EAKIN MARK E said on 3/24/03 10:05 AM: >I just received a Springer-Verlag statistics catelog. In it was a book by >Valen E. Johnson titled Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education. >According to the summary in the catalog, the book argues that since >students award faculty with higher teacher evaluations when the faculty >give higher grades and students tend to take courses with faculty that >give higher grades, grade inflation is the obvious result. Has anyone read >the book? I would be interested in knowing whether it would be a good >book to purchase.
And, I recently read, I believe in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that grade inflation, while definitely occuring, is not a big deal. Even if you are using only a 5 point grade field, the rank ordering of students is still easily accomodated over the course of the several dozen courses they end up taking in their career, particularly for schools on quarter systems. Fortunately, I've found the student expectation for high grades due to grade inflation appears to end at the door of mathematics department. It appears to be because the relatively unambiguous nature of the correct answers on tests. My most recent exam the raw scores ranged from 17% to 95%. I then applied a proportional curve (the grades farthest from the best score get the most upward adjustment) so that the range was from the mid 50% to 100%, mean in the low 80%. The students loved the curve! Paul . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
