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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."
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
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.
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]
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.
An aside to this is that it seems to be entirely possible to get 100% on an engineering exam.
Damned unlikely, I'll grant, but theoretically it is possible.
On the other hand, there are a lot of liberal arts exams where it is actually *impossible* to get a full 100%. Why? Because the graders "don't give grades that high." I've actually seen this happen where a student got their paper praised as the best the prof had ever seen. The student got an 85.. when she asked why she only received an 85 if this was the best ever seen, the response was, "Oh you don't understand. That's an excellent mark. I never give marks above 80."
That's an extreme example, but a lot of professors hold the attitude that a 100% mark will never be given out, because that would imply your paper is absolutely perfect -- and since there's always more to add, no paper is perfect.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
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?
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.
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.
If the liberal arts majors are smart they'll keep their comments to themselves. Otherwise they can do their own damned math homework.
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.
here it is, folks: these private-school elitist types think they're smarter than us lowlifes that only went to state schools.
i'd be offended by this comment if i hadn't met so many morons that had paid ten times as much as i did for my degree, and yet hadn't really gotten anything for the expense except for membership into a bunch of secret handshake clubs. you're not any smarter, and you might have been struggling for that same B+ no matter where you took intro to calculus.
finally, this was just confusing:
and then later:
well, which is it?
--
Long-term effects of Bush deficits
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!
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...
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."
It might be more illuminating if university transcripts for courses also showed a distribution curve and where the student sits on it.
Then how do you interpret a transcript that shows many of the students getting low scores in a class? Does it mean the students were stupid, the professor was a poor teacher, the professor was a hard grader, the material covered was more advanced than other similarly named classes, or that there was a disjoint between class content and exam content?
The simple fact is that you don't know any of those things, and no set of numbers can effectively evaluate those things for you. There are too many pinheads out there who think intelligence, knowledge, and prediction of job performance can be linearized onto a number line. In reality, none of these things can be collapsed into anything close to a straight line.
Therefore any grading system or ranking that tries to evaluate people and put them in order is intrinsically broken and missing most of the information one would want to know.
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