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Adjusting GPAs: A Statistician's Effort To Tackle Grade Inflation
An anonymous reader writes "A recent analysis of 200 colleges and universities published in the Teachers College Record found 43 percent of all letter grades awarded in 2008 were A's, compared to 16 percent in 1960. And Harvard's student paper recently reported the median grade awarded to undergraduates at the elite school is now an A-. A statistician at Duke tried to make a difference and stirred up a hornet's nest in the process."
In the late '80s I graduated high school in the top 10-15% of my class.
I had a 10.5 on a 15.0 scale. 12 was an "A+" with 3 "bonus points" for honors classes.
Anything above a 10.0000 - a numerical grade of "90" in a non-honors class - was converted to a 4.0 for college-admissions purposes.
If a college only looked at GPAs, they would find that my high school was filled with stellar students - about 15% earned a "perfect" 4.0. Fortunately they looked beyond GPAs to things like test scores, class rank, and for some colleges, essays, letters of recommendations, interviews, etc.
Grad schools and employers who know better than to look at "raw" GPAs do the same.
These same companies and grad schools know that "everyone gets an A at such and such school, don't count it for much" and "everyone who graduates with such-and-such major gets an A at such and such school, because those who don't get shunted off to easier majors - anyone graduating from this school with this major is likely to be a good candidate for graduate school or employment."
Ignore GPA.
Anyone happen to have a source to the recent analysis (at least the numbers)? I want to see if they have information on majors, etc. The original article is here: http://www.tcrecord.org/conten... but it's behind a paywall. I've noticed that in my university, computer science/engineering majors average in the C range simply because the courses are intended to be difficult.
Teaching as a discipline is one of many social sciences,
but since it's not a true science, there is no pressure to
create quantitative measures for any of their components.
No rigor, no quant, and you leave it up to individual motivations
as the driving forces.
Result, as the article states, easier classes mean higher grades.
Higher grades means better teacher evaluations.
Better evaluations means easier job and more money.
Result - grade inflation.
It seems obvious now, so we shouldn't be surprised.
The real question should be this: when can we expect the bubble to burst?
Filler / fluff classes should be pass / fail or have there own GPA.
Maybe also give the gen EUD's there own GPA as well.
I would rather have a large number of people get A's, and just have people realize that there are limits to what can and should be tested in school. Either the test is made so hard that only a small percentage of the students are able to answer all the questions, thereby making the median grade a C, or we must accept that it's possible that a high percentage of the class will learn everything they were supposed to learn from the class, and therefore receive an A. The purpose of school isn't to differentiate between who are the elite and who are the median, but whether to certify that you learned whatever it was they were supposed to be learning. I know people who have had teachers tell them they won't give out any A's, which ends up being because it's an easy course, and they don't want all the marks to end up being A, because it looks bad, and would rather just give the entire class low marks.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
research. This teaching stuff just gets in their way, so why not just give them an A?
Not all profs do that, of course. I've been a teaching assistant for good and bad profs. However, many bad profs really do operate that way. I think the real solution is to give profs the option not to teach and to hire reasonably-compensated adjuncts instead. They could be professional teachers, whereas professors are professional researchers and, normally, amatuer teachers.
Of course, that would cost money, so don't hold your breath; universities are too busty blowing their money on other things, like revenue-negative sports teams and facilities. (Only a few universities make money from their sports teams, but almost all universities want to make money that way and think that -- if they spend enough -- they will. Don't hold your breath for that either; at most 50% of teams have a winning record...)
When scholarships and future jobs/grad school is on the line you'd be a fool to take a course from a professor who gave very few As than one that gave lots of As, everything else being equal.
The only good reason to take the "harder grading" professor is if you would actually learn more. It's frequently better to "take the B" and learn more than "get an A" but not learn as much. But if you can find the professor who drives you to learn who still hands out As like candy, vs. a nearly-identical one who only gives a few As, well, you do the math.
The number of people who get a college degree is so much greater than back then, that the better colleges simply have more students with talent to choose from.
Filler / fluff classes should be pass / fail or have there own GPA.
Maybe also give the gen EUD's there own GPA as well.
I presume you regard English 101 as a filler/fluff class, then.
There have been lots of articles about employee performance reviews and the "stack rank" system. Pretty much everything that has been learned about employee performance reviews can apply to students, particularly in higher education.
Companies like to use performance reviews when adjusting compensation, and they also like to have a system that encourages employee development (or at least retention and advancement of the better employees, and hopefully helping other employees become "better" employees). Perhaps we can learn something from the corporate world.
I've heard others suggest using class rank. That's fine if all professors are grading at the same level, but they're not. I think that was part of the point of the original article.
Of course, there are other aspects of the system that can be adjusted, too. Perhaps you force professors to give out lower grades, or come up with a system that voids the advantage of a professor who consistently gives higher grades. But then don't report the grades on transcripts. Just report that a given student was in the top 10%, 25%, 50%, or passed (say, one level overall and another for in-major courses).
There are lots of solutions.
It would be interesting to grade students in the following way:
For assignments and tests, grade the assignments as usual but don't let the students see the actual mark until the end.
Instead, give them a "credit / no credit" assessment for each item, coupled with feedback / answer sheets / group review.
At the end of the year, students will receive a final grade based on the value of all the assignments. This could eliminate some of the pressure that professors feel from students who are constantly badgering them about marks. It would have the side benefit of making it impossible for students to obsess over every single percentage point and instead focus on learning the material (or, conversely, they would be crippled by uncertainty and--rightly--weed themselves out of the system).
This would also necessitate increased accountability. For example, the professor and student would each be expected to keep a copy of all materials submitted for grading and if there was a dispute at the end of the year, a 3rd party audit could be conducted.
Has anyone experienced a system like that? How well did it work?
Well in this age of post inflation, it counts as a firstie.
For many years professors in natural sciences have been adjusting test scores to match Gaussian distribution.
Typically, you decide on the average and then adjust the shape accordingly.
Most professors would go for a 12 points (60%) out of 20 average and a standard deviation of around 3 points (15%). Every student below 10 points (50%) would fail the class.
After that, you rank the questions from easy to hard, according to the scores obtained for each.
Initially, you a award the same weight for each question. If the test was designed properly, this should create a Gaussian distribution.
If not, different weights within a range (e.g. 0.8 to 1.25) for the questions can be adjusted until it matches the Gaussian distribution.
I doesn't solve the problem of easy classes competing with difficult ones but it solves the problem of grade inflation.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Faculty love grade inflation because they spend less time dealing with pissed off students and helicopter parents
Administration likes grade inflation because it means fewer people drop out, which is good for the bottom line. More degrees with honors sounds great too.
All we need to do is fix students, faculty and the administration and we can solve this problem right away.....
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Really, I've been proposing that each GPA be presented with the average GPA for students taking the same class sections. For some students, a 3.5 would be weak (if the average student got a 3.9). For others, it might be outstanding (if the average was a 3.2).
This also makes it more likely that students will take courses with challenging grades. If all a professor gives is A's I can't raise my effective GPA. But, a professor that gives a C+ average gives me the opportunity to decrease my denominator.
For more info on the problem check out http://www.gradeinflation.com/
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
Granted this isn't college, but New York state tackled "grade inflation" by giving students tests that weren't developmentally appropriate and based on curriculum they hadn't been taught. The result was that only about 30% of students passed. The bonus was that State Ed and the governor could then point to those tests as further proof that teachers are failing our students and 1) we need to have more of these tests to assess their performance and 2) teachers should be bound by EngageNY curriculum which literally reads like a script except that actors get more leeway in their roles. (It tells the teacher what to teach, for how long - in 10 minute segments - how to teach it, what questions to ask, what responses should be, etc. Why have a teacher when you can have a robot instead?)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Which classes are the filler and fluff, and which classes are real classes? Who makes that decision? A better solution might be to track a person's major GPA separately from their total combined GPA (many graduate schools ask for this, anyway).
Rhapsody in Numbers
When I taught undergraduate engineering courses at a state university, I always had large classes (> 80 students), so I decided to let the law of large numbers work to my advantage. I would grade each student's work with a numerical score, and would then find the median and standard deviation of the scores for each class. The median I defined to be the threshold between "C" and "B". One standard deviation above the median became the threshold between "B" and "A", and one standard deviation below the median became the threshold between "C" and "D". Any score below two standard deviations away from the median was a failing grade.
I used the median, instead of the mean, to ensure that I never had more than half the class with an "A" or "B". After some experimentation otherwise, it seemed like one standard deviation per grade was just about right -- most students got a "B" or "C", and only the exceptional ones got an "A" or "D" (or worse).
This scheme seemed to work well, and was no more arbitrary than any other. Plus, it was deterministic, in the sense that I could tell the students on Day One how I graded. If a student got a "C", for example, it was because more than half the class did better than he did. In addition, I could justify an "A" grade to the administration, since that person performed at least one standard deviation above the median.
And the schools that don't have a culture of grading to a real standard will eventually find that their grading gets no respect for their graduates. As an Iowa high school graduate in the 1980's I entered a "most selective" school with a GPA of 3.7 out of 4.0 possible. I was flat out told by admission counsellors that at that time a 3.7 from a rural school was more indicative of academic talent than a 4.0 from many places in California or New York/New Jersey. By inflating grades a teacher and student benefit each other, but hurt their institution, their region, and future students.
If this is supposed to be science, why are these professors then fudging with the numbers to fit a particular goal?
I have a serious problem with this, because classes of college students are not a natural Gaussian representation. There would be a tendency for every one of them to be "above average" when compared to a general large population.
This especially makes no sense when the teacher is able to deliver the material in such a way that everyone who attends class understands and remembers. Then the scores end up looking like a U shape... Everyone getting either A's (because they attended class) or F's (because they did not attend or pay attention at all).
Also piss on the idea of a "properly" designed test... In order to get a Gaussian distribution where you wanted a peak at 70%, 30% of the questions wouldn't be able to be answered from the material presented, instead requiring simple guessing or just prior knowledge from elsewhere.
Favored schools, favored class years Demonstration of mastery
My senior year of high school I got a 3.8 GPA. I also had 4 art classes, a music class, English and History.My average work spent on school per week could probably be measured in minutes, outside of the typical school day. I also went on to get a Masters in Computer Science. You're telling me if I said my 3.8 was from Calculus, Chemistry, Physics, P.E., Art, English, and History, you wouldn't or shouldn't look at it differently?
Yes there are standards in the curriculum, so a majority of people will at least have some baseline understanding of Algebra among other things. How do you reward those that seek higher education while not inadvertantly punishing those that dont?
Inflated grades (or scores if it's not a school thing) are a definite problem that harms the value of the scoring criteria, but when in an inflated environment, not giving inflated scores cripples those receiving them as they now appear incompetent.
I've seen it happen, and I've seen some of the best people in the place miss out on raises and promotions that are given to people far less deserving simply because one had a supervisor that followed the proper scoring guidelines, while the other had supervisors that used the inflated values.
There is a basic point missing in that expected grade distribution is very much dependent upon if you are trying to teach a subject to mastery or teach a subject the students limits of understanding. Ie. what is your philosophy of education?
If you are teaching a class covering a subject which can be mastered, then there is no reason everyone should not master the material and get an 100% baring lazyness.
An example would be written test for a drivers license, is there really any reason everyone who takes it should not get 100%?
If you are teaching to a scale, then you don't really care how much absolute material is transferred and your tests are designed to not to measure the material taught in the class as much as then general subject matter which the class covers, and they are designed to test the level of understanding of the subject as a whole with an emphasis on trying to prevent anyone from mastering the test.
Most of your Engineering classes.
My filler/fluff class dragged down my GPA due to an incompetent professor. He insisted that homework assignments be emailed to him, but neglected to tell me that he wasn't getting my emails (in spite of the read receipts) until after grading was finalized and submitted. The result was that I received no credit for homework, which changed my course grade from an A to a C. Fortunately, that course only counted for 3 of 137 credit hours and had a nearly negligible effect on my final GPA.
The real problem is that most colleges require so many fluff and filler courses. I have not once used astronomy, microbiology, or World History Up To AD 1600 in my job as a sysadmin. However, I will admit that psychology (and simulated lab rats) and creative writing have been surprisingly useful.
... at graduation you receive a piece of paper that says what place you graduated instead a paper saying you graduated?
From the experience of someone who has worked in both K-12 and higher education, the problem is innate to the competitive access to higher education and the roots are way deeper than 4-year research universities.
Elementary Schools (grades K-6)
Elementary schools have not been well known for their grade inflation. They are held to stronger minimum student competency standards that allow them to get away with giving a kid an "N" (needs improvement, aka: Fail).
Middle School (grades 7-8)
Grade inflation starts in middle schools where educators understand that proper placement into advanced high school courses poise students for better quality education (regardless of work completed).
High School (grades 9-12)
High School grade inflation most often occurs in advanced classes, to facilitate increased chances of being accepted into a well-respected 4-year university. This problem is exacerbated by helicopter parents and administrators/teachers that don't want to deal with them.
Community College
Grade inflation here is rare unless you're one of the very few students who are actually making the effort to transfer to a 4-year university. These students get "known" personally by instructors and under-staffed counseling centers and relationships are built, exceptions begin to be made/justified, etc.. I've helped to navigate student through CC specifically by connecting them to the right people to make sure they make the transfer in 2-3 years.
Undergraduate (4-year University)
Grade inflation here exists in part because faculty and lectures want students to "have every opportunity possible" to go to grad school (much like what happens in high school), but also because lecturers (without security of employment) that get bad reviews (grade rage) are less likely to be invited back to teach again. This problem is exacerbated by helicopter parents and administrators/teachers that don't want to deal with them.
And all of this exists because we make access to quality education a competition! There would not be grade inflation in middle school if every regular high school teacher was as effective and driven as those who teach high school advanced placement courses. There wouldn't be grade inflation if public universities put less weight into GPA and more into impromptu writing (submitted writing is too biased) and proctored exams. (Instead, GPA should only be for the valedictorian prize and as a progress report on the effort made towards one's education as exhibited by assignment submissions.)
Thus, there wouldn't be grade inflation if we made access to higher education an expected right given that minimum qualifications are made.
"But college education is so expensive! We can't educate everyone to the same caliber with what we have!"
I call BS. At a luxury- and notoriety-based research university, undergraduate education is expensive. At non-research universities, education is relatively cheap. Solution: Make the very specific and public differentiation between "College" and the "Research University". Want a good education with the potential to access research-based careers? Consider attending a Research University. Want a good education so that you'll be a better person, member of society, and have a head start in a chosen industry? Consider going to College.
In California, it's the difference between attending one of the California State University campuses and attending one of the University of California campuses. We need more Cal States and we need to utilize GPA less.
In the past many grades were calculated on a curve. Why should it matter what the other students in the class got when calculating my grade? Answer: It shouldn't.
People talk about "grade inflation", but what are they actually talking about? If most of the people in the class do well, why shouldn't they get an A?
You might want to take note of the following quote from the article, which I completely agree with.
In my opinion, school is primarily for education. If you learn all of the material satisfactorily, then you have earned an A. If you want impose some sorting (to distinguish certain students), provide limited access to undergraduate research and project-based courses which have an internal application process or require extra work. Don't expect to put everyone in the same bucket and have them naturally separate any more.
In my second opinion, this is the new norm, and we shouldn't be trying to focus on fixing the big "inflation" (degree inflation, tuition inflation, grade inflation)., which is necessarily a backwards-facing perspective.
Yes there are standards in the curriculum, so a majority of people will at least have some baseline understanding of Algebra among other things.
That doesn't seem to be working out. Having a deep understanding of why something works is far different from just memorizing facts and patterns, which is what a grand majority of people do. Worse, they often forget those facts soon afterwords.
Thank you Dave Raggett
You can judge laziness by grades now? Interesting, here I thought education and grades were about the ability to comprehend the information, and didn't necessarily measure the intangibles that make a person whole. Seems that I know quite a few people with the good certs, good grades, and absolutely terrible work ethic and ability to troubleshoot. I work with people who on paper might appear better than myself, however in actuality, I'm the most effective technician, who handles the toughest problems, and I continually educate myself and improve my skills.
The use of the GPA encourages students to hunt for the best grades rather than the best education. Class rank within your major, and based only on the core classes, is vaguely relevant. Trying to compare a math major to a liberal arts major based on a GPA is a pointless activity anyway.
It's not about how you set the evaluations or set the scores. It's not even about what your GPA is. No matter how you attempt to fix the system, it will be gamed to maximize personal outcomes by individuals - be they teachers or students.
And, lets face it, in the end it really doesn't matter whether you got a 4.0 or a 3.5 or a 3.0. The real question is did you learn and remember the material. But there are relatively few standardized tests for that in each discipline, and even if there were it would miss all the little side specialties. And personalized testing and grading is both expensive and still subject to personal bias.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Although I do think grades are given out too easily these days, particularly in that they signify "effort" more than actual knowledge due to the sheer amount of makeup work and extra credit available, I also think students are just more exposed to sources of knowledge today than they were 60 years ago. In the 60's, knowing something meant you had to take advantage of the few resources available to you, such as teachers or library books.
Today, people can not only find information about various topics quickly, but they can find it more efficiently as well. Researching something like "geothermal power" used to require finding books related to it, and with the right context, then reading through those books for the pieces of information you need to ultimately reference and use. Now, you could Google it, or look it up in Wikipedia, and see exactly what you need in a much quicker time frame. At worst, you can CTRL+F your way through a reference.
So I'm not going to say that kids are smarter today or more skilled, but I will say that the better grades shouldn't really come as a surprise when the overall testing and teaching methods haven't changed to better reflect the tools we have available as students.
Your first post-college professional job typically cares about your GPA. Too low a GPA and you might not even get the interview.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The pass/fail line should be based on whether they sufficiently mastered the material, not on how well other students did.
If by some fluke everyone sufficiently masters the material, everyone should get a passing grade. If nobody does, nobody should.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It is a fairly common idea in the ideology of many of those who run our education system that if you give students the ability to chose their professors or teachers, they will chose the best professors or teachers. The idea is to make education a marketable commodity with professors and teachers as service providers and students as consumers. There is a deep and fundamental flaw in this view. Markets are indeed extraordinarily good at satisfying consumer demand. The problem is that too many students are not demanding a quality education, but rather the highest possible grade, possibly with the least amount of effort. In other words too many students value the credential rather than the education it is meant to represent. Thus, the market system for education works against the Public Interest, putting an upward pressure on grades and a downwards pressure on standards.
What are some solutions to this quandry? The problem is often that grades for particular courses consist only of a percentage. In most schools and universities those percentages in a particular course do not differentiate between different professors or teachers. Thus a grade given by a challenging professor and one given by an easy professor are difficult to distinguish. The proposal in TFA might help the situation, but I think there is another way. What if each professor got a score not based on the evaluation by students but rather by how his students scored in other courses, especially those that follow his own course. This score for a professor would be like an adjustment factor for his grades. Let's say most students in one professor's Calculus II class who get 75% usually go on to get an 85% score in Calculus III. Thus, this professor's grades would be deemed better than another professor's grades whose 75% students usually go on to score 65% in Calculus III.
This system would reduce pressure on professors to raise grades, especially if students understood this rating system. All that would matter would be that the professor be consistent year after year. It might seem complicated to implement but in our world of computers and databases, I don't think it would be impossible to create. It wouldn't be necessary to follow all of a professor's students, only a few in order to gain a correlation. Indeed, all it would initially require would be for each professor or teacher to be given a unique code which would be attached to each grade given to each student. The rest would be data mining by whatever authority has access to the data.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
1. Curve grading only makes sense if each class has its own curve; otherwise its biased towards easier classes and lenient instructors.
2. A class can be so small that individual students have a significant impact on the score. That means students have very little incentive to cooperate in their studies, and may even have an incentive to sabotage each other. That does not make for a productive educational environment.
CS for sysadmin is also the issue ITT does not have BS like astronomy, microbiology, or World History for IT classes.
Grade should be a measure of how well the individual is mastering the material irrespective of how others are doing.
Consider a class where everyone is doing abysmally, but a handful are guessing better on tests... they get A's... Despite the horrible performance of the teaching staff and/or teaching method. I have encountered this in large first-year calculus classes. Fortunately (for truth) my school did not use the bell curve but instead reported individual's demonstrated mastery of the materials. Those professors who's students consistently performed poorer on the standardized tests did not stay professors for long.
Conversely consider a class where everyone fully groks the material. Only a few can get As on the bell curve model. I have encountered this in small 4th year classes as well.
need to make it so test cramming not = better grade.
You don't want to have tests that are tilted so that people who know what they doing can get lower scores then people who are good at cramming.
Also more tests need to be open book / notes / maybe even open Google.
well we need a better trades / apprenticeships so that the schools don't have to take the full load and dumb down to get people who used to go more of an trades / apprenticeships setting that they may be a better fit for.
Whatever grade you receive should be based on your mastery of the subject and not a comparison to your peers.
If every student in the class mastered the subject, then everyone gets a "Mastered". If any student did not master it, they could accept what ever grade they achieved relative to mastery and leave the course, or accept a "Not Yet Mastered" and repeat the course (at say, 80% of tuition).
The real problem is with the teachers and their methods of evaluating of the students. Good evaluation is hard work. It's easier to invoke some arbitrary method of measurement and achievent and move on.
Filler are classes unrelated to the core. For an art major, art history isn't filler. Math would be. For a math major, math wouldn't be a filler, art history would be. It seems pretty straight-foreward. Who would decide? The accreditation board. It doesn't seem like a hard problem.
Learn to love Alaska
The problem is that grades are arbitrary. The instructor defines them, and the universities and the students pressure instructors to give higher grades in lower division courses. Instead of arbitrary grades, assign lower division grades by quintile. Top 20% A, Bottom 20% F. It's enough to maintain student competition, gets rid of the "easy graders". For higher division, drop the lowest grades, with F being giving to a small percentage at the option of the instructor. Mid division would be ABCD quartiles. Upper division ABC. Graduate AB.
If it's possible for a student to get a degree by taking only "easy" courses, that's a problem with the design of the major curriculum.
Support SETI@home
Because in a system that allocates GPA fairly (where the average GPA is 2 and the standard deviation is 1) a single grade point in a single class is insignificant, so the difference between an A and a B is 0.02 in you final GPA
Support SETI@home
FAIL
PASS
Extra Credit
Extra credit can only be granted with a second prof reviewing the work. Since profs don't like doing that, it would be rare and would really require extra-ordinary effort.
IMHO, that would solve a lot of problems. Grades are this weird Prussian overhang. They need to go away.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
That doesn't seem at all straight-forward to me. The whole point of a classical liberal education (which is the kind of education that most college students are paying for) is give a student a broad background in addition to an area of specialization. I majored in mathematics as an undergrad, but I wouldn't consider my geology, anthropology, and music classes to be "fluff", and I don't think that an art history major should consider their mathematics classes to be "filler" (where both "fluff" and "filler" seem to imply that the classes are not important).
So, as I suggested above, tracking a student's major GPA vs the general GPA makes sense, but declaring that all non-major classes are unimportant filler and shouldn't matter at all goes a bit too far---if I am looking at candidates for a job opening or trying to decide who is going to get into a graduate program, if I had two candidates that were the same on paper, except one did better in their non-major classes, I would consider that student the better candidate. Those are data that I would want to have.
Rhapsody in Numbers
Grading on a curve is no different than stack ranking in the workplace. Why are so many of you advocating for the former when the latter is so universally reviled? Is it because with stack ranking, we're talking about livelihoods and money?
The way to fix grade inflation is to fix society's expectations of GPA and the meaning of grades themselves. That includes the way corporations view academic credentials and transcripts. If you want honest assessment of a student's performance, then start by fixing your own biases and unrealistic expectations that the only qualified candidates should have a 4.0 GPA, 2 PhDs, 3 MS degrees, have been published in at least a dozen research journals in their field, wrote their own operating system from scratch, and is a 3-time Ironman champion...just to be hired for some low-level QA assistant job. Unless of course you're an H1B from India, in which case the triathlete is now "overqualified."
I think that's the real dirty secret everyone knows but nobody is willing to acknowledge. The fact is, grades were lower in the 50s and 60s because people STILL GOT HIRED, and competition was not as fierce as it is today. Everyone knows that GPA these days doesn't reflect true ability or learning, but instead, how well you know how to game the system, which is exactly what corporate America wants anyway--just look at what they teach in all the MBA mills. Those are your future bosses, middle managers, executives. All ambition and buzzwords, but no substance; driving business decisions that treat the engineers, developers, scientists, and in general anyone who actually KNOWS anything...like slaves.
So, you want to fix the system by adjusting GPAs? Fix the way GPAs are used as a stick to beat qualified job applicants with, and then we can talk.
It doesn't make sense for universities to grade. As can be seen from the article and discussion, all the incentives in the system reward grade inflation.
The solution is for grades to be assigned by someone unaffiliated with the university, and should not be awarded based on the work done in class, but rather on mastery of the material that was to have been taught.
Think "I pay the university to teach me, and then I go to a professional society (e.g. the ACM, IEEE, ACS, whatever) to get evaluated and my mastery judged & scored.
Employers now have an easy minimum hiring bar- instead of filtering based on whether you have a degree, or what school you went to, now they can judge by your skills. For example, they could filter resumes based on "ACM score of median or higher on computer science I, data structures, and finite automata".
Yes, this is like professional certifications, but with different incentives. Presumably professional societies have reputations to uphold that would cause them to behave differently than the current "IT vendors trying to sell you a certificate" model.
I ask because about 10 years ago I took organic chemistry. The professor basically said that she had been teaching this class for 10 years, she set up the tests so 65 was "average". So every time she gives the class and given the size(150~ students) she always gets a bell curve with the average right where she expected. She'd love it if everybody did well but she also said that statistically the likelihood that would happen is basically 0.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Ok this is a pet peeve of mine. I hate it when people say they're graded on a curve because 60 is an A. The mechanism that converts a raw score into a grade is the scale. If that scale is determined by how the class did as a whole then your grade is curved. (IE I got in the top 10% of scores therefore I got an A) If the scale is not based on how the class did then your grade is simply scaled. (IE I got an A because I got above 60 which the professor defined to be the cut off for an A. If everybody in the class gets above 60 they all get A) Seriously, it's as though since through out elementary/high school the whole "90+ is an A, 80+ is a B, ..." that people think that somebody, Einstein, Socrates, Jesus, or Mohammed decreed these scores or something. (Just as telling me that the temperature is 20 is meaningless without units telling me you scored X on a test is meaningless without having a meter that tells me what that score actually means.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
A lot of companies, especially large ones, will filter out anyone who doesn't meet certain generic GPA requirements. I finished college with a 2.8 GPA, which was respectable (though not particularly stellar) for my University. So to say they don't care about it is completely incorrect.
My current employer is one such company. I got my job because I had already talked with the Manager who hired me and he forced my name through the staffing process.
A math major working in crypto needs art history why?
Learn to love Alaska
There doesn't appear to be any reasonable way to evaluate a students education. My philosophy is simply this: It's up to the student to get everything they want from their education (knowledge, grades, contacts, study habits, practice w/ sleep deprivation, friends). An education is not given and graded, it is taken and exploited....
In reality, there is only one basic needs in the professor-student relationship to assign a grade or a student to get a grade.
1. Assigning a cost to enrollment into the course (basically to deter folks that aren't interested/qualified in occupying space).
However, the school and the student have a different relationship that is facilitated by grades.
1. By advertising their grades to potential employers or other schools, students can increase their perceived value to such institutions.
2. By assigning grades to students, schools can manage their reputation relative to other institutions (nominally poor students can be "discounted" or grades can be "inflated" to increase the perceived value of all students).
In a way grades are like currency that can be inflated/controlled by the institution to manage their economy. This might suggest that there is some alternate currency-substitute (analogous to bit-coin) that has the property that it can't be inflated (devalued). Something like knowledge?
Although this might seem attractive to have some decentralized authority broker the evaluation of students based on what knowledge they were able to mine from the education process, it has the downside for the schools, w/o the ability to deflate when needed, this increase the likelihood a "greek-like" liquidity crisis (employers won't accept credentials and new students won't enroll). Needless to say, they would fight this tooth and nail...
The evaluation of students by decentralized authority has similar problems of bitcoin. W/o a centralized authority, there is continuing instability, there is a risk of collusion taking over the evaluation or an alternate measure becoming more popular and upending the scheme.
Since it's hard to see the value of grades as an independent entity, why bother trying so hard to figure it out. Just like money, it is not the end goal in life.
Maybe the goal shouldn't be to grade students like eggs. Maybe the point should be to determine whether they know certain material, which grades really fail to do. One thing that most grading methods have in common; They obscure whether or not a particular teacher is successfully teaching their students.
"His research revealed a pair of key findings: Students gravitate toward taking courses offered by instructors they deem to have laxer standards, and they also tend to give better evaluations to instructors who gave them higher grades."
I wouldn't have needed to pay someone $10,000 to tell me that.
I honestly don't know what all this is about. Grades have never been a good measure of a job candidate. I can tell in 5 minutes of talking to an upcoming graduate whether they are worth their salt.
My interviews of new EE graduates (I hire mostly EE and CS majors) always start with the same three questions;
1) What's the difference between a Watt-second and a Joule?
2) Tell me how a transistor works (if they ask which kind, that's a plus, and I say "you pick.")
3) What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen sparrow?
Shazbot! We ran into some trouble getting the comments.
Try again... na-nu, na-nu!
Fuck Beta!
Suppose you have two candidates that are apparently equal on paper, except that one has excelled in their non-major classes, and they other has performed only marginally. This tells me that one of the two candidates is capable of tackling tasks that are outside of their wheelhouse, which is an indication that they might be able to think through situations in more than one way. The other either was incapable of performing a task outside of their chosen major, or chose not to. One of the candidates has displayed some intellectual flexibility, which I consider to be an important trait in any profession.
It should be pointed out that universities are not meant to train anyone for a job working in crypto. Most math majors have probably some calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations. Depending on the emphasis of the program, they have also taken some abstract algebra, real analysis, topology, number theory, and/or numerical methods. It is unlikely that many people with a bachelor's degree in mathematics has the mathematical knowledge or ability to tackle crypto sytems without further training. It will probably be easier to train someone with some intellectual flexibility than someone without, and good performance in areas outside of a student's major indicate some of that flexibility.
Rhapsody in Numbers
The conflict is between academic standards and promotions. They want to do the right thing, they simply can't if they are going to be rewarded by the system.
So, fix the problem by having two professors for each course. One of them gives the lectures. The other one creates homework, writes tests, and grades them. You could even do the latter with a committee. The students need to know that the professor giving the lecture is not the one responsible for homework or testing, which may or may not be standardized. They also need to NOT know who is writing and grading their tests for a particular class, at least before the class is given. Then, student recommendations will focus on what is important, mainly, how well the professor communicates the subject. The committee (of which the teacher may be a part) can thus give cover to the act of suppressing grade inflation. "Not my fault you got a D, that was the committee! I'm only one small cog in a big machine!". This will also create a bit of feedback on who is actually teaching, and who is mumbling to the blackboard.
As part of this, the homework/grader professors should not know who the students are that they are grading. That information should be kept by the lecturer alone. That might keep them honest. If there was a professional competitive situation between the professors, that might also be a problem, but using a committee should fix that. It would also cut down on the work required.
All this assumes that the point of school is to learn the subjects being taught. I'm not sure that assumption is valid, however. It may in fact be a form of test, to judge whether one is worth to be admitted to the priesthood. If so, grades don't matter at all. What matters is recommendations and personal contacts.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
There will always be someone with a perfect score and impaired alcohol metabolism. That someone will invariably ruin life for those (s)he causes to fail.
As a statistician I have to ask why we give grades at all? If the purpose is to measure performance against a standard, as in I wanted you to learn your ABCs and you did, therefore you get an A, that leads to one answer, and the comment that a C reflects bad teaching is correct. But when I am sitting on a selection committee looking for whom to admit to graduate school I also want to know if you are a better student than other applicants, in which case I would prefer to see some C's even if I would not admit them. Of course, it is easy to give A's in courses that don't have good standards, just as it is easier for judges to give all gymnasts 10's, but harder to give all baseball teams wins. Boils down to the difference between art and sports, and A vs C boils down to who do I want serving me coffee and who do I want designing bridges.
As an aside, when I came home with my first standardized test scores I excitedly told my dad I was in the "top 99%". He, of course, pointed out that even lichens are in the top 99%, being in the 99th percentile was, however, considered laudable. Deflated a bit, but always learning. Thanks, Dad.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Inflation seems to be leveling off, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The consumer price index held flat for the past two months, according to a recent report. Learn more about inflation.
Inflation seems to be leveling off, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The consumer price index held flat for the past two months, according to a recent report. Learn more about inflation.