Prof here. Grading is not "stack ranking". when I give out a grade to a student, I don't care how the other students did. I would happily give out nothing but A's (those would be 6's here), if all students deserved them. On the other hand, I have taught classes where 3/4 of the students failed, because they deserved to.
Giving out unjustifiably high grades devalues them. Why should a top student apply themselves, if everyone is going to get an 'A'? A student putting in low effort needs to get a wake-up call by failing exams or assignments.
Grades tell the school how a student is doing, and may serve as a basis for admission to particular courses or projects. Grades tell the student how they are doing, and where they need to invest more effort. Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are.
Ok, stepping back: one possible reason for undeserved high grades can be found in the school administration. Students who fail too many courses must leave the school, and that costs the school money. Administrators tend to think of this year's finances, and don't care a whole lot about long-term reputation. Professors and instructors have to push back, have to insist on maintaining a level of quality. No one wants to teach for a diploma mill.
> Grading is not "stack ranking". when I give out a grade to a student, I don't care how the other students did.
This was not my experience in a large public US research university for undergrad and masters in math and CS. So many of my STEM classes had exams that were not calibrated at all to any "bar" of minimum expectations. Often the median grade for exams (out of 100) was 30-60. So the prof fit it to a normal distribution and then put arbitrary cutoffs for what counted as an A, B, C, D, and F.
Social science and humanities was often very different grading. I had a humanities prof tell me exactly what you said when I asked about the curve: there is no curve, I do not compare you to other students, I compare you to my own standards.
Often professors grade gently to avoid being mobbed at the end of the year as I was told by a few myself. Students have been getting worse by the year at that.
The worst part of the modern college experience I think is the fact in many majors, you no longer learn relevant job skills and are expected to learn them in undergrad or post grad research outside of the courseload. This obviously sets up a world where more advantaged students who can afford free time to such things continue to hold the best outcomes, despite recent DEI pushes from admin to avoid these things. I’ve heard a professor actually state with pride how the lab classes in their department have not changed in over 40 years, so that grades from 40 years ago could be compared to todays grades, somehow believing that is more useful to employers than getting qualified candidates. Then on the other hand students have to take so many concurrent credit hours in different classes that they will admit to triaging their study time and giving up on certain classes, where they might have succeeded if allowed more time for focus perhaps in one of those month-mester formats, where you can get a semester’s course done in a month or so.
If your job is to educate and 3/4ths of the students fail, that sounds like a dysfunctional system. Maybe the course prerequisites were poorly designed. How do you determine with such certainty that it was the student's fault? Do you ever look at those stats and consider whether you're actually doing a good job at teaching?
I've definitely encountered some professors are just terrible educators that take pride in failing as many students as possible... Not that I'd claim this is the case for you, but I always wonder when people bring up these massive rates of failure.
Maybe grading is not stack ranking for you, but for other professors it openly and explicitly is. And it's hugely problematic to have inconsistent grade scales between professors. When two Intro to Statistics professors teach the same curriculum but one routinely fails 0-5% of the class and the other routinely fails 40% of the class and grades matter for getting internships or into grad school, that matters and the 40% professor is probably just on an ego trip. I found out the hard way that this is why there was a waitlist to take math classes in the engineering department but no wait list to take them in the math department, because in the math department a D was passing and you could get into a graduate program with >2.5, but in the engineering department a D was failing and you weren't getting into grad school with below a 3.2. Yet engineering department administrators were recommending students take math department classes and not explaining that. You had to figure it out yourself. Usually by going to the honors society's office and asking the students who spent all their time gaming their GPAs.
> Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are.
I graduated in 2016 and never once had an employer concerned about my grades. It would be a red flag if I had.
Half my time in college was spent working in the dining center cleaning dishes to help pay for my education. I didn’t have the luxury of studying as much as others did.
A sneakier thing that some of my professors did was to inflate the lower percentile of grades. So not everyone would get an A, but nobody would get lower than a B-/C+.
If an org is designed in such a way that students are failing at a large scale then it is by nature the org that is the root cause. Why would you have students in a position to fail spectacularly?
The answer is obvious to any student but eludes employed academics - the schooling system from the 1950's does not solve 2020's problems. Educational orgs were founded by motivated people with specific vision that fit their time. Those people are long gone and now they are grand beiracraucies that have tried and failed to systemize knowledge and responsibilities. They are endlessly trying to recapture magic because the orgs evolve into many non cohesive groups.
Grand systems with many abstractions work when an org is for profit and owns enough fundamental intellectual property and market share that their relevance is by market force. If they didn't have that then a startup could replace them tomorrow.
Education on the other hand is propped up by welfare. It is effecticely the law that only accredited institutions can be "education". Yet we know for a fact that a 10 minute YouTube video has significantly better effects on learning than a semester of classes.
The market of education needs to be disrupted in order for students to succeed.
* Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are.*
Citation needed. As somebody who just wasn’t compatible with the school and academic system, eventually dropping out because it took a mental toll on me, doing engineering research in the industry nowadays and considered to be a high performer at work, I’m lucky my employer didn’t care about my grades but looked at my private projects instead.
> Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are.
As a potential employer, I would prefer to know where the student landed relative to their peers rather than an absolute score.
Maybe in addition to the absolute score we could know the students percentile score in the class.
It's not impressive to get an A at Harvard, all that says is they aren't in the bottom 21% of the class. Being in the top 10% of the class is impressive.
Everything about going to college is to a stamp of approval that you are “better” than others. Better than people from other schools and better than people within your class.
The entire academic system is also “stack ranked”. Promotions depend on getting published in journals, winning awards, and getting grants that others cannot get.
Generally not a fan of the bolding in the article, but the broader point raised by this one is worthwhile.
"Student transcripts, too, might be better understood in the context of institutions' and departments' grading standards."
Students don't want As for the sake of As. They want As to increase the likelihood that they can get a good job or get into grad school. More employers care about GPA than looking at transcripts. If schools are able to adopt a consistent way to measure student achievement across majors and schools that takes into account difficulty, then there would be less demand for grade inflation. If everyone gets an A, then that isn't a signal of student achievement.
This comes from a few recent changes in college admissions. Less students are enrolling in college, and this trend will likely continue for the next 10 years. Part of this is due to there being less people 15-18 years old compared to previous years, so colleges need to be more competitive to retain the same number of students. The other part is rising costs of colleges, to the point where many who would normally consider it are pausing and asking if it is worth it.
In a normally competitive college market, students are pressured to do well academically. If they do not, they receive low grades, then get put on academic probation, then get dismissed from the college and are replaced by a more academically capable student.
For top level schools (MIT, Berkeley, etc), there will always be more students. But for state level universities and community colleges, there is not always another student to take their place due to factors above.
So, grade inflation seems like a natural solution to the immediate number of enrolled students problem, however the long-term tradeoff is that it devalues the institution's image by not holding new graduates to the same standard that graduates 5-10 years ago were held to.
You see this all the time in FinTech - some firms only hire from Stanford, Yale, etc because those colleges are great at creating students with a certain baseline standard of education. The amount of time it takes to ramp up students from those universities compared to others is significantly less.
So in general, grade inflation is a short-term fix that might have long term consequences.
>For top level schools (MIT, Berkeley, etc),
I went to one of these type schools. At the time, grade inflation was already a hot topic. It seemed then that there were two schools of thought:
1) Grades where artificially inflated for some students that couldn't keep up for social or political reasons and to help with their economic future. The idea being that in a "real" job, it isn't about always being exactly right and you can always research any info you need in quasi-real-time, not to mention most of your actual job requirements will be taught to you on the job. So a can-do attitude and good communication skills are adequate and a bad grade should not stop your progress.
2) Students were just smarter and better prepared each successive year. If a student makes an A, you give them the A! And if the school is very selective a lot of students will make A's. They are not there by accident after all! As an example, the average GPA in my school was a 4.1! (And I mean my university, not my high-school where AP "tweaks" GPAs)
I was even in a class where one of our projects was to research and write about this. At the time, there was no one right answer, it seemed.
There isn't grade inflation in STEM programs. These discussions neglect this fact because the vast majority of college students are still humanities majors. If you look at Math or Mechanical Engineering departments, there is zero issue of grade inflation. OP article is about philosophy program where I can definitely see the fuzzy nature of the subject leading to soft grading. If anything most engineering schools are known for grade deflation. At my school, they started adding the course average grade to transcripts, but only for courses at the college of liberal arts.
The student body is also much stronger academically in 2023 compared to 2013 looking at HS GPA and ACT scores alone.
Ime, in 2010-2013, it wasn't that difficult to get admitted into UC Berkeley or UCLA or an Ivy League if you were in the top 25% of your class, but by 2015-2019 it shrank to the top 1-5%.
This had a downstream effect on admissions for other UCs and CSUs as well, as everyone ended up joining their backup/safety school.
The student base became much more rigorous at lower tier UCs, but grading practices haven't changed in 10 years, especially given the fact that most UCs excluding UCB don't grade on a bell curve.
A program like UC Riverside is now much more competitive in 2023 than it was in 2013.
The longer there are standardized classes like ap and standardized tests, the better the gpa will be in future years. This is because programs and extracurriculars continue to optimize for these things. Programs and extracurriculars that don’t exist in college. Is the student from 2023 actually more prepared than the one from 2013 for college? Hard to say because this isn’t exactly what is being optimized or controlled for. Nor is it even clear whether being “prepared for college” by whatever metric that is at 17 is relevant to your academic performance in the next few years or job performance going forward.
> The student body is also much stronger academically in 2023 compared to 2013 looking at HS GPA and ACT scores alone.
ACT scores have been falling since at least 2017 but possibly earlier [0]. GPAs in the US have gone up because of grade inflation (in large part due to NCLB and schools being rewarded for passing more students). In many schools 50% is now the lowest score you can receive (even for work not submitted).
> Ime, in 2010-2013, it wasn't that difficult to get admitted into UC Berkeley or UCLA or an Ivy League if you were in the top 25% of your class, but by 2015-2019 it shrank to the top 1-5%.
Nowhere but an elite prep school would the top 25% of the class be admitted to an Ivy. Even 5% would be a very good school, not typical.
Counterpoint: grades put too much emphasis on performance, and not the joy of learning. Being a hardass and stack-ranking people doesn't actually encourage education or innovation, but encourages people who are good at rote tasks that may not resemble real life.
My mother was an accounting teacher. She said grades should be feedback to the student how well they are doing. And feedback to how well the teacher is doing.
A student with a low grade really needs to consider upping their game or dialing back on their class load. People forget that the results of grades don't necessarily reflect the quality of the student. A student taking 6 classes is going to have a rougher time than one that's taking 1 class. A working single working mother is going to have less time to devote than a 20 year old living with her parents and only going to school.
If your students are doing well enough on the tests that it's hard to not give them all A's you need to increase the level of material your teaching. Because really your wasting their time otherwise. If they're all failing you need to reevaluate the level of material and how you're teaching the class.
> stack-ranking people doesn't actually encourage education or innovation, but encourages people who are good at rote tasks that may not resemble real life.
adjacent: My kids and I ace tests w/o studying. It's an ability we never had to work for. Afterward, the material was forgotten.
Our good and bad grades both poorly reflect what we know.
educational system was never about joy of learning or enlightenment of young minds.
It was always a nursery + learn basic skills like reading and math + creating habits like showing up on time (creating effective factory workers while their parents work in a factory).
Later we added an extra level that prepares for higher education, and here all you are doing is jockeying for a spot in university. Cramming details for a big test so you can be graded vs you peers when applying for university. That's the whole point really. Was majority of knowledge gained in secondary school is lost by the end of your 1st year of university.
The whole idea of school being a place that inspires young people is romanticized propaganda.
At best a teacher might pick a student or two that shows promise and guide them a bit. But they can do it for all kids in every class. They cannot make physics interesting for all kids and make them get all 100% at final test.
Ultimately, this is because employers and grad schools care about the GPA, and schools want to ensure that most of their student body is above the arbitrary thresholds set by those institutions. Otherwise, students and alumni would devalue the university.
If Harvard or anyone else wants to maintain a student body with a GPA of 3.5 at the 25th percentile, they will need to either cut students or inflate grades to reach that point. Cutting students was a popular tactic when university was a summers wage - not so much when students are indebting themselves for 10 years to get a degree. Hence we have grade inflation.
During COVID in UK alot of grades were given by teacher assessment not by an exam. There was grade inflation. For one reason I didn't see was, people mess up exams, run out of time, spend too much time on an answer, misread a question, panic, don't turn over a page, feel ill on the day. Predictied grades don't predict non knowledge based exam performance. I wonder have there been studies covering how many grades are lost due to such failings.
Grade inflation is legit and absurd. As an employer it makes me mad because i cannot use them as an indicator at all, they were never great but now they’re worthless.
My wife is a mature student doing her PhD, she was negotiating grades as part of her TA duties with a professor and his number one priority was avoiding student complaints. Legitimate lines i listened to them say:
“That student did a terrible job, they should only get 8/10”
“This kid is going to complain, let’s give them 9. I don’t think they deserve to pass but i don’t want to answer their emails.”
As an educator, I do not consider it my obligation to provide employers with effective evaluations. I am an educator, not an interviewer. You want effective evaluations, pay for them.
This is it right here. All it takes is for there to be no countervailing incentive for rigor, and for maintaining high standards to be a lot of extra work. For all that we occasionally moan about slipping standards in education, nobody's calling the school administration on their 20-year-old kid's behalf to complain about an undeserved A.
Some of this is because young professors try to grade things fairly (such as failing students who never make any effort to learn the material) and get beaten down by the administration because failing students are a lot of extra work for the admins. Then it flows downhill to professors telling the same to TAs.
I remember as a TA I caught a student cheating (very blatant, included a paper trail with obvious lying) and the professor was like "eh, give him an 8/10 instead of a 10/10". That was the attitude 15 years ago, I can't imagine what it's like now if trends have continued..
This was not an issue, as all institutions used to had their own entry exams. Then they got together and convinced government to create standardized test that would allow to create standard that they can trust and judge entrants by.
When you do grade inflation the institutions will loose trust in the grade quickly and revert back to internal testing.
Fair enough. I misread your post initially but as a professor I can say it's definitely not always like that.
One issue is that evaluation of teaching is often heavily based on student ratings, so there's a huge incentive to avoid conflict and resentful feelings. There is in fact good reason for weighing ratings, because they are predictive of objective learning outcomes, but my sense is the pendulum of emphasis on them has swung a bit too far. I'm old enough to have had a glimpse of an different era and zeitgeist, and have seen what happens when you have instructors who teach poorly, are out of touch, and then blame it on lazy students, but I now I think sometimes basing so much on student feelings is a bit too much.
I also have colleagues at well-known private institutions who have told me very, very clearly and directly that they not infrequently have pressure from administration to give students better grades. They have multiple stories of the college getting calls from a parent who is a significant donor, complaining about their child's grade, and asking the professor if there's "any way the student can make up some of the grade" or something like that. It's never a direct order, and there's never a request to just change the grade outright, but you can tell that there's an implicit message that if they were to ignore them repeatedly, they would make things difficult.
Really like a lot of things in higher education, grade inflation involves a lot of things other than the process of assigning a grade per se, and the interaction between the student and the instructor. There's a lot of cultural and sociofinancial variables involved, many of which are difficult to quantify and might not really be in people's conscious awareness all the time.
Then again, where I've been at there were deliberate but reasonable efforts to rein in grade inflation, and I've never really felt like I was being overly generous for its own sake or to avoid trouble later. In my experience, if you are very very clear about expectations and your grading criteria, and they are reasonable, students don't complain.
Another issue I rarely see brought up in this is that I think increasingly students are counseled by college advising to drop courses if they are struggling. In fact, as I think about it, they track this very very very closely, and have a systematic screening process to flag students who might not do well, with check-ins all the way up through midterm. Some of this is due to new conditions of federal higher educational loans, but some of it is just due to changed advising practices to be more proactive. If you have a bunch of students who might have otherwise failed dropping the course in the second week, where there's no record of a grade in their record, it will look like grade inflation when it's really a type of selection bias.
> I decided to look at UC Riverside's grade distributions since 2013, since faculty now have access to a tool to view this information.
For context, the author is Eric Schwitzgebel:
“an American professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His main interests include connections between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind and the nature of belief”
I work at a large public university. There’s tremendous pressure on professors to make sure students pass. This is especially true on courses that tend to filter students, such as Chem, Physics and some math courses. They will remove tenured faculty from teaching courses where they are failing too many students. These courses will be handed to lecturers who will be more sympathetic to passing more students. Also, they’ve also changed a course like Organic Chemistry from upper division to lower division. They have also started allowing high school level math courses to count for college credits.
The author observed that there is little change over time in the percentage of students getting Ds and Fs. If it were the case that the source of the pressure was maintaining graduation rates, wouldn't we expect the inflation to be focused there, and not at more students getting an A instead of a B?
Returning to a Uk university after 30 years recently to do a taught masters (STEM subject) I noticed that modules were either marked on a curve or (more dubiously) had a “revision lecture” where essentially the lecturer described what questions would be on the exam paper to a close approximation.
I don't think it is just pressure from above. I think a lot of professors would sincerely prefer to not give out any grades (as is done at some universities), or at least to give them an extremely low importance, and grade inflation is a way to approach this within the current system.
I would suspect (as a local to the University in this article) the inflation is higher than one sees.
For a short period of time, I did some part-time pizza delivery in the UCR area. These college students are... not very bright. We're talking leave car doors open (in the middle of one of the worst neighborhoods around) and go back inside while chatting on the phone with their best buddy sort of naive. Some don't even know their own address and have been in the same student apartment for several years.
The ones in the Ag./Hort. Sci classes seem to be mostly on-the-ball, but it helps UCR is almost entirely research fields, for that one. Ditto the geology department (having a literal mountain to yourself in your Uni's back yard for studies helps.)
This is an obvious phenomenon. A hundred years ago college was for a rare breed of scholar. 50 years ago it was for the more ambitious. Today it’s for “everyone.”
But the average person has not become more scholarly or ambitious. Just that the umbrella of “what is acceptable for college” has become broader.
As a business it makes sense. You don’t want your product to be hard to consume so having stringent admissions or academic rigor goes against that goal.
So it’s obvious that there’s infinite pressure to lower the bar in admissions and grading so the university can pass more customers through, collecting 4 years tuition.
I say this as someone with 3.5 degrees who benefited strongly from education. There are benefits, but the average college for the average student today is a scam.
[+] [-] bradley13|2 years ago|reply
Giving out unjustifiably high grades devalues them. Why should a top student apply themselves, if everyone is going to get an 'A'? A student putting in low effort needs to get a wake-up call by failing exams or assignments.
Grades tell the school how a student is doing, and may serve as a basis for admission to particular courses or projects. Grades tell the student how they are doing, and where they need to invest more effort. Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are.
Ok, stepping back: one possible reason for undeserved high grades can be found in the school administration. Students who fail too many courses must leave the school, and that costs the school money. Administrators tend to think of this year's finances, and don't care a whole lot about long-term reputation. Professors and instructors have to push back, have to insist on maintaining a level of quality. No one wants to teach for a diploma mill.
[+] [-] Cheer2171|2 years ago|reply
This was not my experience in a large public US research university for undergrad and masters in math and CS. So many of my STEM classes had exams that were not calibrated at all to any "bar" of minimum expectations. Often the median grade for exams (out of 100) was 30-60. So the prof fit it to a normal distribution and then put arbitrary cutoffs for what counted as an A, B, C, D, and F.
Social science and humanities was often very different grading. I had a humanities prof tell me exactly what you said when I asked about the curve: there is no curve, I do not compare you to other students, I compare you to my own standards.
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|2 years ago|reply
The worst part of the modern college experience I think is the fact in many majors, you no longer learn relevant job skills and are expected to learn them in undergrad or post grad research outside of the courseload. This obviously sets up a world where more advantaged students who can afford free time to such things continue to hold the best outcomes, despite recent DEI pushes from admin to avoid these things. I’ve heard a professor actually state with pride how the lab classes in their department have not changed in over 40 years, so that grades from 40 years ago could be compared to todays grades, somehow believing that is more useful to employers than getting qualified candidates. Then on the other hand students have to take so many concurrent credit hours in different classes that they will admit to triaging their study time and giving up on certain classes, where they might have succeeded if allowed more time for focus perhaps in one of those month-mester formats, where you can get a semester’s course done in a month or so.
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|2 years ago|reply
I've definitely encountered some professors are just terrible educators that take pride in failing as many students as possible... Not that I'd claim this is the case for you, but I always wonder when people bring up these massive rates of failure.
[+] [-] fjjfjfj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecf|2 years ago|reply
I graduated in 2016 and never once had an employer concerned about my grades. It would be a red flag if I had.
Half my time in college was spent working in the dining center cleaning dishes to help pay for my education. I didn’t have the luxury of studying as much as others did.
[+] [-] jseliger|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mise_en_place|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devwastaken|2 years ago|reply
The answer is obvious to any student but eludes employed academics - the schooling system from the 1950's does not solve 2020's problems. Educational orgs were founded by motivated people with specific vision that fit their time. Those people are long gone and now they are grand beiracraucies that have tried and failed to systemize knowledge and responsibilities. They are endlessly trying to recapture magic because the orgs evolve into many non cohesive groups.
Grand systems with many abstractions work when an org is for profit and owns enough fundamental intellectual property and market share that their relevance is by market force. If they didn't have that then a startup could replace them tomorrow.
Education on the other hand is propped up by welfare. It is effecticely the law that only accredited institutions can be "education". Yet we know for a fact that a 10 minute YouTube video has significantly better effects on learning than a semester of classes.
The market of education needs to be disrupted in order for students to succeed.
[+] [-] ren_engineer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eska|2 years ago|reply
Citation needed. As somebody who just wasn’t compatible with the school and academic system, eventually dropping out because it took a mental toll on me, doing engineering research in the industry nowadays and considered to be a high performer at work, I’m lucky my employer didn’t care about my grades but looked at my private projects instead.
[+] [-] andrewmutz|2 years ago|reply
As a potential employer, I would prefer to know where the student landed relative to their peers rather than an absolute score.
Maybe in addition to the absolute score we could know the students percentile score in the class.
It's not impressive to get an A at Harvard, all that says is they aren't in the bottom 21% of the class. Being in the top 10% of the class is impressive.
[+] [-] j7ake|2 years ago|reply
Everything about going to college is to a stamp of approval that you are “better” than others. Better than people from other schools and better than people within your class.
The entire academic system is also “stack ranked”. Promotions depend on getting published in journals, winning awards, and getting grants that others cannot get.
[+] [-] jimbob45|2 years ago|reply
You're in the very small minority. Virtually every professor I had in college employed scale adjustments to grades based on class averages.
[+] [-] tonymet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1980phipsi|2 years ago|reply
"Student transcripts, too, might be better understood in the context of institutions' and departments' grading standards."
Students don't want As for the sake of As. They want As to increase the likelihood that they can get a good job or get into grad school. More employers care about GPA than looking at transcripts. If schools are able to adopt a consistent way to measure student achievement across majors and schools that takes into account difficulty, then there would be less demand for grade inflation. If everyone gets an A, then that isn't a signal of student achievement.
[+] [-] SamuelAdams|2 years ago|reply
In a normally competitive college market, students are pressured to do well academically. If they do not, they receive low grades, then get put on academic probation, then get dismissed from the college and are replaced by a more academically capable student.
For top level schools (MIT, Berkeley, etc), there will always be more students. But for state level universities and community colleges, there is not always another student to take their place due to factors above.
So, grade inflation seems like a natural solution to the immediate number of enrolled students problem, however the long-term tradeoff is that it devalues the institution's image by not holding new graduates to the same standard that graduates 5-10 years ago were held to.
You see this all the time in FinTech - some firms only hire from Stanford, Yale, etc because those colleges are great at creating students with a certain baseline standard of education. The amount of time it takes to ramp up students from those universities compared to others is significantly less.
So in general, grade inflation is a short-term fix that might have long term consequences.
[+] [-] mhuffman|2 years ago|reply
1) Grades where artificially inflated for some students that couldn't keep up for social or political reasons and to help with their economic future. The idea being that in a "real" job, it isn't about always being exactly right and you can always research any info you need in quasi-real-time, not to mention most of your actual job requirements will be taught to you on the job. So a can-do attitude and good communication skills are adequate and a bad grade should not stop your progress.
2) Students were just smarter and better prepared each successive year. If a student makes an A, you give them the A! And if the school is very selective a lot of students will make A's. They are not there by accident after all! As an example, the average GPA in my school was a 4.1! (And I mean my university, not my high-school where AP "tweaks" GPAs)
I was even in a class where one of our projects was to research and write about this. At the time, there was no one right answer, it seemed.
[+] [-] carabiner|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alephnerd|2 years ago|reply
Ime, in 2010-2013, it wasn't that difficult to get admitted into UC Berkeley or UCLA or an Ivy League if you were in the top 25% of your class, but by 2015-2019 it shrank to the top 1-5%.
This had a downstream effect on admissions for other UCs and CSUs as well, as everyone ended up joining their backup/safety school.
The student base became much more rigorous at lower tier UCs, but grading practices haven't changed in 10 years, especially given the fact that most UCs excluding UCB don't grade on a bell curve.
A program like UC Riverside is now much more competitive in 2023 than it was in 2013.
2013 -https://ir.ucr.edu/sites/default/files/2019-03/CDS-2013-14.p...
2019 - https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors...
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramblenode|2 years ago|reply
ACT scores have been falling since at least 2017 but possibly earlier [0]. GPAs in the US have gone up because of grade inflation (in large part due to NCLB and schools being rewarded for passing more students). In many schools 50% is now the lowest score you can receive (even for work not submitted).
> Ime, in 2010-2013, it wasn't that difficult to get admitted into UC Berkeley or UCLA or an Ivy League if you were in the top 25% of your class, but by 2015-2019 it shrank to the top 1-5%.
Nowhere but an elite prep school would the top 25% of the class be admitted to an Ivy. Even 5% would be a very good school, not typical.
[0] https://prepmaven.com/blog/test-prep/average-act-scores/
[+] [-] mathattack|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] softwaredoug|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gibbon1|2 years ago|reply
A student with a low grade really needs to consider upping their game or dialing back on their class load. People forget that the results of grades don't necessarily reflect the quality of the student. A student taking 6 classes is going to have a rougher time than one that's taking 1 class. A working single working mother is going to have less time to devote than a 20 year old living with her parents and only going to school.
If your students are doing well enough on the tests that it's hard to not give them all A's you need to increase the level of material your teaching. Because really your wasting their time otherwise. If they're all failing you need to reevaluate the level of material and how you're teaching the class.
[+] [-] WarOnPrivacy|2 years ago|reply
adjacent: My kids and I ace tests w/o studying. It's an ability we never had to work for. Afterward, the material was forgotten.
Our good and bad grades both poorly reflect what we know.
[+] [-] me_me_me|2 years ago|reply
It was always a nursery + learn basic skills like reading and math + creating habits like showing up on time (creating effective factory workers while their parents work in a factory).
Later we added an extra level that prepares for higher education, and here all you are doing is jockeying for a spot in university. Cramming details for a big test so you can be graded vs you peers when applying for university. That's the whole point really. Was majority of knowledge gained in secondary school is lost by the end of your 1st year of university.
The whole idea of school being a place that inspires young people is romanticized propaganda.
At best a teacher might pick a student or two that shows promise and guide them a bit. But they can do it for all kids in every class. They cannot make physics interesting for all kids and make them get all 100% at final test.
[+] [-] lumost|2 years ago|reply
If Harvard or anyone else wants to maintain a student body with a GPA of 3.5 at the 25th percentile, they will need to either cut students or inflate grades to reach that point. Cutting students was a popular tactic when university was a summers wage - not so much when students are indebting themselves for 10 years to get a degree. Hence we have grade inflation.
[+] [-] vonzepp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verelo|2 years ago|reply
My wife is a mature student doing her PhD, she was negotiating grades as part of her TA duties with a professor and his number one priority was avoiding student complaints. Legitimate lines i listened to them say:
“That student did a terrible job, they should only get 8/10”
“This kid is going to complain, let’s give them 9. I don’t think they deserve to pass but i don’t want to answer their emails.”
[+] [-] noqc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sevensor|2 years ago|reply
This is it right here. All it takes is for there to be no countervailing incentive for rigor, and for maintaining high standards to be a lot of extra work. For all that we occasionally moan about slipping standards in education, nobody's calling the school administration on their 20-year-old kid's behalf to complain about an undeserved A.
[+] [-] snakeyjake|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] streptomycin|2 years ago|reply
I remember as a TA I caught a student cheating (very blatant, included a paper trail with obvious lying) and the professor was like "eh, give him an 8/10 instead of a 10/10". That was the attitude 15 years ago, I can't imagine what it's like now if trends have continued..
[+] [-] me_me_me|2 years ago|reply
When you do grade inflation the institutions will loose trust in the grade quickly and revert back to internal testing.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 20239uejd|2 years ago|reply
One issue is that evaluation of teaching is often heavily based on student ratings, so there's a huge incentive to avoid conflict and resentful feelings. There is in fact good reason for weighing ratings, because they are predictive of objective learning outcomes, but my sense is the pendulum of emphasis on them has swung a bit too far. I'm old enough to have had a glimpse of an different era and zeitgeist, and have seen what happens when you have instructors who teach poorly, are out of touch, and then blame it on lazy students, but I now I think sometimes basing so much on student feelings is a bit too much.
I also have colleagues at well-known private institutions who have told me very, very clearly and directly that they not infrequently have pressure from administration to give students better grades. They have multiple stories of the college getting calls from a parent who is a significant donor, complaining about their child's grade, and asking the professor if there's "any way the student can make up some of the grade" or something like that. It's never a direct order, and there's never a request to just change the grade outright, but you can tell that there's an implicit message that if they were to ignore them repeatedly, they would make things difficult.
Really like a lot of things in higher education, grade inflation involves a lot of things other than the process of assigning a grade per se, and the interaction between the student and the instructor. There's a lot of cultural and sociofinancial variables involved, many of which are difficult to quantify and might not really be in people's conscious awareness all the time.
Then again, where I've been at there were deliberate but reasonable efforts to rein in grade inflation, and I've never really felt like I was being overly generous for its own sake or to avoid trouble later. In my experience, if you are very very clear about expectations and your grading criteria, and they are reasonable, students don't complain.
Another issue I rarely see brought up in this is that I think increasingly students are counseled by college advising to drop courses if they are struggling. In fact, as I think about it, they track this very very very closely, and have a systematic screening process to flag students who might not do well, with check-ins all the way up through midterm. Some of this is due to new conditions of federal higher educational loans, but some of it is just due to changed advising practices to be more proactive. If you have a bunch of students who might have otherwise failed dropping the course in the second week, where there's no record of a grade in their record, it will look like grade inflation when it's really a type of selection bias.
[+] [-] daxfohl|2 years ago|reply
Maybe it makes a difference for grad school, but even then there are likely far better indicators of potential success.
[+] [-] compiler-guy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbcondo714|2 years ago|reply
For context, the author is Eric Schwitzgebel:
“an American professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His main interests include connections between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind and the nature of belief”
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schwitzgebel
https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vondur|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|2 years ago|reply
I'd be curious if inflation holds there, as well, since engineering departments have to answer to an accreditation body (ABET).
[+] [-] Imnimo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmilner|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] currymj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lightedman|2 years ago|reply
For a short period of time, I did some part-time pizza delivery in the UCR area. These college students are... not very bright. We're talking leave car doors open (in the middle of one of the worst neighborhoods around) and go back inside while chatting on the phone with their best buddy sort of naive. Some don't even know their own address and have been in the same student apartment for several years.
The ones in the Ag./Hort. Sci classes seem to be mostly on-the-ball, but it helps UCR is almost entirely research fields, for that one. Ditto the geology department (having a literal mountain to yourself in your Uni's back yard for studies helps.)
[+] [-] xyzelement|2 years ago|reply
But the average person has not become more scholarly or ambitious. Just that the umbrella of “what is acceptable for college” has become broader.
As a business it makes sense. You don’t want your product to be hard to consume so having stringent admissions or academic rigor goes against that goal.
So it’s obvious that there’s infinite pressure to lower the bar in admissions and grading so the university can pass more customers through, collecting 4 years tuition.
I say this as someone with 3.5 degrees who benefited strongly from education. There are benefits, but the average college for the average student today is a scam.
[+] [-] odyssey7|2 years ago|reply