Heebie: "at the elite universities, the students are such outrageous overachievers that any grad inflation is actually probably fair compared to what kind of work students were churning out in the 80s-90s"
You're talking about the UK's elite unis? Or the US' ?
I bet the legacy students were coddled more a generation or two ago than they are now, and the non-legacy students are more likely to be workaholics.
Heebie: I remember well the situation in the 80s at the Ivy Leagues. "Gentleman's C's" were the order of the day. From what I've heard, that's gone up to A's, but I don't actually know. We do know that a shockingly high percentage of admits at Harvard are legacy/interesting sports/dean's choice (money money money). And unless there's good evidence that those guys flunk out at a decent clip, I think it's only fair to assume that they're not working very hard.
The last time I interacted with college students regularly was 2000-05: lots of interns and summer co-ops at IBM. The students were fine, and some were quite smart. But not wildly better than kids 20 years before.
Last: I thought there was a ton of evidence that grade inflation was a real problem. As well as helicopter parents and evaluations driving grades ever-higher. For the same reasons that article adduces about the UK: when you're paying a figurative king's ransom for a degree, you damn well expect that it's a shiny one.
Grade inflation in the elite undergraduate institutions is driven in part by the fact that professional schools use GPA and test scores as cutoffs. If Harvard imposed a curve (e.g., centered on the traditional "C") then many Harvard undergraduates would not get into medical school or law school. Then parents start questioning whether a Harvard education is worth it.
A similar game is played at the professional school level. The most elite law schools either have absurd curves (e.g., my understanding is that the midpoint of the Harvard law curve is set at 3.5 on a 4 point scale) or refuse to provide grades at all (Yale). They also refuse to provide a class rank. These schools want employers to make hiring decisions based purely on the school's prestige. Yale does not want an HR person to pass over a Yale graduate who was in the bottom 10% of the Yale class in favor of a University of Alabama graduate who was in the top 10% of the Alabama class. They just want the HR person to see "Yale" and "Alabama" and bin the Alabama resume while quietly whistling the opening to "Dueling Banjos."
Lesser law schools tend to have more reasonable curves. Truly inferior law schools sometimes run a scam in which they offer full scholarships conditioned on GPA requirements. But the midpoint of the curve is set so low that most students forfeit their scholarship. More prestigious schools emphasize class rank and tie participation in extracurriculars to grades. These schools are grooming a select group of students to compete for prestigious positions (and thereby increase the school's prestige). The bottom half of the curve in such schools exists to solely to pay tuition and to make the top half look good.
I doubt the students are better than comparable students in 80-90s. They certainly don't study more! Instead, the students (parents) are paying for an outcome (a high-paying job) and the schools are trying to deliver that outcome.
My dad got a trophy for highest GPA at his (very much not Harvard) law school. He also got one for being a very bad skier.
Those were either the only trophies he got or the only one he kept.
I guess old Goodhart wasn't measuring cocks.
@nope: Serious question; how hard is it to pass the Bar exam?
I teach in a professional school for one of the "you can get people killed if you don't know what you're doing" professions that has a fairly rigorous licensing exam you need to pass in order to be legally allowed to practice. This pretty well damps down any tendencies to pass people who haven't learned anything. The pass rates for different schools are public knowledge, and if half of your graduating class can't get their license to practice, your school is probably going out of business.
Doesn't the Bar exam play a similar role?
if half of your graduating class can't get their license to practice, your school is probably going out of business. Doesn't the Bar exam play a similar role?
You might think so, but Tho/mas Coo/ley Law School shows that you can keep up a scam law school for decades. (In fairness, only 39% fail the Bar, not 50% ... but less than a third actually get jobs as lawyers.)
Grim excerpt from Wikipedia: 'In 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the district court's dismissal of a class action lawsuit by Coo/ley graduates who sued over the school's allegedly deceptive post-graduate employment data. The Sixth Circuit held that although the graduates' complaint showed that the statistics on which they relied were objectively untrue, their reliance on the statistics was unreasonable.[26] The court noted that "it would be unreasonable for Plaintiffs to rely on two bare-bones statistics in deciding to attend a bottom tier law school with the lowest admission standards in the country."[27]'
I find the reasoning in that judgement so depressing. "Because only an idiot would fall for a scam like this, we're going to give the perpetrator legal immunity for running a scam!" -- ugh. (I'm sure there are some arguments for why this is actually reasonable given X, Y, Z, but it's still depressing.)
"you can get people killed if you don't know what you're doing" professions
It must be stressful to be in one of those.
@AcademicLurker
Elite law schools do not teach you the material on the Bar exam. This is a point of pride for them.
Instead, you learn everything you need to know to pass the Bar exam during an 8-10 week review class you take after graduating from law school. You are expected to spend about 40 hours per week studying during the review course. Most do not. Most still pass. The Bar is a low bar.
Legal training is almost entirely "on the job". That is why lawyers at firms that handle big litigations can charge $1200/hr or more. Nobody else has the experience to handle such cases.
5: Grade inflation to B/ B+ in the 90's, maybe. A, I really doubt. Also, I think there's even a jump between A- and A, because nobody wants to give out too many As. Why do we need Cs. If nobody did worse than B- work, why artificially curve on a C. It's the worst. If they do that ina seminar with 15 students.
In the UK, becoming a barrister is difficult, it also takes several years. I have a friend who is a successful barrister,* and reasonably high profile in a specific area of law, and he says it's the hardest thing he's ever done. Note, this friend of mine was awarded a prize as the best undergraduate male arts and humanities student in our entire university, has an Oxbridge DPhil, was a lecturer in philosophy at various elite UK universities, and was widely published in various fields before he decided to switch over to law. If he says it's hard, it's hard. Although, to be fair, he probably set a higher standard for himself than most people, as that's just how he rolls.
* argued in front of the UK supreme court, etc.
When I was a second year undergraduate, the philosophy department--I think maybe as part of an arts faculty wide plan--decided to move away from the traditional grades, where someone getting 50% had barely scraped a pass, someone getting 60% was quite good, someone getting 68% was probably one of the two or three top students in the entire year, and someone getting 70% was probably one of the top students they'd had in the past decade. No-one got more than low 70s, ever. Instead, they went for a marking scheme where 50 was still a pass, but people could get all the way up to 100.
That lasted exactly one year.
Then they went back to the old scheme, as I think everyone was freaked out at the big disparities in marks. It's a lot easier when the good -> excellent scores span 10%, and a lot more difficult when the best student can be 30 or 40% higher than the "B+" students.
Back in the 80s when I started college at state school, they still had weed-out courses in many fields. You had to get like a B or better to get into the major. You also had to keep either a 2.0 or 2.5 to stay enrolled. Lots of people flunked out. Or flunked into a two semester break before coming back with a renewed sense of purpose and slightly moderated drinking habits.
@15: It's not as hard as all that.
It's a lot easier when the good -> excellent scores span 10%, and a lot more difficult when the best student can be 30 or 40% higher than the "B+" students.
I find this very strange, which is some evidence that it's largely about familiarity. For me, the opposite seems true -- violating the analogy ban, it's why I prefer Fahrenheit to Celsius for weather temperature: it's nice to be able to ignore small point differences and only think in 5 or 10 degree increments. Partly this is about being able to appropriately express approximate values -- temperature-wise, if I say "low 70s", that corresponds to a useful range of values, whereas "low 20s" is too broad, and "about 22" seems (to a non-native Celsius user) a weird combination of precision and approximation. And Oxbridge grading seems like Celsius that way.
So take a traditional weedout course like Organic Chemistry at a school like Harvard, 1990 vs 2020.
I'd like someone who would know to answer:
- Has the content changed? (ie fewer chapters, less or more depth, easier book)
- Has the evaluation of content/testing changed? (easier test)
- Are there actually more A's given than there were 30 years ago?
Now, you get a pass if you can make Jell-O shots that are firm enough to consume by hand.
re: 20
I think it was about familiarity, mostly yeah. Academics and students knew what each mark represented. But also, it's a lot easier to choose one point out of a possible 10, than it is to choose one out of a possible 30 or 40, say. You are sorting the students into a much smaller number of buckets.
It's not like there's much in the way of objective fact about whether a student who gets an 85 is some measurable/quantifiable difference from someone who gets an 80. Although everyone would probably agree who are the people who should be getting 90+ and who are the ones who should be getting less than 60, say.
22 was derived from a process of pure reason since I didn't attend Harvard and haven't even been to Massachusetts.
Being a conscientious kind of student, and a conscientious kind of teacher, when I was one, I've compared A-level philosophy papers across decades, and undergraduate level exam papers across decades, and I didn't see much evidence that they were getting easier. Admittedly, it has now been 11 years since I taught with any regularity, but looking at the time at papers from the 70s/80s through to approx 2010, it didn't seem to me like much had changed in terms of the overall difficulty of the material. Marking standards might have changed, I suppose.
I do know that they changed the pass/fail process for the lihP.B at Oxford around 2000, because there were some very high failure rates that had gotten some publicity/traction. The changes were to allow for the possibility that students could resit a small number of papers. Previously, the system had been that you did 6 essays and a thesis, and if you didn't get a very high mark in all 6 and in the thesis, you failed outright. So some people might have gotten a stellar mark in 4 or the 6 essays, written a couple of average ones (that would have been well above good undergraduate passing standard) and then failed the whole two year degree.
22. My kid is at Penn not Harvard, took intro bio for majors+premeds there this year while living with me, so I had a good look.
Curriculum/teaching were horrid, absolutely weedout function rather than learning or motivating students to be interested and ask their own questions. (I mean, the lecturers who had difficult circumstances did a good job of racing through the topics and saying what was necessary to cover the topic, but that's not enough). Unmotivated firehose of detail, tests were full of tightrope questions. Contemporary coverage curriculum choices weren't antiquated, but a medley of sources so no way to catch up or verify that all topics to be tested were understood by reading from a single textbook and working through.
Jello shots are more of a Cornell thing.
I think that 17. was an OSU specialty, don't know that other solid state schools did it that way. What did Berkeley, UIUC, or UNC do back then to control the number of engineers, bankers, or other limited-admission majors?
had a colleague at prior firm whose child recently did penn pre med, 25 sounds right.
from what i can see of my kid's uc berkeley exp in linguistics, celtic studies & french, no difficulty drop off in course material from my experience 20 years ago. can't report anything re grades given out for middling or poor work.
berkeley law seems to still hew to their obscure fixed curve, as far as i know students still prohibited from knowing class ranking, those go straight to judges only.
15 translated to u.s. would probably be jonesing for a fed circuit clerkship from a feeder judge. acquring a jd in california & passing the bar is not that tough. 1l at berkeley = 40/wk job, 2l - 3l was pregnant & then had child to fill spare time, also ta'd & ra'd, took seminars for which did research-wrote papers (more time & labor intensive than exams), graduated on time & passed bar. had an middle ranking easygoing infant on scale of constant crying to uncanny ability to sleep through the night, which helped.
To 16 and grading scales generally: when I started teaching at middling red state U it was an eye-opener how the grade scale compressed a normal distribution* of student knowledge (*note to self, do not say "bell curve" here)...in that the students who got 95 on an exam didn't have 11% more knowledge than those who got 85, but knew easily ten times more biology. The student who got 99 might know ten times as much as the student who got 95. The spread of learning is pretty stunning. Some of that was what they came in knowing. But the top students also learned a lot. The students in the lower quarter of the distribution learned very little biology over the course of the semester, and over the course of four or five years either. To relate it to what happened a generation ago, when my father, who was a professor of English, moved from a private research university to an urban public college circa 1969 he said "I figured out pretty quickly that they didn't hire me to fail 70% of my students." So, ever so at educational institutions that have unselective to open enrollment.
Like Heebie, I figure that even the legacies at the Ivies are way up in the distribution of smarts and drive and more so than 25 years ago, but interested to hear if that is actually backed up by anyone in a position to know.
drive and smarts to get good grades and front competence, not at all necessarily to do any work or learn anything.
Google and effective publication of detailed information has changed attitudes towards knowledge IMO.
Harvard grades are higher than Berkeley because the students are better. I can say this firmly having taken first semester French at Harvard and first semester German at Berkeley. Elite colleges have gotten so so much more competitive. Heebie is right on this one.
On the original point, the big UK/US difference here is that graded in the UK are much much more bureaucratic than in the US. Instructors in the US have tremendous freedom in assigning grades, while the UK has elaborate complicated checks and balances. Exams go through many layers of approval, grading is highly standardized, there's automatic regrading checks if you're near a cutoff, etc. The US just isn't like that.
All that said our dean has explicitly threatened to take away our postdoc program if we don't start failing fewer people soon. They don't care about ABC differences, but there's huge pressure from the legislature down to the Dean to have all students graduate in 4 years whether they go to class or not.
Of course the virus and the lockdown have further buggered things up here. I know someone who teaches at what is by common consent the best state sixth form college in Oxbridge. As a result of the pandemic, students have not sat external, moderated exams but been awarded grades based on their teachers' expectations.
The result is that the parents know exactly who is responsible for little Timmy failing to get the grades they needed to get in to the desired course. And they know, quite literally, where the teacher lives. There has been a huge amount of pressure exerted as a result. Last year, my informant said, they consciously inflated their grades by 5% across the board; this year, by 8%. But rival schools were inflating them by 12 and 15%.
We have a lot of pressure to ensure that students are 'retained', meaning don't flunk out. I don't see the pressure from B to A but F to C- is getting pretty intense. Student success lately seems to mean 'blame the faculty' not 'maybe suggest to the students that they'd do better if they came to class.'
What I don't understand is what the people pushing to eliminate failing grades think is behind the value of a college degree. If you literally don't have to do anything but get in and pay, surely it's worthless, right? I have the same question about pressure from administrations to not have students pick classes themselves, isn't that kind of independence the value in a college degree? Aren't we just killing the golden goose?
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What I don't understand is what the people pushing to eliminate failing grades think is behind the value of a college degree.
I assume the only factions arguing for abolishing failing grades entirely are educators who have completely given up on all standards and are taking the path of least resistance, and the self-esteem-at-all-costs kind of hippie. Two small and not very motivated groups. But tons of people are opposed to specific failing grades, i.e. their own. A tragedy of the commons thing.
I would say that, when I've given an entire class of students either an A- or an A, they all learned the material reasonably well. But, IME, the distinguishing feature of Harvard undergrads is an overwhelming sense of entitlement, and a belief that they are Hermione with a time-turner or something. "I'm planning to take another class at the same time as yours, so I might miss most days of class. My House Dean told me it was okay."
IN a really stratified class society, one which also measures everything by money, the fact that you can afford college education is a vital marker of status. It need have nothing to do with whether you learned anything. So course you cannot fail has a market value. It's like owning a horse in mediæval Europe. Doesn't say you're any good as a soldier, but it says which rank you fight in.