Hi The Flynn Effect is a change in raw scores that requires re-norming to maintain average IQ at 100. It is not due to norming and hence would apply to academic performance. Indeed, tests like PISA have been used to document the Flynn Effect. For those interested, the journal Intelligence had a special issue on the effect last year. Here's Flynn's closing paragraph of his comment paper.
Everyone concedes that people altered when the Enlightenment banished a mindset that tried animals in court and believed in witches. Did the alteration of our minds stop dead in 1900? We freed ourselves from fixation on the concrete and entered a world in which the mass of people began to use logic on abstractions and universalize their moral principles. Living our lives day by day, we take modernity for granted. The very existence of the modern world is astonishing. I refer not to the internet or the air travel or the organ transplants but to altered human beings and altered minds. Collectively the scholars in this volume are beginning to write the cognitive history of the 20th century. Take care Jim Jim Clark Professor & Chair of Psychology U Winnipeg Room 4L41A 204-786-9757 204-774-4134 Fax ________________________________________ From: Mike Wiliams [[email protected]] Sent: December-05-13 11:32 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Subject: Re: [tips] grade inflation at Harvard and other places Hello All, I think its possible we are trying to enforce variance that does not exist among students. All or most of the students can actually have a mastery of the material in the courses and deserve A's. This is theoretically possible and likely happens at a University like Harvard. I have also observed this in medical school. The students who finally get in are studying and test-taking machines. They work extremely hard and actually know the material. Instead of making tests that accurately measure this, they are given horribly designed test items that have ambiguous multiple choice options and K-type questions etc. The variance on the test that forces the grades into a normal curve has nothing to do with the course content. The variance is attributable to test taking skill. Most of them should get A's and we need to live with it. Why is it so important to enforce a bell curve? The Flynn effect is not applicable since grades are not normed. The norms of an IQ test are updated. The content may change but this has nothing to do with the Flynn effect. I am not convinced of the Flynn effect anyway. It was discovered essentially by accident and we never had a sufficient longitudinal study. It should be called the Flynn suggestion. Can you imagine how bad the grading would be if we graded by norms and only assigned a standard score? We could end up failing students because they performed less than peers even when they mastered the course. Mike Williams Drexel University --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13251.645f86b5cec4da0a56ffea7a891720c9&n=T&l=tips&o=31045 or send a blank email to leave-31045-13251.645f86b5cec4da0a56ffea7a89172...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- 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=31047 or send a blank email to leave-31047-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
