Slashdot Mirror
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."
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 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.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
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!"
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.