Re: Concerned about grades (not really physics anymore)

[Marc Kossover <marck9@IDT.NET>]

Howdy-

On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Michael Edmiston wrote:

> At Bluffton College we believe the ACT or SAT score is one of the best
> predictors of how a student will fair in college.

Have you actually determined that this is true? Most places that have
looked into the situation have been surprised. According to the
Educational Testing Service, the people who write the SAT, high school
grades alone have a higher "r" than SAT scores alone by a statistically
significant margin. Only when scores and grades are mixed together in some
sort of complicated mixture that varies with each gender and race do
scores actually beat grades by any margin.

You are thinking that this is true because of variations across schools.
So did they, and yet the situation remained the same even within a
particular school.

Maybe it is the major, and yet again, in the major high school grades
predominate predictor of freshman grades.

Even at the high school where I teach, grades and scores do not correlate
very well. Although there is a trend that the people with the highest
grades tend to have the highest scores, r is still only 0.67. It's a lot
better than zero, but hardly perfect either.

Our school has had to rethink our policies. Maybe we grade wrong. Maybe
the tests are wrong. Maybe nothing is wrong because the tests and grades
measure different things and maybe that is good.

All of this comes with a caveat: Test scores do measure something. Kids
with a 10 on the ACT are clearly different than kids with scores in the
high 20s. The question is how different and how much small a range makes a
good measure.

But before you decide that scores will do the best job for you, you should
check.

> The reason this strikes a raw nerve for me is it "cheated" my son.  He
> graduated from HS last year.  He was a good student but did not always
> strive for the A.  He graduated with a 3.8 GPA and got a 29 composite on the
> ACT exam (he only took it once).  This would indicate he is not outstanding,
> but pretty good, and he ought to qualify for some scholarships.

Most example I have seen for scholarships require good grades and good
scores. I think that you overestimate the chance of getting an award on
grades alone. My home state of Louisiana gives free rides to the state
university (and cash scholarships equal to in-state tuition to private
universities) for students who finish with relatively high GPAs and test
scores. Note that they don't give them for one or the other but both. Most
awards are the same way.


> However, in
> his graduating class of 104 students there were 26 students with 4.00 GPA,
> and a few more above 3.9 (they got one B).

Apparently you need to do some complaining. At my school approximately 10
kids have GPAs over a 4.0. We give a .33 bonus for kids in AP courses. We
have a rather wide distribution, I will admit.

> If ACT/SAT scores mean anything, then here we had a student in the top 5% of
> his class as measured by ACT, but not even in the top 25% of his class as
> measured by GPA.  Almost all of the 4.00 students had lower ACT scores than
> my son.  How did they get 4.00 GPA?  Partly because of tremendous grade
> inflation, and partly because to get the grades the teachers assigned a fair
> amount of "busy work" that my son sometimes refused to do, especially in his
> freshman year.

Once again, what you need to do is complain, although there is some
credibility to the complaint that life is composed of much busy work.
Sadly.


---
Marc Kossover
marck9@mail.idt.net