A reader advances a great idea for the thread on grade inflation:
I teach upper-division cell biology at a major research university with more than 200 students a year, many of them desperately hoping to get into medical or dental school. It doesn’t matter what type of grades we give; they all want the highest possible so they can get into professional school.
The only thing that I believe will limit grade inflation is if the median score was reported along with every class grade (and the all important cumulative GPA would be reported along with the cumulative median GPA of the student’s classes). So while an A- might sound like a great GPA, if the student’s median GPA was an A- it would be very clear that this was just an average student. One might hope that students would actually seek out classes with lower median grades since otherwise they would have no chance to actually excel, and at a minimum, it would take pressure off those of us who teach and are trying to resist pressures to inflate our grades since we could fairly point out that it was in the students best interest to not have an absurdly high median GPA.
A few more readers chime in:
In an ideal world, intellectual mastery would matter more than grades. In such a world, the smart students would flock to the toughest professors. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. Students live by the grade and die by the grade. As aren’t taken as exceptional but are expected.
Take me, for example. I was at my college on scholarship, so if my GPA fell below 3.5, I would be placed on academic probation. If it fell below 3.25, I would lose my scholarship and not be able to afford to go to school anymore. And this was on the lenient side. It’s nothing compared to the expectations for those going on to law school or trying to get into Ph.D programs.
Another protests that students actually don’t punish hard graders with harsh reviews:
It’s an academic myth that giving fewer As results in lower marks. I taught in a math department for years, and my grade distribution in my classes was pretty close to a normal distribution centered on 78 percent. Yet my evaluations were consistently among the highest in my college. The research literature backs me up. Consider this study, in which data from 50,000 undergraduate courses was analyzed:
After controlling for learning outcomes, expected grades generally did not affect student evaluations. In fact, contrary to what some faculty think, courses in natural sciences with expected grades of A were rated lower, not higher. Courses were rated lower when they were rated as either difficult or too elementary. Courses rated at the “just right” level received the highest evaluations.
Please help combat this myth!
Update from a reader:
In response to your reader’s proposal that students’ grades in a class be measured against the median so that everyone involved can accurately measure a student’s “achievement” in terms of positive or negative deviation from that median: Yikes!
It may be true that students are obsessed with grades as a path to scholarships and acceptance to graduate schools. But it’s not clear at all that professors or colleges should bend to that obsession either by further quantifying grades. Let grades be the problem of graduate schools trying to sort students or students trying to compete with each other. Our primary goal is teaching, and we need to ask ourselves whether grade inflation is a problem that interferes with that goal. In my experience, it’s not, but the obsession over grading is. We ought to think of ways we might limit that obsession rather than feeding into it.
The Dish 