Re: Fwd: Grade inflation

[Robert Herdegen]

At 01:09 PM 2/7/2001 -0800, Harry Avis wrote:
>There is a fascinating article by Freese, Artis, and Powell in a small book
>The Social Worlds of Higher Education edited by Pescosodo and Aminzade -
>Pine Forge Press (forgive me for not using APA style for this reference.
>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.

Of course, this assumes that they maintain the same level of performance after being admitted that they did before matriculation. One could, however, compare student work from different schools with different admissions criteria, on some objective basis (such as using trait analysis). Is the work of Harvard undergraduates really better than that of students at other schools? Is it the top "1%" in measures of quality of all undergraduate student work?


>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

OK...I know I could go to the original source to get the info, but how did they determine that there had been no grade inflation? Seems to me that the only way would be to compare student work from, say, 30 years ago with student work on comparable assignments from today, again using some common set of criteria (again, using something like a trait analysis), and comparing the differential between the grade determined by the common criteria and the grade given to the paper. Of course, all this assumes that the quality of the instruction has not changed, either, nor has the quality of the students entering the institution.

>informal study, they found a correlation of -.09 between grades and student
>evaluations.
>Does anyone know of other studies?
>


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Robert T. Herdegen III
Department of Psychology
Hampden-Sydney College
Hampden-Sydney, VA 23943
804-223-6166
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