<p>IMO grades should be a form of individual evaluation. I agree with Rox’s post, basically.</p>
<p>Private colleges and universities give, on average, significantly more As and Bs combined than public institutions with equal student selectivity. Southern schools grade more harshly than those in other regions, and science and engineering-focused schools grade more stringently than those emphasizing the liberal arts. </p>
<p>My GPA from my degree from a large Public Southern school in a scientific/mathematical discipline all of a sudden feels a whole hell of a lot better. I rarely had the benefit of a curve during my undergrad time. Difficult exams, little to no curve, no extra credit, no dropping the lowest test. I guess that’s why they created the GRE, to standardize grades and ability.</p>
<p>Well I guess this can’t be because students are just smart. That’s just absurd! There must be a conspiracy theory for everything! ;)</p>
<p>I don’t find this too odd. To me 43% is a relatively low number. That means more than half the other students are getting Bs or lower. What if most of the other half of the statistic is getting Cs? That doesn’t make this sound too impressive. </p>
<p>Plus I never look at one article and take it as a sign that the world as we know it is falling apart.</p>
<p>“The piece comes from Stuart Rojstaczer, a frequent critic and scholar of grade inflation”</p>
<p>I wonder if his research might be biased. Just saying…</p>
<p>@RoxSox
No undergraduate student, graduate student or even professor fully understands the material to a perfect level. If for example you’re taking a class in calculus, you may understand how to integrate but I guarantee I could set you a problem which you would be unable to do. If you take a class in literature you may have written a good essay which covered the basic points but you won’t have covered every subtlety and the essay can always be improved upon. Why should one average person get the same grade as someone who is more talented and more sophisticated in their ability to apply their knowledge.</p>
<p>Grading is both a method for the student to gauge how well they’re doing but inevitably it Is also a way for employer and grad schools to distinguish between different students. If half of the people in the class get an A there’s no way for either the student or a future employer to know whether you’re the 43rd best student out of 100 or whether you’re the best. Why should the best student not get a better grade than the 40th best student?</p>
<p>What you’re concerning yourself with is the probability of one class <em>all</em> being exceptionally talented. That’s a different issue, the professor should be able to decide year from year how many students get an A (statistically in a large class it won’t vary by much at all). The point I am making is that there should be some way of distinguishing the very bright student from the average one. If one year by chance every single person in that class is very bright - fine give them all an A.</p>
<p>In a lot of the classes I’ve taken about half of the class fails or withdraws each semester without exception. I am a science major at a large public Southern university, though.</p>
<p>What if most of the students who think they won’t be getting an A or B in the class withdraw or drop?</p>
<p>I find the US higher education grading system of interest, because it’s very different in England. (I can’t speak for the rest of the UK)</p>
<p>In the Humanities, a 40 is a pass, a 60 is very good, a 68 is excellent, and a 70 is truly outstanding.
Anything above 80 is publishable academic material. (Literally)</p>
<p>The average grade on the first test in one of my summer classes was a D (and the professor remarked that that was unusually high, and the average is normally an F). Comparing the roster now to how it was at the beginning of the semester, only one person has dropped. We are past the point where you can drop with a refund, and there’s one week remaining to drop with a W on your transcript. With the average grade right now at a D, it seems possible but unlikely that everyone who expects to get lower than a B right now will drop before that date in this specific case.</p>
<p>@AlwaysinAwe</p>
<p>That depends on the level of the class. If it’s Calc 101, for example, you should be able to do problems up to a certain level. Everyone who can do that should get an A. It doesn’t matter if the student in Calc 101 can do problems at a Calc 201 level or even at a grad student level. That student should get an A, and the student who can do problems at a 101 level but not a 201 level should also get an A, BECAUSE it is Calc 101. This is why there are multiple levels of a class. If you can master the material AT THE LEVEL IT IS TAUGHT AT, you deserve an A.</p>
<p>Furthermore, in this economy and job market why should only geniuses get As? Yes there may always be a better essay, but if we keep raising the bar for those who do the absolute, absolute best, it just lowers the GPAs of perfectly intelligent people, who would be excellent additions to the workforce, and keeps them out of grad school and lowers their possibilities. The geniuses will get As anyway in the current system, so I don’t know how it hurts them.</p>
<p>AlwaysinAwe, If no department head is telling professors how they have to curve a class you’re going to see grades go UP most likely, not down.</p>
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<p>Really? You don’t see how it hurts the “geniuses” who would get As even if the classes were harder? You mention economics, do you remember supply and demand?</p>
<p>^Okay, so only geniuses should get into grad school, and those people who are perfectly intelligent but not geniuses shouldn’t.</p>
<p>You said:</p>
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</p>
<p>If too many people are getting As it will make it harder for the “geniuses” (by which I will assume you mean something closer to top students) to get into grad schools, because the easier classes are, the more grades are determined by flukes. </p>
<p>Not only geniuses should go to grad school, but you should be able to distinguish between someone who is 90th percentile and someone who is 99th percentile.</p>
<p>Isn’t that what standardized tests are for? Distinguishing the 90th percentile from the 99th? And, if you’re way up there percentile-wise, when does it stop mattering how much of a tenth of a percentile you’re above someone else? Being in the 99th is “better” than being in the 90th, but those are still both great percentiles.</p>
<p>Well the GRE is broken but maybe it will be fixed soon. I don’t know about MCAT and LSAT and all that. However, standardized tests don’t measure the same thing grades measures. It’d be as if you said we didn’t need to measure volume because we can measure weight. Grades and standardized tests don’t measure the same thing and don’t tell grad schools the same things.</p>
<p>Also, what percentage of people do you think go into PHD programs? I doubt it’s more than 10% of those who enter undergraduate programs. So in that case, it is extremely important to separate the 90th percentile from the 99th. If you didn’t then you wouldn’t be distinguishing between grad school applicants at all.</p>
<p>Why are so many schools so opposed to the idea of an A+? Wouldn’t this more easily differentiate between bright students who put in a lot of effort and do well and students who perform profoundly well in a class–all without artificially “punishing” anyone?</p>
<p>@RoxSox</p>
<p>Well to be honest yes there are some highly competitive grad school programs which only very very bright (not just perfectly intelligent) people can attend. These programs need information on who is the top 5% of their class and can solve the most complex problems not who is in the top 43% of the class who covered the basic material of the course.
If you receive 100 applications to an academic program all of whom have straight As and you can only accept 20 applicants you have absolutely no information to go on.
There are also less competitive grad school courses, for which being in the top 30% of people is fine. So if you only gave the top 5/10% of people a grade A and those in the 10-35% range a B, a B would still be a fairly impressive grade and allow students entry to these courses.
It’s just a case of providing the maximum possible information. It wouldn’t make sense to give 50% of the class an F because then you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the students who know absolutely nothing of the subject matter and those that have understood most but not all of the material.</p>
<p>And yet I’ve had professors who refuse to give out Ds because if you did that poorly you may as well fail- this in organic chemistry where historically about half of the class fails* each semester.</p>
<p>*I also consider C- failing because even though it’s technically a passing grade, it’s not enough to get into the next course in the sequence.</p>
<p>@ AlwaysInAwe, that’s precisely what letters of recommendation are used for: to distinguish good students from the tippy top students.</p>
<p>Yeah, I read somewhere that in one class, a professor gave everyone two grades-the grade they really earned, and the grade sent to the registrar. Also, no wonder we think schools in the South are worse-worse GPAs, worse jobs presumably. Since most schools that do the liberal arts have an expansive general education requirement, that is another reason why grades are actually higher: the schools know that students may not be good in everything, but reward “thinking outside the box.”</p>
<p>@berilium
Yes but you’re likely to get one or two letters of recommendation from professor who won’t in general know of your performance in all of your classes. This still means there is no indication of where you lie in your other classes. From my experience (albeit of undergraduate admissions) letters of recommendations are extremely subjective and only concentrate on the positives. According to these letters of recommendations almost all the students are identically perfect students.</p>
<p>If students would be too disheartened not to receive an A grade than allow for an A+/A* or whatever that is only available to the top 5%. I think not always getting the top grade is something everyone has to get used to (unless they’re lucky enough to be amazing at everything).</p>