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Comment by vitobcn | Hacker News Reader

I find this graph outlining the frequency of different grades from 1949-2009 to be enlightening [1]. Around 1940's only 15% of grades were "A", and in the last few years they went up to close to 45%.

The source data is coming from research compiled by Rojstaczer and Healy [2].

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[1]: http://pazymino1evolutionliteracy.blogs.umassd.edu/files/201...

[2]: http://rampages.us/profjhonn/wp-content/uploads/sites/111/20...

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Here is a better version:

http://www.gradeinflation.com/figure8.png

and another interesting one in addition:

http://www.gradeinflation.com/figure1.png

How can you differentiate between grade inflation and knowledge inflation? Perhaps the increase in grades is because the difficulty of the material doesn't rise as fast as our ability to teach it and students' ability to learn?

I'm inclined to agree about knowledge inflation (in the sense explained in the following paragraphs), but I don't think it has to do with the perceived difficulty of subjects changing, or necessarily with instructors inability to teach at a level of rigor that might pull the average down (by increasing perceived difficulty).

Regarding "knowledge inflation", I'm not sure that we see an inflation in knowledge per se (at least in a way that affects grade inflation in college courses), but I think what we do see is an increase in 1) quantitative methods, and 2) cross-talk between fields. This influences the subject matter people in a variety of fields are expected to know (e.g., the amount of math, comp. sci., stats, etc...) , and thus, I suppose, inflates the expected knowledge in this sense.

Anecdata: I teach calculus 1, and guess how many math majors are enrolled? Zero. It's mostly bio, and other sciencey fields. This affects how I teach (and grade!) calculus. I'm willing to bet other courses -- like intro programming, intro stats, etc... -- experience something similar. Is this an explanatory factor for grade inflation? I don't know. There's obviously a huge number of things to consider.

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