Grade inflation at UC Riverside, and institutional pressures for easier grading

http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2024/02/grade-inflation-at-uc-riverside-and.html

by surprisetalk • 2 years ago

103 195 2 years ago

schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com

malfist• 2 years ago

Why is it always assumed when grade averages go up, it's the professor grading easier?

Students have more resources than ever to do a good job, perhaps it's students that are improving

throwaway098479• 2 years ago

My thoughts exactly.

1980phipsi2• 2 years ago

Average ACT scores have declined six years in a row and are at their lowest level in 30 years. This isn't necessarily the strongest argument because of potential changes in the composition of the test takers. Particularly as schools go test optional. However, I think that is broadly in line with what other test scores are showing.

You can pair that with surveys of how much college students are studying and it is down significantly from 30-40 years ago. You might make the case that they are better prepared now, but the other side of that would be that less may be expected of them.

surge2• 2 years ago

I also believe this is a side effect of "everyone has to go to college", you're no longer getting the most academically gifted (of which I am not a part either). It's far more likely with a larger portion of the populace or diverse populace going to college you're going to get several students that struggle because in certain majors you can't coast through college like you can many high schools.

20239uejd2• 2 years ago

On the other hand, GPAs remain about as predictive of later criteria as standardized scores. In some studies they're even slightly more predictive.

Each have their issues. Even with grade inflation, GPA is reflective of a long-term process that unfolds over years. ACT is an afternoon when who knows what can be going on.

1980phipsi2• 2 years ago

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.

clusterhacks2• 2 years ago

Wish I could upvote more "to increase the likelihood that they can get a good job or get into grad school." I taught as an adjunct at a great public university. Undergrads seem to think there are two grades - A or failing.

But that attitude starts in high school. As a parent of kids there now, rampant grade inflation and an "infinite re-do" approach to assignments and tests really sets the tone for kids to feel quite bad about themselves for a B+.

I'm bullish on standardized tests becoming more, rather than less, important for admissions to competitive (or more honestly, limited-number-of-student-slots) universities at the undergrad and graduate level.

kjkjadksj13• 2 years ago

Imo the standardized tests should be designed by the majors and not be standardized at all. Many like the language dept have already designed great ones to place people into the correct level language class based on what they offer at that university. This model expanded to the rest of the school would encourage learning without gaming the test or wasting time studying just for the test like we see in standardized tests and the predatory market surrounding that industry.

morkalork• 2 years ago

Also scholarships and bursaries? Often you have to maintain a high GPA to continue receiving money.

odyssey7• 2 years ago

The achievement of course objectives is a measure of instructional quality. Why add insult to injury when the customers don’t get what they paid for?

xyzelement2• 2 years ago

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.

dwallin2• 2 years ago

A hundred years ago college was for a rare breed of scholar.

A hundred years ago college (and especially elite colleges) were largely for white upper-class men so I would be very careful throwing around words like "rare breed". Education in general was something reserved for the elite, why would you bother educating someone who would probably be working a factory line?

The general population is far more educated, providing massive well-documented and widely-studied societal benefits. What has changed is we have moved (slightly) away from viewing education as a way of stratifying our society and more towards it as something that should be a baseline for our citizens.

bluGill2• 2 years ago

A hundred years ago college (and especially elite colleges) were largely for white upper-class men

In the US. Other countries had different factors on who they discriminated against.

xyzelement2• 2 years ago

What percentage of even that group went to college a hundred years ago? That is my larger point.

// and more towards it as something that should be a baseline for our citizens.

At least that's the idea. In reality someone can now graduate 300K in debt, with a degree that neither enables them to make a living nor be an informed citizen of the republic.

I suppose another way my point can be made is that there's now a wider gulf between "has a college degree" and "has a valuable education" because of how common and watered down college has become.

kjkjadksj13• 2 years ago

Most of todays most prestigious american colleges got their start on a government mandate to teach agricultural practices to potential farmers, and by and large they all continue to do so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land-grant_university

alephnerd6• 2 years ago

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.

2013 -https://ir.ucr.edu/sites/default/files/2019-03/CDS-2013-14.p...

2019 - https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors...

mathattack• 2 years ago

Could there be grade inflation in HS grades (likely) or ACTs (maybe)?

alephnerd6• 2 years ago

grade inflation in HS grades (likely)

Unlikely, as grade inflation would imply less need to take AP Classes, but proportion of students who have taken AP classes and tests has risen from 2013 [0] to 2021 [1].

Also, GPA is based on UC HS A-G classes, which are regulated at the state level.

ACTs (maybe)

Unlikely, it's the same damn test (source: took it in the early 2010s, and helped prep family friends in 2021-22).

------

The main difference is California had a baby boom in the 1990s-early 2000s due to tech and immigration from Asia+Latin America [2][3].

In the 2009-11 period you wouldn't see portable trailer classrooms in top Californian HSes, but by 2011-15 they were everywhere, as the 1995-2005 cohort began entering middle and high school.

By 2020-21, the glut was largely over, and Californian school districts began shutting down elementary schools due to low attendance.

California in 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2021 had a TFR of 2.5, 2.0, 1.95, and 1.5 respectively.

[0] https://www.dailynews.com/2013/02/20/numbers-taking-passing-...

[1] https://reports.collegeboard.org/ap-program-results/class-of...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/02/national/population-growt...

[3] https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/01/california-sees-sl...

kjkjadksj13• 2 years ago

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.

alephnerd6• 2 years ago

there are standardized classes like ap and standardized tests, the better the gpa will be in future years

Of course, and this is the point - it had made college freshman more college ready.

AP Coursework is equivalent to the content taught in the 101 course of just about every UC or CC. Doesn't matter if it's AP Chem/Chem101, AP Calc ABC/Calc1-2, AP US History/US101, etc.

The fact that it has become normalized for high schoolers to take first-year level coursework in high school points to younger high schoolers cohorts being better prepared for 4 year programs compared to older cohorts.

the student from 2023 actually more prepared than the one from 2013 for college

There is a direct correlation between High School performance and College performance [0][1].

And UCs do take into account high school level variability [2]

[0] https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/rel/Products/Region/northwest/Public...

[1] https://consortium.uchicago.edu/publications/high-school-GPA...

[2] https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/how-to-apply/ap...

ramblenode• 2 years ago

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.

[0] https://prepmaven.com/blog/test-prep/average-act-scores/

verelo7• 2 years ago

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.”

sevensor• 2 years ago

i don’t want to answer their emails

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.

me_me_me2• 2 years ago

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.

20239uejd2• 2 years ago

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.

kjkjadksj13• 2 years ago

At some colleges if you retake a course and get a higher grade, that’s the grade and the old one stops weighing down the gpa calculation. This was not an uncommon route to pass a chemistry series.

noqc• 2 years ago

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.

stagger872• 2 years ago

What do you consider the grades you give your students if not an "evaluation" of their performance in your class? Alternatively, if you do consider them an evaluation, are you saying your grades are not effective at evaluating them?

bo10244• 2 years ago

Ok, but your reputation among employers may go down and that will hurt all of your future students.

verelo7• 2 years ago

Wow...thats just...yep.

I think grades are very much an indication of performance, more generally a valuable part of the student experience and growing as an adult, if you can't be bothered grading...step aside, plenty of other people want your job and are willing to work for it.

snakeyjake2• 2 years ago

It is incomprehensible to me that you would even consider using grades as a hiring indicator.

stagger872• 2 years ago

I'm curious if you do hiring, and if yes, for how long? There was a time in my career where grades were a data point that could be used. But I agree, nowadays not so much for the engineering roles I deal with.

verelo7• 2 years ago

Yeah, its been a while since they felt useful, but there was a time when they were valuable for junior employees.

Internships have almost completely replaced this imo, but i think that mostly speaks volumes to overall disappointing performance of education in recent decades.

P_I_Staker2• 2 years ago

In my opinion, they are an indicator similar to personal projects. Now if you can do a really good job of vetting their work and it's extensive, the personal project could be much better.

They still had to grind out the work. Actually, some of the BS in academics is not that different from the BS in the corporate world. They're going to have some BS metric, and depending where you work, they just thumb their scales for developers they want to keep (or lose).

In my experience, there are many "developers developers", and outside of software, engineering geniuses with poor grades. That said, these developers often seemed to have other issues, and frankly might be wrong for like 80% of gigs.

If someone is genuinely talented, but thinks there's zero value in demonstrating that with more abstract, academic pursuits that tells you something about them. Perhaps more of a problem for stuffy corporate jobs.

streptomycin• 2 years ago

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..

verelo7• 2 years ago

Yeah this is similar today. No one calls a student for cheating, at least in what I’ve been observing. Students that complain get additional marks, students that get accused of anything revolt, teachers are basically scared of the “customer”, and for good reason, unfortunately.

softwaredoug2• 2 years ago

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.

WarOnPrivacy4• 2 years ago

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.

azemetre• 2 years ago

What kinds of tests are you acing? Also for learning wouldn’t it be better to actually challenge yourself and exercise the brain muscles when learning something new?

I’ve met too many first year college students who breezed through high school but never learned how to study. When the first calculus exam comes around they all tend to fail then get very anxious/depressed. Sometimes they’ll drop out entirely.

I’m sure this story isn’t uncommon for others either.

me_me_me2• 2 years ago

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.

bo10244• 2 years ago

This comment is not historically accurate with respect to universities. Universities originated as places of research and scholarship (there are also theological roots). Joy of learning and enlightenment are deep in their roots (so deep we may not be able to find them any more).

Gibbon1• 2 years ago

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.

lightedman• 2 years ago

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.)

bsder• 2 years ago

What about the numbers for the engineering departments?

I'd be curious if inflation holds there, as well, since engineering departments have to answer to an accreditation body (ABET).

bradley132• 2 years ago

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.

ecf• 2 years ago

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.

tekla3• 2 years ago

Funny, most of my class considered it a red flag if a employer didn't check for grades. Mostly because it meant everyone who had < 3.0 GPA or so would mob them.

All the best employers had 3.5 or bust.

kjkjadksj13• 2 years ago

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.

nradov3• 2 years ago

Colleges aren't intended to be trade schools teaching job skills. This does, however, put some students in a difficult position. If someone wants to become a professional software developer and isn't particularly interested in becoming a well-rounded individual with a broad, liberal education then there aren't many good options. Coding boot camps exist but are generally limited and low quality.

You might not realize this yet, but occasionally overloading students with coursework is actually a positive. I attended an academically rigorous college and as an average student there was just no way I could finish everything on time in a high quality way. This taught me effective time management, ruthless prioritization, and the pointlessness of perfectionism. Those lessons were more valuable than the content of any particular course.

bradley132• 2 years ago

Often professors grade gently to avoid being mobbed at the end of the year

Mobbed how? I have had students protest their grades - there's a process for that. If the grade is somehow a mistake, or unfair, it gets corrected. If not, and if the grading is demonstrably fair, what are they going to do?

FWIW, although I am a hard grader, the student ratings indicate that they appreciate it.

teeray• 2 years ago

you no longer learn relevant job skills and are expected to learn them in undergrad or post grad research outside of the courseload

Colleges scoff at the idea of becoming "job training schools," but that is exactly what they need to be. The students are, overwhelming, there to "get a good job after college." Only a fraction of them will continue on to spend their entire career in academia.

jimbob45• 2 years ago

Grading is not "stack ranking". when I give out a grade to a student, I don't care how the other students did.

You're in the very small minority. Virtually every professor I had in college employed scale adjustments to grades based on class averages.

seanmcdirmid• 2 years ago

I think its very common to grade on a curb, mostly because most professors don't have a natural high water mark defined (like what does "A" work mean independent of your peers?). And if they did have an idea, they probably have taught the class many times to get that idea. Especially for smaller upper division classes that are not taught at scale, this is probably not very feasible.

itronitron• 2 years ago

And yet GPA is used to rank applicants in pretty much every academic admissions process.

jseliger• 2 years ago

That can be true and yet the incentives remain: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess...

mise_en_place2• 2 years ago

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+.

phone8675309• 2 years ago

The democratization of the gentleman's C[1]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gentleman%27s_C

vanilla_nut• 2 years ago

In my experience, administration cares a lot about pass/fail ratios. Much less so about the distribution of passing grades. I've seen situations where administration forced a curve in a difficult class because they weren't willing to face the music when over 50% of a class failed. Mostly because the students and their (helicopter) parents would raise a shitstorm of busywork and a lot of bad press.

Of course, sometimes 50% of a class fails because the teaching is shoddy, or the grading is unfair, or the prerequisites weren't properly set or enforced. It isn't always a failure on the part of the students. Failing grades are inherently a failure of the system to prepare and guide a student through material. A common symptom of that systemic failure? Lazy, unmotivated students.

Cheer21712• 2 years ago

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.

bcrosby95• 2 years ago

One of my favorite finals had two parts. One was a normal test on the material. That was not graded on a curve.

The other was a more open ended set of problems. That was graded on a curve, and was a lot of fun.

But yeah, every other CS class I took was on a curve.

aidenn02• 2 years ago

In my most extreme case of this, I had a C.S. midterm where I nearly doubled the second highest score (90 vs 47). The cutoff for an A was around 40.

The only one of my humanities classes that had a curve was the "Introduction to logic" (which was offered by the philosophy department). It was a rather gentle curve, but the tests were also open-book.

jhbadger• 2 years ago

One of the amusing things I encountered in grad school was taking a course where both grad students and undergraduates were allowed. The course was curved for the reasons you mentioned but what was interesting was that the grad students and undergraduates were curved separately. To protect the undergraduates, right? Actually as it turned out the grad students scored worse on average!

TheAceOfHearts• 2 years ago

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.

burnished• 2 years ago

It would be weirder if it never happened.

JadeNB• 2 years ago

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 think "only a poor teacher blames their students" is a pretty tempting companion to "only a poor craftsman blames their tools," but, at least from my motivated thinking as a teacher, I don't find it completely true.

The structuring of universities as businesses means that there's a strong, if seldom explicitly acknowledged, tendency to view a degree as something that is purchased, rather than earned. This means that there is a lot of pressure from administration to make sure that a large proportion of an increasingly large population of students—students whom the faculty had no voice in choosing—eventually get their way to a degree. The students who are interested in their education still work sincerely towards that goal, but the ones who view a degree as a credential they are purchasing can fall, intentionally or unintentionally, into the trap of relying on this institutional pressure to shepherd them through as long as they play the system correctly. And then, as a teacher, your choice is to connive at this "go along to get along" mentality, or to be stuck in a situation where there is no reasonable way to get students who came to you unprepared—for societal and educational reasons—to a point where one can honestly say that they have mastered this course's material and are ready for the next.

dmckeon• 2 years ago

One approach to requiring prerequisites is to give a test on the prerequisite content on the first or second day of class, with the test scored quickly, and the results worth 20% of the final course grade. Students who do well on the test know the prerequisites, and those who bomb the test have time to drop the course and enroll in one of the prerequisite courses - or to stubbornly struggle with the higher-level material and earn a B grade. It takes some cooperation among the faculty to pull off, but can be effective.

bobthepanda5• 2 years ago

One interesting point is that public universities are sometimes used as dumping grounds for people who could not get into private universities, and politicians also often want to expand classes for political reasons. Sometimes this can result in wholly unprepared people going to courses they will not pass, which does a disservice to the students, the professors and the university.

I attended my public school just as CS was becoming a hot subject. My entering class had 300 CS students; by the time I graduated there were 900 incoming students into CS and many more clamoring to get in, and the program was struggling with such a fast expansion; but telling voters that we are expanding CS education sells well. On top of that the university had also been decreasing the amount of remedial core classes for students struggling as well.

klyrs• 2 years ago

If your job is to educate and 3/4ths of the students fail, that sounds like a dysfunctional system

University must not be easy for slackers. Slackers must fail in class, or they will not learn the real-world lesson that underlies it all.

As an undergrad, I was a keen student. I listened, learned, and put hours into my homework to really make sure I learned it. I took three courses where around 75% of the class failed or dropped out. I learned an incredible amount of material in those classes, and I aced each of them. I observed my classmates treating the classes like any other, phoning in the homework and getting slaughtered in exams. Each instructor had a prepared speech for day 1 setting expectations for the difficulty of the course.

You get out what you put in. Yes, bad and ineffective teachers exist, but in my experience those teachers are the most generous with grades. The tough ones, willing to fail anybody who doesn't know the material, have the highest standards for themselves as well as the students.

If you really want to know how effective a teacher is, you can't just look at the grades in their class. You also need to track their students to the classes which depend on that material.

hilux5• 2 years ago

Everything you say is true.

As an administrator for an Extension school (at a major university), I inherited a set of Accounting instructors who failed most of their students in intro courses, and took pride in doing so! In their view, they bore no responsibility for their students' success, or lack thereof. The students needed to work harder.

I replaced all of them with instructors (men and women) who had much better professional credentials ... whose students earned mostly A's and B's. There's no evidence that the second set of instructors lowered the standard in any way - their students continued to do well in the program. The new instructors just taught better, and cared more.

Unless admissions massively screwed up and people who can't do algebra are suddenly taking quantum physics, it's almost always the instructor's fault. But being an instructor (in US HCOL areas) is such a poorly paid and ill-respected profession, it often doesn't attract the best and brightest.

Jensson5• 2 years ago

Maybe the course prerequisites were poorly designed

The prerequisite courses are grade inflated so the incoming students lack fundamentals. The only way you can then run the course is to either grade inflate as well and pass students who don't have a clue about the topic or you fail like 3/4 of the class.

If the prerequisite courses weren't grade inflated and the incoming students actually knew what their grades says they should know then it wouldn't be a problem.

jncfhnb• 2 years ago

As someone who comfortably was at the top of every class without a ton of effort I found grading to be stupid. Incentives demanded you have As. Teachers who were rigid graders with thresholds at 95% for As were very frustrating.

The difference between an A and an A- is not one of mastery but of minor errors and lapses in focus.

Teachers don’t have the ability to meaningfully measure top performance. Imo grading should have a lower ceiling for an A but no curve.

So much anxiety would be lost if everyone just chilled out and said, look, if you generally understand all the material, you get the top mark.

ren_engineer• 2 years ago

universities have gone from having the goal of actually educating to giving credentials in return for a lot of money

tonymet• 2 years ago

i would hire a student to do a regression on your grading over the past few years and see if that's true

fjjfjfj• 2 years ago

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.

hollandheese• 2 years ago

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.

Intro to Stats: it's vastly vastly more likely that the 0-5% failure professor is not doing their job and is just passing every student regardless of the quality of their work.

andrewmutz• 2 years ago

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.

sudosysgen3• 2 years ago

Do transcripts in the US not show the class average?

lizard• 2 years ago

That's fine for a well establish course and curriculum, where its pretty well known where the students are at (or should be) and the material is presented in a consistent manner that has successfully filtered the deserving and undeserving. Which is something that all teachers and schools should strive for, but probably not where many are at.

New topics are added, new teachers, new academic plans defining which courses are required and when. New initiatives, programs, and policies are created all the time that change how people move through the education system. Even someone teaching the same course for 30 years is going to experience their own ups and downs that they may, inadvertently, project onto their students in different ways at different times.

I'm not saying you should hand out undeserved grades. I agree with your perspective that grades have to mean something and high grades need to be earned. My personal take is that as a society we just need to get comfortable with C's, because that's where the average should be. (Sure, who wants to hire a Writer who's only average at writing? But by letting them know they are only average in writing you can now give them opportunities to _measurably_ improve, or highlight that they are above average in math and might be more successful there.)

But if 3/4 of the class failed then _something went wrong_, and I would hope that our educators are able to reflect on that a little more then, "because they deserved to."

The only thing those students got out of that class was an F. And the one thing the school administration has got right is that giving out F's is a failure of the institution. The problem is that right now their incentives are to reduce the number of F's rather than improve the teaching and learning. If those students had learned something or got your wake up-call, they would have done better.

I'm not blaming you. There's a whole institution behind you, and several more over a student's education, with all sorts of problems and not enough of them having anything to do with actually educating people.

But solutions have to start somewhere, so I would still look to you to talk to your fellow faculty and leadership; tell them that 3/4 of your class couldn't even hit average marks compared to every other time you've taught the course, and that we have got to do better to prepare incoming students for the material they are about to learn.

Education isn't about regurgitating the same things over and over and keeping up the same bell curve until you retire. It's about teaching and learning and creating new opportunities for people to grow. That won't always work for everyone. You'll have to give out a an F here and there. But just like high grades should mean something, low grades should too. A student putting in low effort but grokking the material should be getting a C. An F is an indicator that something is wrong and the student isn't where they need to be.

devwastaken2• 2 years ago

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.

selimthegrim3• 2 years ago

If you think college students these days have the attention span for a 10 minute video assigned to them in class I have some bad news for you as an instructor

eska• 2 years ago

* 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.

j7ake• 2 years ago

I disagree that grading is not stack ranking.

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.

SamuelAdams• 2 years ago

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.

mhuffman• 2 years ago

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.

carabiner• 2 years ago

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.

vonzepp• 2 years ago

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.

currymj• 2 years ago

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.

daxfohl• 2 years ago

Why not pass/fail everything? I've never looked at a transcript when hiring someone. It's not a strong differentiator in industry.

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

You haven’t. But lots and lots of firms do. It might be better if they didn’t, but that isn’t the world these grads are entering today.

neilv• 2 years ago

I would love it if grades kept improving because students kept getting smarter.

vmilner• 2 years ago

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.

lumost• 2 years ago

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.

hbcondo714• 2 years ago

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”

Sources:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schwitzgebel

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/

aidenn02• 2 years ago

What does "DFW" stand for?

enjoyyourlife• 2 years ago

D grade (unsatisfactory), F grade (fail), Withdraw (course dropped)

See https://uwm.edu/academicaffairs/student-success/data-of-the-...

downrightmike• 2 years ago

Its just a required piece of paper with $100k debt at this point.

Imnimo• 2 years ago

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?

vondur• 2 years ago

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.

Grade inflation at UC Riverside, and institutional pressures for easier grading

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