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Re: grade inflation, etc.



Grades have been considered to be without meaning for some time. Consider
this definition by an anonymous author that I first came across in 1981:

grade (n.) - an unsubstantiated report by a biased and variable judge of
the extent to which the student has attained an undefined level of mastery
of an indeterminate amount of material.

To date, no one has devised an acceptable replacement feedback mechanism.


Sorry to resurrect a dead horse, especially one that's not really a physics
topic, but I've just read the whole student evaluations/grade inflation
thread, and I must toss in my two cents worth of confusion.

And I do mean confusion. I've wondered for several years what the point of
grades is, and I haven't come up with any answers that reflect anything
good.

In particular, I've noticed for several years that many of my top
physicists don't earn A's in my course. This is because lab work counts
toward their grade, and they often don't write up the labs.

This doesn't mean that they're lazy. The students I'm thinking of do the
labs...in fact, they usually get their lab partners through with superior
results. They show extraordinary curiosity and often do labs on their own,
and study physics topics independently. They seek extra challenge put a
great deal of extra time into the study of physics. Their test scores are
excellent to amazing. They love physics and they're really good at it.
They just don't see any point in writing up the lab for my judgment when
they already understand the lab.

It's not just my students, either. There was a posting about Banting, the
Nobel laureate, and his lousy grades (I deleted it by mistake). His lousy
grades were taken as evidence of the superior standards of his time. But I
think there's another point that's missing here: the great scientists
often have lousy academic records.

Darwin was pretty much out-and-out told he was useless for anything.
Einstein had trouble at just about every level, and wound up in the patent
office partly because he couldn't get recommendations. Galileo got in
constant trouble with professors for challenging Aristotelian physics.
Schwinger flunked a chemistry course. James Watson, if I recall correctly,
was exempted from his university's doctoral requirement in organic
chemistry after he almost blew up the lab. Newton wasn't considered any
good academically until he beat up the class bully and decided to beat him
in school as well. After that, he made himself number one
academically...but only paid enough attention to his schoolwork to stay
number one, and spent the rest of the time playing with toys. Mendel
wanted to be a science teacher, but flunked the exam.... The more I read,
the longer the list gets.

It seems to me that if grades and GPA's are supposed to identify superior
students, they do a lousy job. And that they do quite a bit of damage in
the process of doing that lousy job.

Am I missing something here?



Digby Willard