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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."
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...
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.