I believe this is topical; it was sparked by the pronoucement of the grading policy for an economics course by an economics professor on this list. He said that if one gives better grades to those who do well in the end of the semester, one simply discriminates against those who work hard at the beginning of the semester rather than those who work hard at the end of the semester. This seems to be true only in the case of those courses which do not build on the material taught at the beginning of the course. For instance, a foreign language course which taught you sets of nouns each week. On the other hand, a foreign language course which taught you verbs the first week, how to conjugate them the second week, and required you to use them in complex sentences the third week would be fundamentally different. If someone were to do well the third week and not the first, they would have learned more than someone who did well the first week and not the third. This is because knowledge of the first week is required to do well in the third. I hope the particular economics course, industrial organization, is of the second type. If so, trend grading would be worthwhile. By trend grading I mean weighting assignments late in the semester heavier or "bumping up grades if students are improving." Furthermore, my unsupported assertion is that all classes that are both worthwhile and interesting are of the second type.
Patrick McCann p.s. this is less of an attempt to change the policy than to defend the policies of other professors who were criticized so harshly.
