Standards based on mastery of the material, not besting other students.
(And, by the way, there is evidence that students at Yale and some other places are getting “smarter” than they used to be, but this too is beside the point.)
There has to be a standard for the mastery of the material. No? Or is it set so most can get A’s?
I’ve seen fair amount of mediocrity coming from some of these places. Where’s the evidence you base your claim on?
Seems like just a renaming of A, B, C, D, F (without +/-).
Of course, if 60% of the grades were P (C), then getting more HH (A) and H (B) grades than P (C) grades means that the student is one of the stronger ones. It also means that with the grade quotas, competition between students is incentivized.
Actually the opposite effect, and I think most Berkeley Law grads have the same opinion as mine. SP and NC were not necessarily given. In fact a Sub P shows up on the transcript as a P. There was however some administrative counseling with a SP and too many SP’s and NC’s might result in a student being encouraged to take time off or suspended.
Since P’s made up 60% of grades, getting a P was not a big deal (vs getting a C in a grading scheme where most students receive a B/B- or better) for students or prospective employers. The more cut off grades that you have, e.g A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-… means there is more granular distinction between students, so getting a couple of more points than your classmate results in a different grade and relative ranking at more break points. That tends to increase competition.
However, if A, B, C, D, F with no +/- and the same distribution (60% C) were used, would getting a C be no big deal for students or prospective employers?
Maybe, but there seems to be a perceptional stigma attached to a C. Because the system is different, employers generally read the “how we grade students” memo from the career placement office, so they walk in knowing what a P means. A recruiter going to a school with a traditional A-F grading even with a stated 60% curve for C’s may consciously or unconsciously carry a negative view on any C’s even though it is objectively the same as a P. As a former recruiter, I definitely ranked stacked my interviewees based on GPA in an initial cut. Obviously I used the interview and the whole resume to make a final call back no call back decision. At Berkeley it was more general initial piles, more HH’s, more HH’s and H’s vs a sort by gross GPA.
The standard can be mastery the material. If it is, then the percentage who get A’s should depend on the percentage who master the material, not on some arbitrary before-the-fact determination that x% will get A’s no matter how many master the material.
Take two language courses, for example. In the first, almost everyone is fluent in reading, writing, and speaking. In the second, no-one is fluent. If almost everyone in the first class has mastered the material, then why shouldn’t almost everyone get a grade reflecting that? If no-one in the second class has mastered the material, then why should anyone get a grade reflecting that they have mastered the material when they haven’t?
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If the standard is the mastery of the material, how would the mastery of the material be measured? It needs to be measured against some standard, so the standard itself can’t be the mastery of the material. It’d be circular otherwise.
I never advocated that a course be graded on a curve, regardless how students in the class perform. IMO, grades should be assigned based on a historical standard for that course at that school.
If a grading scale demands that not everyone get As and Bs, regardless of the performance of the students, that’s a curve. Likewise if a grading scale demands that everyone get A’s. And if the numbers are dictated by how students performed in the past, that too is a curve.
And whether you call it a curve or not, you have insisted that the purpose of assigning grades was to “differentiate” among students. I disagree. The purpose of a assigning grades is to indicate a level of competency, not relative to the other students, but relative to the requirements of the course. That is what is meant by mastery of the material. Everyone could master the material, or no one. The “standard” isn’t dependent upon on the performance of the rest of the class
It is the difference between viewing grading as a ranking vs. a rating. The purpose of the former is to sort and differentiate. The purpose of the latter is to designate a certain standard has been achieved, regardless of how many achieve it. If all of the students meet the requirements of X grade, then that’s the grade they should get, even if giving it doesn’t differentiate between the students at all.
Los Angeles County health department rates restaurants on a A-F scale. The purpose isn’t to sort or “differentiate” the restaurants relative to the other restaurants, it is to designate the strengths and deficiencies of the restaurant relative to the Health Code requirements. The outcome may be used by the public for comparison purposes, but that is not the purpose of the grade.
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The differentiation isn’t just among a particular group of students who happen to take the class together, but among all the students who have historically taken the course.
Again, that competency has to be defined and standardized, which is relative to how students historically perform in that course. The reason we have severe grade inflation at most schools is because we keep redefining and lowering that standard for competency,
Of course, if one of the courses is an advanced level course, while the other is a beginner course, the expectations may be different.
The tricky part from the instructor’s standpoint is to design graded material (tests, assignments, projects, etc.) where the difficulty matches that used previously, or is more or less difficult by a known degree, without reusing old material.
To answer the OP’s question - yes this does happen. I was an instructor/Assistant Professor at 2 well known NYC universities about 20 years ago. I was “ordered” to change grades by Deans. There was cheating, whining, complaining, and entitled behaviors….yes, even then. My tests were right from the text book - multiple choice format. So it wasn’t my opinion dictating the score. I was ordered to change grades to keep certain students at a certain GPA level so that they could keep scholarships. I was also told by one Dean that they needed a certain GPA to get state/federal funds for certain students.
I had students from significantly different academic backgrounds and preparedness in both my undergrad and graduate classes. Many were NOT prepared for the rigorous research demands of graduate school.
Here is one conversation I had with a GRADUATE student in my classroom:
“ Professor XYZ, were Locke and Martin Luther real people? Did they really exist?”
“Well student ABC, is this a philosophical question you are posing?”
“ Professor XYZ, I don’t know what you mean by that”
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In my misspent youth I taught courses and devised and graded exam questions in two rather different colleges and in a law school. Anyone who has done that will be confronted with a wide range of student results - a few abject failures; many versions of acceptable regurgitation; some more polished versions thereof; and the odd really virtuosic performance. Grading is an art, not a science, but you can’t fail to notice these differences. If grades mean anything at all they have to take account of such differences, whatever the institution in question.
Underlying this discussion is the sense that if a given institution is one that has an awfully lot of smart kids in attendance, say Yale, then those kids ought to be graded as if they were taking the same course at a lesser institution. They would be making A’s at those places, so why not here at Elite U. - even though they’re just middle of the pack here. I say they don’t need that treatment, they’re already sufficiently privileged just by having gotten themselves here. If there are distinctions in performance this ought to be reflected in grades. It’s a matter of simple honesty and accuracy.
It’s inevitable that some assignments and tests will vary in their difficulties from year to year, but an experienced professor should be able to take such variations into account. S/he should have a good feel how strong a particular class is, based on, not one test or assignment, but a collection of them. In particular, s/he knows the strongest students in this class and how they compare to the strongest students in previous classes, so s/he can calibrate accordingly.
For those who aren’t aware of the French system, it’s graded out of 20. There’s an expression that 20 is for God, 19 is for the professor, and 18 is the highest that the best student in the class might hope for. When I took classes at a French university my college back home translated an A as maybe a 14/20 or above, so about 70%. I think an 11 may be have been a C and maybe a 7 was the lowest D, but it’s been many years. But just a frame of reference for the difference between the French and the U.S. grading systems.
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