Grade Inflation in Higher Education 1077
ProfBooty writes "A recent Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post on grade inflation by a Professor at Duke. Obviously this guy doesn't teach engineering courses. Quite honestly, I can't understand why science and engineering majors are held to one standard for grades and academics versus humanities majors even in the same school. Perhaps it is because people's lives hang in the balance when they interact with the products and structures designed by science/engineering students. Perhaps it is because they aren't worried about hurting students self esteem? It really is too bad the media doesn't report enough on education from the technical side."
Grade Inflation in the UK (Score:5, Informative)
(Of course, in Soviet Russia, grades would have inflated YOU! - sorry, couldn't resist)
He doesn't teach humanities... (Score:5, Informative)
Name: Stuart Rojstaczer, Ph.D.
Affiliation: faculty
Title: Associate Professor
Department: NSOE & Earth Sci - Earth & Ocean Sciences
Department: Civil & Enviro Engineering
Just some food for thought...
might reduce grade inflation at some places (Score:1, Informative)
4.3 on a 4.0 scale (Score:1, Informative)
I'm sure I'll get hate mail for this one... (Score:3, Informative)
The thing that amazes me is that in almost every class I had that was a science field, at some point in time we had to explain the scientific method and how to write a research paper. How do you get into college and pass ANYTHING if you don't know those concepts?
old news (Score:3, Informative)
My observations (Score:4, Informative)
1) Hard science courses are definitely more strictly graded than more subjective courses, such as English, Psychology, Philosophy, Sociology (insert next humanity here). This is mostly due to the fact that if you take an objective test in Math, Physics, or Mechanical Engineering you have little room for subjective interpretation. If you got it right, it's right, if not, it's wrong. In English, though, teachers can be afraid of giving out a C, and can consequently say "While that paper is probably C work, I can justifiably give a B with no one noticing"
2) Schools that grade on the A,B,C,D,F scale seem more prone to grade inflation than the system that the University of Washington and a few other schools have. In our system, your grade is exactly mirrored based on a numerical system of distribution. For example, if I got a low A in my Chemisty course, I will get a 3.5 on my transcript, not an A. This prevents everything from being categorized to four or five letter grades. This reflects everything inbetween. There are many times that I wish I had the letter grading system, because my low A's or B's would not be a 2.6 and 3.5, but instead an B and a A, which would be equivalent to a 3.0 and a 4.0 respectively.
Anyhow, those are my two bits.
My experience as an instructor (Score:3, Informative)
Recent undergrad course I taught at Duke had this breakdown:
A: 11%
B: 57%
C: 20%
D: 11%
I do not think, but haven't checked, that my previous section of this course was much different. This is a normal course, about middle of a student's career at Duke.
The real stumbling block for most students is a so-called "C-wall" course. If you don't get a C or better, you can't move forward in your curriculum, so a C is effectively an F in that course. It seems to me that the basic tension is between a standard like that and a grading system that is consistent across all courses and curricula.
The really surprising thing to me was a grad course I recently taught. The undergrad students were amazing compared to some of the graduate students. The undergrads are clearly some of the best students I've ever seen while the grad students are potentially from other schools for which the environment wasn't nearly so exacting. If all I ever saw was those kids, the ones that had plowed through Duke's undergrad curriculum and were taking grad courses until they graduated, I'd probably be accused of grade inflation too. (Many of them did A-grade work.)
GPA ranges (Score:3, Informative)
Also, the school offered a database of each professor and course that listed corresponding grades. So a student could see which professors gave higher grades before they took a class. You could also see the average GPA of students who took the class in previous semesters.
I think the problem of grade inflation might be worse at ivy league/private schools not large state colleges.
Re:F in Engineering curves to an A (Score:2, Informative)
Absolutely unbelieveable.
I botched two problems out of 4 - one because I didn't know the relativistic 4-vectors well enough to solve the problem. This wasn't some extra credit part we never covered. It was an essential part of the course and cirriculum.
Instead of getting a cruddy score like I honestly deserved, I walk away with an A+ on my transcript because everyone else in the class was as dumb or dumber. I'm not complaining (since it's not my major and I don't intend on taking any more physics courses), but it bodes ill on the quality of students we're churning out.
Yes, perhaps I should get credit for doing better than most of the class. But I clearly failed to master the material required - and the 77 is far more reflective of my mastery of the material than that A+. If everyone got such atrocious grades, then *maybe* there shouldn't be any A's being handed out.
P.S. This is an Ivy. And I don't think we're alone.
At CS in University of Toronto ... (Score:2, Informative)
Well, I'm in the 'humanities'. (Score:5, Informative)
1. We're allowed to drop classes up until almost mid-semester. Guess what? A lot of people will stay in, fail the first two tests, then drop. They don't get a failing grade because they aren't there, in the end, to *get* an overall grade.
2. I see plenty of people getting C's. Maybe not necessarily plenty with D's and F's--see the above, most of the ones who can't do it end up dropping--but C's are common, at least from where I'm standing.
3. Our instructors, anyway, always set the grading scale in the syllabus. It's usually pretty normal. Sometimes a little skewed to give people a little more room to pass with a C, but some of them require a full 95% or better to get a full A. If people do 'too well', it's the material that's the problem, not the grading itself.
4. People who are C or lesser students do not necessarily stay in college, period, much less in one class. They also generally are not going to Duke. (We're excepting sports players, here, as a general thing. I won't even go into that.) You see a lot of them in the low-level classes, but if you're looking at an Honors English Composition class like I had last semester, no, it's *not* going to be a proper curve by a long shot. The people who are there are there because they're good.
It's a matter of money. When you're paying for school, no, you're *not* going to be happy to get a D or an F. The solution among my classmates is to either not *take* the courses they don't think they can manage well in... or to drop so that, if they still have to pay, at least they aren't destroying their GPA over it, which can lead to getting kicked out of their program entirely.
At a place like Duke, does it even occur to this guy that he's not *getting* the students who really are complete academic failures? That he doesn't *see* the ones who are completely incapable of writing a comprehensible paper, the ones who can't find a standard deviation in statistics even when handed a calculator that does it for them?
I suspect if he saw some of the work *I've* seen from the classmates who later drop, he'd start understanding it more. Maybe they're lackluster in terms of attendance and participation, but I suspect *his* students are, overall, intelligent and competant.
As far as tech vs. everyone else? I don't know why things would be different. It may have more to do with job-market competition than anything else. If you start looking at humanities majors who're looking to go to the doctoral level and want to get into good grad schools, you start to see the same level of perfectionism, I bet.
economists' view of grade inflation (Score:3, Informative)
http://post.economics.harvard.edu/hier/2003pape
Doonesbury dealt with this in ''93 and 94 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:F in Engineering curves to an A (Score:4, Informative)
And, hey, some things are just hard and 40% is a good success rate. Taking batting a baseball, for example!
Re:Liberal arts majors... (Score:5, Informative)
In a way, schools encourage this... (Score:3, Informative)
When I was in college, I had a partial scholarship. The terms of it were that if my GPA dropped below 3.0 or I got lower than a C in a class, I lost the scholarship. At one point, I got a C- in French (although my GPA was still above 3.0) and got put on probation. One more and I would have lost the scholarship. When you have tens of thousands of dollars ins scholarship money riding on a grade, you are going to be willing to plead for a higher grade, take easy classes to boost GPA, or drop a class you know you are doing badly in.
Also, graduation awards and honors like Cum Laude, ect are calculated based on GPA. Doesn't matter what classes you took, so someone with 1 easy major is on the same grounds as someone with 2 tough double majors and a member of a college honors program - and one grade can make the difference between the tenths of a point difference in an award.
There is also a certain amount of grade "deflation" too - I have had one professor in an Ethics class who strongly disagreed with my viewpoint (during class discussions he would ask me "So, MadAnthony02, what does the business major think?), and oddly enough I didn't do very well in his class. My point is grades can be very subjective, yet the numbers can be very important.
Professors sometimes spared lives. (Score:5, Informative)
During the draft, college was the only thing keeping some young men from getting sent to Southeast Asia and, as such, they could appeal to professors on a very personal level: If I fail your class, I'm going to war.
As such, professors (ESPECIALLY in the liberal arts
Re:A prospective from Duke (Score:1, Informative)
Perhaps you should spend less time touting how highly ranked your (supposed) school is, and more time learning how to write.
Re:The guy is forgetting one important thing (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A perspective from Duke (Score:2, Informative)
I will not deny that some professors inflate their grades and some departments inflate their grades at some universities.
And as to the rest I got into a few top national universities, and I'm at Duke because it is a small, private university with a beautiful campus. Most of my friends are at public universities because they are great schools, just not quite as good as Duke, or some of those other private school-elitist ones you point out. Also, because they're giving me almost a full ride. So, I'm paying less for my degree than you, I got A's in calculus in high school, I'm getting A's here. Last semester I got an A+ in advanced physics.
It was pointed out in one of the other comments to my piece that I have no validity as a freshman. And would like to say thank you, I am aware that I am a lowly freshman, who can only read the articles, talk to his friends, his professors and provide an opinion backed by alot of research into the subject.
Lastly but obviously not least to the crowd which reads slashdot, thanks for correcting my grammar, sometimes my word usage is slightly off. I hope no one has trouble reading my posts.
Re:A prospective from Duke (Score:4, Informative)
I am a senior at Duke...double major Chemistry and Math, what most people would say are not the easiest majors in the world. I guarantee that the author of the Wash Post article is correct...there is grade inflation at Duke.
In many of my classes (yes, sorry to say predominantely humanities) grades have been absurd. It takes an EFFORT to get a grade lower than a B in the vast majority of classes at Duke. This holds even in the hard sciences. To say that first year calculus is the most failed course on campus may be true...but the failure rate is still exceedingly small...i would estimate below 2%.
The people I do know that have done poorly in classes (Cs, Ds, Fs) openly admit they never went to or did any work for the class. I know people who have intentionally missed finals and still gotten Bs!!!!
After my four years here, I have never once felt like a teacher is grading unfairly to counteract grade inflation, in the humanities or otherwise. I am not saying Duke is a joke; it requires a significant amount of work to get an A in many classes. However, it is almost impossible to do worse than a B-.
As an interesting sidenote, Professor Rojstaczer, while at Duke, was a professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment. It is well known on campus that the Nicholas School is very easy (not to the level of sociology, but close).
Further information from the Author (Score:2, Informative)
The author of this piece maintains this website http://www.hostcompany100.com/goneforg/gradeinflat ion.html [hostcompany100.com]
Lots of people are saying "It's not happening here." Take a look at the site and see the numbers for yourself.
Chances are it is happening there, and you just don't know about it, or you're part of the problem.
Re:The guy is forgetting one important thing (Score:4, Informative)
Things were, however, very different in Computer Science department. In most classes, As usually only represent less than 15% of the students, Bs and Cs dominates, while Ds and Fs are not that rare either.
By the way, anybody looking to hire a software engineer?
WPI sure didn't inflate my grades (Score:2, Informative)
As it was, I worked my ass off at WPI and still got a few C's. WPI uses A/B/C/NR where NR is a failing grade that does not appear on your transcript (in theory to let you experiment with classes outside your field, and "punt" them (fail) if you sucked, or something). Thus, if you failed all your classes you received a blank report card - a "snowflake." Many a student snowflaked. I only knew one person who got all A's.
Even in grad classed our teachers had no fear of handing out C's. The majority of my cryptography class got C's, many failed, more than got A's (you get F's in grad school, not NR's). I got an A
A relative of mine, a psychology teacher at a New England school, insists everybody inflates grades, thus everybody has too or students wont attend your class. This seems to me like herd mentality, or peer presure, or circular reasoning, and many other things that ought to make a psychologist speak out. I mentioned my school doesn't seem to inflate grades, especially in crypto, but my data was dismissed as "everybody does it" and crypto was probably a "weeder course."
Oh well.
I may be the victim of my own apathy, but who knows
Homework vs. Test (Score:3, Informative)
Sounds like your class worked this way, and that might be a good thing too.
Re:Do grades really matter? (Score:2, Informative)
No, BASIC didn't stand for anything, now it does [reference.com]. Linguistics is a changing field, just because something was true yesterday doesn't mean it's true today. 200 years ago color was a misspelling, today it's an Americanism. See my point?
Re:Liberal arts majors... (Score:2, Informative)
For instance, I clearly remember Electric Circuits II exams that had some neat questions to expose the bright students from your standard mediocre student. It worked this way:
a) If you sucked, you would find yourself performing huge matrix operations on complex numbers using the brute force way to solve circuits.
b) if you were good at math, you would attempt to solve with convolutions, simpler if you get it, but still long to do.
c) If you were bright, you would figure out that most of the matrix calculations could be avoided with some clever transformations and notice that you ended up with very little math to do.,
Bottom line, if you even dared to use your calculator to solve the problem, you would loose alot of time inputing the matrix, most likely ending up with little time for the rest of the exam, and most likely stick in a typo that would render your solution useless.
That would really suck because most of the questions relied on the answer from the previous one.
So in the end, you would end up with a 2 bell shape distribution of the grades: those who didn't use the calculator, figured out the trick and completed the exam on time with flying colors; and those who, users of the calculator, regardless of whether they got the answer or not, ran out of time and did not complete the exam, flunked.
When I look back on it, I am pretty sure that most of the ones that flunked out those exams are some of the shittiest electrical engineers out there, calculator or not :)
Capitalism in Education (Score:2, Informative)
Remember that private universities are corporations, and they want revenue. Most grad students were there at the cost of their companies. Typically, as long as they get a B or above, the corporation pays. Otherwise the student pays. Take a class or two, and if the grades are not up to par, its not financially worth taking the class. So to make sure the university gets a steady revenue stream from the local corps, they make sure that the students pass with an A or B.
At least thats how it was when I was there. Did I mention I'm never going back?
Even better - the other UW (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The guy is forgetting one important thing (Score:1, Informative)
Both of these universities exhibit grade inflation...but it is usually worse in upper division classes than in intro classes. People were weeded out in intro physics and math courses at an undergraduate freshman level. However, they were not weeded out with F's...it was done with C's and D's...because upper division courses required not just passing grade but minimum grades...usually at minimum a C+ to advance...which means if you have any hope of succeeding in science or math, you need to get at least B's. One C can easily be the end of the road.
Now, having said that, another very important consideration that I haven't seen addressed is that by then end of the semester most of the people who would have gotten C's, D's, and F's have already dropped the course. (Courses can be dropped very far into the semester at both universites.) They either try again next semester or move on to something they can do. However, most people don't stick it out and get a low grade...and this is a feedback mechanism for grade inflation. You don't stay in the class unless you are capable of getting an A or a B.
Now I am not sure how most statistics on grades and grade inflation are compiled, so I don't know if graduate courses fall into this criteria, but in graduate school it is a simple fact that C=F, you need to maintain a minimum B average to stay in school and if you get a grade below a B, you don't get credit for the course. So once again, one C is the end of the road...or at least a very large stumbling block, so you stay in the classes you can perform well in and drop those you can't.
Now I must mention that a majority of the classes I took as an undergratuate and graduate student graded fairly...and it was usually quite possible to get a low grade, and I know many people almost did. It was not uncommon for a class to end the semester with 50-75% of the students it started with. But I have also had a few classes where pretty much everybody got an A, but I am happy to say those have been few and far between.
It's an economical reason. (Score:1, Informative)
If you have higher grades, you're getting graduated earlier, the fact is that the job market is really not that good right now, so people are going back to school, if people are gaduated in 2 years instead of 3 because they're getting better grades, the school will be able to have one third more students, and therefore increase their profits by 33%, just by giving people better grades than what they deserve.
And you're still wondering why schools' quotes are so high, while the job market is so low?
Grade scale (Score:3, Informative)