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Re: Advice for Tina and other rookies...

Rick has two points below.

The north central accrediting is currently on an "assesments" kick. I have
often thought this was unecessary as the course grades "should" provide an
assesment of whether or not the student has learned and achieved what is
supposed to be learned and achieved.

The local supporters of "assesment" point out that you no longer can trust
grades to provide such an assesment, hence the need for other assesment
instruments. I interpret this to mean that because of grade inflation we
need other "grade-like" assesment instruments. Thus adding a whole new
layer of paper work that we as faculty and administrators have to produce.

The other point regarding how to turn-around grade inflation. I saw on the
news a few weeks ago a piece on grade-inflation at colleges. They claimed
that Dartmouth now puts on the transcripts not only your grade for a class,
but the average grade of that class as well.

I think this is a good idea and think it would be helpful if accrediting
agencies started requiring such a practice in transcripts. I think this
would be a kinder gentler approach (even if less effective) to addressing
the problem, rather than mandating certain grade averages, one does have
classes that are significantly better than average, particularly for smaller
ones at the advanced level (the other side of the coin is present as well).

I think a transcript should show grades in classes, average grade for that
class, a cumulative GPA and a four year moving average of graduating GPA for
students in all majors offered by a single department. Its not a perfect
idea and has flaws, but it would be helpful to those who look at transcripts
and need to draw conclusions. Also, it would be more honest than current
practice.

Joel Rauber

-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Tarara [mailto:rtarara@SAINTMARYS.EDU]
Sent: Thursday, May 02, 2002 9:42 AM
To: PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu
Subject: Re: Advice for Tina and other rookies...


I'm wondering now if the problem of grade inflation (or at
least the onset
of such) isn't tied to the extensive use of student course
evaluations in
faculty evaluations. I'm sure this is not a new thought. I
can't remember
seeing such an evaluation until I was into graduate school
(early 70s), and
even at that point, I'm not sure they were a serious
component in decisions
of retention, tenure, and promotion. Once being popular was
more important
than be effective, then grades started to rise. I will note that the
breakdown of our student evaluations has always sorted by the
student's
expected grade (always higher than the level at which they
were working),
which I found often showed that the best ratings came from
the B through A-
students with a small drop off from the A students ('aim at
the middle and
bore the good students') and a big drop off for the C and D
students (who
thought they were getting B- to C). Now, of course, most classes are
populated by Lake Wobegon students so the spread is B to A or
even B+ to A.

I'm becoming more convinced that the only way out of the
grade inflation
morass is for North Central and other accrediting agencies to
set average
grade guidelines and to penalize schools that fall too far outside the
'normal' range. If student evaluations are not abandoned as
an evaluation
tool for faculty positions, then average grade in the class
will have to
also be a strong criterion--too high is bad! The argument
that 'everyone
did what was expected' just means that expectations were too low! ;-)

(Just finding excuses to keep from grading papers and writing exams.)

Rick

**********************************************
Richard W. Tarara
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN 46556
rtarara@saintmarys.edu

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www.saintmarys.edu/~rtarara/software.html
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Edmiston" <edmiston@BLUFFTON.EDU>
To: <PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu>
Sent: Thursday, May 02, 2002 9:10 AM
Subject: Re: Advice for Tina and other rookies...


Michael Monce reminds us about the correlation between low
grades and poor
course evaluations. This has indeed bugged me for some time. The
teachers
who grade easy and try to be the students' friend typically
do get higher
teaching evaluations, and this can have all sorts of
political and career
ramifications. On a chemistry-education list we recently
discussed how
chemistry and physics grades tend to run lower than grades in other
disciplines and how this hurts science in several ways.