Dennis:
I agree, that if the elite schools are attracting the best, the
not-so-elite get fewer of the best; but it's not a static pool of
students. There are more people attending college now than previously,
so I don't know a simple way to check for grade deflation. Many of
today's middle and lower level students would not have been attending
college 50 years ago. I cited the Harvard data because most of the
examples of inflation I have seen used Harvard or Berkeley as examples.
But I am puzzled by your final comments. By native ability, I assume you
mean 'g' (general intelligence); whether it's native is another story.
True, instructors don't know the SAT or IQ of individual students, but
'g' correlates with grades - how much depends on the heterogeneity of
the sample (less correlation at the elite schools because of restriction
of range). SAT, g and grades are inter-related, and while I believe the
lines of causation run from g to both SAT and GPA, the lines of
causations don't have to run this way to predict higher GPA when SAT
(and g) rise. Btw, IQ scores have risen (the so-called "Flynn effect")
over the last few decades, but it's unclear whether this is an increase
in actual intelligence, or increased performance due to test
sophistication.
But I am curious as to why you think we are becoming less fussy about
the cut-offs (psychologists aren't very big on unconscious processes
these days!). Despite my conviction that the Harvard/Berkeley
"inflation" is legitimate, I suspect there is some not-so-noble
inflation out there. I suspect it is due to the rise in a "making the
customer happy" model which has crept into academics. But on the other
hand, I haven't seen much solid data on this topic. It's mostly
anecdotal and selective. I would like to see a genuine rise in grades
with SAT (or g) held constant; or, even better, a rise in grades with
actual performance held constant.
I used to serve on an Academic Standards committee, and I researched
this issue with the assistance of our registrar's office (grades over a
12 year period). The raw data showed a very slight increase in grades,
but what was overwhelming was the variability across departments.
Philosophy, Psychology, Math and Biology had the lowest GPA; theatre,
music and education had the highest, and English showed the greatest
rise over the time period. I speculated that it was due to the increased
use of adjuncts in English, as adjuncts live semester-by-semester by
student evaluations. The other thing that came out my experience with
collecting data on this topic was the extreme _sensitivity_ some have
about comparing departments. After I summarized the data, administrators
here squashed all discussion of the topic and forbid the data I
summarized for the committee to be made public. Puzzled as to wisdom of
suppressing data, I waited a semester or so, and then when the topic
came up in a faculty e-mail discussion, I let the data slip out. It felt
good!
============================================
John W. Kulig
Professor of Psychology
Plymouth State College
Plymouth NH 03264
============================================
"Eat bread and salt and speak the truth"
Russian saying.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Behalf Of dennis roberts
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2003 3:33 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: grade inflation
At 03:15 PM 3/24/2003, John Kulig wrote:
>I haven't read Johnson's book, but one thing to look at is which
schools
>the grade inflation data is coming from, since the demographics has
>shifted since WWII, with the elite colleges (Harvard, Yale, Berkeley,
>and so forth) actually having better students than previously. Case in
>point:
i am not sure how much the quality of the incoming classes ... has to
do
with the overall distribution of grades ... given that if more of the
elite schools are skimming the top for the brighter students ... other
institutions are having to "settle" for less able students and, their
grade
distributions should be going DOWNhill ... perhaps becoming more and
more +
skewed ... which i don't think is happening at all
to the best of my knowledge:
1. institutions really have no instructions to faculty on how to grade
IN
relation to the ability of the admitted students and
2. generally speaking, grading is totally within the domain of the
teachers/professors/instructors ... and little pressure of any kind
(except
in rare cases) is placed on faculty to grade in any particular way
in addition, i doubt that the typical faculty member has any accurate
idea
of the distribution of SAT scores for their incoming students ... and,
even
if they knew that for the institution as a whole ... how could they know
that for the students in their classes?
i think the major contributor to "grade inflation" is the deliberate or
unconscious ... action on the part of faculty ... to NOT be as fussy
about
their grade cutoffs as they used to ... for a VARIETY of reasons ...
(but
having little to do with the "native" ability of the students in their
classes)
.
.
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