At 01:09 PM 2/7/01 -0800, Harry Avis wrote:
>(snip)
>The authors point out: 1 C is not an average grade, since students must
>maintain a C average to remain is school. 2. School like Harvard take the
>top 1% of students so an "average" or C grade would be A work elsewhere.
>They argue that As and Bs should be the appropriate grade. Most
>interestingly, they analyzed data from their own college (Indiana
>University, I think) and found no statistical evidence of grade inflation
>despite the almost universal impression of grade inflation. Finally, in a
>informal study, they found a correlation of -.09 between grades and
>student evaluations.
>Does anyone know of other studies?
These arguments are interesting, and I need to think more about them. In
the absence
of any specific knowledge of the Indiana U study, though, I'd suggest that
there are
multiple ways to operationally define grade inflation (GI). One would be
an actual increase
in grades/GPA over years/decades. I'm assuming that this was the measure
that the Indiana
folks used when they found no evidence for and found no evidence for GI.
Another conception of GI, however, is that grades have stayed the same in
the face of inferior
work. I'm too young and too new in this biz to have any first-hand
experience in this regard
(making me a beneficiary of GI?). But, I've heard numerous senior
colleagues at multiple
institutions lament about the kinds of exams they gave and the written and
oral expression
that they used to expect 20 years ago. They have claimed that there is
just no way
they could give those same assignments now and have a reasonable number of
students pass.
Of course, this could just be "golden age" type thinking ("when I was
young..."). However,
there might be reasons to tentatively buy it. High school graduates who
may have never
even thought of attending college (or, perhaps, of even finishing high
school) 25 years ago are
now enrolling. If the population of colleges/universities is now accepting
a larger proportion
of high school grads than they used to, then even if the quality of h.s.
education remained
constant (which some would argue with), then one would expect that the
quality of the
average college student's work should be decreasing. If grades have
remained constant
across this time period, it is at least suggestive of the latter type of GI
I mentioned above.
I know what my mom would say. She's been teaching English (now mostly
grammar) at
a secretarial school for almost 30 years. When she started, her classes
were made of up many
h.s. grads with A averages. College just wasn't considered to be an
alternative for some
women then. To hear her tell it, I bet that she hasn't had an A-average,
maybe even B-average,
h.s. grad enrolled in her entire school in close to a decade. Her
population has changed
dramatically, as has her job. She now teaches grade-school grammar to high
school grads.
Has her grade distribution changed? Nope.
-Mike
************************************************
Michael J. Kane
Department of Psychology
P.O. Box 26164
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, NC 27402-6164
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
phone: 336-256-1022
fax: 336-334-5066
