Re: grade inflation, etc.

[Doug Craigen <dcc@ESCAPE.CA>]

> Still, I think there is a point to be made here.
>  I have indeed heard that high school grades are not a great
> college success predictor.
> (Though they may be among the best available...)

... somewhere there should be some hard data on this contention ...

Even if we were to accept that grades are an accurate measurement, they
still may not work well as a predictor.  My own grade history is an
example of this - my undergraduate grades were higher than my high
school grades and my graduate grades were higher than my undergraduate
grades.  My guess at the reason (in my case) has to do with study habits
- especially the high school/university transition.  In my high school
class there were many hard working straight-A students who quite
properly got higher grades than lazy me who did what he felt like doing
and took whatever grades that gave him.  When we hit University where
the classes were harder - those other students were already learning as
fast as they could in high school and their marks then fell.  Since my
high school marks only represented a fraction of my potential, I had no
trouble obtaining the same and in fact higher grades as I chose.

Here's another example of the inappropriate belief that grades can
predict grades - after the December exam I received an email from a
student saying that my exam was too hard.  The proof was that she had
done poorly on it but she was an A student in her other classes.

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Doug Craigen
          Latest Project - the Physics E-source
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