Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities
gradeinflation.com
gradeinflation.com
[1] This grading system was set by the department so that there wouldn't be "easy" and "hard" quarters to take the course.
And a newer book called "Academically Adrift" found that students aren't learning much in college.
How do they get away with all this? One explanation is the signaling theory of education. A degree (and the prestige/selectivity/reputation of the school and program) is a proxy (signal) for IQ plus an indicator of persistence (toughing it out to make it through a degree program).
"ryan Caplan of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the value of a college education. Caplan argues that the extra amount that college graduates earn relative to high school graduates is misleading as a guide for attending college--it ignores the fact that a sizable number of students don't graduate and never earn that extra money. Caplan argues that the monetary benefits of a college education have a large signaling component rather than representing the value of the knowledge that's learned. Caplan closes by arguing that the subsidies to education should be reduced rather than increased."
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...
A lot of those out-country students are scared of angering students, getting bad reviews and getting kicked out. End result, classes are getting easier and grades are inflating. Students are getting less prepared for later classes
I'm a US citizen and I have a reputation for being a hard grader because my position is a lot more stable (it is a lot easier to get funding for US citizens).
I teach mostly upper level classes and I am failing a lot of students with "good" grades.
The only thing I grade on is an ability to communicate mastery, rather than mastery itself. There is not much I can do about that.
Have you read Quiet?
Is it actually an issue with grad students worrying about being kicked out? That would be completely bizarre and unthinkable to me: I thought it would be at worst jeopardize the student's TA ship or some silly thing with quals.
http://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/students-and-exch...
Is there really a difference? The brightest math genius, if he is unable to communicate his mastery in any way, is no better than the average individual.
To me the problem seems to be that grading is based on communicating mastery in a highly artificial situation. How often is a programmer or scientist needing to work under the same conditions as on a test? How often is an engineer supposed to receive zero input from their peers before completing a design? How often does the average student need to know the 50 states and their capitals when looking it up is not an option?
From my perspective "communicating mastery" is exactly what you describe. I am limited to the context and expectations of a classroom. So students being able to pass tests is at the root of "Communicating Mastery" whereas mastery itself would be the ability to do the job in "real life"
The only solution I've found is to design tests and projects that focus on describing the process rather than the result.
I give a lesson on "How to take a test in Computer Science" in every class I teach which is mostly about un-teaching them how to take tests.
I tell them:
- Every question is an essay question, even if you are suppose to pick from a list of answers. The only true multiple choice is a scantron test, which I don't give.
- If a question is vague, either ask for clarification or even better:
- make assumptions
- be aware of those assumptions (this is really what I want to test for)
- write them down as part of your answer
- If there are many reasonable assumptions, enumerate them and if there is space and time, answer the question for each of them.
The real problem at this point is not how a specific test is run, but rather that our education systems has trained students to think inside a very small box when taking tests, and students become often paralyzed with indecision when asked to act outside that box. Most of my students have never experienced socratic method, and are honestly scared of it.
Even in my own personal life, I often reach a point where I'm internally better at a subject than I can express it even in a natural setting. So I do think there is still a concept of internal mastery and that it does have use for self reflection.
Most often this is when debugging some complex application and getting an intuition as to where the application is broken. It still takes more time before I can express my mastery of the issue in the form of a fix and in some cases even more time before I can give a sufficient justification for why the fix works.
Recently I fixed on issue by applying a sort to a list being traversed by a function calculating something off of it. It was weeks later before I figured out why the sort was actually needed (when working on a related issue), there was just an intuition that the list needed to be sorted.
>The real problem at this point is not how a specific test is run, but rather that our education systems has trained students to think inside a very small box when taking tests, and students become often paralyzed with indecision when asked to act outside that box. Most of my students have never experienced socratic method, and are honestly scared of it.
Yep. Helping little siblings with homework, I'll sometimes ramble off topic and they will try to steer me back to helping them get the right answer. So I then tell them "Yes, the teacher just wants the right answer, but the ramblings are going to be what actually helps you later in life." I found that professors who ramble off topic and bring it back on topic are some of the best because they show how all the sterilized knowledge actually matters.
We want to produce competent and educated students. Colleges and Universities want to maximize throughput and income. _In the short term_, student reviews do that job.
This means, if everyone does well, even if your exam scores are near perfect, you could still end up with just a pass grade.
It sucks for students, but this way, grade inflation just cannot happen.
But cohort size changes (the number of babies born can differ substantially year over year), which impedes comparability.
Sure, both ends of the grading scale are easy to read when using bell curve grading. The problematic part is the center (where - by definition - the majority of graduates will be found): The C grade of year X could very well be better than the B grade of year Y.
Bell curve grading seems to be the worst of both worlds - the students experience even less correlation between effort and grade and you weaken inter-cohort comparability. If grading reform is willing to lose comparability between students anyway it should move in the opposite direction and grade relative performance improvements of individual students. That is proven to result in better overall performance of students (especially for weak performers).
The point is with scoring on a curve you can say that this person scored at this point in the curve so they are comparable to some one who achieved the same 20 years ago.
Intelligence pretty clearly has environmental influences and can change over time, even if the base value and/or maximum achievable level for a particular individual is genetically predetermined.
> The point is with scoring on a curve you can say that this person scored at this point in the curve so they are comparable to some one who achieved the same 20 years ago.
Comparable in terms of where they are in the distribution of people who were tested at the same time.
Not necessarily comparable in the actual skill that is being measured.
Which comparison is important depends on why you are comparing; there are times when you want the former kind of comparison, and times you want the latter. (If you keep both individual raw scores and group statistics, you can answer both questions appropriately, if you just grade on a curve and keep only the result of the curve, you cannot.)
Intelligence development certainly is both heavily dependent on environment and can change for a given individual if the environment changes.
A quite well designed study on this topic is the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study that shows that adopted children have an IQ more similar to their social parents than their biological parents. It further showed that earlier adoption (= more exposure to new environment) meant higher correlation.
Whats more important however is the fact that IQ as measured is not a very good indicator for future performance. Motivation, especially achievement motivation has been shown to be at least as important for a successful professional life. And achievement motivation has been shown to improve strongly when grading based on individual performance improvement, e.g. measuring the relative performance gains (see e.g. Rheinberg & Krug, 1999).
But as it can be shown that the environment strongly influences IQ I'd say it is safe to assume that we as a species haven't yet approached the biological ceiling of our cognitive abilities. Once the environment doesn't influence IQ test results anymore, though...
This may seem counter-intuitive, but there can be huge differences between classes and/or years. Same teacher, same material, seemingly similar students and widely varying results. Ask teachers and they'll confirm this appreciation. And this grading system completely ignores the fact...
I am assuming there are entrance exams as well.
I guess the moral here is do what challenges you and don't worry about anyone else.
Colleges here use both to determine scholarship eligibility, and it turns out I qualified for nothing. If I had taken the easier classes and raised my GPA to meet the threshold, I would have gotten a full ride based on my SAT.
The moral here is you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
But I do suppose that the person who is 'cheating' the system is more likely to get screwed harder than someone doing the 'right' thing in the case of a major change. I expect that if things were changed in a way that hurt people doing what they were supposed to, there would be some transitional period, grandfathering, etc to protect them, whereas if a change hurts people who are gaming the system, it's more likely to just leave them hanging, since they shouldn't have been doing that anyway.
The irony in all this is I ended enrolling in a science degree for which I only needed a very low mark to get into - I could have enrolled in any of my high school's subjects and it would not have mattered.
(As an aside, this is but one of the reasons internships/coops/externships are so important for undergrads.)
Problem is it sucks not only for students but everyone else (e.g. potential employers), too. If grades only show your relative position on a bell curve and not your absolute skill level, they cease to allow for skill level comparison between people. With bell curve grading an engineer with an C being born in a baby boomer year may be better than an engineer with an A graduating in a year with less students.
Your graph still shows the trend. But in a way, that's the most dangerous lie, the sort where you "help truth along" a little bit, to be more compelling.
The kind of false impression that at least I get when I look at this graph is that the grades were multiplied by a factor ~1.3 over the past 20 years when they were only multiplied by a factor 1.06. For anyone familiar with GPA, this is misleading.
The point is that a grade is an ordinal quantity (somewhat). You don't get anything useful from multiplying grades by any "factor". Anyone in danger of thinking otherwise should not blame the graph. Fast food articles such as "Top 10 secrets of misleading graphs your profs don't want you to know" are probably more culpable in that regard.
In principle I agree, but grade inflation preserves the order so why should we care about grade inflation if grades are only about order? I think the plot and the rest of the article goes beyond that.
Also an histogram is a poor representation choice for ordinal data.
It isn't really disingenuous. It's become fashionable to claim that "all graphs should start at zero", but that's not necessarily how you display data. Here is Edward Tufte:
"In general, in a time-series, use a baseline that shows the data not the zero point. If the zero point reasonably occurs in plotting the data, fine. But don't spend a lot of empty vertical space trying to reach down to the zero point at the cost of hiding what is going on in the data line itself. (The book, How to Lie With Statistics, is wrong on this point.)"
He's talking about time-series in this case, but the point remains: you need to understand the data. Sometimes (as in this case, where the trend is important, not the magnitude of change) showing the "zero" point is irrelevant.
Not all graphs no, but for histograms which are meant to compare quantities, maybe yes. See the other discussion in this thread.
The kind of false impression that at least I get when I look at this graph is that the grades were multiplied by a factor ~1.3 over the past 20 years when they were only multiplied by a factor 1.06. For anyone familiar with GPA, this is misleading.
So first, what are grades even for? They give students and teachers feedback, they set goals and they enforce a certain amount of discipline, pacing, something to enforce practice. Basically, teaching tools.
If I try to think of something analogous, a periodic fitness test as part of a fitness program might be it.
Once grades exist, they pick up all sorts of other uses inside the system. Admissions of various sorts. Hiring. Proof. Measures of competence. Comparison. When this is the actual goal, the grading and testing looks different. GMAT is designed around this "secondary" use.
I think if you roll back the history of how high schools or universities picked up all the habits and structures they have now, grades weren't as central as they are now. Matriculation was the main marker and that's a binary.
Anyway….
I think this kind of focus on grades, grade inflation, deflation and such is more about the fact that most of us were at one time or another concerned with our grades. Any unfairness annoys us and when different generations, places or subjects "have it easy" we get annoyed.
I don't think it matters much though. The main reason for grades is the first part, the teaching tool. Hopefully that becomes the focus. Better grading where better is "helps the student more." That probably means tracking and giving feedback progress, reacting to deficits, controlling the pace and stuff like that.
I hope grading gets completely hijacked by the technology assisted pedagogy.
Even more, students are awarded between 0-70 max,although the documentation says it's 0 - 100. I've also discussed with several professors that they are encouraged to degrade the student, even if they find nothing wrong with the paper, because otherwise the results won't be consistent with past data.
Does anyone see any problem here ?
I suspect your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I'm sick of humanities-bashing. If people don't like culture, that's fine, but they don't have to go around oozing their contempt.
I thought the whole point of the modern humanities is that culture (or at least western culture) is evil and oppressive. In my experience the average humanities course is not concerned with "culture" in the "cultured" sense of the word, which I assume is the definition you were using. The university I attended recently dropped all the Greek, Latin and Classics courses, for instance, and fired (negotiated generous early retirement packages with) all the staff who had taught them.
I get the impression you don't value things like anthropology, non-Western history and gender studies. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'd disagree here as well, though. I value and respect those disciplines, and I don't see their growth as a bad thing.
I've nothing against anthropology, gender studies etc. as disciplines, just with how they're often taught, with a focus on promoting particular ideologies rather than detached critical thinking.
Humanities (crap), finance (useless banksters), business (lol MBAs), economics (the an inevitable discussion every year here about how the Nobel Prize isn't a real Nobel). It's annoying, but I'm used to it.
Down in Australia, its less of this and more "you should be thanking me for giving you 51% in physical and computational chemistry".
edit - long day == giving up on spelling
Seems like getting the grade got too easy...
I am confused by this statement, because the Y axis label on the accompanying chart says the exact opposite: that both the average GPA and the average change in GPA is higher for humanities than for natural sciences.
(I'm not American, my knowledge is limited)
While I am not an expert on the matter, I do work at a college and in my experience there is more to it than that.
Just to name one, when I went to school in the late 70's we lived in cinder block dorms and ate in a cafeteria that basically had one dinner choice, while if we offered that today students would not come here. All that stuff costs money, also. Plenty of blame to go around.
You cannot legally repossess someone's human capital. So the current law is set to avoid the moral hazard of someone borrowing $100k in student loans and then declaring bankruptcy right after graduation.
Non-secured debt of other kinds are generally dischargeable in bankruptcy, so that principal isn't generally applied outside of student loans.
These qualities often are not creativity or diligence(hard to be quantified now), but family connections or social status.
Showing personal skills in an interview assumes you got one in the first place.
1. jackpirate mentioned more filler courses
2. The internet? If you had a bad professor and a poorly written textbook back in the day, you were kind of screwed outside of working with friends. Today the internet offers pieces of courses and HW examples from all over the world, and things like Coursera and MIT opencourse software are available.
3. MORE AP and IB classes allow students to take college level courses but alot of kids at my college for example, in stead of carrying over the credits, chose to retake Calc I & II, even though they had ACED the AP exams, giving them a freshman year filler of courses that were relatively a breeze for them. I don't believe as many students took AP and IB classes back then. It seems to be the norm nowadays to use this AP/IB edge to actually help yourself ease into college courses be essentially retaking them. Besides, graduating early from a 4 year university is not encouraged, most kids at that level also want the full 4 year experience so their motivation to transfer the credits goes down.
If you think about it, this gives the private universities grades a double edge. you are more likely to be accepted into a competitive private university if you are smart enough to be acing college level courses in highschool, and once you get to the private university, you breeze through those courses by essentially retaking them.
Most students used a combination of all three of these things and obtained 3.8-4.0 Freshman year, allowing for more slack when the harder courses started to come in.
4. Lets not forget aderall meds are handed out like candy these days to help kids work harder longer. Use of these drugs at top private universities is rampant. In many cases, parents seek out medication for their kids claiming ADHD when really what they are saying is "my kid is not working hard enough to meet up to my standards and because he must be as smart as I am that must be because he is distracted with video games, and therefore has ADHD". Many kids seek it out for themselves. Roughly 1/3rd of the kids I knew were taking aderall regularly (either with or without prescription) to pull all nighters on a regular basis to keep up in school.
one of many easily googled sources: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/education/seeking-academic...
5. As for the difference between public and private schools, competitiveness and cheating (illegal use of adderall included) is contagious and I definitely think competition, cheating, use of drugs to work harder longer (as opposed to enjoyment and recreation), seems to exponentiate itself amongst more competitiveness students, which statistically, are more likely to end up at more competitive schools.
6. Overall, more and more kids are going to college each year, but interestingly, the applicant pools for public universities does increase, the applicant pool for top private universities is exponential each year, allowing private schools to choose the cream of the crop, potentially creating more of a gap between the general caliber of students between private and public universities.
Anecdotal sure but to give you an idea, my friend who went to Johns Hopkins told me stories of kids ripping pages out of textbooks in the libraries so other students had no access, and I've heard this happens at top law schools as well. I witnessed in my private university even as a freshman. In many cases these are kids whose entire identities and their parents value of them depend on acing through ivy league schools, and failure (failure in these case being Bs)is not an option. I can't speak for the average public school, but I feel as if this mindset is less likely to be the norm here.
one of many sources to help support pt 5 & 6: http://nypost.com/2013/08/25/tutor-reveals-ivy-admissions-ma...
7. Someone else mentioned visa students who are TAs are pressured to give good grades for good reviews. With underclassmen on student visas, the competition seems to go up and they are in my experience more likely to engage in competitive behavior or cheating or aderall abuse because the stakes of failing out are also alot higher for them, but it seems to have the opposite effect if you are an undergrad versus be a grad grading TA trying to get good reviews from undergrads.
Anecdotal story, but proves that not all private schools use grade inflation liberally:
At my college, which is a private university ranked top 50, goes up and down each year by 20 or so in rankings, we are not top 5 but usually in top 25, grading is really tough and we were actually ranked top 3 toughest graders lumped in with MIT, except MIT exempts students from their entire freshman GPA (I've heard) to help with suicide and other such issues. Twice I was curved down because grades were so good we were suspected of cheating. The average GPA at my college was 2.7 when I graduated in 2012 and that is after 10% of students fail out. I wish I experienced more grade inflation at my school!
In the three cases of severe grade inflation during my undergrad career, the averages on the exams were 20/100 or 40/100, and they had to curve up 30-40 pts just get a third of the class to pass, and still that meant most kids got Bs or Cs. I'll never forget when we got 18/100 average for 64 kids in a class and we were all Engineering Majors. Different topic but I believe that results from hiring Professors who are better at research (brings in funding) than they are at teaching. Theres no reason statstically why the average of 64 students junior year of one of the hardest Engineering Majors at a top Engineering School should all be failing unless of course the Professor sucks at teaching.
So in this case, there was severe grade inflation, but that did not results in higher GPAs overall relative to other schools, it just helped A Professor not get in trouble for being responsible for causing the entire Electrical Engineering Department to fail and have to retake her course, which would have definitely put this Professor under review...
For freshman, it was graded pass-fail for the first year when I attended back in the '80s, now just for the first semester; that's more to ease the transition than anything else, and "hidden", unofficial grades are kept in case you need them for e.g. medical school applications. And the reported GPAs treat an A as 5.0.
Some figures for applications, as of some years ago, I think more people are applying now: 13,000 applications, but MIT has a high bar in terms of being able to do the general requirements of a semester of math past the AP Calculus BC sequence, one term each of mechanics and E&M calculus based physics, and other stuff like chemistry and a lab. So no legacy admits per se, instead the admissions office identified 3,000 applicants who they thought could "do the work", then constructed a class of ~1,100.
I think for my school people did choose the right majors but the Professors were hired based on their ability to bring in research/grant money and had no interest/some even acted disgusted at having to bother to teach a class, therefore alot of the class, despite being high performers in general, found that alot of classes, almost 100% consistent with the Professors mainly focused on research as opposed to teaching, caused lower grades overall. We have a very low endowment and overall much less money than MIT, so the pressure/incentive to hire Professors based on their ability to bring money in the school always trumps their ability to teach or produce a stimulating curriculum in general.
I would say this results in higher curves due to lower test performance in classes, that do not actually result in curving everyone up to an A, and thus is perceived by the outside world as "tough grading" but I think the students are of high caliber, but really it is a result of poor teaching. If the 64 students who have made it through the first two years of a college with high grades, all go into one class, and suddenly the average is 18/100 on an exam, and the 4.0 student makes a 55/100 and also gets an F without a curve, then we could say, maybe this is an issue with the a construct of incentivizing Professors to actually bother teaching and not so much that the students werent cut out for the major.
To add more stats, according to 2013, there were 16,000 undergraduate applicants to my school with an incoming freshman class of 1,204 so similar.
But on the more general point, I don't think the main driver for the disparity between high grades in private schools is due to a scandal or grade inflation, as most of my points support, in general higher performing students get into higher performing schools and those more competitive schools are good, especially with a large applicant pool, at deciding who is capable of doing well there, though I would say MIT is much better at this than my school was.
And this is enforced a whole bunch of ways post-tenure, e.g. I witnessed a case where a professor a lot of us have heard about was sat down by the head of his department (who I worked for at the time) and forced to read all the student evaluations of a course he'd just taught, which were all strongly negative except for another exception that proved the rule (we'd read them prior to the confrontation), and was then told he'd never teach that course again, he'd screwed up so badly.
Anyway, yeah, I can see all your points, which reinforce what I've been reading and occasionally witnessing starting in the '70s. One might more broadly correlate it with caviler way colleges and universities let students take on massive debt with all too often little chance of repaying it in a reasonable amount of time, the massive bloat of administrators, and how the latter are wresting more control from the faculty ... too many of these institutions just aren't all that serious about undergraduate education.
The same exists in the UK. Because if you don't get an A, you won't get into the high end universities, you won't get a high paying job, and that's you done. Life of serfdom.
Exceptions to the rule exist but our society is based on small amounts of winners compared to many losers.
Life is probably less winner takes all over here, but I don't think it has anything to do with grade inflation or lack thereof in high school or college.
For that matter; where you are accepted into higher education over here tends to be determined by a score which is your average grade plus some points for age (maybe for "life experience"?), and other things. Which ends up meaning that if you don't have near perfect grades out of "high school", you won't get into medical school (I guess this is the hardest one to get into). It is my impression that since the US has more privatization, you can at least find some university/college if you have money or connections even if you don't have stellar grades.