In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Paul Bernhardt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >EAKIN MARK E said on 3/24/03 10:05 AM:
>>I just received a Springer-Verlag statistics catelog. In it was a book by >>Valen E. Johnson titled Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education. >>According to the summary in the catalog, the book argues that since >>students award faculty with higher teacher evaluations when the faculty >>give higher grades and students tend to take courses with faculty that >>give higher grades, grade inflation is the obvious result. Has anyone read >>the book? I would be interested in knowing whether it would be a good >>book to purchase. Students give higher evaluations to those who teach ONLY rote memorization and routine calculation. It is not grade inflation which is the big problem; the grades are essentially meaningless at this time. I cannot tell from a student's grades if the student has any understanding of the subject. We need to raise the level of the courses to where they were in the 50s, and to recognize that many, if not most, entering students have not had even the semblance of a decent high school education. It is not that they did not learn what was presented, but that not much of any real importance was presented. >And, I recently read, I believe in the Chronicle of Higher Education, >that grade inflation, while definitely occuring, is not a big deal. Even >if you are using only a 5 point grade field, the rank ordering of >students is still easily accomodated over the course of the several dozen >courses they end up taking in their career, particularly for schools on >quarter systems. I consider anyone who would make such a statement to be uninterested in the quality of education. Why should I, or anyone else, care about the rank ordering in trivial pursuit? >Fortunately, I've found the student expectation for high grades due to >grade inflation appears to end at the door of mathematics department. It >appears to be because the relatively unambiguous nature of the correct >answers on tests. This is not correct. The courses have become so poor as to often be worse than useless. >My most recent exam the raw scores ranged from 17% to 95%. I then applied >a proportional curve (the grades farthest from the best score get the >most upward adjustment) so that the range was from the mid 50% to 100%, >mean in the low 80%. The students loved the curve! But they got a totally misleading idea of how much they learned. The grade-credit system has been allowed to destroy the level of the curriculum. -- This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University. Herman Rubin, Deptartment of Statistics, Purdue University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558 . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
