades. Grading is not supposed to be a way of endearing yourself to your students. Professors who do a good job teaching are respected. Those who can't teach well may find that grading generously helps. They would do a better job of serving their students if they improved their teaching skills, and graded more honestly.
I agree with this guy's post. I went to the same school, and without a curve, some of my ME classes had averages in the low 40s at BEST.
It sounds like you have some issues to work out. The guy said that he worked for his grades, and yet the exam structure did not seem to reflect that. I agree. I had many friends at MIT and Tufts who did not have the same exam techniques we did at Umass, and who agreed that they were unfair. This resulted in EXTREME curving, just to pass very few people in each class.
Unless you went to Umass/Amherst, and had a different environment. I worked hard for my grades, did well on some and poor on others.
Have YOU ever thought that it's possible that professors' measurement schemes are NOT infallible ?
For obvious reasoins, I have to post anonymously. Suffice to say, I teach philosophy at a State University. I can assure you, philosophy courses are not 'subject', or even easy. If you don't have a good argument for your postition, you lose - simple as that. 'Good' is not subjective either. Arguments can be assessede for validity (whether the premises deductively entail the conclusion) and soundness (validity and the truth of the premises. Last semester, in my 101 class I failed over 1/3rd of the students. Only two students got As.
Now some may say that I am just a hard case. That is not so, I maintain very rigorous standards. Classes are not curved. Curves are fundamentally unfair. Some classes are harder working and smarter than others. Descriptive statistics are kept by me of each section of a class I have taught over the years. Student performance is then compared with every student who has ever taken that course with me.
More interesting though is a problem I ran into a few years ago. We teach a baby logic course that is required by some other subjects. I knew that the instructors of the other sections were much easier than me. For this reason, I was under pressure to 'dumb down' my section. I resisted the temptation, although I was concerned that students would avoid my section. The refusal to dumb down actually had the opposite effect! Students heard I was hard, but this mean that the smart students enrolled in my section, as they wanted to learn! My sections were full, whilst the 'easier' sections were not. I even had a student once thank me for failing them! Even though they had not passed the course, they told me that what they had learned was some of the most useful things they had learned in all their lives. Go figure.
a 70% failing rate is not uncommon for some introductory level classes in France, and
A's are a rarity. this might be related to the fact that tuition for a year of college in france is about a week of minimum wage salary compared to 2 years of minimum wage salary in the US.
Laurent
Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
her refers to the girl taking the class.
A geology/engineering prof. writes a piece talking about grade inflation ... Original poster assumes that he's talking about humanities. Discussion proceeds mostly on that assumption. I thought only humanities types played fast and loose with the data. As a history teacher I'd flunk most of you for faulty research
Doesn't it really boil down to that the humanities like english lit, creative writing, to a large degree are subjective. One person thinks Tom Clancy is great, then next thinks he is crap.
But in subjects like Math, there is usually one right answer, or a set of distinct criterium. That algorithim is either giving the right answer or it is not.
I am an MBA student at a private southern school (you figure it out) and I have realized how much grade inflation has occurred even since I graduated from college 6 years ago. I am carrying a 3.5, which I thought was pretty good, that puts me squarely on the 50th percentile. People wonder why so many execs don't understand accounting . . . .
Come on. Do you seriously think that ALL humanities majors get a free ride while engineers get their asses busted? Please. There are PLENTY of ways to fleece grades as an engineer. In fact, the reason I left the software engineering program at my school was that most of the students were riding the smart kids to good grades, spending all their time studying and buying solutions to labs. My roommate couldn't do simple sums or holding a soldering iron and ended up with an honors degree in EE, plus an internship with Raytheon.
At the same time I was failing differential equations, I was tutoring a guy who came out with a B. I might add that his father was in the same fraternity as the professor.
I'm not saying there isn't a lot of grade inflation in the humanities -- there's gonna be, when you're dealing with something as subjective as essays. But nowadays you get the same thing in engineering classes: group projects, seminars, essays and so on. I took a D once in a class i could have TAUGHT because my project group decided I wasn't worth informing when and where they met to discuss the talk I wrote and delivered. And the professor wouldn't hear a word of protest. "This isn't an art class, this is management in engineering."
Hey freaks: now you're ju
gpa->0
lim CS = CIS
gpa->0
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Certainly, if you consider an absolute scale, I don't think that "skewed" grade distributions are statistical anomolies. Given 10 semesters (and hence 10 grade distributions), you should expect that some of them are going to be top heavy, and some are going to be bottom heavy.
It would be unfair to grade relative to the others in a particular class. Especially when you consider situations like the following. At MIT, most sophomores take 18.03 (Diff eq) in the fall semester. Those who take it in the spring tend to do so because they either failed it in the fall, or struggled with prereqs. There are also some very bright freshmen who take it in the spring. Thus, the ability distribution in the fall and spring classes could be quite different. Why should they be graded only relative to the others in the class that semester?
Unfortunately, grading on an absolute scale tends to lead to grade inflation.
My Dad graduated as a co-valedictorian of his undergrad back in the 60's. Of course he was an org chem major. The other two were nurses.
Now I think the real difference is how this has started to spread into hard sciences and primary school. Remember all that New Math crap?
Instead of right and wrong learning (which was seen as puritanical, porochial, or fascist) a wider birth is given to interpretation in the hopes that the student will find their own way to learn (so graded work may not be their strong suit, etc).
Of course the only thing I've seen come out of this is lethargy, procrastination, and soft, error prone thinking. See the calculator crutch. Hell I've seen CS grad students who have a hard time figuring out the maximum size of a 24 bit address. You can just see them curse the fact they can't break out the TI.
Ehhh. Such is life. Luckily the real world sorts out fakers in industry.
But in circle jerk fields like Literary Criticism, what's there to stop them?
What is music when you despise all sound?
The problem is there is no standardization in most technical fields. You can take an algorithms class at Caltech and take an algorithms class at Rolling Hills State, but all the grade tells you at the end is what percentage of *that professor's* test you knew.
And make no mistake about it - there are plenty of businesses who will hire a candidate with a 3.8 from Rolling Hills before they will hire one with a 2.3 from Caltech. They don't know each professor, so GPA is all they have to go on.
If there were national or multiple standards for class tests, or even boards, then they'd have something to judge upon, but until then, all a teacher who grades hard is doing is decreasing employment options for the students.
It's easy to say everybody should grade hard, but real world is some people do and some people don't, and that's not likely to change.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I am with you and I do understand, I am ADD and always will be the problem doesn't go away, but it can be trained to be suppressed. I am also dyslexic(I swear that word exists to prove the condition...if you really are it takes 20 minutes to spell it :>), and never learned to read until the 3rd grade and not well till I was in the middle of the fourth.
I can offer advise on how I got through...I am not the attacking type especially since I know i face this with my own children...
My parents had a hard rule nothing distracting in my bedroom...no TV, no video games, I had music and my toys and such but nothing that might be a deterant to learning my lesson, if I got sent there.
Homework had to be done, no questions about it and they had to see it...if they found out I had not done homework I got grounded in my room end of story. I lived in fear of a teacher calling and rating me out which did happen....
I screwed up so bad once that I was doing math problems for a week instead of anything else, NO TV, come stright home, do homework or do the math problems(we were learning multiplication so the only way I could get off grounding for not doing my homework was writting the tables from 1 - 100)
In the case of reading assignments there was no arguing, if I didn't do it I got locked in my room till I did, and if I did anything but read I got locked in there longer...the lesson do what you have to then you can do what you want to!
Help him organize, and reward good organization...after the homework is done, make sure its packed into the bookbag...stuff like that...i was an organizational mess (still am really, but I learned to concentrate on getting the important things in the right place)
ADD(etc) is not a crutch, it will not go away, it has to be trained around. Its not going to work in the real world(tm) so don't let it be an excuse in school. My parents never filled me in on the problems I had, but they knew and made me work through them...
If i was good then i knew that after school while the sun was still out I was going to be able to see my friends, ride my bike etc, but after dinner 6:00pm or so...it was homework time and if I wanted to watch TV before Bed (which was quite early so I didn't have much time)...it had to get done, no arguements...the only way I was going to be up past my bed time was to finish homework...which by the way broke down like {k-4 8:00pm -9:00pm, 8 being more typical I don't think I really watched prime time TV till Middle school) (5-8 9:00pm-10pm...10 was a very special night and a real long shot most of the time) (9-12 10:00pm most nights-11:00pm more towards 11-12)
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
here's a link: to a story on a college discussion website that talks about this issue at the high school senior/ college freshman level.
~ now you know
Lay off the insults, all. Much of the reason that I went to MIT and majored in EE years ago was the difficulty of a "real" liberal arts education. Math and science had a rigor that was easy for my brain wiring, and so I didn't have to sweat too much to get my degree from the 'tute. I could take weekends off and still get a good grade. For someone whose gifts lie elsewhere, what I did might have seemed hard. Now in my forties, I feel that I have been trying for years to make up that lost opportunity - yes, I wish I'd been willing to work harder and really get the grasp of history, literature and social sciences that I now see as critical. I've done alright - but when I look at my father's bookshelves (he was a writer by trade) I shudder at the volume of information he had absorbed as a "real" humanities major.
You'd think that since I previewed my post twice , I'd actually catch my spelling mistakes. :-)
I meant Xenophobic....
Cherish my balls, mmkay?
There are few schools today that really grade. The top schools are (e.g. Harvard, Yale, Duke, etc.), simply put, easy. Also, large universities aren't exactly bastions of stringent academic standards. I've gone to a large univeristy, UTK, and I also go to William and Mary. W&M is one of the few schools around that still has difficult classes without monumental grade inflation. But even at the so called "academic bootcamp*" of W&M, there is some grade inflation among various majors. On the other hand, UTK is a massive joke.
I like the current Duke student's nonsensical argument that goes "we're all smart so we deserve A's." He needs to take a basic statistics class. Duke, Harvard, et al. are just doing their students a favor by giving them good grades so they will appear better than people from, say, Virginia Tech. I assume the universities are looking for a quid pro quo of sorts. Let's all just hope that employers and grad schools realize the ivies are a joke, with only a few notable exceptions.
Sure, grade inflation may look pretty in the Ivy Leagues, but it all evens out in the real world. Don't think major employers don't take a look at all of their applicants from Harvard or wherever and notice that, for some reason, 50 applicants all have 4.0s while the highest grade of an MIT applicant is a 3.5/4.0. (Yes, I know MIT is on a 5.0 scale.)
I had a TA who said, "A degree is not a birthright" and meant it.
This is going to be the end of the 112% class average in my computer science class, isn't it?
(The class average right now is honest-to-goodness 112%.)
I never thought of my school as easy. It highly regarded in the engineering and technical communities. We have the second most active robotics department in the country...yada yada yada...
The point is, engineering students here still see the joys of grade inflation. Perhaps not as drastic as in the story, but students always seem to get grades higher than the numbers conclude.
It makes the Profs look good, and the students feel good. In my experience, an unhappy student will kick, scream, and yell about ANYTHING they don't like. Getting a call from a parent (such a High School tactic) makes the engineering administration here act.
I'm in college, its not easy to get an A, I dont care what the guy says. Just because alot of people do well in college doesnt mean theres grade inflation, perhaps its because people do all their work, they get high grades on their tests and they write good papers, maybe thats why they got the A.
But no, some dumbass has to try to rob everyone who got a legit A of all the credit they deserve. This guy pisses me off.
I admit I could never get an A in math, but thats why I'm not majoring in math, someone whos good at math could major in math and get all As in math. In college people get to do what they are good at and what they like doing so why the hell shouldnt they be getting all As?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Look at the GPA's at top grad schools, in business you see 3.8s and in engineering 3.2-3.5 is generally what is seen. I am an CE Student at the University of Michigan and I can tell you that when I started taking CE classes I got my first C's of my college career, they are harder and require more work. The Sciences were easier and humanities courses I took I could pull a B or an A without showing up. I am sick of this business of GPAs and people caring. Honestly people look at me like I am crazy when I say I do not care about the grades but rather did I learn or not. As far as I am concerned grades are a farce, I have known people with high grades who really do not know that much but have great quantative ability.
Let me start by saying that no, I didn't RTFA, just posting my experience.
I am a Comp Sci major at a certain central Florida university. As such I am required to maintain a C or better GPA, as well as get a C or better in any class I take in order for it to count towards my major.
We are forced to take Physics I and II, Calc I and II, the very same class engineers take, as well as electives for classes such as Calc III and Differential Equations. Engineers can get a D in the class and still have it count. IMO this is a bunch of bullshit. My job may use the skills I learn in diff eq or calc but won't depend on it, as well as the lives of others too.
Just my $0.02, I am currently retaking a class because I got a C- (since that's less then a C, I didn't get credit for it!) and I'm pretty pissed about this stupid policy.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
And at UC Santa Barbara, I was enlightened by an anecdote from one of my history professors. He said that on that day the chairman had come by and suggested that the professor go easy this quarter because they needed more history majors in the discipline. I always suspected that friends of mine who were ground down by their sophomore Chaucer classes were part of that department's winnowing process. I also noticed that it seemed easy to get B's in film studies courses, but hard to get A's. I think this was to provide some correction for the general education masses who, perhaps, didn't really need to understand the mise-en-scene concept or have an opinion over the limitations of the auteur theory.
I did well in the history course (about the French Revolution and Napoleon). Grade inflation was a well-trod topic in academia back then, as well.
From my experience, the grade inflation is most apparent in the soft sciences(poly-sci, etc) and humanities(English et.al). In engineering and hard sciences (bio,chem, physics,math), professors have absolutely no qualms (as evidenced by my transcript) about giving C's and below. Interestingly, I got A's in every single humanities class I took.
The reason intro calculus is the most failed class is because they have a 7-question integrals exam that you can take a few times during a semester. If you don't get them all right on any one administration of the exam, you fail.
I know at least one EE professor who awards no partial credit (and rightly so), saying, "You're an engineer. You make a mistake at your job, people die." At least four of my professors did not curve any of the classes they taught, their reasoning being that a student earns his grade, and doesn't just fall ass-backwards into an A.
Also, Dr. Stuart Rojstaczer has a primary appointment in the Earth and Ocean Sciences Dept., and a secondary appointment in the Civil Dept., and right now he's a Visiting Professor at Stanford.
(Aside: Stanford is the place where you can drop a class until the day of the final with no mention of the class on your transcript. And if you don't show for the final, they assume you've withdrawn from the class, but don't list it on your transcript as a withdrawal.)
I used to teach a speech course at a state university. It was pretty much the philosophy of the department that, although students' performance would typically fall in a bell curve type distribution, there was no need to force a bell curve...in other words, if the students gave good speeches - rather than gave _better_ speeches than their peers in class [which is the essence of a forced bell curve] - then they should receive a rewarding grade.
Which brings me to my second point... grading 'subjective' courses is, IMO, more difficult for the teacher because it brings in the element of personal bias, and typically helps to inflate grades the way the author mentions. I could give a multiple choice test, based on specific information given in lecture or textbooks, and grade accordingly. And the scores fell along a distribution curve [A-F]. But grading someone giving a speech was more difficult. For the ones who were more comfortable speaking in public, their initial grades on speeches may have been higher, but through the semester, the ones who improved the most also received better grades, because one of the goals of the course was to get people comfortable speaking in public. So it was more arbitrary.
In the less abstract courses that deal more in facts and numbers [chemistry, anatomy, calculus, etc.], it would seem to be more likely to have grades that approximated the curve.
Who put this thing together? Me, that's who.
The way to get an A. Do all your work. Do all your homework. Make sure all your work and your homework is done right. Make sure your papers are perfect. Make sure you do perfect on the Exams and show up to class everyday.
You will definately get an A no matter what the class is, if you do this. You SHOULD get an A because you deserve an A if you do perfect.
Now, if you slack off, you miss a few classes, you dont do all your homework and you dont do all too great on your tests, thats when you get the B or the C.
Theres no grade inflation, you wont get an A unless you do EVERYTHING. I'm not saying everyone should get an A or B but if everyone is doing all their work and its all done right how can a professor not give them an A?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
wait until i graduate before people do something about this kthnx
Other situation can arise wherein one can recieve a decent grade in a CS course and not one of their programs was written by themselves. Then again, this really will bite them in the ass 10 minutes into a job interview or worse, 10 days into their first job. Practice makes perfect - not deserving a grade will catch up with you eventually, whether you "got away with it" initially or not.
-- (Score:i, Imaginary)
Grade inflation in the lower grades is a huge problem... it is at the point where some teachers have been fired for refusing to raise grades at a parent's request. When those kids get to college (and we have reached alltime highs of high school students going on to college... over 2/3's, the last I had heard), what happens? If they go to, say, MIT, they flunk out, but most colleges can't afford to just flunk loads of their students out... they have to think of their bottom line. If the parents want to pay them for a diploma, then that's what they'll get. That would have meant a threat to a colege's accredidation in the past, but as inflation inched up, and became more widespread, the risk becomes lower. The "bottom line" is also what drives the publish-or-perish mentality that leaves lots of tech students being dealing with TAs rather than their big-name professor.
Quite honestly, I can't understand why science and engineering majors are held to one standard for grades and academics versus humanities majors even in the same school.
IMHO it has a lot to do with the kind of people who would choose to major in fields which make no secret of being a PITA. They are the people who, by and large, are least effected by the pre-college grade inflation. As a result, those parts of the university aren't under the same pressure to inflate as the rest of the university is. If they ever do come under the pressure, however, they will inflate, too.
College degrees are increasingly becoming as impressive as a high school degree.
I see a lot of posts talking about how libral arts is way too different to grade than engineering/tech majors. Thats just not true, the same way a math problem needs formulas and all the work shown. Anaysis of a case study or literary work needs citings, close inspection of the reading and facts to support your claim. While in math that may lead you to one answer, when analyzing say a case study, you need to put everything in order before you give out an answer. I would say those problem solving skills that i learned in my management classes helped me in my technical classes to achieve better grades.
I'd sign up for all of these guy's classes.. Un/fortunately, we don't seem to have a rash of grade inflation at WIU, atleast not to the extremes that are depicted by the media about other schools.
Perhaps it is because people's lives hang in the balance when they interact with the products and structures designed by science/engineering students.
Riiiiiight. So all those polsci and sociology and psychology and health policy people who go on to devise the social and political systems that deploy the resources in the institutions that care for you when you're sick, or regulate toxins in your environment, or create a legal and punishment system, or induce or alleviate recessions and monetary policy (and so on) are just pissing in the wind? I mean, what's the construction and regulation of the byzantine complexity of social economies compared with building a bridge or a new Linux kernel?
Da Blog
Yeah, I once got an A at Pomona. It was for a poetry workshop. We wrote, read, hung out, gave a reading at the end. We had to turn in somewhere around ten poems (depending on length) plus two or three translations and an essay on your own poetics and an essay on another's poetics by the end of the semester. I think everyone who did that probably ended up with an A provided they gave a damn in their effort. I think one of my ten poems ran something like "Purple. Yellow. Black./ The dragonflies should met./ Like wooden racecars loose on the ice:/ Where are the children on nights like these?/ Muses, your voices are too strong to hear!/ I kiss you." Am I deserving? Judge me! Judge me!
Actually, the guy who wrote this peice is an Associate Professor of Geology and of Civil and Environmental Engineering. So, while this piece might not be from a "technical" point of view, it refers to the sciences rather than the humanities.
As a PhD student in English Lit, grade inflation has *not* been my expierence at all, but rather the opposite--professors who don't give out simple A's on principle.
"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." -Isaac Asimov
I am a graduate with an MA, so what bothers me about grade inflation is that the value of my degree is being eroded as more and more people are getting my degree that would not have made the cut in my year.
Allan
> I think that's a problem with the administration though.
> It's unrealistic to think that everyone in a class can be
> above average. That's what a C is supposed to mean right?
College is different than high school, where they HAVE to keep the dregs of society around. Everyone in college SHOULD be above average from the very beginning.
The D and C students should never have set foot in a college (or university) in the first place. The admissions process should have weeded them out. And if people ARE chronicly getting those sub-par grades, admissions should be tightened up and made more competetive.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
In engineering, if you screw up, at the very least it costs someone a (normally) substantial amount of money to fix the problem, or to pay the lawyers. At the other end of the spectrum, lots of people die (the bridge collapses, the airplane blows up, the submarine sinks). I think that professors in engineering schools take that into account when they assign grades.
An engineer will tell you what the answer is, how accurate it is, and what assumptions were made in getting that answer. In the end, something gets built, and either works or not, entirely based on how closely the engineer understands the problem, and how effective he is at reaching a solution. For the problems that you work on in college, there is very little wiggle room on the correct answers.
In few other professions will someone without many years of proven experience be given the kind of responsibilities that many engineers have to deal with. They would rather flunk you out than let you go forward without the skills you need, and the ability to apply those skills.
Many people leave engineering in the first few years of their careers, and decide to follow another career path. This happens because they can't deal with the pressures of trying to solve the problem, within budget, on time, and working properly.
I think the whole idea of grades should be tossed. Students should simply "pass" by scoring a minimum required. In return, the threashold would be moved higher. The threashold should be equivalent to what is normally a "B" now IMO.
:-)
Students should be given so many tries to re-take exams. For example, give them a quota of 4 retries per semester (out of *all* classes), perhaps with a retry fee. Somebody with too high a retest count should probably be kicked out if they don't get their act together. (Perhaps freshmen should be given more retries because they don't really know what to expect yet.)
However, the downside is that if there is a subject that you just really stink at, then that one subject might keep you from graduating. Whether this is good or not, I have yet to decide. Should somebody be kept out of engineering just because their english really really sucks and they don't have a knack? This may disquality a lot of otherwise bright foreign students. (Then again, they'll just become H-1B's anyhow if we let them
Or me with bad spailing.
Table-ized A.I.
I have to admit I've never understood curve grading. True, I'm a physics major and so can't speak to other disciplines (in particular economics and electrical engineering, not to mention the humanities), but to me grading always seemed simple. One of my intro physics professors stated it well:
If you perfectly learn all of the material, you get 100%. If you don't learn any of the material, you get 0%.
I've taken classes where I've learned about 60% (average grade on tests) and gotten an B because that's how the grading was curved. Leaving those classes, I've always been confused about the material and have to go back and learn it right the next time I encounter it. I can properly apply a skill set that's 90% complete (A-), but not one that's 60% complete. There's just too little to work with; none of it sticks together.
Of course, everyone learns at different rates. Some might be bored to tears while others are struggling. Philosophically, my answer is that IT DOESN'T MATTER. A class presents material, and the grade is an *absolute* indicator of how much of it you successfully pick up. People who are having trouble need to put in more effort than those who aren't. That may seem harsh, but it's not my intention. There really shouldn't be anything wrong with doing your best and getting a C (75%). That's still a damn good fraction of the material, and I'd rather get a true C (75%) than an inflated B (60%) any day.
How do you get a 0.0 GPA, You paid to go to college and you didnt go to class at all?
Dumbass!
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If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. I agree 100%. If the homework is not done, the kid should not spend 1 second watching TV, talking on the phone, playing video games, etc. That's not to say that you should just lock him in his room and forget about him, though. As the parent post said, you should offer to help with anything except actually doing his homework for him. Once he understands that you are willing to help, and that he will be doing ABSOLUTELY nothing else until the homework is finished, he'll start doing it.
Admittedly, this is complicated greatly by the 50% custody thing. That's a whole different issue, though.
I think you meant transsexual or hermaphrodite. Transvestites just like to dress up in clothing traditionally meant for the opposite gender.
Sorry, feeling pedantic today.
As a young professor, I wonder if grade inflation isn't correlated with the increased use of student course reviews. After all, if your job is on the line, giving higher grades is probably the easiest way to boost your reviews.
A a comment from a freshmen in highshcool who unfortunetly still remembers homework at that age let me tell you something: Almost all homework falls into 2 categories
1 Pointless assignments given so the parents would see there child doin something related school. THis unfortunetly seems to be a majority fo the homework given in most clases. FOr some reason a lot of parents seem to thing that
Homework=learning
and this is not the case by any means. Up until highschool the amoutn of homework a chjild has bears no corelation to anything grades, self esteem future etc. I'm sorry but I don't balme your child. FOr some reason parents and teachers have somehow mannaged to convince themselves that students should be doing school work for more hours a day and more days a week then workers post industrial revolution. CLose to a total of 9-10 hours a day and probably aournd 1-4 on weekends, not including projects. Is there a reason kid's can't be kids. but anyway
2 math assignments. Math the only subject in my experiance that truly needs, or even gain anyhting significant from homework.
procrastination is a way of life aka i'll think up a sig later
But what if I'm the history major who tutors the CS students in math, eh?
(Actually, I was.)
And my teachers didnt inflate. I got an A- on all of my papers.
Also about cramming, I never cram and I never study, I admit I get Cs and Bs on my exams because of it.
The A student is the student who knows the material as well as the teacher and who is ahead of everyone in Class.
Theres alot of good teachers in college compared to the amountin highschool.
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Bullshit!
Illiterate means "not literate", or, loosely, unable to read. I can say with all conviction that I am illiterate in Spanish, French, German, as well as in hundreds of African dialects.
What did you think that "illiterate" meant?
And, of course, penmanship and personal hygiene are important in such courses as calligraphy and nursing...
The difference is in the way tests and homework can be scored. In math, 2+2 is always 4; there's no room for equivocation. It's either right or wrong. In humanities, if you spell everything right and stick to the topic of the paper, you get a B. But what's the difference between a B and a B+?
The scale is subjective in humanities courses; professors probably push grades up because of pressures to graduate more students. Or at least keep them in school. No college ever received 10K a semester from a dropout.
I went to the University of California at Santa Cruz, and started when grades were still optional (as of Fall 2001 letter grades became mandatory). For each class I received a grade of Pass or No Pass, and a written evaluation of my work (For the record, evals in large (>100 students) classes were usually brief). This written evaluation was generally a much better indication of my true performance (good or bad) than a grade would have been. I also got into all 3 grad schools I applied to (including U Washington and U British Columbia, both very highly ranked in my field) with no problems. Who needs a GPA? I have one now in graduate school, and I don't think people have any better idea of what kind of student I am than they did with letter grades.
I'm currently an undergraduate in a cognitive science & artificial intelligence program. My program is split into nearly even thirds of humanities ( mostly philosophy & linguistics ), social sciences ( psychology ) and hard(er) sciences ( maths & comp. sci ). I've noticed a very distinct gradient in both the workload & rigor across the courses in the different fields.
I don't like to say that sciences are harder or more difficult, because I don't think that's a fair comparison. One must be just as intelligent and competent in a pure humanities, especially considering that most of what you spend your time grappling with is much less precisely defined, so there is vast room for ambiguity and confusion. However there is a very different standard of rigor in terms of what is considered "quality" material. In math its fairly obvious, you either have the correct method and the correct answer or you don't, its black and white. In philosophy, there are many more gradients of "truth" especially when truth itself is not well defined. Its more about the way in which you argue than what you argue. ?More about style than content?
Also the workload is much different. In higher years of humanities essentially all you do is read papers and write papers. One need not even pay attention to the majority of it, just understanding the key ideas is often sufficient. It is, perhaps, easier to "coast". Anyone who's attempted to "coast" through a 3rd year math or sciences course ( unless they're already an old hand at the given material ) will fall on their face within the first month.
I have a lot of friends going into grad school in humanities, and I think they are all very intelligent, well-read people with a good deal of insight into their respective field, but I think that the difference in rigor of the fields is definitely a strong force.
Ultimately this shapes the grading distribution. If it is so much easier to be wrong in one field, you must expect that the grades will be lower than one where the ultimate "truth" in a discourse is open to interpretation and personal opinion.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
As grades spiral upward, my job becomes more difficult. Somehow, I have to get the most from my students without the external motivator of grades.
This is a university professor? Since when do university professors care in the least what grade a student earns? We're not talking about high school (where education is mandated by law); we're talking about university (where you pay to learn, hence not a right; it's a privilege).
True, for some students -- those with a strong internal desire to learn -- the absence of real grades is actually a blessing. Outstanding students don't need a teacher who carries a big stick. They need educators who are partners and facilitators in learning.
No university student should EVER need a teacher with a big stick; nor should a university student ever need a "motivator." University students should already be "motivated" to participate and learn in class... else they shouldn't be at university.
But not every student is so motivated.
Fine. Then students who are not motivated should fail and be removed from university.
So when the commonest grade is A, I have to use other means to get them to learn: I have to cajole, to gently persuade.
Why? Why should a university professor feel pressure to "cajole" a student to learn, to participate? Again... a university student is of age and should be held responsible/accountable for his actions/decisions.
And in all honesty, I don't think I have the psychological skills necessary in this climate to approach my goal of educating all my students well. Many of my colleagues around the country would, I think, acknowledge a similar lack of such skills if pressed.
I do believe a lot of his colleagues would scoff at the notion that they must "motivate" or utilize some sort of "psychological skill" to get students to learn. All of my university professors were the exact same: show up to class and participate or... don't. They didn't care. It was up to me to participate, to learn, to questions, to achieve. It wasn't the job of my professor to gently push me in the right direction. Bullshit. He/she gave me the tools needed to succeed. It was entirely up to me to use them.
We spend way too much time these days making excuses and making things easier. We need to stop making excuses and start demanding better performance. If students are failing science, for god's sake don't lower the science standard. Demand more from the students. If they don't work hard and don't achieve, then don't pass them.
A good example is the new California state English standard. 10 years ago most graduating high school students were required to pass 4 years of English (grammar, writing, and 2 years of literature). However, in the past 10 years the average test score has fallen dramatically and in response our beloved and respected School Administrators decided to lower the standards and require only 3 years of English study. Why? Why lower the standard when test scores fall? Why not demand more from students? And more from educators.
I got into UIUC (third ranked CS program in the country) with a mere 3.2 GPA (Carnegie Mellon). I took lots of hard courses, and never got a C. I ended up not choosing to go to UIUC, but I got in. Get research experience, and they won't mind the GPA.
I did a joint CS / Psychology degree at a Canadian liberal arts school..
Wasn't the brightest in the comp sci camp, but got a couple of A's because I can string sentences together. There were a lot of A's (bright kids... half girls almost!)
Was close to the brightest in the psych department, but by 3rd and 4th year, if there were any A's handed out in a psychology class it was the EXCEPTION.
I could count the A's on two hands that the entire psychology department gave on midterms/presentations in my last year of school.
Psych profs at my school didn't give an A to a student unless they learned something from the student... and most psychologists think they know it all.
with the exception of that neuropsych prof who gave every pretty girl a high grade. boy did he bug me (fortunately for my paper, the mistook my name for a girls name, so bam. A)
I spent five or six years interviewing applicants for the computer science degree at Cambridge University (that is, the real Cambridge in England, not MIT.) Cambridge is the premiere scientific university in the country, if not the world. Everybody who applied was offered an interview; a process of self-selection is evident - Cambridge tries to select only the very best students.
1. At my college (Cambridge is a collegiate system) we aimed to make six or seven offers and expect three or four candidates to get the required grades (interviews happen a few months prior to the applicants taking most of their A levels.)
2. If we had twenty to thirty applicants, we would usually find *one* that we had to have, one that seemed like a good bet, and thereafter we were scraping the barrel. The difference between the ones you were interested in and the rest was unbelievable.
3. All the applicants were taking fast-path maths at school and usually had their first maths A level already in the bag at grade A. All the applicants had solid gold references from their schools and had predictions of all A-grades for the rest of their A levels.
4. This means that as interviewers, school performance is useless to us as selectors since it gives us no information on which to differentiate between students. What's left is interview, which means making a decision based on less than half an hour with a terrified applicant. Another tool we could use (and will probably return to) is pre-filtering by making applicants sit an examination of our own devising.
5. We went to great lengths to put the interviewees at ease, explaining that there were no trick questions, that if we asked something with a seemingly obvious answer then we genuinely expected the obvious answer, that we would be guiding them through some difficult problems to see how they worked and so forth and so forth. Every interview started with a brief chat about their interests and a warm up problem. We then aimed to get them through at least two hard problems with the aim of testing a range of the talents we believe a good computer scientist should possess.
6. In most cases we only got through a single hard problem. In all too many cases we didn't get much further than the warm-up problem.
7. The warm up problem was usually something like - prove that the product of any three consecutive integers is divisible by six;
- draw y = x^2 (the number of people that cannot do this makes one weep);
- (our favourite) imagine someone had asked *you* to design the internet, sketch out a design.
8. Many interviewees could not tell you straight off that (2^57) / 2 = 2^56.
9. Despite already having a grade A at A level, these star pupils did not have the mathematical facility that we the interviewers had when we did our O levels (O levels were taken at age 15, now replaced by GCSEs, and one usually took eight or nine of them, while A levels are taken at age 17 and one usually takes three or four of them.)
10. Sixteen years ago the UK government changed the school examination system from O levels to GCSEs, ostensibly to ensure everybody studied the same curriculum, although a cynic might suggest that it was done just to be seen to be doing *something* about education.
11. In order to make the change look like a roaring success, the exam results for the first years were undeniably sugar coated.
12. Either way, pupils were entering A level courses less well prepared that they did under the O level system.
13. The introduction of school league tables by bureaucrats that simply do not understand statistics has led to competition and hence grade inflation in the following ways: higher marks given for coursework, which forms a substantial part of the overall exam result; selection of easier examination boards for A levels (not all examination boards set exams of the same level of difficulty - some will even award two A levels (e.g. one for pure and one for applied mathematics) for the same course content that will only net you one A level with another board); and generally making the A and B grades so broad that there is a huge gulf between a good A and a weak A.
14. Despite wails of frustration from the immediate consumers of these exam results (employers and universities) that standards are falling, the UK government (and the school teaching bodies) insists that year-on-year improvements in the number of people getting As is the product of better and better teaching (although teachers' pay has not risen commensurately and there is a reasonably high turnover rate in teaching - these are clearly extremely well motivated and talented teachers!)
15. It doesn't help that the government insists that everybody must be an academic at heart and is close to achieving its goal of getting 50% of school leavers into higher education. This means that in the most optimistic case, most university students are going to have an IQ around 100. I'm not making value judgements about the relative worth of intelligence, but trust me that an IQ that mediocre is a *very* bad sign for someone aiming at a degree - unless the degree is trivial to obtain.
16. We're already at the stage where having a degree doesn't tell you much about someone's ability. So yet again employers have to fall back on unreliable interviews to make a decision.
17. Even if you think grades could and should be awarded for objective levels of technical ability, that doesn't really help employers in the market for the very best candidates.
18. I'd really like to conduct an experiment where I get a group of successful GCSE level, A level and degree level students to sit the corresponding examinations from twenty years ago. I'd lay money on the results being shockingly poor.
Right, that's my tuppeny'orth.
Top US colleges don't have a C++ course.
I have been the Director of 3 engineering departments doing R & D over the last 10 years. In that time I have interviewed thousands of college graduates with many different flavors of degrees in engineering. I can definitely tell you that almost 99.9% percent of them don't understand the basic skills that software engineers need to know.
I have come up with a two question weed out process:
1. write a hello world program.
if they pass that...
2. write a a string copy routine.
almost none of them can pass #1. Of the ones that do almost none can pass #2.
The ones I pick are the ones who I think my lead programmers can train to be good engineers, something I would have thought that the colleges should have been teaching them.
I am now used to interviewing 100-200 grads to get 1 employees.
I remember when I was taking grad classes as an undergrad to get credits. The undergrad classes were harsh, but the grad classes in the same subject, and sometimes as a "codeshare" with an undergrad class were much easier. While an grader would deduct points for style and format from an u/g, they wouldn't for a grad student. *Even on the same TEST*. Here's why:
Remember that private universities are corporations, and they want revenue. Most grad students were there at the cost of their companies. Typically, as long as they get a B or above, the corporation pays. Otherwise the student pays. Take a class or two, and if the grades are not up to par, its not financially worth taking the class. So to make sure the university gets a steady revenue stream from the local corps, they make sure that the students pass with an A or B.
At least thats how it was when I was there. Did I mention I'm never going back?
I took a class last semester called 'Industrial Organizations' at my school (Rockhurst University; small, private, Jesuit). It was an upper-division economics class (EC 4400) taught by a professor that I have a lot of respect for. The week before exams, he told us that he thought everyone in the 16 person class would be getting A's.
Grade inflation! I can hear some of you cry out. In this case, however, I disagree. The professor himself said that this class was the best he had had in his 15+ years teaching this particular course, and that he believed the students really earned the A grade.
And he was right. It was a difficult class, and I found it to be my hardest class that semester (and I have some difficult classes). And the other students agreed; the teacher himself is amazing and inspiring, and everyone in the class really did work hard for their grades. And learned more, too!
So situations like this are not all bad.
Illiterate means "not literate", or, loosely, unable to read. I can say with all conviction that I am illiterate in Spanish, French, German, as well as in hundreds of African dialects.
What did you think that "illiterate" meant?
The original post highlights the similarities between several groups of people : How many geeks are borderline illiterate? BSEE, BSCS, MSCS, MSEE, MCSE, H1B-just-off-the-boat, it seems to make little difference.
Apparently, the original poster thinks little of the skills of those holding certain technical credentials, and then throws into the mix H1B ( a temporary visa program in the US for skilled workers) holders. In addition, s/he throws in the perjorative term : "just-off-the-boat". To this, I cry "Xenophobia", and simply point out that it is rude and misguided to confuse their level of intelligence with their level of fluency in written English. I would also hope that others would not make the same mistake linking my intelligence to my ability to read foreign languages.
Someone, please, mod me "off-topic." We've gone too far astray....
When a student is asked to solve a differential equation or calculate the force being applied to an object, the student cannot fudge their way through the answer. They are either right or wrong. And a student who is wrong but told they are right will build bridges that fall down or airplanes that don't fly.
And the objectivity goes both ways. If a grader arbitrarily gives a student an A because, say, the student is particularly attractive and flirtatious (I'm an academic and yes, this happens all the time), an outside reviewer can evaluate that student's answers and determine whether the grader was acting with integrity when they awarded the grade.
In the social sciences, however, grades are much more subjective. The incentives are for the professor to award high grades and there is really no practical way for outside reviewers to challenge the grading policy with regards to, say, English papers.
And when ill-equiped liberal arts students go out into the world, they typically become business types with equally amorphous and subjective performance measures. Rarely can someone objectively say that the company would have earned $1M more in profit because some suit didn't understand the Willa Cather's oblique phallic references.
I have two BAs: One in a liberal arts field and one in a hard science. So I can say from experience that the amount of effort and intelligence required to successfully complete a liberal arts degree is far below that required to complete a technical degree.
So although the liberal arts professors have little incentive to give bad grades and engineering students are probably bummed to compare their grades to their liberal arts brethren, when involved in a hiring process, I would give much more credit to an engineering student with As and Bs than a liberal arts graduate with straight As simply because the engineering grades are a credible signal of ability and determination.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
It shows the author is a wimp, without the courage of his convictions. It shows that our educational system is being taken over by left wingers bent upon destroying our country, while making wimps 'feel good about themselves' The DOE needs to become a branch of the DOD! Our future national security rests on how well our childred can defend the counry.
An even better grading system (in my opinion) is the one used at many Canadian institutes of higher learning, for example at the University of Waterloo (the other UW). Students' final grades in a class are just a percentage (0-100). Of course, this is still subject to belling and inflation, but it provides a far finer granualarity.
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
> Perhaps it is because they aren't worried > about hurting students self esteem? That's probably because we're geeks and preserving our self-esteem only leaves us with unrealistic expectations for the workplace. After all, we're going to be managed by PHBs and be made to feel worthless anyway, so why not start in college?
People who teach well arent the ones doing it for the money, its the greedy ones who do it for the money who suck.
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This reminds me of what happened in Australia. We have a system called TER (tertiary entrance rank) which is effectivly a mark out of 100 that is a bell curve with an median of 50. It has the same importance as SATs. We used the system for many years but then results started getting published in newspapers. Each year there were complaints about the education system not performing well enough, since there were always half of the students getting under 50. Surely in a good system this would improve.
Now we have a UAI (university admmision index) which each year is artificially inflated further. A UAI of 70 last year would get ~72 this year. How long can that continue?
Isnt' this just what the outcome based ecudation lame socialists want so that everyone has the same outcome regardless of how much/how well they performed in college?
We're all the same and the law will make it so.
Stupid, stupid socialists
This is the real reason college educations are not what they ought to be. The professor doesn't understand that the grades aren't inflating they are being compressed at the high end of the scale. If grades were inflating an "A" might be the middle grade now and "A^3" would be the highest grade. If this is typical of PHd critical thinking these days then we're all in trouble. Later my /. friends
I meant B-/C+ not B+/C-, that would be quite different.
My Sig is Sauer.
And you're not elitist?
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
This doesn't really have anything to do with the article, but I'm wondering if anyone here has ever encountered the concept of ressurection points in their college curriculum. I just took Biology and the proffesors system was that the comprehensive final added points back to the three previous exams for the coresponding questions. I really thought this was the most enlightened grading scheme I've ever seen, and I don't understand why it isn't adopted more. After all isn't the point to at least eventually learn the material. I don't see why ones grade should be punished just because you didn't quite get the hang of the material until later in the course.
You said, I certainly earned straight A's in humanities classes (literature and a lot of Asian history and language) with a fraction of the effort required to maintain a B average as a molecular biology major.
As a professor of English, my direct advice to you would have been to switch your major, though you probably would have flunked out if you tried to study English beyond the undergraduate level.
The Tempest was being performed in 1611. It was printed in the First Folio in 1623. In 1580 Mongaigne wrote "Of the Cannibals" about the Brazilian Indians, and this essay is the source of Gonzalo's speech. Colonial Britain was well under way by the early 1600s. Indeed, any casual reader of The Norton Shakespeare will find the following:
If you had asserted that imperial England did not begin until the 19th century (do you even know what was happening in Georgian England during the 18th century?) you would have gotten an F in my class, especially if you used it as a means to debunk postcolonial readings of The Tempest.
Shows what you learned at Yale. What a waste of money.
blog
Well, the reason is economical, I'm not supposed to talk about it, so I'll remain Anonymous.
If you have higher grades, you're getting graduated earlier, the fact is that the job market is really not that good right now, so people are going back to school, if people are gaduated in 2 years instead of 3 because they're getting better grades, the school will be able to have one third more students, and therefore increase their profits by 33%, just by giving people better grades than what they deserve.
And you're still wondering why schools' quotes are so high, while the job market is so low?
I am a student at Duke and I know Stuart Rojstaczer, the author of the Op-Ed piece on grade inflation. While his primary appointment is in Earth and Ocean Sciences as a hydrologist, Dr. Rojstaczer is also an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. I can vouch for the fact that grade inflation here is not limited to non-science and engineering departments.
The best professors I've had, and the ones I respected most, were ones who did not curve their grades. They make their expectations very clear to the students and tell them exactly what kind of work will get an A, B, or C. Then they stick to these expectations all throughout the term - even if the class as a whole starts doing badly.
The kicker? Generally the distribution of grades ends up as a much more accurate Bell curve than that of my professors who "curve" their grades.
The advisor to my senior research project is also one who doesn't believe in curving. So, we have a well-balanced and solidly-grounded project... but we're probably going to end up with a B if we work hard - because the advisor saw the potential of this project, and we didn't live up to it.
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
"But if you're going to college then you must be self-motivated..."
I was a TA for an undergraduate class for the last three semesters, and I am shocked and appalled at your comment. You may be self-motivated, but I VEHEMENTLY disagree that being in college means an individual is self-motivated. Far from it.
I actually couldn't care less about the grading system now since I'm out of school and never intend to go back... That being said, I've seen an exam that a buddy of mine TA'd. It was the EXACT same exam, word for word and number for number that we did in the year that I took the course.
When I took the course, the class average was something like 60-70% for that exam. The year that my buddy TA'd, the class average was 30%. Grading on a curve means that if the class is full of morons then they will be judged favourably.
Alternately, what if the kids ARE smarter now?
If you had asserted that imperial England did not begin until the 19th century (do you even know what was happening in Georgian England during the 18th century?) you would have gotten an F in my class, especially if you used it as a means to debunk postcolonial readings of The Tempest.
If you tried to assert that British Imperialism is merely the act of empire-building, and not the mindset of the masses, I would have certainly had an excellent time explaining the difference between postmodern interpretation of the term "British Imperialism" and your (firsthand) 1800's interpretation of the word.
You imply that you are a liberal educator (especially if you used it as a means to debunk postcolonial readings of The Tempest). However, unlike you, Yale professors would never drop a hard F on a student for attempting to interpret a literary work using the construct of british imperialism.
If you actually are an English professor, I pray that you are not so narrow minded that you would fail a student for interpreting a work differently (even if more conservatively) than you would like.
When I was a engineering grad student at Stanford, you needed a 3.2 to graduate.
Think about it. Everyone that graduates in that program is within a range of 0.8. Suddenly a 3.5 seems kinda low.
Just for the record. I'm smart, worked my butt off, and just barely cleared the minimum grade. And I can't remember most of it (despite working in my degree field). Our concept of "education" is rather broken.
If the humanities majors stop talking to the math/sci/engineering majors, then tens of thousands of programmers will end up spelling like CmdrTaco!!
(Sorry, Rob. We're a bunch of ruthless ingrates here, I know.)
The only concession my school (as a whole) makes for grading is that we have no D or F grades. Instead, if you do worse than a C, you get the equivalent of an F, called instead a "NR" - no record. That's right, if you fail a course, it doesn't appear on your transcript. It's certainly saved me a few times, and it's encouraged me to take classes that were very challenging.
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
. . .when the commonest grade is A. . .
;-)
hopefully he is not a professor of english...
In lieu of recent reports of grade inflation, I propose the following new grading primer:
E - Eager!
N - Nice!
R - Reasonable!
O - On Time!
N - Not Bad!
Along with goading students into a psychologically comforted state, this almost instinctively refutes all attempts for inflated grading.
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
Posting anonymously to keep the noise from my username down.
OK, so I feel like a total schmuck for being so aggressive. FWIW, I was responding to your insinuation that humanities professors grade according to a political agenda. Some may, but many of us don't, even if we do have political agendas.
I have a political agenda and it does lean leftwards, but students who produce leftist trash get graded accordingly. While they may live in a place closer to my heart, I don't reward bad writing and/or argumentation. By the same and oppositely directed token, a well-supported argument that busts apart leftist party lines will get the grade it deserves. I have given A's to students who have, for example, argued pro-Life well.
My job is to teach students how to effectively express themselves in writing. I also want them to think critically, and I reacted negatively to your insinuation that espousing a wrongheaded politically correct interpretation would do well (e.g. Prospero as white male oppressor of indigenous persons).
I'm sorry your professor trounced you for pointing out that Victorian imperialism postdates The Tempest by some two hundred years. I'm wondering who that could have been. Hopefully not one of the tenured faculty.
I'm sorry I harshed on your comment without taking into account that you were speaking of a real-world experience.
Stupid me.
msq
I would have emailed this, but you don't have a website or email listed.
I teach at a local trade school that offers, among other things, associates degrees in network administration. Several terms ago, I had a class that was all here on financial aid from a local employer who had laid them off, and was putting them through school as part of the package.
Several of them EARNED D's and F's in my class. (Network Infrastructure) I was ordered to change their grades to C's, beause anything less than a C gets them dropped from the program if they are on finacial aid of this type.
I did it under protest, because I have to feed my family, but I know of MANY instances of this type of behavior. The school cares about money and image. (i.e. graduation rate) I will never hire anyone from this school if I ever get back into the field, and unfortunately, will not be able to provide references except to a very select few who are here to learn.
"My ship came in, but was bombed by terrorists in port and sank." - Me
My sense is that there were some pluses and minuses to this approach
You just didn't see the more extreme examples
goofing off in classes. Folks really did work.
Reasonable standards combined with a core curriculum meant at the end of the process, you really could assume your classmates knew something in advanced courses.
Sadly, cheating was VERY widespread from what I could see.
There wasn't a lot of teamwork-there were cases of things like people sabotaging other folks lab experiments and such.
There _were_ different standards in the sciences and social sciences/humanities--and this pushed a lot of folks out of the sciences.
Personally, if i were running a academic institution:
I would make the standards much, much stiffer
in areas that didn't have clear practical
value(i.e. if there isn't much demand for
archaelogists, only give the students dedicated
enough to actually get work in the field an A).
If there is a high demand for engineers,
lookat what it actually takes to produce a
reasonable engineer-and give those folks B's.
Secondly, I would reconsider seriously what it means to repeat a course. I'd move more towards a certification concept in the basic science
One of the Instructors at CMU(where I'm now taking courses via distance ed) has that concept. He gives folks a chance to redo all homework assignments-and the assignments are _tough_ but his _goal_ to get get as many people through the end of the process as he can. His class has been around long enough he has a pretty dang objective standard-and he really does work to get people up to that standard. (My own personal sense CMU cares more about the students that U of Chicago did--a famous quote there from an aministrator was that the University of Chicago didn't really need students!).
For every article out there bemoaning the problems of grade inflation there are others that point out that the actuality of grade inflation is a bit out of proportion. Here's an article on Christian Science Monitor's website: http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0820/p14s01-lehl.htm l
There are some things that have changed since the good ole' days when we got Cs and Ds for that first draft of an essay. The first being that there are a number of teahers out there who think that students learning about the writing process and honing critical thinking skills might not be such a BAD thing. As such, some of those same teacher are less likely to paint the first draft in red ink with a giant D- at the bottom of the page.
In the undergraduate department at the University of Toronto, the professor always make sure the class average is around B or C+. If the first exam has an average of an A, the professor will simply make the second exam harder to balance out the overall average. Therefore your mark doesn't depend on how much you study, but on where you are with respect to the rest of the class. If you are in a class of 100 with lots of students below you, be ready to get an "A". If you are stuck in a small competitive program with class size of 20 people, you will get an C+.
This is the exact same thing that happened to me. My average in 3rd year university was 67% because the class size was 20 people. My average in 4th year jumped to 90% when my program shares classes with students in other program, creating a bigger class of 100 students. And I spend the same amount of time studying in both years.
The worst part of this is that the University of Toronto doesn't even care if its program is the toughest and hardest to get high mark. A student with 80% average from a grade inflated university will be considered in the grad school application while a student with 75% average from University of Toronto gets his rejection letter 2 weeks after the date of submittion.
Those who fall into the illution of enrolling into a challenging program (a.k.a. Engineering Science at University of Toronto) for better learning experience will be forever doomed with low grade and without any chance of graduate school.
Life is just never fair.
- Burning Tyger
More importantly, why does this trend seem to be increasing/spreading? We are intentionally dumbing down our society. We've already set up an economic system that increasingly is promoting the construction of disposable or short lasting items - and then complain that the quality of what we buy is lacking. Soon, we wont even have people trained well enough to make such products.
The solution to poor education is *NOT* artificially educating grades - it's better education.
The solution to better SAT grades shouldnt be (but is) artificially inflating test scores but should be better education.
The solution to raising grades in educationally disadvantaged areas isnt artificially educating grades - it's better education.
Maybe I have a 1 track mind, but I managed to get in the high 90th percentile on my SAT - when it wasnt the joke of a "test" it is now, and when they didnt artificially inflate the test scores. I for one am happy that instead of raising my test score, they just taught me.
Just my 1 cent...
Robert
WebMaster:
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At Pomona and Harvard at least, it goes without saying that the students *are* above average. A friend of mine sat in a class at Pomona where the instructor asked how many were valedictorians at their high school. 90% of the class raised their hands.
People of this caliber generally do good work most of the time. There's no reason to artificially classify it as average. There's no benefit to grading on a strict bell curve -- these are usually "A" caliber students, doing "A" and "B" caliber work all the time.
Look at it this way -- most good grad schools have a matriculation requirement of B+. Who do you really think would be a better candidate for any grad school -- an "A" student from San Diego State, or a "B-" student from MIT?
you are right when you say realize the future is outcome based education
We all know people who got lousy GPA's or failed out and have gone on to do great things. Additionally, we all know people who have graduated with honors, who never really got their act together.
This world needs scientist, engineers, linguists, humaniteers(?) and all other types. The luck few of us are the ones who find our talents early and get an education that we can expand to a profession/career/business.
Prof. Rojstaczer's webpage can be found
Give the multiculturalists enough time, and they'll get their claws into the science and engineering courses, too, and we will see grade inflation there, too. These folks have confused equal *opportunity* with equal *outcomes*.
For those interested in reading more about grade inflation, check out Illiberal Education, by Dinesh D'Souza. A bit outdated, but still relevant.
Just shows kids are smarter than the old fogies. I guess they must rot in their graves now!
Funny, at the yuppy schools I went to, flunking students was problematic precisely because of those $300k homes. Principals cave pretty quickly to rich angry parents.
...then sitting down to homework will be hard for him - it's not a matter of his not liking to do it! I'd think it would be better for him if things were consistent between mom and dad's houses, or if he stayed in one place long enough to settle in. I'd think kids would have to be super far behind in reading, writing, or arithmetic before you'd hold them back at such a young age though. What's taught in fourth grade that isn't repeated in 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th?
The first years of school are such a damn repetitive bore, at least where I went.
The submitter ASSUMES that this man is not in engineering....... http://www.env.duke.edu/faculty/bios/rojstaczer.ht ml
Let's pull a few keywords from this page: Geology, Engineering, Biogeochemistry, Geospatial Technologies.
What kind of arrogance have engineers bred in themselves that they assume that grade inflation couldn't POSSIBLY occur in their own beloved disciplines?
I testify, due to the number of foreign-born teaching assistants that I have had whose command of English is not acceptable, that the poster's point is not without merit.
I think it's wonderful that people come from around the world to educate themselves in America. I believe, however, that until they demonstrate a solid ability to communicate in English, that they do not belong in positions where they are teaching English speakers. (Of course, language classes might be a different story!) I have no illusions whatsoever about (for example) my ability to teach a French person anything at all, although my conversational French is not horrible.
On the other hand, I work with several foreign-born students on a research project, and their communications skills (in English...I'm completely illiterate in their various native tongues) range from good to superb.
It's not xenophobic if it's demonstrably true, and it's demonstrably true that there exist H1B visa holders who do not have good English communicatons skills.
Of course that shouldn't stop them from doing whatever they want to of course...our President's communications skills are pretty lame too.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
OK that last paragraph came out a little fast. Department of Redundancy Department...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I think it has to do with a thing i like to call college tuition inflation. However if this corresponded correctly there would be scores like A infinity or A++++++++++++++++++++ for what was a B in 1991, so maybe i'm wrong =)
http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
Hey
What do you mean?
Our President, George Bush went to Yale
and he
Oh right, sorry
Bull shit there isnt a High School student in this country today who hasnt written a hello world program in BASIC or C/C++. String copy routines maybe hello world no. The only reason to higher new grads is cause they work for peanuts sometimes for free. I dont care how stupid they are if they dont cost me anything
When looking for graduate schools, I was amazed by how much I saw of this. I looked at the undergraduate degrees in order to determine what the school expected as an average applicant. My program is definately harder then most of those I saw, well.. especially since I'm doubling, but the ways the schools try to hide poor grades is disgusting. I've actually heard admission officers try to use it as a reason to come!
So quite honestly, it does concern me since my school is definately not inflating grades. I've worked my ass off and stuggled for a B. The majority of people on campus have 50-100% scholorships, making those of us who thought we were smart in highschool just die trying to keep up. I have quite a few friends who came in with sophmore standing, two who actually learned calculus either before or during junior high.
But all of this really does concern me. I laugh when I see graduate students put their GPA on their resume, since most graduate programs require a B or A for credit. And now that I'm taking 4 graduate classes, they really aren't hard.
The good thing is I do have proof of of my school's system. I have the campus grade report, showing the average grades broken down into various subgroups. It also shows the last 3 terns, The average grade is actually just shy of a 3.0. That's pretty respectable, and note that this is an engineering school.
I sometimes wonder if I should attach the grade report to my resume. If everyone is getting inflated grades, perhaps I should prove mine isn't.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
I just returned back to University to complete my CS degree (only part time now) but I have become totally suprised by the new grading schema. I wasn't the greatest student before but under this marking system i would have been an A/solid B student. One course, you don't receive an F till you reach 39-20% of the grade. Hell, and F- is under 20%, and you get up to 5% just for attending the Lab section! that means you just need to get over 15% on all the rest of the exams before you fail really bad!.
Here a B is 75%, as I recall that use to be a C+ if you were lucky. Sad part is the grading on my other class is worse.. an A- goes right down to like 75% or something silly like that.. you don't get a C- till somewhere around 55%, which is the min. required grade to continue with future classes. Almost like they are pushing everyone thru for a degree.. why couldn't they done that 8 yrs ago when I was there.. i would be a graduate then!
yeah!
(How often does that happen?)
58 posts modded 5?
Here Here! I experienced "questions" about my "low" GPA from Tech. It never seemed fair to compare GaTech students with students from Stanford, who (rumored) could drop the class the DAY OF THE FINAL.
In Electrical Engineering, it was a WELL KNOWN FACT that all classes was graded on the curve, and the median grade was 75. This meant that if you got a 76, you got a B. The lowest grade to get a C was a 60. This may seem like grade inflation HOWEVER it wasn't, since the tests were horrible and profs always CURVED UP! And if a test had a high average (higher than 75), WATCH OUT! The next test was going to be the equalizer!
And if anyone thinks GaTech has grade inflation, check the retention/graduation rate. Its in the 66-69% range. Brings to light the Freshman Orientation Motto "Look Left, Look Right, One of you *WON'T* be here 4 years from now".
if (!sig) { printf("Signature Unavailable\n"); }
I like the conclusion:
"...our success in providing this country with a truly educated public is diminished. The implications of such failure for a free society are tremendous."
[SARCASM]And to think nobody noticed that until now!!![/SARCASM] And now you even have a "highly educated" person running your country.
Set a pass mark of 60%, and then, of those students who make the grade:
The top 15% should be As, the next 25% Bs and the remainder Cs.
Cs should be an adequate grade.
As and Bs should be reserved for those who show knowledge above and beyond the normal requirements - and hence be able to command better pay.
Just my 10c.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The german magazine Der Spiegel recently had an article about grade inflation in Germanyand came to the conclusion that professors didn't want to give students low grades because of the bad economy and high unemployment rate in Germany, so as to not send the students out in the "wild" without any chance to get empoyed
When I first got to college, I failed out with a 1.1 GPA overall.
When I went back to school a short few years later, my GPA was 3.8. I'm sure grades are now inflated!
Or, well, maybe it's because the second time around I actually went to class once in a while...
I never saw an engineering course that wasn't curved, and curved in a big way. Instead of most of the students deserving a C and getting a B or A, most deserved an F and got a C.
Grade inflation isn't universal, nor is it universally applied. My alma mater boasts a 2.3 overall GPA. To achieve this, the administration (when I was there) REQUIRED EACH class to maintain a 2.3 GPA EACH semester. So, if you were in a class full of dunces, you had it easy: if you were in a class full of serious students you didn't eat or sleep until the semester was over. It's a nice idea in theory, but it makes for serious stress for a good class just to get Bs. I think I'd have preferred NO curve to that...
The bottom line for all of this nonsense is, once you're in the workforce, you're either a competent worker or an idiot who gets in the way. There are millions of ways to get good grades while concealing the fact that you are a bumbling fool.
Is this simply another example of the elite being able to buy their way into good grades? In short, it seems that if your parents' wealth can get you into an elite university then you are all but guarenteeing that you will get good grades.
Hell, an anthropology professor at Northwestern University just announced earlier this quarter that he doesn't give out anything other than A's and B's.
Of course I suppose that Bush, et al, would have you believe that I'm engaging in class warfare for simply pointing this out.
Scott
I'm so happy going through all these posts ! At least, not to feel too lonely. At times I am under the impression, that I was the only one in here (and in the world) to insist on *some* academic standards. It is my pleasure to cite from a post of a leading US professor of education - a very respected and even adored scholar - in another mailing list to which I belong: "Failure is avoidable; one might even say it is undemocratic to have students fail. The traditional stance is to blame failure on the student, but I do not accept this. It is the problem with the learning provided." When I first read this, I had to wipe my eyes: Is this true? Have I lost the ability to read? Do I happen to be too old? Should I retire? Or is this chap braindead? Honestly, I settled for the last assumption. Thank you everyone for providing some support for my weak position and showing that I'm not the only conservatist educator !
Well, I guess it was mainly the Homosexual population at the time that was carrying the virus... but still, weren't you worried about anything else consequntial? I know that it was a long time ago, and people realize things afterwards- but, still... wow. I am in college now, and have my share of fun (and am a Music student mind you), but still do class, and take care of business. I have worked too hard to get to this point to lose it.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
FYI, I paid 1000-1200 $ per semester and 500$ per internship semester, which totals to 14 000 for my Baccalauréat. I have a computer engineering degree from Université de Sherbrooke. I don't think medical or law schools are more expensive, when you come from Québec, that is.