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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.
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.
Whatever you do, be sure to take ANY class taught by "Stuart Rojstaczer"! You'll get an "A"!
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]
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.
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.
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?
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?
Seen here amongst other places.
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?
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
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.)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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
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.
Contrast that with almost everything else, where it's all basically bullshit. Almost any answer can be seen as being correct.
Nonsense. English majors are expected to understand the basics of rhetoric and how to present an argument well (a skill which is in short supply among many of the engineers with whom I have worked). Economics majors had better understand how to derive supply and demand curves. Physics majors need to understand why engineers can get away with chopping off all the terms in an expansion except the first. Nearly every academic discipline has a set of objective criteria that can be used to differentiate between those who have mastered the discipline and those who have not.
Personally, I do not really care about grade inflation. Undergraduates at the junior/senior level are more like junior graduate students. They are there because they like what they are studying and thus ought to be getting As and Bs as a matter of course. If they are not, a kindly prof should pull them aside and suggest they look for something else to do.
FreeSpeech.org
Reading the frelling article. The author is a Geologist, not a liberal arts prof. And he's complaining about grade inflation in HIS field.
Oh, I forgot. Reading comprehension is a libarts skill.
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
Here's the comics search. Note they're in reverse order.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
... 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
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.
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."
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.
I pulled a straight 0.0 for 3 semesters before they kicked me out.
Best Slashdot Co
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...
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
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
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.
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.
Really? From the other side of the pond, that is not my impression. Hardware wise you are onto something, but a lot of software originates from your side, as do the locomotives Intel/NVidia/others. And if you leave out TV series and stuff from Hollywood (much of it is not made by liberal arts majors it seems ;-) ), not much arts stuff is seriously influential in Europe.
I believe this is more of a marketing issue. Japansese/European tech-companies have large market shares in the USA. As for history, we tend to be more interested in European history, you in American history. Same goes for literature, you read American authors, with whom you share a larger common experiencebase than with European ones, while we may never have heard of them because the publisher thinks the books are not interesting abroad.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
But the better standard (arguably better) is "above and beyond" is required for an A. I have had classes (few and far between) where knowing grading standards and managing to grab every single point guarantees... a B+. You have to come up with your OWN extensions, and do a good job of it, before the teacher considers it worthy of an A.
But papers are RARELY, if ever perfect. Math homework, most engineering homework, and so on can be graded objectively... and anyone who can claim to grade an English paper objectively is lying. The absolute most consistency with which I've ever seen non-technical papers graded still has about a 10% spread - and that's from Advanced placement people who've been grading English papers for 15 years. With enough work, anyone can pump out a "B" paper... it takes talent and a little bit of luck to eek out an "A" when the teacher doesn't inflate grades.
I've also had another professor who had a different take on study habits in general. His claim is that there are two types of people: those who cram the night before the final, and those who work all quarter, do all the homeworks and readings and attend class, then don't need to study. Because they've learned everything. I don't have much sympathy for the crammer, because he didn't really learn the material - he just went through the motions. But the student who worked all quarter is probably the A student - and it takes a very good professor to bring out that difference in actual grades. Which brings everything right back to the old "there aren't enough good teachers" argument :).
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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
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!).
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.
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