No, I haven't read it. The causal link appears obvious. So I immediately want to play contrarian :) Certainly, this linkage could account for why average grades did not go down at the end of the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, I am suspicious that a general attitude is developed in some cases, an implicit social contract entered into by the students and the instructors. This unstated contract, involving entitlement, appears to me to have a major part in whether the linkages below operate. And yes, clearly there are many other forces at work to apply pressure on both students & instructors to provide grades regardless of learned content.
Now, if someone can bring that social contract to the surface, and puncture it so the students go along emotionally as well as intellectually, I would love to hear the details. Perhaps this is in the book, too? Jay EAKIN MARK E wrote: > 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. > > Mark Eakin > Associate Professor > Information Systems and Management Sciences Department > University of Texas at Arlington > [EMAIL PROTECTED] or > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > . > . > ================================================================= > Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the > problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: > . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . > ================================================================= -- Jay Warner Principal Scientist Warner Consulting, Inc. 4444 North Green Bay Road Racine, WI 53404-1216 USA Ph: (262) 634-9100 FAX: (262) 681-1133 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web: http://www.a2q.com The A2Q Method (tm) -- What do you want to improve today? . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
