

Surprising Source of Grade Inflation - tokenadult
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/15/virginia

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ellyagg
"The data show a much sharper rise in Virginia than elsewhere. From 1995 to
2007, the average high school GPA of enrolled freshmen in the commonwealth
rose from 3.27 to 3.56, an increase of 9.9 percent, or 0.79 percent a year. In
the national sample, by comparison, the average GPA grew to 3.49 from 3.28, a
rise of 6.4 percent or 0.5 percent a year."

I'd be interested in seeing a table of all states rates of GPA change for the
given period. I checked the paper, but it doesn't provide it. Without that,
this information is impossible for me to evaluate.

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jcl
As I understand from the article, Virginia schools started awarding students
an automatic GPA increase for doing well on a standardized test, and a
researcher observed that the average high-school GPAs of college-bound
Virginian students went up relative to the rest of the country.

Am I missing something here? How is this conclusion surprising?

(Or are they saying that the fact that Virginia is awarding the increases at
all is surprising?)

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xenophanes
article says

> changes that school districts quietly made to encourage student
> participation, often involving grade-based incentives

so this is _cheating_ but by local districts not statewide.

they are making their kids look better to colleges, when equally skillful,
intelligent, and hard working to kids from other places.

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jimboyoungblood
I'm confused. How is this relevant to HN?

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tokenadult
The site founder has an interest in education issues:

<http://paulgraham.com/hs.html>

<http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html>

<http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html>

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tokenadult
Why would anyone expect high school grades to mean anything in the first
place?

<http://www.amazon.com/Howard-Kirschenbaum/e/B001IOBN0I/>

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endtime
Why would anyone expect them not to mean anything? And what's with the Amazon
link?

~~~
tokenadult
How can the grading standards of one high school possibly be linked with the
grading standards of more than 10,000 other high schools around the country,
many of which will be in different states with different state-regulated
curricula? Why should anyone expect a grade of A from a northern Virginian
high school to be at all comparable with a grade of A from rural Mississippi,
for example?

The link in my previous reply (parent to your reply) is to a book about the
arbitrary nature of grades in American schools. For more than a generation,
researchers have known that there isn't any standard comparable from one
school to the next for how grades are issued.

