Nearly Half of All College Grades Are A's | Hacker News Reader

Nearly Half of All College Grades Are A's

deseretnews.com

31 pointsinshane40 comments

Yup. Faculty don't like you pointing this out and actually complain loudly to the Provost level administration at a University when it is done so. Here's what happened to me a few years ago:

I created a web app at the request of one of the schools & deans at the University I work for. (I do stats/database reporting full time.) It was wildly popular with students for enrollment purposes. After a few days it got shut down by a direct Provost order. The faculty did not like it being so easy to compare their grades with their colleagues on "identical classes" (large foundational courses math and science) and worried that it would damage departmental and eventually school reputation.

Personally I thought it was bullshit to take down (not only because I worked so hard on it and it was fuckin cool.) The data is released to companies (by way of an Open Records Request) that make money by selling "pick the best professor for this class" rankings to naive students.

Our research department devoted resources to making the application because we thought making the data easy to use and public would in fact CORRECT for grade inflation over time. Basically, I feel that the old way has to die off before any changes will be made and there's some pretty big changes looming for higher ed in the future.

If you're just storing non-personal statistics on grades for courses of professors, how can they actually shut you down? I know there are lots of "Professor Review" sites out there, so is it just the grades aspect? I don't remember signing anything at my college that says I can't give out grade info, but I may be mistaken.

> If you're just storing non-personal statistics on grades for courses of professors, how can they actually shut you down?

"I created a web app at the request of one of the schools & deans at the University I work for."

The provost has some authority over the deans and schools. Since the application is "owned" by his employer....

Yes, maybe he could continue it "on the side" but he may want to stay employed and if he got the grade information from the school, they can probably shut that down

Yeah, University employees are contractually held to a non-compete agreement which would prolly break down here when brought to general counsel.

The grade distribution information is not considered restricted under any FERPA or other policy, but it is considered 'sensitive' and requires an external party to jump through quite a few legal hoops to access.

Edit: I serve at the behest of the Provost. So that was basically the boss/boss saying "we made a mistake, please take that down."

Coming off a three-year stint working for a University, I would have to agree that the old ways have to die before change can come about. University bureaucracies are built on the idea of long-standing tradition (even tenure promotes the idea of no change), so when change comes, the administration fights it. Especially, if that change involves opening data up that could somehow in their minds potentially embarrass them.

Transparency leading to reform.

I am sorry this did not work out.

The idea's still there in the administration tho. It's the Faculty who need to quit being butthurt about it.

Generalizing: Working with leading faculty is a bit like working with the 'always answers in snippits' students from highschool 40 years later in their life. Procrastinate, panics when something isn't the way they expect it, and genuinely quirky. All it takes is one noisy tenure to make a stink to a VP/P and many things get shut down.

Maybe in a decade when the damage grade inflation has done to accreditation and the value of a degree becomes apparent the faculty will allow for this type of thing to exist.

I attended university in the early 90s, and majored in Computer Science. On a lark, I took a class on Native American Literature (just on the name alone, I thought it would have been more Native American lore; it turned out to be contemporary fiction written by Native Americans). The entire grade was based on one mid-term and one final. The mid-term I failed. When it came time for the final, I realized there was no way I could even answer the single question and simply walked out of the class.

I fully expected an F for that class, but I ended up with a C, which surprised the hell out of me.

I was recently talking with a friend (a former English instructor for a well known university in the United States) about this, and he said I either received a "Gentleman's C" or (more likely) the instructor simply thought he lost my paper and erred on the side of grade inflation.

leme guess, UC Santa Cruz? ;)

Wow, does Santa Cruz really have that bad a rap?

It likely wasn't, by the way- the school of engineering at Santa Cruz wasn't founded until 1997.

Grad quality is more consistent elsewhere, like Cal, than at USCS.

Nope. It was a university in Florida.

In the late 90s, early 2K, I was erroneously enrolled for a semester I never attended (left University) and received all Fs, except for one class, I received a D.

The NYT article on the same topic has nice graphs that show the change in grade distribution since the 1940's and the shift in the bell curve:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-of-...

And, Walter Russel Mead of The American Interest offers a nice summary: "43 percent of all grades given in American colleges are A's. Social science grades are higher than grades in science and math. Humanities grades are higher still. Grades in private colleges are higher than grades at public universities. Northern schools give A's more freely than southern ones, and prestigious colleges have flabbier standards than their less fashionable rivals."

I went to school at a private, expensive, Catholic university in the Midwest. Later, I moved and finished my degree at a state school in California.

I'd estimate classes and grading at the state school in CA were at least twice as difficult.

That's a very disturbing chart. Even if the course materials are just as hard as before, which I doubt, as a student you can't know whether you actually comprehend them as well as you need to. By extension, employers can no longer rely on a degree as a token of acquired knowledge or work ethic.

Yet tuition prices consistently increase.

Why is it costing more to impart less knowledge?

I once read an article by person who primarily interviewed "C" grade students for positions.

His philosophy was that students that where talented often cruised along and didn't try to hard, the ones that struggled often put in more work and got "A" because of it, but the "A" wasn't a reflection of talent. Just a reflection of an ability to pass a test.

In Norway, we have the opposite problem: Nearly half of the grades in some subjects at NTNU are Fs, and 40% of all students get an F every year. The institute for IT, maths and electronics implicitly says that "a high failure rate means the standard is high", and they ignore feedback and complaints about professors.

Luckily (if I should put it like that), the grades themselves are usually fair. It's just that some subjects require too much work to be considered as one subject, which seems to be the university's intentions.

This is similar in Germany. Although I always had the it was necessary to remove a certain percentage from students with weed-out courses as entry to Maths, CS and Engineering is mostly free.

But as soon as you are through the weed-out stage (or undergrad) A or B is pretty much the only grade you can get.

When I was in college I had a professor offer to not put a grade on any of our work. I took him up on it and it was one of the best classes I ever had. I was so much more focused on the feedback rather than the score. I wish more college classes were like that.

There are acutally entire colleges like that...

http://www.ncf.edu/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_College_of_Florida#Distingu...

I wish it was at least a little more standardized across schools and majors. A little variance is fine but i went to a school where evreryone,not just me, had to study into the night to maintain barely passing grades in any technical subject while kids at other schools and "easier" majors maintained 3.5+ without cracking open a book.

This is a good trend. The grade is binary (A or not A). It's not possible to evaluate a class of 100 students with 90% of whom you've never spoken.

I always felt it was a good idea to make sure my teacher knew my name after the first couple sessions. Get to know your teachers everyone, they are cool and they want to see you succeed.

For the curious, I can tell you this is certainly not a global effect. At the UK university I work at, we mark work out of 20, and only a small proportion of students get above 17 (considered excellent, probably equivalent to A).

I attended the International School of Brussels for my high school education, and most teachers were from the UK. I can vouch for the difference in culture regarding grades. I once had an English teacher tell me I should be "leading the class" since she had given me an A- the semester before. Such an attitude was prevalent among all my teachers, and I felt it really damaged my college application to American schools. I applied to stanford and of the 4500 early applicants, 2500 had a 4.0 GPA (perfect). Not one student at my school had an unweighted 4.0. I had a measly 3.4.

Other than the comparative nature of GPAs in college applications, I thought it was a great approach. The only class I was able to coast through was Math, but I was one of the few who could do so.

I have no data to back this up but anecdotally I once had a professor explain how some, if not most, professors would adjust their grading to get to a specific average for exams and essays.

However we use numbers (1 till 10, 10 being best) here and from my understanding they would try to average it around 7.5. Having all your grades an 8 (or higher) translates to graduating cum laude, basically turning cum laude into 'just above average'.

I assume this is due to management tactics that involve investigating classes that deviate from grade averages rather than trying to judge based on course quality.

How cum laude is awarded differs somewhat between universities, but the University of Maryland, for one, does not confer latin honors to any student below the 10th percentile in their college. Here are the GPA requirements for this past semester for the college of engineering:

  GPA Ranges for Latin Honors: May 2011
  
  Summa:            4.000 - 3.976
  Magna:             3.975 - 3.912
  Cum Laude:      3.911 - 3.825

This is still well above 'just above average.'

None of this is surprising given only straight-A students get into college, and only straight-A college students get into graduate school. The days of the "gentleman's C" have long past.

not mine...

Now that we have entered the machine thinking age, where tools like IBM's Watson can answer open ended straight forward questions, grades measuring memorization and straight forward question-answering miss the mark.

I predict the ability to answer a multiple choice/fill in the blank test will be dominated by the machine once IBM's Watson gets deployed to all the arts and sciences.

There needs to be a bigger emphasis on what you can build given the sum of human knowledge instead of "how much you can remember".

I'm thinking of a grading system where you measure the number of processes and tasks you can do which are useful to humanity that $10,000 worth computer can't do. High = A, Low = F. "the arts" doesn't count. I'm talking creative thinking, innovation, things like that.

By your standard, we should let the machines vote because that's a multiple choice question.

I think an advanced objective-thinking algorithm like watson advanced another 15 years would provide night-vs-day superior choices than your average self serving voter who has the objective thinking capability of a random number generator.

Voting is basically a popularity contest anyway. An objective thinking machine would have to be fed an objective question, like: "Which candidate has appealed to the politically active youth community with a tech-savvy hip message of 'change' "?

I agree with you that a machine may someday make a more "rational" vote than the average voter. We had quite an experience in Quebec recently...

That being said, your solution does not improve humanity. It does not make the voters (or the students) better understand their world. It's just a bandaid to hide their ignorance.

Building things that depend on the sum of human knowledge is a very, very slow process if you are ignorant about large parts of your respective field.

A question..should not an article of on such a serious subject be devoid of errors?

Not just grammar, but illogical assumptions, errors in logic, etc? See how many errors you find..I find too many to rely on the article on any basis.

This comment is a classic example of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

If you'd prefer, you can skip the article and read the executive summary yourself at http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=16473.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com