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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
A U shape is unrealistic. This assumes that the only difference between students is their level of dedication and how well they pay attention. The reality is that not all students are created equal, and some are stronger than others. Indeed, there is some reason to believe that students might be normally distributed. Yes, we expect college students to come from the elite of society, but some will be more elite than others, and since not everyone is majoring in the same field, we would expect the lower division classes (at least) to include both strong students and weak students. In any case, remember that you are not comparing university students to a "general large population," but to the general population of university students.
Personally, when I am assigning grades, I expect there to be very few As and Fs (one should have to work very hard to get an A, and one has to be particularly negligent to earn an F), a fair number of Bs and Ds, and a large number of Cs (where a C means that a student has demonstrated adequate performance, but nothing noteworthy). I don't force the grades to fall into a normal distribution, but they do normally fit something that looks approximately normal (though a beta distribution might be a better model, given the fact that grades fall on a fixed interval---and the distribution is rarely unimodal, meaning that neither a beta nor normal distribution is a very good model). That said, I have had classes where more than half of the students get a B or better, and I had one very depressing semester where less than half of the class managed to get a C (huzzah for lower division math classes that are required for graduation with any major).
Rhapsody in Numbers
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.
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.
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
Personally, when I am assigning grades,
Assigning them? Most tests these days are quantitative, not qualitative, and the grades are "earned" with correct answers, not assigned. There's not much wiggle room in the grade assignments when the tests are purely quantitative.
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
None of the metrics work in all cases. "I'm 10th in my class" meant I was good. But "I'm in the bottom half of my class" is bad. And "I was 10th out of 19" just confused the heck out of them. Public school (top in the US for a number of years), with only 19 people in my graduating class. The numbers obviously don't matter that much. The lowest person in the class took 3+ AP classes as a senior. Even grades don't mean that much in such an odd environment. Thankfully my SAT was high enough to guarantee entry into a state school (always a priority because of the cost), despite my location in the worst measured class rank. But then, even the lowest SAT score in the class was above national average. Only two perfect scores of the 19, though.
I know other people from other schools with grades like 5.5 on a 4.0 scale. Honors classes were 5-point scale, and AP were on a 6-point scale, and weighting was given to later years to erase earlir mistakes so scores of the all honors/AP group were absurd. Most times they got listed as 4.0, so about half the school was listed with a 4.0, and the points above 4.0 were mainly used for ranking within the class.
Learn to love Alaska
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
I assign to a student the grade which that student has earned. Can you suggest a better verb for the action that I am performing?
Rhapsody in Numbers
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.
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 math major working in crypto needs art history why?
Learn to love Alaska
When it's a subjective grade assignment, assign is probably best. When it's an objective grade, I generally hear ir called "marking" the paper, or grading it.
And you completely dodged the implied question, were you assigning subjective grades, or objective ones? Because that does help influence proper word choice.
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.
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
As you say, you didn't ask the question. You only implied it. I answered the question that you actually asked. There's no reason to be so passive aggressive about it.
The answer to the question that you have asked now is that instructors do their best to assign objective assessments, but a truly objective assessment is impossible. The instructors, like everyone else, are human. They make mistakes: in the emphasis of material in lecture, in the construction of assessment questions, and in the grading of assessments. Students also have an uncanny ability to screw up questions in unexpected ways---such mistakes may imply some understanding of the material, and deserve credit for that, but no objective rubric built before grading can possibly anticipate all possible errors. Not to mention the fact that grading papers is very different from grading computations or proofs. It is also impossible to write an assessment that can be done in a reasonable amount of time that will completely determine how well a student has mastered the material required, hence the selection of material for emphasis on an exam is somewhat subjective. For all of these reasons, and more, any assessment is going to be somewhat subjective, even if the design goal was to make it as objective as possible.
Rhapsody in Numbers
That's why most instructors give objective tests. when the correct answer is "c", it's hard to subjectify that.
The other thing is you implied that you do grade on a curve. It's just not a set curve, but the better the others do, the worse, comparatively, the bad ones do. I've been in classes like that. The lower English classes in college were rife with that.
Learn to love Alaska
Seriously? Your answer is to make everything multiple choice? Multiple choice questions are decent for measuring rote memorization and recall of facts. They are not so great for determining if a student can abstract from their base of knowledge and synthesize. And, frankly, most professors that I know don't give tests that look like that. In my department, there are consistently multiple choice sections on most of the exams for lower division classes (precalculus, calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations), but we have been moving away from those forms of assessment as they do a poor job of measuring student ability. Beyond these lower division classes, there are diminishingly few multiple choice or true false questions, and most of these allow for work shown and partial credit (which cannot be anything but subjectively graded).
Making everything multiple choice also does not address the subjectivity inherent in the selection of questions to ask, and manner in which material is emphasized in lecture or in the text, hence it does not solve those problems.
I find it funny that you feel the need to pigeonhole me. I don't grade on a curve in the sense that I do not determine ahead of time that a certain number of students will get an A. It is theoretically possible that every student in a class will earn an A, or that every every student will fail. I've never had it happen, but there is no reason that it couldn't. However, I acknowledge that people are imperfect (including myself) and that I might make mistakes in how I assess my students (I might make an exam too difficult, or fail to perfectly teach a particular topic). While I have cutoffs for particular letter grades established a priori, I am more than willing to adjust those cutoffs up or down a little to make them fall between clusters of raw scores, or to adjust for assessments that are too easy or difficult. I suppose that you would call this curving, but I don't see it as being nearly so black-and-white.
I am now honestly curious: what experience do you have teaching and assigning grades? You seem to think that you have solved all of these problems. How may I subscribe to your newsletter?
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
I find it funny that you feel the need to pigeonhole me.
I'm not trying to pigeongole you. I'm trying to understand. You imply things, then clarify to the opposite of the initial implication, but when I try to drill down to figure out what you are trying to say (or what you did, if you are deliberately trying to give a different impression), is pigeonholing you. Why, because you prefer to perform drive by assertions, without question or explanation?
I am now honestly curious: what experience do you have teaching and assigning grades? You seem to think that you have solved all of these problems. How may I subscribe to your newsletter?
I have no answers. I just have more questions. Why do questions make you so uncomfortable?
I taught high school physics for one year. While I was in high school. The teacher noticed that 1/2 of the class was "above" the other (teaching physics is different whether you use algebra or calculus - reflected by when I went to college, there were seperate classes for each, and half the class had already had calculus, so many of the "complex" algebra physics were trivial if you just figured out one aspect and integrated over time, or such). So I was given the "calculus" half, and sent to another room. one semester later, another teacher complained about the arangement and the class was merged. "My" half had already completed the year's material in that one semester. I'd have kept going, if there hadn't been the complaints about us. By the stodgey economics teacher.
I have no degree in education, but was a trained tutor through college (even tutoring people in classes I've never taken, one need not know to be able to teach, though it helps), and worked a few years as an IT trainer.
I suppose that you would call this curving, but I don't see it as being nearly so black-and-white.
Why do you obejct to calling grade adjustments "curving"? Is there some negative connotation you take from that word? I personally don't have any connotations or other meanings associated with it, so I'm just curious what you think they are, as you obviously have some. Or is asking a clarifying question "pigeonholing" you again?
Learn to love Alaska
I'm not trying to pigeongole you. I'm trying to understand. You imply things, then clarify to the opposite of the initial implication, but when I try to drill down to figure out what you are trying to say (or what you did, if you are deliberately trying to give a different impression), is pigeonholing you. Why, because you prefer to perform drive by assertions, without question or explanation?
You are the one making fine distinctions between the words "assign" and "mark," and you are the one that wants to declare that my grading system either is or is not "grading on a curve". When I attempt to actually explain what it is that I do, you accuse me of "performing drive by assertions, without question or explanation." Maybe you really are curious, but it feels to me like you are not making an honest intellectual effort to understand what I have written, and that you are trying to rely on easily understood pigeonholes.
Let me reiterate and attempt to clarify: I mark assessments (exams, quizzes, etc.). The marks that I make on those assessments are used to assign a grade, but marking an assessment and assigning a grade to that assessment are distinct activities, and the distinction is not between objective and subjective methodologies. The assignment of grades is as objective as I can make it, but complete objectivity is impossible. It should also be noted that even if the marking of an exam is done entirely objectively (by a Scantron device, for instance), a grade still has to be assigned to that assessment. This can be based on an a priori scale, a curve, or something in between. I do not grade on a curve in the sense that I do not determine ahead of time how many people will get a given grade. I do, on occasion, adjust the cutoffs for grade assignments in order to give all scores in a cluster the same letter grade. This is to take into account my own inability to write an assessment that is 100% objective, consistent, and reliable, and to acknowledge that there is likely very little difference between the demonstrated mastery of the material that similar scores on an assessment represent.
As an example, suppose that I have a pile of exams. Generally speaking, I grade on a 4 point scale, and assign anything greater than 3.5 an A. However, on a given exam, I might have a group of five or six students who all score in a range from 3.4 to 3.6 points, with the next highest score a 3.1. In this case, I do not see a meaningful distinction between a score of 3.4 and 3.6---all of the students in this group have demonstrated a similar level of mastery, and deserve the same letter grade. Hence, I will adjust the cutoff down to 3.4 out of 4, and assign As to all of these students.
Personally, I would not call this "grading on a curve," because, as I said above, "grading on a curve" usually implies that the number of grades at each level is determined a priori. However, if you feel it is necessary to label such a grading system, and you feel that the appropriate label is "grading on a curve," I have no objection to that label, as long as you recognize that this is not grading on a curve the way that most people mean it.
I have no answers.
You declared without justification or evidence that most instructors use entirely objective exams consisting of multiple choice exams, and implied that this is a solution to the subjectivity built into all human systems. That seems like an answer to me.
I just have more questions. Why do questions make you so uncomfortable?
As far as I can tell, you have asked two questions: you questioned my use of---and drew great meaning from---the verb "to assign", and used that to launch into an implied question about objective vs subjective grades. I have done everything I can in order to clarify. I'm sorry that such clarification cannot be made into a nice, one-word summary.
I taught high school physics for
Rhapsody in Numbers
You are the one making fine distinctions between the words "assign" and "mark," and you are the one that wants to declare that my grading system either is or is not "grading on a curve". When I attempt to actually explain what it is that I do, you accuse me of "performing drive by assertions, without question or explanation." Maybe you really are curious, but it feels to me like you are not making an honest intellectual effort to understand what I have written, and that you are trying to rely on easily understood pigeonholes.
You, youself, have indicated it to be "on a curve" but you apparently don't like that term. I'm not trying to pigeonhole it by assigning a term but find out if it would fit a general definition. Your grading is subjective, and the grades for some papers depend on the grades on others, so that sounds like a "curve" to me (where a curve indicates that the grades are at least partially variable based on the output of others). That you are trying so hard to explain what you do while tip toeing around that wording is of interest. Exploring it isn't an attempt to pigeonhole, but investigate.
You declared without justification or evidence that most instructors use entirely objective exams consisting of multiple choice exams, and implied that this is a solution to the subjectivity built into all human systems. That seems like an answer to me.
An observation is not an answer. An observation that solves a problem is not necessarily an answer. I went through public school, then a large university. The tests were almost universally multiple choice, often Scantron (tm). Yes, even lower schools have scantron readers. Makes for interesting results, when they get hand-me-downs from larger schools updating and the lower machine is a little off. It could happen where all "e"s were incorrectly marked as wrong because of the alignment of the machine, so the post-test reviews were often quite challenging.
So, stripping away the anecdotes and personal anger, you lead a high school study group
No, I was a teacher with all the duties thereof, aside from setting the syllabus. It wasn't a study group, but I independently created homework, graded it, and lectured from the study material. By your attempt to dismiss it, you are indicating that 99% of all teachers I have do nothing in class other than lead a "study group". You probably just lead a study group. If the answers to all your questions was "yes" would it matter? Or have you already made up your mind and closed it? You are getting more argumentative with ever post now. "personal anger" Where was that again? Calling a teacher "stodgey"? That's an absurtly low barrier for anger. By that standard, you are angry with me. Are you?
Learn to love Alaska
(1) I am not "tip toeing" around any particular term. It is clear to me that grading on a curve means something different to each of us, and that the particular phrase is causing confusion. To prevent as much confusion as possible, I am attempting to explain how I actually grade, rather than relying on a term whose definition we clearly cannot agree on.
(2) You are conflating the idea of grading on a curve with objective assessment. The most objective assessment that I can imagine is a multiple choice or true/false question (or a quiz or exam made up of such questions). One could very easily give such an assessment, then assign grades to raw scores (measured objectively) based on a curve. Conversely, a subjective assessment can be assigned grades on an absolute scale. The marking of individual questions may have some subjectivity in it, but the grade that a student is ultimately given on the assessment will not depend on the grades of other students. These are two distinct concepts, and I believe that I have addressed them both (yes, my assessments are subjective, because it is impossible to create a truly objective assessment; the system that I use to assign grades to assessments combines the extremes of grading on a curve and grading on an absolute scale, as described above). Is there something else that requires clarification in that respect?
(3) I apologize if I was incredulous regarding your high school teaching duties. I find that the idea of a high school students being given teaching duties over his peers strains belief. Frankly, if I learned that my daughter were in a class where another student was responsible for writing the exams, grading work, and assigning grades, I would immediately ask that she be transfered to another class. I don't believe that a high school student has the necessary knowledge base to teach a class (ideally, the teacher should be far in advance of the students), I don't think that the power imbalance created by such a situation is appropriate, and I wouldn't trust a high school student to maintain the privacy rights outlined by FERPA. If you really had that kind of power, the econ teacher you mentioned probably saved your school from a lawsuit.
(4) I asked about your experience writing assessments because knowing about your experience allows me to provide explanations and ask questions that are better tailored to your experience. If you had years of experience, I would ask how you write your assessments---your questions and comments imply that you believe that it is possible to write entirely objective assessments, and I would be curious to know how you write such assessments. Since you seem to lack that experience, let me again refocus on the questions that are important when writing an assessment: how do you eliminate as much subjectivity as possible? how will you know if a student has demonstrated mastery of the material? what will you do if, after giving your assessment, you discover that you wrote one or more questions that didn't measure what you thought they measured?
The first two questions go into assessment design, but the last is important for determining how to assign grades. If your design is flawless, you don't need to consider the final question. However, no one is perfect (though some are better than others), and a small post hoc rescaling (a curve, if you like) can mitigate problems with the design of an assessment. Another approach is to remove certain questions from the assessment after the fact, or to change the weight of certain questions. I sometimes use these techniques, as well.
Rhapsody in Numbers
The material wasn't an issue. I had taken the equivelent of two years of university physics and one year of university calculus in a program from a private university. And, as your incredulity goes, the person in charge of accepting that credit as a transfer, refused to accept the credit and apply it. If I didn't have a math, I couldn't graduate, and I don't remember if science was also required. My senior year of Calculus, I spent no time in my class, until the principal found out, and grounded me to class. After which I brought jigsaw puzzles from home and worked them in the back of the class. After that was discovered by the principal, I was "ordered" to sit at my desk. The room had Pi to 50 digits. I still remember the first 50 digits of Pi. I never scored less than a perfect score on any Calculous test, and slept as much as possible. Near the end of the year, the class was nearing the half-way point of my previous class.
I've been smarter than most of my teachers since about the 2nd grade. The class was told to draw "a man with two orange heads" for a halloween display for an upcoming open house. Everyone in the class drew a man with one head on each shoulder, both orange. I drew a man (normal man) with a jack-o-lantern in each hand - a man, with two orange heads. I was sent to the principal's office and beaten for failure to follow directions (a violation of the law, parents must be notified before any beatings). That's also about when I started getting locked in a closet every day for lunch. That teacher had many accolades, and my mother lied about my address to get me in her class.
With that as my benchmark, I was never worse than my second grade teacher.
As for FERPA, the teacher of record was still the other teacher, and I don't think there was anything in the arrangement that would violate FERPA. The "real" teacher gave the topics, and some minimum mandatory work, and I created a class to fill in the other 90% of the time. I don't know what the grades were derived from, but evaluations of the students were passed to the "real" teacher for her to do with as she wished.
Having been brought up with standardized tests, I preferred to give them. Doesn't hurt that for IT training, most people were seeking a certification, almost all of which were multiple choice. So it's a common format, with well known rules. It doesn't hurt that it's almost entirely objective (though many times tests will contain poor questions, whether poor wording in the question, or multiple correct answers, of which the "best" is expected, but often hard to determine). Though in college, in smaller classes, the grades were almost divined by the teachers. Twice I feel I did inferior work, but received a passing grade or better because the teacher felt I "tried". I would have felt robbed if it went the other way, but was happy to have the boost the other way.
When I got my master's, it was hard to get anything other than an A. That was great. Why? Because it meant that the people learned, without regard to tests, assignments, and such. You got from it what you put in to it. There were no worries about the freeloaders dragging down the group projects, or the annoying people who slow things down asking questions that were answered in the reading they didn't do. Some people are externally motivated, but the internally motivated ones do worse in a graded environment.
I have been known to remove questions after the fact, usualy with giving the best score from the two scores, so someone who got it right wouldn't get a deduction for it going away. Nobody has ever complained about that. Weights change as well. To help approximate a curve. I'm generous with grades. But not afraid to fail someone that deserves it.
Learn to love Alaska
The material wasn't an issue. I had taken the equivelent of two years of university physics and one year of university calculus in a program from a private university. And, as your incredulity goes, the person in charge of accepting that credit as a transfer, refused to accept the credit and apply it. If I didn't have a math, I couldn't graduate, and I don't remember if science was also required. My senior year of Calculus, I spent no time in my class, until the principal found out, and grounded me to class. After which I brought jigsaw puzzles from home and worked them in the back of the class. After that was discovered by the principal, I was "ordered" to sit at my desk. The room had Pi to 50 digits. I still remember the first 50 digits of Pi. I never scored less than a perfect score on any Calculous test, and slept as much as possible. Near the end of the year, the class was nearing the half-way point of my previous class.
I've been smarter than most of my teachers since about the 2nd grade. The class was told to draw "a man with two orange heads" for a halloween display for an upcoming open house. Everyone in the class drew a man with one head on each shoulder, both orange. I drew a man (normal man) with a jack-o-lantern in each hand - a man, with two orange heads. I was sent to the principal's office and beaten for failure to follow directions (a violation of the law, parents must be notified before any beatings). That's also about when I started getting locked in a closet every day for lunch. That teacher had many accolades, and my mother lied about my address to get me in her class.
With that as my benchmark, I was never worse than my second grade teacher.
As for FERPA, the teacher of record was still the other teacher, and I don't think there was anything in the arrangement that would violate FERPA. The "real" teacher gave the topics, and some minimum mandatory work, and I created a class to fill in the other 90% of the time. I don't know what the grades were derived from, but evaluations of the students were passed to the "real" teacher for her to do with as she wished.
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear, but I accept that you taught a high school class as a high school student. I expressed my concerns about the arrangement, but I accept that you did it.
Having been brought up with standardized tests, I preferred to give them. Doesn't hurt that for IT training, most people were seeking a certification, almost all of which were multiple choice. So it's a common format, with well known rules. It doesn't hurt that it's almost entirely objective (though many times tests will contain poor questions, whether poor wording in the question, or multiple correct answers, of which the "best" is expected, but often hard to determine).
I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but the basic gist of the above seems to be that standardized tests are objective, and this objectivity is an advantage. I agree that standardized, multiple choice tests are about as objective as possible, and that this is a point in their favor. There is one right answer to any given question, assuming that the question is well written. However, as I said way up the thread, such assessments are not very good at measuring anything except rote memorization. I expect my students to be able to do more than memorize the values of trig functions for a subset of angles or the first 50 digits of pi. I want them to be able to analyze and synthesize. Multiple choice questions do a poor job of assessing a student's ability to to this.
Though in college, in smaller classes, the grades were almost divined by the teachers. Twice I feel I did inferior work, but received a passing grade or better because the teacher felt I "tried". I would have felt robbed if it went the other way, but was happy to have the boost the other way. When I got my master's, it was hard to get anything other than an A. That was great. Why? Beca
Rhapsody in Numbers
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.