On Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:27:41 -0800, Paul K Brandon wrote >Good point-- >I believe that you're going to find most Repubs in Engineering, >Business and Economics; not fields noted for grade inflation.
According to the article by Bar & Zussman, the Republicans are mostly in the natural sciences and least in the humanities (using their designation). However, this distinction appears to have no effect if my interpretation of the following paragraph is correct: |The results presented in Table 4 are consistent with our grading |egalitarianism hypothesis. In all specifications, the coefficient |on the Republican professor indicator is negative—implying that |low-ability students can expect lower grades from Republican |professors—and the coefficient on the interaction variable is positive— |implying that the return to ability is higher when the professor |is Republican. The fact that the coefficients barely change when |we include discipline indicator variables or department fixed |effects increases our confidence that grading outcomes are |indeed correlated with professor political identification. (page 39) That is, it appears that the department/discipline does not interact with professor's political affiliation. There are a fair number of analyses to look at and interpret, so reading this paper might take a bit of time. It should be noted that the authors provide access to their data on the journal's website in the form of a Stata file. I haven't tried importing it into SPSS yet but if it can't be directly imported there probably are workarounds (e.g., using a program like stattransfer or accessing a copy of Stata and saving it in SPSS format). The fun is ready to start! ;-) -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] On Jan 10, 2012, at 5:00 PM, Jim Clark wrote: > Hi > > Interesting article. One thing I did not see mentioned was different types > of courses that might differentiate Rep and Dem faculty. For example, if Rep > profs tend to be more in quantitative fields and Dem profs in "touchy-feely" > fields, distributions of grades could differ by area in the way depicted here > (i.e., more higher and lower grades in classes of Rep profs). > > Take care > Jim > > James M. Clark > Professor of Psychology > 204-786-9757 > 204-774-4134 Fax > [email protected] > >>>> Rick Froman <[email protected]> 10-Jan-12 4:43:09 PM >>> > Here is an interesting blog post discussing a recent publication of empirical > research into differences in grading by Republican and Democratic (US > political party affiliation) professors. The primary source is evidently not > freely available on the internet unless your library subscribes to the > American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Don't miss the graph about half > way down the page. > > http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-republican-and-democratic.html --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=15218 or send a blank email to leave-15218-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
