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Re: grade-grubbing vs. poverty or death



At 03:17 PM 1/7/00 -0500, Michael Edmiston wrote:
Most of
the financial-aid packages require a 3.0, but a few require a 2.5 GPA.

If over half the students are getting financial aid and need roughly a
3.0 GPA, then we will have one of two situations... (1) the average
grade at our institution will be higher than a 3.0, or (2) each year
many students will lose financial aid.

That's really where the rubber meets the road, isn't it?!!!

If you think that's bad, imagine what it was like 30 years ago, when the
student had to maintain a good GPA or he would lose his academic deferment,
get drafted, and quite possibly get killed. That was especially troubling
at the more selective schools..... What do you do, give everybody As
because they could easily have gotten As if they transferred to the
community college across the street?

To Michael's list of possibilities one might add
(3) We could prevail on those who grant financial aid, deferments, and
other emoluments to give up their idiotic focus on GPA.

If the grantors really think class standing is important, they should focus
on ordinal class rank (which can't easily be inflated). But even that is
still mostly idiotic, because of the obvious differences from school to
school.

There's a simple principle that says you should measure whatever you care
about, and reward whatever you care about -- not something else. If you
care about how much the kids have learned, you should measure how much they
have learned and reward them accordingly. Grades are obviously a poor
proxy for that.