In response to my post "Do Grades Affect Student Evaluations and
Course Enrollment?" [Hake (2004)] regarding Valen Johnson's (2002)
"Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education," Paul Camp on 15 May
2004 10:48:22-0400 posted [in its entirety except for a repeat :-(
of Hake (2004)]:
The above URL brings up a "Slate" article by Jordan Ellenberg (2002) titled
"Do the math - Don't Worry About Grade Inflation: Why it doesn't
matter that professors give out so many A's."
A more accurate, albeit awkward, title might have been "Do the math -
Don't Worry About Grade Inflation: Why it doesn't matter that
professors give out so many A's - insofar as discriminating 'the best
from the very good, the very good from the good, the good from the
mediocre' course performance as indicated by grade point averages
from transcripts covering an entire undergraduate career."
Ellenberg wrote [bracketed by lines "EEEEEEEEEE. . . .":
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
The arguments put forward against grade inflation span all genres:
psychological (easier grading saps a student's will to achieve),
moral (a weak performance is unworthy of the letter B), Marxist
(grade inflation is a symptom of the consumerization of education),
and even geopolitical (higher grades in the humanities draw American
students away from the sciences, thereby compromising our ability to
build better weapons and deflect other people's).
One of the most powerful and popular arguments against grade
inflation is that it makes it difficult to tell one student from
another. Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard. . .[
<http://www.gov.harvard.edu/Faculty/Bios/Mansfield.htm>. . .] and a
vocal grade-inflation foe . . . .[Mansfield (2001)]. . . ., puts it
this way: "Grade inflation compresses all grades at the top, making
it difficult to discriminate the best from the very good, the very
good from the good, the good from the mediocre."
That sounds reasonable. But it's wrong.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Ellenberg then "does the math" to purportedly show that:
"A grading scale much too coarse to separate students' performances
in a single class (for instance, the system with just two grades) can
- if it is not TOO coarse - be perfectly adequate when we have a
whole transcript to look at. . . . So, Mansfield is wrong - which
doesn't mean grade inflation is all right. There are still those
moral, psychological, Marxist, and geopolitical questions to think
of."
Then Ellenberg raises some crucial questions [also broached by
EvalTalk's Bill Harris (2004)]:
"And underlying all these questions is a deeper one: WHY DO WE GRADE?
Is the point to give students information? To reward, punish, or
encourage them? Or just to hand them over to law-school admissions
committees in accurate rank order? UNTIL WE ANSWER THIS QUESTION,
THERE'S LITTLE HOPE OF MAKING SENSE OF GRADE INFLATION. It's as if we
were bankers trying to formulate a monetary policy, but we hadn't
quite decided whether dollar bills were a means of economic
transaction or a collection of ritual fetish objects." (My CAPS)
But, despite the evidence cited by Johnson (2003) and Mansfield
(2001), is grade inflation a myth? Russ Hunt (2004) wrote: "Almost
two years ago Alfie Kohn published a piece in the *Chronicle* which,
as far as I'm concerned, made it absolutely clear that grade
inflation is a myth -- and, further, made it clear why even if it
existed it's not the problem. The article's on his Web site
<http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/gi.htm>. If someone can counter
his (I think conclusive) arguments I'll be extremely interested."
But regadless of whether or not grade inflation is a myth, I think
the validity of student evaluations for judging the cognitive impact
of courses is still open to question [Hake 2002)]. John Belcher
(2004) wrote [bracketed by lines "BBBBBBBBBBBBBB. . . . ."]:
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
Let me point out something that affects student evaluations of
courses at MIT more than grading policy, and that is class attendance
and whether it counts or not.
I am a MacVicar Teaching Fellow at MIT (a prestigious award) based in
part on the fact that in 1994 I got a 6.6 student evaluation of my
lecturing on a 7.0 scale, for teaching freshmen physics in a 700
student course. In part that was because I (of course) gave
wonderful lectures. Unfortunately that 6.6/7.0 was based on 175
students filling out an in-class questionnaire the last week of the
class. The other 75% of the students were not there that day,
despite the fact that I give wonderful lectures. Actually it was not
quite that bad, I estimate my average attendance was about 40%.
In contrast, teaching with 4 other instructors in an interactive
format this last term to 500 students, we will get nowhere near
6.6/7.0 in terms of
overall student rankings for the course, in part because students attendance
or not has a letter grade affect on their final grade-if they never
darken the door of the classroom they cannot get an A.
I guarantee I get a lot of 1's on a 7 point scale from students who
do not like this at all, and are there even though they do not want
to be, and feel that they do not need to be. This is whether they get
an A in the course or not.
On the other hand when we do a pre/post test comparison with
lecture-recitation versus this format, the [normalized] gains are
what we traditionally expect, a factor of 2 higher by standard
assessment measures of interactive engagement over lecture, at every
level of student abilities in the course (see
<http://web.mit.edu/jbelcher/www/TEALref/fnl.pdf> for details). And
even if you don't believe the statistics, my gut feeling after
teaching this course for 30 years is that the students in this format
learn a lot more.
Alas, I did give wonderful lectures though.
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
REFERENCES
Belcher, J. 2004. "Re: Do Grades Affect Student Evaluations and
Course Enrollment?"; online at
<http://listserv.boisestate.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0405&L=physlrnr&O=D&X=309F3E5370037FB502&Y=rrhake@earthlink.net&P=4854>.
NOTE: The encyclopedic URL for Belcher's post indicates that one must
subscribe to PhysLrnR to access its archives, but it only takes a few
to subscribe (and then unsubscribe) by following the simple
directions at
<http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/physlrnr.html>/ "Join or
leave the list (or change settings)" where "/" means "click on." If
you're busy, then subscribe using the "NOMAIL" option under
"Miscellaneous." Then, as a subscriber, you may access the archives
and/or post messages at any time, while receiving NO MAIL from the
list!
Ellenberg, J.S. 2002. "Do the math - Don't Worry About Grade
Inflation: Why it doesn't matter that professors give out so many
A's"; online at <http://slate.msn.com/id/2071759/>. Jordan Ellenberg
<http://www.math.princeton.edu/~ellenber/> is an assistant professor
of mathematics at Princeton University. "Slate"
<http://slate.msn.com/> is evidently a free online newspaper
sponsored by Microsoft. At "Who we are"
<http://slate.msn.com/id/117517>, one finds that (a) Washington Post
columnist Michael Kinsley is the founding editor, and (b) the current
editor is Jacob Weisberg, who has written for a wide variety of
magazines, authored the 1996 book "In Defense of Government," the
2000 eBook "The Road to Chadville" [downloadable at
<http://slate.msn.com/id/117517>], and edits "The Slate Book of
George W. Bushisms."
Hake, R.R. 2004. "Do Grades Affect Student Evaluations and Course
Enrollment?" online at
<http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0405&L=pod&O=D&P=7354>; post
of 14 May 2004 16:18:41-0700 to AERA-J, ASSESS, Biopi-L, Chemed-L,
DrEd, EvalTalk, Math-Teach, Phys-L, PhysLrnR, POD, and STLHE-L.
Harris, B. 2004. "Re: Do Grades Affect Student Evaluations and Course
Enrollment?" online at
<http://bama.ua.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0405b&L=evaltalk&T=0&O=D&X=656F006748B56E20A6&Y=rrhake@earthlink.net&P=4116>.
Harris wrote: ". . . I've found at least one person who claims to
have done a private study that showed no correlation between GPA in
college and performance on the job *as measured by that company's
internal performance ranking system*. That was inside one company,
so it may not indicate that GPA and performance on the job is
uncorrelated in general. It also begs the question of the quality of
their internal performance ranking system. So, is there research that
points to the utility or its lack of grades and GPAs, either for some
purpose inside college or for post-college experiences (e.g., as
predictors for successful hiring or graduate school admissions)?"
NOTE: The encyclopedic URL for Harris's post indicates that one must
subscribe to EvalTalk to access its archives, but it only takes a few
to subscribe (and then unsubscribe) by following the simple
directions at
<http://bama.ua.edu/archives/evaltalk.html>/ "Join or leave the list
(or change settings)" where "/" means "click on." If you're busy,
then subscribe using the "NOMAIL" option under "Miscellaneous." Then,
as a subscriber, you may access the archives and/or post messages at
any time, while receiving NO MAIL from the list!