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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."
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.
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]
I don't think most engineering is as black and white as "is the formula correct?" I mean at least for CS just because your program meets the project requirements doesn't mean you get an A, in fact if you have crufty code that gets the job done but is not easily read and maintainable most profs I've had won't give you an A. Maybe CS is different because programming languages are just that languages and so many of the same issues are present as in the humanities, just with a technical bent but I doubt it.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I used to teach Algebra and Statistics in College. Most of the students were nurses but there were a few lawyers. They would always try to argue their grades up. I would just have to tell them that you can't argue the number 25 into the number 10. The answer was wrong and they would just have to live with the grade.
The city is being overrun by a herd of Lucy Liu's.
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 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?
Yes the capacity to teach university skills is disappearing fast and it has indeed tremendous effects.
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.
I am actually an employed electrical engineer and the guy who posted it :P
I just thought it was odd when I was in school a couple years back that the liberal arts kids were heald to a lower standard than the science/engineering students in terms of work load and grading.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
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."
Bingo.
I got 2 degrees from Lehigh: Mechanical Engineering and Philosophy. I was a grader for an intro to logic course, taught by the Phiul. Dept. One day I gave a couple of homework papers a 0 (grade of 0, 1, 2), and was reamed out by the students - "It's Philosophy, there ARE no wrong answers" - and the teacher - "They handed it in, so they can't get a 0."
Problem is, it was a logic class - there ARE wrong answers. If it was taught by the math department, these students would have been laughed at. Since it was a Philosophy course, "opinion" mattered.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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.
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.
... 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
This is old data but probably still pertinent. When I was at Ohio State (BSc '78, MSc '80) the student paper published the average grade given in the various schools. This ranged from a low of just barely over 2.0 in Math and Chemistry to a high of something like 3.64 in Education. You can chalk some of this up to everyone having a math prerequisite which tends to drag down the math average but give me a break on the AVERAGE grade given in the college of education being an "A".
The joke among those of us majoring in Math was, "But you could be an honors student in education now," whenever someone got nailed by one of the "ball buster" senior level math exams. A degree from a college or university should mean the same regardless of discipline as far as the standards the student is held to. Based on the people I ran across majoring in education, this most assuredly wasn't the case.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
You may see similar slopes but the absolute levels are wildly different. 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. (Yale, if that matters.) That's one anecdotal datum, of course.
If a humanist says, "well I think The Tempest is about the search for the telluric currents in 16th century Italy," I'm going to ask "and what makes you think that Shakespeare KNEW anything about the so-called telluric currents, or anything about Italian alchemists? And what in your reading of The Tempest suggests telluric currents as a subtext to the play?"
Sure, and you're shooting a fish in a barrel by explaining that to the guy who thinks that in an literature class all answers are valid. Realistically, though, students have learned that they only need to spit back some boilerplate about how The Tempest represents dead white male colonialism and racism in the technocratic magician's domination of the person of color, Caliban. (The Tempest is that one, right? Not that it would be any more difficult to do the same thing for any other play.) "But, Professor?" asks the molecular biology major in the back. "Wasn't Shakespeare long before the 19th century British imperialism you're talking about?" Now, now, we can't have any facts interfering with color-by-numbers ideology.
In fact, grading was so lenient, I could disagree once or twice a month and still ususally earn my way back to an A!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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...
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
They don't say it, but this choice is made constantly. Many people I know who make a living in the "hard" sciences have no aptitude whatsoever for English language, or literature, etc. and would simply not be able to make any meaningful contributions in those fields.
It's two very different talents and mind-sets, I wouldn't call one 'easier' than the other.
sic transit gloria mundi
This talk of distribution curves reminds me of an experience when I was a T.A. for a graduate level course.
The professor gave a problem on a test that was pretty damn hard (in fact, years earlier the solution to the exam problem had been an entire journal article!).
Needless to say, the poor students didn't make too much progress on the problem.
We had to do a "rescaling" of what "A", "B", etc. meant since the typical score was between 11 and 20 percent on the test.
I suffered a couple of tests like that myself, where the problems were ridiculously difficult for an exam lasting only a couple of hours.
All in all, I think it's reasonable to give students good grades as the level of education increases. After high school, most of the less intelligent students have been weeded out. Having the median grade be 3.2 is not unreasonable.
Likewise in graduate school, as even more of the less able students call it quits (although some very good ones also decide they've just had enough).
If you try to reverse the grade inflation abruptly by centering a Gaussian on 2.00, you're going to hurt a lot of students that are being evaluated by people that are unaware of the new curve baseline.
Of course now at the workplace it's a similar quandry. Much is made of the policy that we hire only the best and the brightest - the top ten percent. Well, then how come is it that we only get paid within a few percent of the industry average salary, eh?
"Ah, that's because those other companies are hiring the top 10 percent, too!"
Right....
It might be more illuminating if university transcripts for courses also showed a distribution curve and where the student sits on it.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.