Test Scores Down, GPAs Up: The New Angst over Grade Inflation
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there, they're, their
its, it's
should have, could have
The same went for term papers. They were assigned at the first session, with a hard due date. For every day a paper was late, the grade went down one letter. He said they had the entire term to do them, no excuses were acceptable. After all, in business, excuses are never acceptable.
Half the students submitted the paper a day late, and about 10% 2 days late. Their grades were downgraded as announced.
The next semester, there was only one paper one day late. None the next year.
Expect excellence, and you'll get it.
This bit made me chuckle, as a big part of business is coming up with appropriate (sounding) excuses
My property tax statement says if I do not file the form on time with the full amount, the check will be returned and I will be liable for late fees plus interest.
It depends on how late. If it's not too late, generally nothing. If it's a little late, a penalty of a few %
> And it's even worse if I'm late filing a tax return, or heaven forbid, late on a tax payment.
If you don't owe taxes, then you don't even need to file. If you overwithhold, there's no penalty for not filing.
If you don't, the the penalty is like a few % of the owed tax, per month late. Similar with nonpayment. And it caps at like 40-50% extra of the owed tax, if you're extremely late (though there's interest too).
So actually it's not that bad.
But an F on a single paper also isn't that bad either.
It is?
Would you fire a programmer who let a bug slip through? Would it be acceptable to give a zero to a student who had a bug in their code? I've seen successful books with spelling errors. They should be minimized, but having a single spelling error doesn't mean the write gets 0 income. I've seen math professors forget a negative many times, doesn't mean they are idiots who don't know math or that they are no longer worth learning from.
I personally find professors who are overly strict to be compensating for not being able to make their material appropriately difficult. Effectively, if they didn't do this, their class averages would be abnormally high. I have many professors with hard classes that taught well yet didn't need to resort to this style of grading to think that one must do this to avoid grade inflation.
I think it depends on the error. For the code example, the code should at least be compilable, with no syntax errors. How could you give anything other than an F on a code assignment that doesn't even compile?
There are obviously mistakes that go too far, but these generally involve an element of malicious intent. If a junior takes down prod, that's probably a sign that some security settings are missing. Only if they knew they were taking down prod, knew they shouldn't, and did it anyway should something like firing be on the table.
1. Calculating intermediate results and carrying them forward was an automatic F. (This was because accumulating roundoff errors was a big no-no, and often if you worked through the algebra a lot of the terms that contributed to errors would cancel out.)
2. Coming up with absurd answers got you not just an F, but negative credit. Caltech expected students to know what was reasonable. Negative energy was not reasonable. If you produced such an answer, you'd need to annotate it with "I know this answer is absurdly wrong, but I cannot find my mistake" and then you'd get partial credit for how far you'd gotten in the derivation.
Caltech was training engineers and scientists, where such mistakes can have disastrous consequences.
My project was to design and build a glass tty. But I was careful with the spec, and specified a keyboard entry device. I designed a single board computer out of a 6800 uP, wirewrapped it. I made a keyboard out of random keys. I wrote the software (about 2K of asm). But I did not get the display to work. The prof gave me an F because the display didn't work. But I pointed out that the spec did not require a display(!). So the prof changed it to an A. Later, I finished it and got it all working properly.
The EE91 lab space the two days before the due date was packed with students working 24/7 to get their projects done.
But doesn't your response actually create the issue you're responding to?
10 Students coddled, lack resilience because they experienced few setbacks and allowed to weasel out of anything,
so they overreact to any setbacks they do encounter.
20 Coddle students more, expose them to fewer setbacks and looser standards.
30 GOTO 10You're twisting my words, and I didn't say any of that.
My point was that if it's "better suited to previous generations than today's," it's probably due to today's generation being over-protected to the point were they can't handle a failing grade on a paper. Avoiding that kind of thing more will just make them even less capable of handling it.
And honestly thinking about it a bit more, "failing grades due to typos" may actually be a fairly ego-preserving way to get a kid exposure to the experience that an F isn't the end of the world, and they can recover from it. That kind of grade couldn't reasonably be interpreted as the kid being judged incapable of good work.
Nobody is asking professors to provide anything. The ask is that they don't go out of their way to pile on extra cruel punishments on already-stressed students for typos. That's beyond the ability of a professor? What the heck are all the other ones doing then?
If the requirements of college are too stressful,
1. drop out and try something simpler
2. put in a lot more time studying
I had a lot of stress in college, to the point of abdominal pain, and picked option 2. It never occurred to me to demand easier coursework.
Note that the students did not have any problem with those requirements, and his classes were full.
Were you under the impression it's kindergarteners who are committing suicide?
- The "Sergeant" - The "Actual carpenter"
The "Sergeant" is somebody who HAS a disciplined way of working and still a minimal yet consistent set of rules for their students.
You learn that you can't weasel your way with him. However, you never worry about being mistreated or facing injustice (which sounds ironic because "Sergeant" screams and all that, but is not mistreating you but hammering into you discipline)
The "Sergeant" TRULY CARE about you. And that means it will not allow you to "go to war" if you are lacking!
The opposite of it is "THE BULLY", and he after you, period.
----
The "Actual carpenter" is somebody who teaches his actual experience working.
It will not just explain the theory of "the chair", HE HAS BUILD A CHAIR BEFORE, and it will teach you that.
He really can answer 'What is the point of this?'
The opposite of it is "THE PRETENDER", who has no idea of how to make a chair but certainly has a strong opinion of how to make one.
----
People that have not experienced the good version of the "old ways" are terrified of "discipline and hard work".
My grandmother was a "Sergeant". You NEVER mess with her. How many times do she hit me or abuse me? zero. A good "Sergeant" does not need to. She only needs to make an intense look at me (or anybody else btw), and that is all.
None of these requirements were difficult or unreasonable. The students didn't have a problem with them, either. His classes were well-attended.
I don't have an issue with the requirements, but rather with the magnitude of the punishment.
"There are many real-world tasks where an error could result in catastrophic failure--we approach those tasks with caution!"
Then make it more realistic. You got the wrong numbers for the budget, broke an employment law in a mock interview, etc.
"and really, when has anybody ever asked you what your GPA was in college"
Job interviews right out of college.
When the students thought he wasn't going to enforce it, they didn't bother complying.
I think people would quickly see the issue with this. Failing someone with a speech impediment isn't acceptable, even in a public speaking class. Spelling is not that different, given how much of ones ability to spell a word is related to ones ability to pronounce a word. Yes, if there are a few specific words people could try to just focus on perfectly memorizing them, but what's the value in that? And if they mess up, that really deserves a 0?
I also expect students to stand during their presentation. No excuses or automatic zero. If some may think this is a comparison too far, I'm someone with a speech impediment from childhood which led to a long struggle with spelling and I don't really see how it is different.
Me neither.
> I'm someone with a speech impediment from childhood which led to a long struggle with spelling and I don't really see how it is different.
The spelling in your post is perfect, so I infer you did overcome it. Great!
One can also have one's roommate check a term paper for spelling. I'd even write "business" on a card and refer to it as necessary. It's not like needing a dictionary. Just 5 words or so.
Little story: I would contract out the work preparing brochures for my business. I would have to correct the spelling every time. The contractor would get annoyed with that. One day, he prepared a brochure, and sent it to the printer for thousands of copies. He proudly showed it to me. The first thing I noticed was the headline was misspelled. He wound up fixing it and rerunning the print run at his own expense.
Misspelling in business is not only unprofessional, it's costly.
I do know that I stop reading articles on the internet that the author couldn't be bothered to use a spell checker on. There's way too much to read, why waste time on sloppy writers?
I’m curious if an ‘F’ for a typo can even be enforced if the professor provided a proper grading rubric.
As for other issues, I am susceptible to making certain kinds of mistakes in programming. I've learned to double/triple check those to compensate.
Is it really a big ask for people wanting a business degree be able to spell business? Oh the humanity!
one’s correct usage of its has no bearing on their mastery of introductory finance.
If we devoted extra energy to getting high schoolers to follow your dad’s shitty rules, they would probably do worse on standardized tests because you’ve utterly distorted the apparent salience of certain skills
> high schoolers
This was college, not high school. More is expected from college students.
Was this what your dad was teaching?
I'd add:
your/you’re
who’s/whose
were/we’re/where
to/too/two
then/than
are/our
lose/loose
wary/weary
affect/effect
aloud/allowed
definitely/defiantlyThe one I hate is swapping complement/compliment. It's like smoothing a sheet and encountering a burr in it.
Clearly your father never built software.
This shit is why people make up dates and then expect miracles to happen and then wonder why the code base looks like we empty a portapoty into the repo.
Demming is still having a laugh about this type of nonsense.
In one of my early jobs, I was assigned a programming task and given 6 weeks to deliver it. I delivered it in 4. The supervisor made a report via the project management system that I'd delivered it on time. I went to his office and complained about that, saying I wanted the record to show I delivered 2 weeks ahead of schedule. The supervisor said the project management software had no way to enter anything that was ahead of schedule.
Another anecdote from the same company:
They signed a contract with IBM to write some software for them, and was given 9 months to do it. The company hired a team of about 5 consultants to do it. If the software was delivered on time, each got a $10,000 bonus (this was back when $10,000 was a huge amount of money). The software was delivered on time. I asked one of them, did the bonus do the trick? He said, no, they were professionals. I laughed.
I do this now for a living. Phased releases, change of scope means pay out the phase and start a new contract.
I collected 75% of cost of ONE project 3 times from a single client... DO A, no do B, no do A... they canceled A for a whole year. I came back and finished it on a new contract the 4th time for 1/2 the first contracts cost (cause it was done).
It was not a trivial sum of money either.
The disadvantage with standardized tests is that it's an unrealistic work experience in which the student has no access to tools and reference materials that they would ordinarily be able to leverage.
Need the formula for the moment of inertia of a shell sphere? The coefficient of linear expansion of gallium? Fourier series of a sawtooth wave? If you've somehow forgotten the formula for the mean of a sample? It's all in there.
There were of course some things that weren't in the formula book - and if you had to look up every last thing, you'd face a lot more time pressure in exams.
Ugh; there's a reason why I'm switching my architecture course to MIPS32.
How many people will ever have a need to know the derivatives of the inverse trigonometric functions?
No, they wont.
Anyone who's taught test prep knows that "modest"/lazy students can achieve huge returns from being coached to exploit patterns in test structure and test content without actually becoming any more qualified as a student and without developing any kind of transferable knowledge.
But it requires investing money in private test prep tutors, many of whom are themselves capable of good-paying opportunities elsewhere, so it's largely not available to earnest and hopeful students of lesser means.
This impacts SAT, ACT, GMAT, LSAT, and plenty of other common tests.
Or checking out a book from the library and reading it.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
Text-only:
links -dump https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/BB1myA8y \
|sed '1,/\"body\":/d;/\"readTimeMin\":/,' > 1.txt
less 1.txt |sed '1,/\"body\":/d;/\"readTimeMin\":/,$d' > 1.txt1. Honors and AP courses get +7 added to grades. 2. Honors classes are on a 4 point scale, AP classes are on a 5 point scale.
The school still considers 95-100 to be an A and 94-88 to be a B, so it's totally possible for an AP student to get the bare minimum B score and receive an A and a 5 for their GPA average.
I explained to her that this is not how the real world works, and that she should not expect retakes to be available in the future. Sadly, it seems that perhaps I was wrong — this may be the new normal for students (up until the doors of the operating room, at any rate).
No one is suggesting that if you get a C on the midterm you shouldn't be able to get an A on the final. But if you get a C on the midterm you shouldn't be able to retake it multiple times and overwrite all but the last grade, as if they never happened.
There are also practical considerations, like the fact that this is unfair to students who are in different classes: imagine if you have a biology test and a history paper on the same day. If your history teacher doesn't let you rewrite papers indefinitely, then you can't blow the paper off and focus on the bio test. But if another history teacher (or teachers of other subjects, which your bio classmates are taking instead) do allow for rewrites/retakes of their assignments, they can blow off everything else and do much better on the bio test.
It's also hard for teachers to have to keep coming up with new test questions. If they re-use the same test questions, it becomes trivial to get a good grade since students know what the questions are (this is especially true for multiple choice, but is also true for other question types).