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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."
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?
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
Department: Civil & Enviro Engineering
M.E.s have a technical term for what Civil Engineers build. The term is "Targets".
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I would agree that at most of the Ivies (perhaps universities in general) grade inflation is rampant. However, there are few possible solutions. On the one hand, if businesses and graduate schools began to accept the fact that even the worst Ivy League student was better than the best state school student, grade inflation could end. Of course, I don't think this would go down well with the public, and I don't believe this to be true myself.
On the other hand, it could be stated as a general truth (not always true, but in about 98-99% of all non-sports-recruit cases) that most of the students at Ivy League schools (Or MIT, Caltech, GATech, Stanford, the list goes on and on) were the top of the class and probably all operate on a pretty high level. This argument would suggest that grade inflation is merely a reflection of the absolute (rather than relative) abilities of the students at Ivy League schools.
I don't support grade inflation, but I really cannot controvert the arguments that I've heard. If someone can find some answers to the above statements in support of grade inflation, I'd be really interested in reading them.