The validity of grades

Wow you quoted me :) (I kind of feel embarrassed, its an essay I through together and then basically retracted because it was so thrown together, and Iv'e been to lazy to fix it...)

Some thoughts on what you said:

  "Smeder misses the main point, which isn’t identifying 
  the problem; a gazillion people in the Chronicle of Higher
  Education have said virtually the same thing at various 
  times. The real problem is solving the problem, which 
  requires changing the incentives that drive professors. "

Your argument is that we need to put the carrot in front of the teachers. Give them incentives to be better teachers. I think this is true. But it only solves part of the problem.

Your solution is analogous to a magazine company giving its sales team commissions in a world where sales teams don't earn commission. Which I agree is smart. In fact I hate it that teachers don't have incentives to be good teachers.

... continuing the magazine company analogy: Yes, I agree sales reps should be paid on commission. However, if the magazine sucks and the company is poorly run fixing the issue with the sales team isn't going to fix the company.

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The point of my essay was to say that the problems with college are out of the hands of teachers. It is an organizational problem. In a magazine company a organization problems would be: The magazine has a bad art department or the main editor sucks at his job. These are issues that correcting the mistake made with the sales team wont fix. Giving the sales team the commission they deserve wont put a high quality magazine in the hands of the public. Sure it will help. The sales team will put pressure on the Art Department to step up their game. But in the end you cant fix the magazine by fixing the how the sales team is paid. My argument is you can't fix college by fixing how we treat teachers. Giving teachers is only part of the solution.

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Giving teachers incentives is needed, but it won't fix college. The organizational level issues with college I stated in my essay are:

- Super Star teachers are not utilized to their full potential.

- Designing a good lesson plan is difficult. Creating fair tests is difficult. (And people act like its not!) It's so difficult I think a team of people using the most recent research on education methods should be doing this not a teacher by himself with microsoft word and power point open. This guy http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebra... should be helping teachers teach. It is ridiculous that most teachers don't use the education techniques this guy used. And I am sure there are many other education techniques that teachers could be using but don't.

- Students are not given adequate resources to study and collaborate (24 hour study areas, rooms with white boards).

- Peer tutoring programs and study groups are greatly lacking.

- Way to many students don't have the basics down: Writing, Spelling, hand writing, study skills and basic math. The lack of these skills cause many brilliant and creative students to needlessly to do poor in school or worse kicked out. For example I got B's and A's in my Special Relativity and Intro To Quantum Physics class but did poorly in my lab grades because I had bad hand writing, couldn't spell well or use grammar correctly.

I decided grades were bullshit and rebelled in college because I failed a programming module while people who copied my lab work passed. Even worse was when people who copied my answers for a quiz got higher marks than me even though our answers were exactly the same (seriously, wtf? was it my handwriting? ok, so I have really bad handwriting).

Towards the end, though, I realized that spending extra time in college redoing modules wasn't making any statements other than that I like incurring debt and am possibly retarded. So I gritted my teeth and finished it. Despite knowing that grades are mostly bogus, I found to my surprise that I actually enjoyed that last year in college. If I bothered to learn the course material, it was good for me. If my teammates in the lab hacked the system by letting me do all the work, it was good for me because I learned more. And if they got better grades, it didn't matter, because they're bogus anyway, and I knew I could leave them in the dust when it came to doing real work.

What I'm trying to say is that grades are bogus, but you should try to learn the course material in any case because it's good for you.

In the vast majority of college classes that I've had, I've seen a pretty high correlation between the amount I've learned and the grades I've gotten. I've never felt like I did badly on a test even though I knew the material really well.

And there are some silver linings to grade inflation. I've never shied away from a really tough class for fear of getting a really bad grade, because it's hard to get a really bad grade when you're making an effort. That doesn't mean it's fair when my GPA is compared to less inflated GPAs, but at least it means I won't graduate feeling like I skipped out on really cool classes for the sake of my GPA.

Also, my perception is that grades appear to be inflated because the vast majority of people here are really smart, work really hard, and learn lots of stuff.

Complaining about the validity of grades is an easy path to deciding "I could do better than them if I actually tried" for me. I've regretted not trying, but I've never regretted working hard, regardless of the grade.