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."

Comments

Use Class Rank

[the eric conspiracy]

Ignore GPA.

Re:Use Class Rank

[rritterson]

The essence of class rank is to compare the student to his/her peers instead of against a fixed measure whose bar can be raised/lowered.

Class rank is problematic though, for a couple of reasons:
-It doesn't make sense to compare GPAs across majors. The article points out that natural science professors already grade more stringently. Class rank across the entire university would only ensure natural science students looked poorly. (And vice versa for humanities students)
-If your GPA is going to be directly compared against others as a measure of your talent, you have an extra incentive to find a way to take the classes offered by the professors who grade most easily, boosting your GPA and thus your class rank.

We actually have a time-tested way of comparing students' performance to each other: grading on a curve. When I was in college (early 2000s, major American public university), all science and math courses were graded on curves, with 10-15% of the class getting As. Most professors had a minimum score that would guarantee a passing grade so that there wasn't a necessity to fail anyone, typically set to some percentage of the median Some students complained that they were doing well and learning the material, but are only getting Bs because of superstars in the course. To that, I say tough, because in the real world, no one is going to hire you to do anything just because you are good enough if another candidate is around who will do a better job than you will.

Fortunately, my university's grading policies were well known enough by employers in my field, so that the relatively lower GPA were taken into account when recruiting. The best students had A's in about 2/3s of courses. Hardly anyone had a 4.0 in even a single semester, just because it's extraordinarily difficult to be in the top 15% in every subject and have any kind of regular life.

Re:Use Class Rank

[wanax]

Grading on a curve only works for large, introductory courses. The problem is two fold 1) smaller classes cannot be assumed to have a normal distribution and 2) Once you get past intro classes in any subject, there is a strong selection bias so that people in upper level classes all tend to be high level performers in that subject (which also means you can't assume a normal distribution).

The big problem with grades is that they conflate course difficulty and student performance. If you want grades to be a proxy for performance, you have to weight them somehow or other by class difficulty. The problem is nobody can agree on how to rank class difficulty due to academic politics, since nobody wants to be the department that gets the short-end of the stick with class difficulty rankings. In my personal experience, being one of the few people who have taken multiple graduate level classes in 3 disciplines (History, Mathematics and Neuroscience) at that level no field is particularly easier or harder than another, it's just that the type of work one does is very different.

The other issue that I rarely see addressed in all of the 'grade inflation' concern (and which class rank also ignores) is that maybe today's college students are actually working a lot harder than those in 1960 (perhaps due to debt, the weak economy, lack of security from getting a degree etc), and have actually earned a big chunk of the upward grade adjustment. That's certainly been my experience when compared to my own cohort, and that of quite a few professors that I talk to as well.

Re:Use Class Rank

[unrtst]

The big problem with grades is that they conflate course difficulty and student performance.

IMO, there's also another glaring flaw in Johnson's premise that students gave better student evaluations of teachers who graded more leniently. There is a HUGE assumption there that the various teachers running the same classes were all equal in their quality of teaching. Why is it so difficult to believe that some teacher was able to reach and educate more of his students than someone else?

Statistically, I understand there should be some sort of even distribution, but the sample size (in number of teachers per course) is not large enough to be of statistical value.

Johnson said, “As you might expect, the effect of either expected course grade or received course grade is very powerful in student evaluations of teaching. If a student was getting a C in a course, he or she was very unlikely to rate the instructor highly. If they were getting an A in the course, they’re more likely to rate the instructor highly. I think this provides quantitative evidence for something most instructors know: If they grade easier, they will tend to get better course evaluations.”

One year, I had an art history teacher whose class was at 7:30am, in a dark lecture room, with a dim projector on the whole time, and spoke through an ancient 3" amplified speaker with an voice that was already monotone and droned on and on and on. I got a D-. The next year, I did more research on the available teachers, and found the one that engaged the most and who had more people getting higher grades. He was fun, taught in a well lit class in mid-day, involved us in projects to learn (ex.create an interactive presentation of some artist with a group of other students for homework, as opposed to filling in the blanks on a test in a dim room with projected images), and I got an A+, go figure.

I'll admit his tests were slightly easier (fewer exact date type questions (what year was this created, versus during what time period), multiple choice on name questions, rather than having to fill it in spelled perfectly, etc), but I also learned a LOT more, and neither graded on a curve.

I also take some offense to applying various curves or rankings etc to students. Given a class of 30 people, it's almost guaranteed that you'll have some years where half the class are "A" students, and some years where there's hardly a one, and that's assuming that the teaching and material are equal.

Overall, I'd agree that there is grade inflation. Jacking with the grades isn't going to fix all the underlying problems, and it will create other problems. He notes that one of the most likely reasons are student evaluations - so untie those from teacher review (instead, to review a teacher, do so as one should for reviewing any employee... go watch them while they're actually working, and only use the reported figures to identify people that should be reviewed first or may need help).

Re:Use Class Rank

[ComputerGeek01]

How is grading on a curve better than a strict percentile rank? Is there any benefit to the complexity it adds?

Answer 1: It isn't. Answer 2: There is no benefit anywhere regardless of what you compare it against.

Teachers who grade on a curve don't understand what a GPA is meant to represent. They are taking something that actually a representation of a students performance in a course (since the raw score is an average of their scores in assignments, tests and projects for the class) and they are trying to hammer it into some half-assed solution to compare students against one and other. They are saying "It doesn't matter how well you have demonstrated your understanding of the course material, or how well you've done in regards to the individual assessments that I myself assigned and evaluated. Instead of getting out from behind my desk and developing a system that reflects what I am trying to show here, I'm going to deprecate your grade until it suggests that you have a less then basic understanding of the material that was taught. Because that's just easier for me to do."

Have any of these Gen X retards even considered the students who, despite knowing the material, will have to sign up for, pay for and hope to find an empty seat in a class all over again just because they didn't try hard enough to impress their narcissistic teacher? Probably not because that wouldn't be helpful in stroking their ego and making them feel more important in the world. What actually needs to happen is for teachers from all schools and disciplines need to sit down, STFU and realize that outside of the classroom they have no authority, nobody gives a damn about their opinion and that even those glowing recommendations that they wrote for their favorite students mean slightly less then whether or not the applicants socks match this morning. Their job is to teach and evaluate their students understanding of the material, that's it. It is not to try and decide if one student is better then another or if Little Bobby Tables needs to apply himself more. You want a way to compare potential employee's? It's called a fucking portfolio.

Re:Use Class Rank

[ShanghaiBill]

Good point

No, not so good. Class rank favors those that took easy classes, and those that went to bad schools with lots of dumb classmates.

Here is a better solution: Test for the actual skill you need. If you are hiring someone to write C code, then give them a programming task that they should be able to finish in an hour. If you are hiring someone to dig ditches, hand them a shovel, and see how much dirt they can toss out of a hole in 20 minutes.

Number of times anyone has ever asked for my high school GPA: 1 (the college I attended)
Number of times anyone has ever asked for my college GPA: 0

Teaching is a social "science"

[HellCatF6]

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?

The whole system needs to change

[CastrTroy]

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.

Too many people like it inflated

[edremy]

Students love grade inflation because they love getting A's

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.....

Re:Seeing past how you count

[SJHillman]

I graduated high school in 2006 and got my Bachelors in 2009. College admission was, and still is, the only thing that even gave half a flying fuck about my High School GPA. Grad school admissions have been the only thing to give a half-flying fuck about my undergrad GPA (and even then, as long as it meets their minimum requirement, they don't much care). Employers have mostly only cared about whether or not I did graduate. I've seen a number of (accredited) graduate schools that only assign pass/fail to courses and don't do GPAs at all. For the most part, your GPA is like your SAT score... it's relevant for a very short time frame afterwards and for a very small number of situations (mostly admissions and scholarships) and nobody gives a flying fuck after that.