On Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:31:54 -0800, William Scott wrote: >Make Palij wrote: > >"The reason for this appeared to be that students could drop a course without >consequence up to the 12th or so week in the semester. So, students who saw >that they were failing going in the final weeks could drop the course with >their G.P.A. unaffected." >---------------------------------------
Please note that the above quote is from an ancedote that I was relaying and not a result from a research study. I even labelled this "Personal Anecdote Department" in order to make clear that one should be cautious about making the "anecdote=data" confusion. That being said, more comments below. >If this were true, and was the reason for grade inflation at that institution, >then we should have nothing to worry about. The students were still receiving >accurate grades and credit for courses in which competent work had been >completed. Or students could look for teachers that were easy graders or gave courses with lax standards. I'm sure that one can come up with all sorts of alternative reasons for why the grades of the students with the "12th week drop option" would not be an accurate reflection of that student's performance unless: (1) there were uniform, valid, and reliable testing for the material in a course that provided scores that were comparable across instructors, departments, and time, and (2) one has a specific theory as to the type of knowledge that a person should have from a specific course and how the testing provides evidence of the existence of such knowledge and its extent. If the above conditions can be met, shouldn't we have national tests for each college course that would "fairly" evaluate all students taking a specific course (e.g., psychological statistics)? > However, I doubt that the grade inflation disappeared after that >loophole was closed. Because my imcomplete memory is irritating me, I've tried to find some corroboration for it. One source is a NY Times article from May 31, 1994 titled "At Stanford, A Rebellion of Grades". If you have access to the Proquest newspaper database, you can find it there. Some points made by the article: (1) There is no grade of "F" at Stanford (2) A grade of "C" is "fast becoming extinct" (3) A student could drop a course on the day of the final exam with no consequences (4) The median grade for undergraduates in the previous year was "A-" Now I'm not sure but I do have a feeling the grade distribution might have changed after this point in time (the Wikipedia entry refers to Stanford but does not provide much information -- any Stanford grads out in Tipsland?). The point of the article was that the faculty was attempting to institute new grading policies. However, not all people were in support of such a move, as expressed in the following opinion by a former Stanford student: http://www.utwatch.org/archives/subtex/cleaver_issue4.html >It sounds like a rationalization invented to explain the >source of the inflation as something other than a reduction of standards. When >I presented clear evidence of grade inflation to my institution, the response >was "students are better now than they were then, therefore deserving of >higher >grades". I had to point out that the SAT scores had declined somewhat over the >time period involved. There is research on these points if one is interested, often by political conservatives as represented in an article by Thomas Reeves on the website of the National Association of Scholars; see: http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=708 By the way, what was your suggested solution to grade inflation to your administration? Was it forcing grades to follow a particular distribution? What was the rationale for this? -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
