

Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving all A’s already? - timgluz
http://andrewgelman.com/2011/07/12383/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+StatisticalModelingCausalInferenceAndSocialScience+%28Statistical+Modeling%2C+Causal+Inference%2C+and+Social+Science%29
Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving all A’s already??<p>People have discussed why the grades have been going up and whether this is a bad thing.<p>I (Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics, http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/ ) have a slightly different take on all this. As a teacher who, like many others, assigns grades in an unregulated environment (that is, we have no standardized tests and no rules on how we should grade), all the incentives to toward giving only A’s.<p>So the real question is, why have grades been going up so slowly?
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impendia
I taught freshman calculus at Stanford. I had little idea what I should expect
of the students, and certainly I didn't have any absolute standard of what
constituted an "A", "B", and so on.

So what did I do? I just got the grade distribution from the last time it was
taught and curved my class the same way. But this wasn't perfect... there
would be a clump of five students who all got around the same numerical grade
around a cutoff, and I'd round up rather than down. Similarly there were a
couple of students who showed unusual effort and/or improvement, and I rounded
them up if they were borderline. The end result was a grade distribution that
was just slightly more generous than the last time. And hence I perpetuated
the cycle.

As a professor, if you want to give strict grades, you have to be able to
justify your reasoning when students complain. I don't terribly like grading,
I don't have any deep insight on how to do it, and my department doesn't have
strong opinions (other than that I should get back to writing my grants). So
what do I do? I follow my peers.

~~~
patrickyeon
Why did you curve your class? I mean, I know that we expect grades to follow a
statistical curve, and I can almost see it justified (although I disagree with
it) in a class with more subjective grading (eg history, languages), but
questions in freshman calculus have well-defined scores for different answers
and parts thereof.

~~~
impendia
Certainly everyone got a numerical score at the end... but what letter grade
should, say, a 77 be? There were no departmental standards, I don't have any
particular personal standards, and I hadn't tried to match the difficulty of
the exams to what was done previously.

I could do something like 90-100 = A, 80-89 = B, etc., but that is no less
arbitrary than any other system, and in my experience it is customary (as well
as, IMHO, a good idea) to write harder exams and then make the cutoffs more
generous.

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fab13n
The question is: how grade adjustments can be gamed by students? If well done,
it can turn into a competitive exam, so that students will fight each other
rather that syndicate to game the system. But then, you'll have a very nasty
class dynamics, which will favor sociopaths.

That's what happens, for instance, with medical students in France: studies
are free (or rather everyone pay for them all their lives through taxes), but
by the end of 1st year there's the _numerus clausus_: the number N of MD to be
trained is determined, a national exam is set up and the N best grades get to
enter 2nd year. As a result, describing the relationship between 1st year
students as nasty would be an understatement.

~~~
jessriedel
This doesn't really seem like rational self-interested behavior on the part of
the students. There are thousands of doctors trained every year in a country
as large as France. A student's choice to mean or nice to the tiny subset of
his peers which he will have substantial interaction with is going to have a
negligible effect on the average score. Therefore, it's very much in his
interest to cooperate with his small group of local peers in order that the
group can do better than the average.

Since students _do_ end up being nasty to each other, that tells us there's
something very irrational going on. Thus, it might be more effective to try to
manipulate that irrationality away than changing the fundamental structure of
the tests.

------
_delirium
A problem with a post-hoc adjustment imo is that it makes the connection
between the professor/material and the grade received more confusing. Students
typically want to know: what does the professor expect, and what do I have to
do to get an A (or a B)? Halfway through the semester, a struggling student
might want to know, am I on track to fail (or get a D perhaps), and is it
plausible for me to bring it up or should I drop the course? The professor
might have specific suggestions for improvement, and give rough feedback on
what the student needs to do for the rest of the course to get at least a C
(or maybe even a B).

But if the answer is that the professor themselves isn't quite sure, because
it'll go through some statistical adjustment process after the course ends,
that's a bit less helpful.

I'm admittedly thinking more about smaller courses and especially project- or
seminar-based ones. Large lecture courses with homework+tests that are just
numerically graded and averaged could more plausibly be done as he proposes.

------
Ryanmf
From the article: "I assume that back in the 1940s, a prof couldn’t really
just give all A’s to his or her classes: someone would probably notice and say
something. But now we really can, and it’s been that way for awhile."

    
    
      US College enrollment, 1940: 1.5Mm [1]
      US College enrollment, 2009: 19.5Mm [2]
      
      Average yearly cost of 4 year Uni., 1940: $6000 (adj. for inflation) [3]
      Average yearly cost of 4 year Uni., 2009: $20-35k [4]
    

So yeah, none of this has anything do do with admitting unprecedented numbers
of students—many of whom are woefully unprepared for the experience—to
universities already stretched so thin that you might not even _meet_ a
tenured professor until your second or third year.

None of this has anything to do with entire sections being managed,
instructed, and graded by TAs who themselves are just figuring out what the
hell they're doing. None of this has anything to do with a complete lack of
focus on accountability by administrations far more concerned with collecting
as much money as possible to bankroll research by a handful of their most
notable staff, and occasionally give themselves nice bonuses.

It's probably because professors feel sad when they're forced to objectively
evaluate things, and they would just give everyone A's if not for their
inclination to protect the mental image of their own GPAs fifty years ago.

Again, from the article: "So, now that we’re giving out the grades, we don’t
want to devalue this currency."

Newsflash pal, that currency is already way past devalued. We're not even
trading in the same market any longer. And this sort of bizarre, self-absorbed
postulation, with absolutely no acknowledgement of the poison coursing through
the system which you—dear author—have devoted your (professional) life to,
casts serious doubts in my mind that it will _ever_ recoup its lost value.

[1]: <http://www.census.gov/apsd/cqc/cqc13.pdf>

[2]:
[http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0273.p...](http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0273.pdf)

[3]: [http://www.reducemycollegecosts.com/wp-
content/uploads/2008/...](http://www.reducemycollegecosts.com/wp-
content/uploads/2008/10/rising-costs-university-of-colorado-at-boulder3.pdf)

[4]: [http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2010/08/24/the-
averag...](http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2010/08/24/the-average-cost-
of-a-us-college-education)

------
glimcat
"These trends may help explain why private school students are
disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and
why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional
schools."

This part here is malarkey. They're quoting it mainly to show why the topic is
noteworthy, but the premise is faulty. Admissions boards are well aware of
grade inflation and do not choose students based on ranking their raw GPAs.

------
bugsy
Hate to say it but the guy who wrote that article seems very unprofessional to
me. He says he gives As to all his students for everything they do regardless
of quality because it makes them feel good about themselves and like him more.
Then he suggests that other teachers who don't also do this are elitists who
had it easy and don't want newcomers in their A club. Then he bemoans that it
is impossible to assign different grades without standardized tests.

Wherever he is teaching must not be a very good school (edit: ah Berkeley;
it's overrated), everything he says is bunk.

And yes, I have taught elementary, high school and college classes. I don't do
grades for elementary, but for high school and college it is not difficult at
all to assign objective grades for work done. Also, the students respect you
less not more when you just give out all As. Most students respect fair,
impartial and realistic grading. Those who don't probably shouldn't be in
college anyway.

It's also OK to do as Reed College does and keep the grades in a private file
in the event of subsequent grad school transcripts needed, and instead
evaluate each student with written essays and never let them see any grades.
No grades at all is better than all As. Giving all As does not make you a
"nice guy" any more than giving out free crack samples so people "like you"
makes you a nice guy. The people don't really like you because you give them
free crack, and you're not really a nice person because you do this. Wow, why
isn't this obvious to people. It's amazing I have to even say this.

~~~
Estragon

      ...the guy who wrote that article seems very unprofessional to me
    

He's a highly respected statistician who's written some very valuable books,
including at least one very useful book on teaching statistics. He actually
says nothing about the rate at which he himself gives A's, just that all the
incentives tend that way. In fact, at the end he cites an approach to post-hoc
modification of grades which would make it irrelevant whether he assigned A's
to everyone or not.

~~~
bugsy
What were your thoughts about the fact that the world's leading expert on the
topic, whom he cited in his article, responded in the comments pointing out
his errors, and he responded with personal remarks and no facts? That doesn't
sound like a professional statistician to me, it sounds like a child.

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mathattack
Although I'm not a teacher, this topic is near and dear to my heart.

My current firm recruits CS, Engineering and Financial Mathematics grads from
top schools. Even in this environment, we need to give everyone a math test as
part of the hiring process. We can't trust the GPA. Top software firms make
developers write code as part of the interview. Even CS (which seems tougher
than most majors) suffers from grade inflation. The beauty of this system is
that "grade grubbers" who nag the professors for better grades ultimately
don't get rewarded. People who are in school to learn do.

A prior firm that I worked for (large consultancy) did a study on if GPA was
predictive of good work performance. They found that there was a pass/fail
barrier of a 3.0 for technical degrees, and 3.2 for non-technical degrees.
Folks who couldn't find a way to hit the lower barrier on average didn't do as
well. Folks who did better were more likely - but there was no benefit for
getting much higher. A 3.8 student wasn't any more likely to perform better
than a 3.1 student. (Slightly off-topic - the only other predictor of success
was people who worked at least part-time while in school. It didn't matter
what the job was, but people who had to work doing school on average performed
better than those who didn't.)

So what can be done that doesn't crush the professors? My grad school forced
every non-Phd class to hit an average GPA. Want to give more As? Then give
more Cs. When every professor is forced to live by this, nobody suffers in the
evaluations.

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mbateman
The incentive for giving a reasonable spread of grades is that your students
have incentive to try harder. Thus you get better students.

The disincentive for giving all A's is that you disincentivize your students
from bothering to put in much effort.

Ideally you want to grade hard enough so that even your brightest student has
to put in a lot of work to get an A. That can be hard to do in the current
climate of grade inflation, but when I grade I at least try to err in that
direction.

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Astrohacker
Since grades are so subjective, I've always thought of them as being basically
meaningless. So I'm happy seeing grade inflation because it's gradually making
grades obsolete.

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soundsop
When I went to grad school in engineering and became a TA, I found out there
was a guideline for the undergraduate class average from the department. It
was actually presented as the historical class average for informational
purposes, with standard deviation, but the implication was that a professor's
class average should be close the the historical average.

------
apinstein
I think a major problem with grading is that it causes teachers to conflate
two separate but important measures, effort and performance.

Those uses grades as a guide to acceptance (colleges, jobs, etc) really want
to know both of those pieces of data. So they use standardized tests to get
hints at performance and interviews, recommendations, etc to get hints at
effort.

Maybe what we really need is a new grading system with two scores for each
class, one for performance and another for effort.

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PeeDubYa
Maybe some of the grade improvement is real. The Flynn Effect has recorded an
increase of 3 IQ points per decade.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
And universities have become much more academically selective. Once upon a
time, university students were selected for wealth and spare time, but the
rise of standardized tests means that they are now selected for (mostly) by
IQ.

