
Nearly Half of All College Grades Are A's - inshane
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700151924/Nearly-half-of-college-grades-are-As-study-finds.html
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harry
Yup. Faculty don't like you pointing this out and actually complain loudly to
the Provost level administration at a University when it is done so. Here's
what happened to me a few years ago:

I created a web app at the request of one of the schools & deans at the
University I work for. (I do stats/database reporting full time.) It was
wildly popular with students for enrollment purposes. After a few days it got
shut down by a direct Provost order. The faculty did not like it being so easy
to compare their grades with their colleagues on "identical classes" (large
foundational courses math and science) and worried that it would damage
departmental and eventually school reputation.

Personally I thought it was bullshit to take down (not only because I worked
so hard on it and it was fuckin cool.) The data is released to companies (by
way of an Open Records Request) that make money by selling "pick the best
professor for this class" rankings to naive students.

Our research department devoted resources to making the application because we
thought making the data easy to use and public would in fact CORRECT for grade
inflation over time. Basically, I feel that the old way has to die off before
any changes will be made and there's some pretty big changes looming for
higher ed in the future.

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Jach
If you're just storing non-personal statistics on grades for courses of
professors, how can they actually shut you down? I know there are lots of
"Professor Review" sites out there, so is it just the grades aspect? I don't
remember signing anything at my college that says I can't give out grade info,
but I may be mistaken.

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anamax
> If you're just storing non-personal statistics on grades for courses of
> professors, how can they actually shut you down?

"I created a web app at the request of one of the schools & deans at the
University I work for."

The provost has some authority over the deans and schools. Since the
application is "owned" by his employer....

Yes, maybe he could continue it "on the side" but he may want to stay employed
and if he got the grade information from the school, they can probably shut
that down

~~~
harry
Yeah, University employees are contractually held to a non-compete agreement
which would prolly break down here when brought to general counsel.

The grade distribution information is not considered restricted under any
FERPA or other policy, but it is considered 'sensitive' and requires an
external party to jump through quite a few legal hoops to access.

Edit: I serve at the behest of the Provost. So that was basically the
boss/boss saying "we made a mistake, please take that down."

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spc476
I attended university in the early 90s, and majored in Computer Science. On a
lark, I took a class on Native American Literature (just on the name alone, I
thought it would have been more Native American lore; it turned out to be
contemporary fiction written by Native Americans). The entire grade was based
on one mid-term and one final. The mid-term I failed. When it came time for
the final, I realized there was no way I could even answer the single question
and simply walked out of the class.

I fully expected an F for that class, but I ended up with a C, which surprised
the hell out of me.

I was recently talking with a friend (a former English instructor for a well
known university in the United States) about this, and he said I either
received a "Gentleman's C" or (more likely) the instructor simply thought he
lost my paper and erred on the side of grade inflation.

~~~
pagekalisedown
leme guess, UC Santa Cruz? ;)

~~~
sliverstorm
Wow, does Santa Cruz really have that bad a rap?

It likely wasn't, by the way- the school of engineering at Santa Cruz wasn't
founded until 1997.

~~~
pagekalisedown
Grad quality is more consistent elsewhere, like Cal, than at USCS.

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nhebb
The NYT article on the same topic has nice graphs that show the change in
grade distribution since the 1940's and the shift in the bell curve:

[http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-
of-...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-of-college-
grade-inflation/)

And, Walter Russel Mead of The American Interest offers a nice summary: _"43
percent of all grades given in American colleges are A's. Social science
grades are higher than grades in science and math. Humanities grades are
higher still. Grades in private colleges are higher than grades at public
universities. Northern schools give A's more freely than southern ones, and
prestigious colleges have flabbier standards than their less fashionable
rivals."_

~~~
Joeri
That's a very disturbing chart. Even if the course materials are just as hard
as before, which I doubt, as a student you can't know whether you actually
comprehend them as well as you need to. By extension, employers can no longer
rely on a degree as a token of acquired knowledge or work ethic.

~~~
chopsueyar
Yet tuition prices consistently increase.

Why is it costing more to impart less knowledge?

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JeanPierre
In Norway, we have the opposite problem: Nearly half of the grades in some
subjects at NTNU are Fs, and 40% of all students get an F _every year_. The
institute for IT, maths and electronics implicitly says that "a high failure
rate means the standard is high", and they ignore feedback and complaints
about professors.

Luckily (if I should put it like that), the grades themselves are usually
fair. It's just that some subjects require too much work to be considered as
one subject, which seems to be the university's intentions.

~~~
pmr_
This is similar in Germany. Although I always had the it was necessary to
remove a certain percentage from students with weed-out courses as entry to
Maths, CS and Engineering is mostly free.

But as soon as you are through the weed-out stage (or undergrad) A or B is
pretty much the only grade you can get.

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scottshea
When I was in college I had a professor offer to not put a grade on any of our
work. I took him up on it and it was one of the best classes I ever had. I was
so much more focused on the feedback rather than the score. I wish more
college classes were like that.

~~~
chopsueyar
There are acutally entire colleges like that...

<http://www.ncf.edu/>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_College_of_Florida#Distingu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_College_of_Florida#Distinguishing_academic_features)

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rimmjob
I wish it was at least a little more standardized across schools and majors. A
little variance is fine but i went to a school where evreryone,not just me,
had to study into the night to maintain barely passing grades in any technical
subject while kids at other schools and "easier" majors maintained 3.5+
without cracking open a book.

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rrrrzzzz
This is a good trend. The grade is binary (A or not A). It's not possible to
evaluate a class of 100 students with 90% of whom you've never spoken.

~~~
fletchowns
I always felt it was a good idea to make sure my teacher knew my name after
the first couple sessions. Get to know your teachers everyone, they are cool
and they want to see you succeed.

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CJefferson
For the curious, I can tell you this is certainly not a global effect. At the
UK university I work at, we mark work out of 20, and only a small proportion
of students get above 17 (considered excellent, probably equivalent to A).

~~~
phamilton
I attended the International School of Brussels for my high school education,
and most teachers were from the UK. I can vouch for the difference in culture
regarding grades. I once had an English teacher tell me I should be "leading
the class" since she had given me an A- the semester before. Such an attitude
was prevalent among all my teachers, and I felt it really damaged my college
application to American schools. I applied to stanford and of the 4500 early
applicants, 2500 had a 4.0 GPA (perfect). Not one student at my school had an
unweighted 4.0. I had a measly 3.4.

Other than the comparative nature of GPAs in college applications, I thought
it was a great approach. The only class I was able to coast through was Math,
but I was one of the few who could do so.

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qF
I have no data to back this up but anecdotally I once had a professor explain
how some, if not most, professors would adjust their grading to get to a
specific average for exams and essays.

However we use numbers (1 till 10, 10 being best) here and from my
understanding they would try to average it around 7.5. Having all your grades
an 8 (or higher) translates to graduating cum laude, basically turning cum
laude into 'just above average'.

I assume this is due to management tactics that involve investigating classes
that deviate from grade averages rather than trying to judge based on course
quality.

~~~
arghnoname
How cum laude is awarded differs somewhat between universities, but the
University of Maryland, for one, does not confer latin honors to any student
below the 10th percentile in their college. Here are the GPA requirements for
this past semester for the college of engineering:

    
    
      GPA Ranges for Latin Honors: May 2011
      
      Summa:            4.000 - 3.976
      Magna:             3.975 - 3.912
      Cum Laude:      3.911 - 3.825
      

This is still well above 'just above average.'

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sudobear
None of this is surprising given only straight-A students get into college,
and only straight-A college students get into graduate school. The days of the
"gentleman's C" have long past.

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nolite
not mine...

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maeon3
Now that we have entered the machine thinking age, where tools like IBM's
Watson can answer open ended straight forward questions, grades measuring
memorization and straight forward question-answering miss the mark.

I predict the ability to answer a multiple choice/fill in the blank test will
be dominated by the machine once IBM's Watson gets deployed to all the arts
and sciences.

There needs to be a bigger emphasis on what you can build given the sum of
human knowledge instead of "how much you can remember".

I'm thinking of a grading system where you measure the number of processes and
tasks you can do which are useful to humanity that $10,000 worth computer
can't do. High = A, Low = F. "the arts" doesn't count. I'm talking creative
thinking, innovation, things like that.

~~~
St-Clock
By your standard, we should let the machines vote because that's a multiple
choice question.

~~~
maeon3
I think an advanced objective-thinking algorithm like watson advanced another
15 years would provide night-vs-day superior choices than your average self
serving voter who has the objective thinking capability of a random number
generator.

Voting is basically a popularity contest anyway. An objective thinking machine
would have to be fed an objective question, like: "Which candidate has
appealed to the politically active youth community with a tech-savvy hip
message of 'change' "?

~~~
St-Clock
I agree with you that a machine may someday make a more "rational" vote than
the average voter. We had quite an experience in Quebec recently...

That being said, your solution does not improve humanity. It does not make the
voters (or the students) better understand their world. It's just a bandaid to
hide their ignorance.

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shareme
A question..should not an article of on such a serious subject be devoid of
errors?

Not just grammar, but illogical assumptions, errors in logic, etc? See how
many errors you find..I find too many to rely on the article on any basis.

~~~
meatmanek
This comment is a classic example of
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law>

