Let's all list our grades, SAT scores, and how much our parents paid in bribes for those.
"Beer Fights Grade Inflation" would have been a good headline.
Heh. Very often I perceive "let's focus on solving the larger social problems, this is just a symptom" as a copout, say when talking about housing the homeless. "We fucking need to solve both!" is my response then. But in this case, yup, a symptom not worth much political or institutional attention.
"GPAs are overly important when you have too many people scrambling for too few opportunities. Decrease the importance of grades by fixing poverty and inequality."
hear hear - also, create sufficient, and adequately funded, higher education opportunities for many walks of life. it is a scandal that the univ of cal and csu systems have not grown to keep up with the growth of the state's population, and have been savaged by cuts in funding.
Until we fix the larger social problems -- EVERYBODY FAILS!
(this gives everyone motivation to fix things)
Are people still blaming grade inflation on Vietnam? The war that is, not the country, and professors being less willing to flunk someone if they knew it meant they would be drafted.
6: The Vietnam explanation sounds plausible, but looking at the most common "4 year college grades over time" chart, it looks like the Vietnam era coincides with a sharp decrease in Cs and corresponding increase in As, with very minor changes in Ds and Fs. that doesn't seem to match the "they didn't want people to flunk out and get sent off to war" explanation.
I heard in from professors in the 90s. Maybe these professors were nicer than the older ones who would have retired before I got there.
Grade inflation is fine. With what college costs these days, consumers should expect to get A's as part of the package.
The same kind of dynamic occurred in Russia in the 90's, just with municipal government. If you were a provincial official, the scope of your corruption was largely determined by how your town was classified, so all of a sudden all these two horse towns became "Regional Importance Cities". I blame Grad inflation.
Obviously kids these days are just charged up with HFCS. All to the good, I say.
The Vietnam explanation sounds plausible, but looking at the most common "4 year college grades over time" chart, it looks like the Vietnam era coincides with a sharp decrease in Cs and corresponding increase in As, with very minor changes in Ds and Fs. that doesn't seem to match the "they didn't want people to flunk out and get sent off to war" explanation.
But remember that this era also includes a massive increase in the number of women entering higher education. If we assume that the ability to achieve high grades is equally distributed across men and women (duh) than a significant increase in women will automatically cause 'grade inflation' if only because there is a previously un-admitted group of high-achieving students who are now suddenly allowed in classrooms.
Are we still observing the analogy ban? Because if not, the best analogy is that grades are like poop. That is, very helpful as proxy evidence that the system is functioning more or less effectively, but otherwise gross and unimportant.
What with social media, things that used to pass without comment are now receiving clapbacks and online derision. This is Shade Inflation.
If we assume that the ability to achieve high grades is equally distributed across men and women (duh) than a significant increase in women will automatically cause 'grade inflation' if only because there is a previously un-admitted group of high-achieving students who are now suddenly allowed in classrooms.
This is a charitable way to put "She couldn't possibly have earned all those As!"
12: From the charts I've been able to find with minimal effort, the Vietnam era shift from Cs to As coincides with a sharp increase in college attendance in general, but not an increase in the percentage of women attending relative to men.
Maybe fewer smart/hard working people in general attended college before then, and the '63-'73 period saw the erosion of the gentleman's C.
Grades are like poop because you shouldn't mention them during dinner.
Young women whose loose morals would have previously earned them a classification as hussies, harlots, or tarts at best are now referred to with terms that connote desirability and a condescending sort of respect. I blame maid inflation.
The same kind of dynamic occurred in Russia in the 90's, just with municipal government. If you were a provincial official, the scope of your corruption was largely determined by how your town was classified, so all of a sudden all these two horse towns became "Regional Importance Cities"
That sounds more like the process in the 1990s and 2000s when every college became a University. Now the few remaining ones with College in their name sound MORE prestigious because it sounds like they have a laserlike focus on undergraduate instruction instead of being a place for 40-year-olds to advance their careers getting part-time graduate degrees.
You used to make summertime refreshments using only the most ripe, delicious fruit. But now any old shitty yellow fruit will do for your juice. I think you see where I'm going with this.
Grades are like poop because they both result in the use of thin paper.
Vaguely related to 12/16: a few years ago I read a magazine article that a) wasn't porn*, and b) unironically used the term "coed" to refer to female college students. I felt briefly like I'd stepped into a time warp.
*I imagine the term is even too antiquated for porn at this point.
Should I be giving a Harvard-level difficulty class at Heebie U? Of course not. I should give a class that fits my students, where a hard-working, talented Heebie U kid can get an A, and a mediocre Heebie U kid can get a C.
That doesn't seem to apply to this situation, though. The article isn't talking about the relative difficulty of courses between universities, but the overall proportion increasing (rapidly) over time and some universities having crazy rates of Firsts. 50% at Surrey? Even if they were doing Harvard level courses and performing at Harvard levels of ability, that would almost certainly be inappropriate.
23: You're right that it's different. But a very common thing is for a new faculty member to start with very difficult courses, fail a lot of students, and then over the course of their career, modify their courses to fit the actual group of students that they're teaching. (Then, as they get older still, and burnt out/lazy, they discover that the easier the course content, the easier the teaching and the whole thing, and so they further water down the course past where the students' ability lies. That part kind of is grade inflation.)
Grades are like poop because they both are released once a quarter.
I feel like grade inflation would still be a thing if we cured poverty. It might even get more intense since when people's basic needs are secured they pay more attention to signaling games.
But we could still pause and take a victory lap for curing poverty, before taking on grade inflation.
We could solve the problem by eliminating grades.
Grades are like poop because a TA will take less time than a full professor to produce either.
"when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
This reminds me of the Reply All episode about CompStat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompStat
Also why I don't like "agile metrics".
OTOH I think it's generally true that the measured dislike and complain about the tools of their measurement. For instance I recently learned that Salesforce is detested by the individual sales reps who use it, but beloved by the sales managers who use it to stay abreast.
Are grades really all that important for the vast majority of folks who get a non-scholarly job after completing, or not completing, undergraduate education? I have occasionally hired recent graduates for secretarial or paralegal positions, and if they don't list their GPA, I don't ask. Definitely don't ask if they have any work experience. A certificate from an ungraded 3 month professional program, often taken in the summer either after the BA or after dropping out of the BA, is more important. Very high grades are a minus for some kinds of jobs because you expect the employee will get bored, and either do a sucky job or leave for grad school.
Even for PhD programs, aren't recommendations more important? JD and MD programs use standardized tests. MBA programs care more about work experience.
26: I probably shouldn't try to generalise too much beyond my Oxbridge experience but you'd think this tendency would be mitigated in an England & Wales context, and as far as I understand it a Scottish one too, by the fact that the people teaching the students generally aren't the ones grading them, for the grades that matter*. Similarly course difficulty is basically set a faculty level, though obviously it will be influenced by how specific professors go about their teaching. There may be similar incentives at play (certainly seems so from the data), but I doubt they're operating at the level of the individual professor.
* Possibly not true for dissertation type papers, but I honestly don't know.
Definitely not for my professional master's. My internships and data skills were relevant; my coursework might have been; not my GPA.
I did a term at UC Santa Cruz where they don't grade you, but instead they write a paragraph about what kind of student you have been in that course.
Which is much worse. I can handle a B-, but 150 words expressing detached judgment about my abilities and limitations is not the kind of thing I actually want to read.
33: When I was recruited by Google, 21 years after earning my doctorate, they wanted to know my undergraduate GPA. I don't think it mattered too much, but if it had been unexpectedly low, it might have derailed the process at some point just because they have a really selective process with a lot of hurdles in it and a whole lot of people who have to sign off (something like around 1% of potential recruits end up getting hired). I do remember going around with the company doing resume verification for them on why I couldn't just refer them to my supervisor to verify the time I had spent as a sole proprietor (a copy of my business license finally sufficed for this, making me glad I had done the formal paperwork to set up the business).
Are grades really all that important for the vast majority of folks who get a non-scholarly job after completing, or not completing, undergraduate education? I have occasionally hired recent graduates for secretarial or paralegal positions, and if they don't list their GPA, I don't ask
The last admin I was involved in hiring, her grades meant a lot, but it was because her history was otherwise kind of erratic. Dropped out of college first time through, ten years with only a few jobs for a couple of months here and there, and then back to college (which she was still finishing at night at the time she applied). The fact that she had straight As in the classes she'd taken in her second try at college made her look a lot more reliable than the rest of her history, I probably wouldn't have advised hiring her with much worse grades. (She turned out to be absolutely terrific.)
34: a not-small part of the bacc prep is working with the students to accommodate the vagaries of their exams being graded by teachers from other schools. there is then a process by which the juries agree on the scores for each exam, to try and even out the grading across the process. flights of fancy and oddities accommodated by your own school's faculty are a big risk in this process. the whole grading season is unquestionably brutal for fr teachers, but i still find the blowing-off-steam thing they do on twitter, sharing the most absurd idiotic responses to the exam questions, really super off-putting. one thing to do this face-to-face over drinks with your colleagues, another to memorialize for the entire world the idiocy of some random kid.
It's funny you mention Harvard as an example of academic rigor, when it was well-known (and a butt of derision) in 1986 even within the Ivy League as the home of the "Gentleman's C", and I'm sure I've seen more-recent writeups that tell the story of how basically it's an "A" these days.
||
Holy moly. There's a student (who I'm quite fond of) who is struggling with some mental health stuff and was absent last week. She climbed in bed on Monday (it sounded like in a depressed/hiding way), and got out of bed on Tuesday, and found out it was Friday.
|>
It's funny you mention Harvard as an example of academic rigor,
I mean, there are idiot legacy admits, but the majority of students there are academically far more talented than at Heebie U, even if they're idiots in different ways on different axes.
How do you go that long with needing to pee? Not just marveling. Asking for instructions.
I've seen a number of articles that claim employers doing really look at grades, so I say don't worry!
I have hired probably a dozen or so people at this point and have never asked any candidate about their grades. In fact we've never even validated that they actually have the degrees they claim to have, aside from checking the publications they list and talking to their references.
Do you check that the journals in which those publications appear are "real"?
Many Harvard classes are hard and the grades are not inflated. The same work will get you a lower grade at Harvard than at Berkeley, and a lower grad at Berkeley than at my current school. Harvard draws from a much larger number of students than it did 50 years ago and those students are harder working and better prepared than they were then. Old people complaining about grade inflation just don't want to admit that younger generations are smarter and harder working and deserve the jobs held by useless boomers.
||
NMM to the Beat's Ranking Roger.
Way back in the day their "Mirror in the Bathroom" served as a shibboleth, if you met someone and they knew the lyrics to that song you knew they were cool. Only 56 too. RIP.
|>
Jesus he was 17 when that song came out.
When I was a grad student and occasionally in the position of giving grades, everyone acknowledged the possibility of grade inflation, and maybe even ended up having it baked in to the professor-provided grading rubric by the baseline of an "average" grade being more in the B rather than the C range*, but the A itself was meaningful and people were dedicated to keeping it that way. Given how many ways you could assign the steps down from an A, I couldn't tell you that a B+ I gave wouldn't have been a B- in the context of another grading system, but every A I gave was for work I thought reached the level that most people would think an A should be. I really doubt there are many classes even at immoral elite schools that are rife with admissions bribery and entrenched enwhiteled privilege where an old gentleman's C is now an A.
* Some professors seemed more willing to have the full range of C to A, with D** and F being real failure, while other profs had classes where everyone who passed was in the B to A range, and anyone who failed was D or F.
** I'm not sure I've ever understood the D. In schools I attended it seemed like if you got a D you needed to take the class again if you wanted credit. So it was like an F with effort. I failed a few students, but always because there was required work that they simply didn't do. I think I got close to giving someone a D, but they got a C- and it was legitimately borderline, like some assignments missing but not enough to fail.
49: Megan met him -- http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_16520.html#2007818
I did a term at UC Santa Cruz where they don't grade you, but instead they write a paragraph about what kind of student you have been in that course.
I was on a grad admissions committee once and it was one of the few situations where it makes sense to look more closely at grades and transcripts*. One applicant had gone to a school that didn't do grades and it was really hard to evaluate their evaluations alongside everyone else's grades. If you got an A- at a regular school and the professor gave you positive feedback and suggestions on how to make your work better, that would show up on a transcript as an A-. But in an evaluations school, everyone reading your "transcript" gets the suggestions for improvement, which almost certainly make your "grade" sound less positive than a simple A-. I felt bad for that applicant, though I don't think not having grades ultimately made a difference in the overall decision.
* Even then, this was less important than the personal statements explaining why they wanted to be in the field and what they wanted to work on, their overall past focus and experience in anything field-related, and even the letters of recommendation, as flawed as that system is. Nothing was less important than the GRE scores, though. Basically, anyone who made it past the other evaluative criteria had GRE scores that were good enough to be ignored as a differentiating factor.
And one more thing, when I was taking some beginning language classes, I thought it was kind of fascinating how different schools approached the concept of a first-year beginning course. The difference seemed to be more in deciding how much to cover, rather than grading per se. An A in first-year German everywhere was probably a "real" A in terms of how you score answers. But some schools might cover so much in the first-year that it would count as two years or more at a different school.
41, or something like it, happened to me in college. Jet lag was a factor but it was mostly depression/malaise. Went to bed on a Saturday night, woke up Tuesday morning completely surprised and shocked to have fully missed days. I don't remember going to the bathroom (but do remember waking up a few times and going back to sleep because it was "still night").
I'm sure I've seen more-recent writeups that tell the story of how basically it's an "A" these days.
The median grade at Harvard is an A-.
I swear I just posted a comment, but it's not showing up. Wonder if this, unrelated, comment will: I don't really think very hard about grading in my class. I know people with all kinds of elaborate theories about how many students are supposed to get which grade. But in every class I've taught so far (and that notably doesn't include giant intro classes, which might be a different beast), almost all the students have basically learned the main things I expected them to, and I give them good grades. Are those grades inflated? I don't know. But I wouldn't want students who learned the material to be given low grades just to meet someone's abstract idea of what the distribution should look like. I could also make my classes much harder to better "sort" the students, but then I think a larger fraction of students just wouldn't learn the main points. That doesn't seem like a good tradeoff to make just in the name of achieving a "better" grade distribution.
My employer's annual performance review system requires us to grade people on a scale of, effectively, B- to B+. It is made very clear to us that A is reserved for immortal creatures of godlike form and power, and A- can be awarded at most a couple of times per hundred people per year for actions along the lines of inventing a vaccine for malaria or flinging yourself in the path of the bullet fired at the adorable orphan, while C+ is for slouching barely-human orkoids and anything below C is pretty much saying that you should just put them out of their misery right now. So normal humans are B- to B+.
My masters degree was kind of the opposite of grade inflation. The failure rate was astronomical (20-30% was average, and everyone admitted was already a high performing student with a 1st from a good university). After one particularly bad year, the year before I sat my finals, they had a crisis meeting and changed the structure of the final examinations, to make it possible to resit a limited amount,* but the faculty completely resisted a lot of the suggestions from the students, that would have made it harder to fail outright (but not affected the final grades at all). Because, and I quote, one of the faculty members told us, "This is the hardest philosophy degree in the world, and we want to keep it that way."** I think the consensus in the room was that he was a fucking prick. There was definitely an element of, "We had to do it, so you have to do it."
That said, I don't think anyone has checked my grades (at any level) for any job I've applied for in the past 10 years. It's pretty much entirely about experience, and I work with people with poor degrees, no degrees, strange academic job histories, people who left school at 17, etc.
* before that change, if you failed one paper (out of 6), and the passmark was set at a very high grade level, you failed the entire degree, with no possibility of redress or a resit. They changed it to allow, I think, students to resit one paper.
** he may have been slightly self-aggrandising when he said that, but the basic impression that it was brutally hard, and outright failure was common, was definitely true.
To 58, the advantage of this system is that B means "meets expectations in all areas", B+ means "goes above expectations in some areas" and B- means "Falls short in some areas". After that it's gods and orcs and Jonas Salk only. So you could give all your students a B and that would be perfectly acceptable.
How adorable an orphan is can be really subjective.
And culture-bound. In most of Asia, asking politely for more gruel counts against adorableness.
Bullets aren't subjective at all.
59 was pretty close to a law school grading curve, except we were allowed more As. Maybe 15-20% were As or A-s, and the rest in the B+- range unless someone had a weird breakdown.
If they were a white male who had a weird enough breakdown, they were immediately interviewed for the federal bench.
"There was among the candidates one of the name of Ling," said he, when no-noise had been obtained. "The written leaves produced by this person are of a most versatile and conflicting order, so that, indeed, the accomplished examiners themselves are unable to decide whether they are very good or very bad. In this matter, therefore, it is clearly impossible to place the expert and inimitable Ling among the foremost, as his very uncertain success may have been brought about with the assistance of evil spirits; nor would it be safe to pass over his efforts without reward, as he may be under the protection of powerful but exceedingly ill-advised deities...
I think we should have a day where everyone comments solely in Kai Lung quotes.
68, 69: I had never even heard of this author or these books! Shame!
Books are great. I'm still reading Elements of Surprise. It's taking forever because I keep stopping to read the mysteries discussed in the book before I read the spoiler.
71: Me, too. I read Villette so it wouldn't be spoiled for me. It's pretty great.
Only difficult if you don't like ghost nuns, crossdressing, and anti-Belgian racism.
76: I would say it was more anti-Catholic than anti-Belgian.
Just anti-Walloon or against the whole lot?
Just learned that the Brontës' father was originally called Prunty, but he changed it because he thought Brontë sounded more classy, and/or possibly as a mark of respect for Lord Nelson, who was made Duke of Bronté by Ferdinand the Mad King of the Two Sicilies.
As mentioned by Mr. Mybug in Cold Comfort Farm. (That is, his book on Branwell Bronte, arguing that he wrote all of his sisters' books, is based on two letters he wrote his aunt Prunty.)
I already knew that the Brontës were all massive polar exploration groupies and called two of their toy soldiers "Ross" and "Parry". (Parry was the Paul McCartney of early 19th century polar exploration, Ross was the Mick Jagger. See portraits:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Parry_(explorer)#/media/File:Captain_William_Edward_Parry_(1790-1855),_by_Charles_Skottowe.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_Ross#/media/File:James_Clark_Ross.jpg)
And I think there's both anti-Catholic sentiment and anti-Belgian racism. She thinks Catholics generally are underhanded and deceitful, but she thinks Belgians are stupid and have offensively tidy hairstyles.
82: ah of course! I didn't make that connection when last I read it; I thought Prunty was just a funny name that SG had thought up. But of course Branwell would have actually had aunts called Prunty.
The remains of my GCSE Russian insist that it should be pronounced "Bront-yo".
I guess that explains all the mustache wax Poirot used.
I have a reference book that allows you to look up a 19th century author and find other 19th century authors whose names you could substitute without altering the general point you are making.
The name for such a book is, of course, a brontesaurus.
Now you have to write it. Whoever you are.
On topic because college: "But she grew up tall and she grew up right, With them Indiana boys on an Indiana night."
#/media/File:Captain_William_Edward_Parry_(1790-1855),_by_Charles_Skottowe.jpg){kind=link}
){kind=link}