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Re: [Phys-l] AP on GPA (the other AP)

This is why class rank is used for acceptance more often than grades. It is
afait calculated as n out of m where n is the ranking and m is the number of
students. So if you are in the middle your ranking might be 50/100.
Incidentally in my small country HS I was the upper 5%.

TX mandated grade inflation by mandating the J curve for grading. This puts
D as 70-74, C 75-79, B 80-89, A 90+. Then of course there is the practice
of rounding grades so 69.5 -> 70. In the 50s 69.9 was failing, and in NY
the teacher had to ask permission to raise it.

But of course grades really often have little actual meaning because you do
not know what content was used, and whether or not the student actually
understood it. This is precisely why the FCI and other evaluations were
developed. The state high stakes tests actually suffer from poor design so
they do not really test well how the students are able to think about the
subject.

The fact that students transfer to improve their apparent GPA happens in
schools around Houston. If you transfer from a grade inflated school to a
noninflated school your class rank will rise and improve your chance of
getting into a good college.

One solution to the grade inflation problem is to quote the average grade
and STD along with the student grade. The curve could also be included as
the distribution between F and A. Or go to strictly numeric grades and do
away with A,B.. and quote the average & STD.

A correlary to the problem is that students take easier courses to avoid bad
grades in difficult ones. This of course is spotted in the ACT and SAT
scores.

Actually part of the problem of high stakes testing is easily solved by
doing away with them, but then requiring content tests for entrance to any
state college. These content tests could also be given and be part of the
student's record. But graduation would not be dependent on the scores, and
could be decided by local school policy. This is precisely what NYS had
with the Regents exams. NYS also had a state diploma which was awarded
based on the state exams.

However the content test need to be well designed, which requires $$$ that
the states will not spend. Incidentally there is evidence that even
students who pass AP with good scores are not really equipped to understand
the material, so even end of course tests are not designed very well.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX



AP (by which I mean the Associated Press) put out a story on grades,
grade inflation, et cetera:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/11/18/AR2006111800473_pf.html

Much of the article is anecdotal, but there were also some factoids
and figures.

Some snippets:

"We're seeing 30, 40 valedictorians at a high school because they don't
want to create these
distinctions between students"

The average high school GPA increased from 2.68 to 2.94 between 1990 and
2000, according to a
federal study. Almost 23 percent of college freshmen in 2005 reported
their average grade in high
school was an A or better, according to a national survey by UCLA's
Higher Education Research
Institute. In 1975, the percentage was about half that.


Zalasky's GPA is nearly an A minus, and yet he ranks only about in the
middle of his senior class
..... Last year, he even considered transferring out of his
highly competitive public school, to some place where his grades would
look better.

Now that's a scary anecdote. It's scary on multiple levels:
-- I suspect the report is misleading; it doesn't say how /seriously/
the kid considered transferring, or why he finally decided not to. It
also doesn't say how deeply the reporter had to dig to find a student
who was willing to say something sensational.
-- Most of the article is about grade inflation, and this anecdote says
"something" when it reports that a B+ is a middle-of-the-herd grade.
However ...
-- At another level, this makes a deeper point about competitiveness.
Class rank (at a particular school) is insensitive to what we usually
call grade inflation. That is, even if there were "more" grade
inflation
or "less" grade inflation, this kid's class rank would still be in the
middle of the herd. Therefore, this anecdote can be interpreted as
something else, namely a would-be effort to inflate /class rank/ by
moving to a less competitive school.

Class rank inflation ... now that's a scary thought. OTOH there are,
of course, ways to detect and correct for this sort of thing.

As I've said before, I don't know what grades (or class rankings) mean,
but in any case school is supposed to be about /learning/. Grades etc.
"should" somehow support the goal of learning. If a middle-of-the-herd
student is tempted to transfer to a less-competitive school, where he
would almost certainly learn less, then the incentive system is badly
broken.

Incentives for students are generally necessary. Learning has long-term
value, whereas students are notoriously hypersensitive to short-term
considerations. This has been a problem for (at least) the last 2300
years, if legend is to be believed:
http://pirate.shu.edu/~wachsmut/ira/history/euclid.html

Such incentives will never be perfect, but still we should do the best
we can, and we should always be alert for breakdowns and/or opportunities
for improvement.

From the keen-grasp-of-the-obvious department: We need to figure out
what
we care about, and then design grades, standardized test scores, etc. to
reflect what we care about.

As for me, I care about more than one thing, so it seems verrry unlikely
that any one-dimensional metric such as GPA or class rank will ever tell
me what I want to know.

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