<p>
</p>
<p>To me this is a good argument for grading on a curve. My son’s school is on the 90-80-79-60 scale, but most teachers use extra credit and extended deadlines liberally in order to ensure a fair balance of final grades. The percentages give the false impression of objectivity. I say, lose the artifice and just use A=best, B=above average, C=average, etc. If 26 is average, then 26 is a C. So be it. Why not?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Because it’s part of the sophomore requirements, just like the ACT is part of the junior requirements.</p>
<p>mommusic – I wasnt as clear as I could have been, but in post #112 I meant to convey that the B student aced the final exams yet it wasnt enough to bring his grade up to an A because he didnt do all the other fluff work. Meanwhile, the A student did all the right things yet did NOT master the class material to the standard that a top grade would indicate.</p>
<p>I see it in our local schools and I read about it elsewhere grade inflation is rampant. Heres a quote from the report I referenced in post #112:</p>
<p>Nearly four out of five remedial
[college] students had a high school grade
point average of 3.0 or higher.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Part of that is learning vs getting a high grade. If the grade is the only goal, there’s no motivation to learn or retain.</p>
<p>The discussion about ability vs execution is classic. Someone at work has two daughters. One is very bright and the other is meticulous about execution. She predicts the meticulous one will get the better grades.</p>
<p>All the brilliance in the world won’t get one very far unless one adds work to it. Potential versus accomplishment. Son also got some lesser HS grades due to homework sometimes counting in a course… Fortunately AP exams have nothing to do with HS performance when they give out the number grades…</p>
<p>Eons ago my HS gave an overall grade with 3 subdivisions- knowledge and skills, citizenship and individual performance. My citizenship grades one year in science fell when the rotation of alphabetical seating placed me dead front and center instead of in the back- I had bad habits. My Phy Ed grade was helped by the second two components (and the written tests). More was expected of me to get an A in IP. There were also comments written by teachers- a comprehensive REPORT on how you were doing, the purpose of the report card. I wish our son’s district had done more than the computerized report with a few stock comments sometimes.</p>
<p>This could be my daughter. She had a B+ in APUSH for one semester. </p>
<hr>
<p>Oldfort wrote:</p>
<p>She had all A and A+ (math and science), one B+ for one semester in APUSH.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>lol. .</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That’s true, but since many students don’t come into their own until college, I think it’s legitimate to weigh test scores (potential) as heavily as grades (accomplishment), more or less. I base this on the fact (at least I think it’s a fact) that most teenagers don’t really have their acts together in high school, but by the time they get to college, they mature and begin to reach their potential. I doubt there are many kids with 2200+ SATs who fail to achieve something significant. I wonder if there are studies on that; I’d like to know if my assumptions are correct.</p>
<p>Taking a community college or university course during one of the high-school summers can be a real eye-opener for the very bright but somewhat disorganized. They can learn how fast college moves and that you can’t recover near the end of the term with cramming and all-nighters if you didn’t work during the semester.</p>
<p>I do read about the rare student that doesn’t attend classes and just shows up for exams but those students usually already learned the material somewhere else or just by self-study.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I met a few of these “rare” people before, except they did not learn the material somewhere else beforehand, they were just that brilliant. </p>
<p>Of course, one may argue that no matter how difficult a class is, it is still just a set of structured lessons with fixed goals and really not much in ways of open-ended uncertainties, unlike real life. When a task becomes sufficiently complex or when a situation becomes too open-ended, the lack of discipline will negatively impact performance regardless of how brilliant a person is.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Wise words. In my own experience, although I always attended classes as an undergraduate, I rarely studied outside of class, and I graduated with about a 3.5 GPA. In grad school, where material wasn’t as clearly laid out and research was mostly self-guided except for monthly meetings with my advisor, I struggled for about a year, and never got completely used to it. (I’d probably have a Ph.D. if I had.) I had a difficult adjustment again when I entered the working world, except when the job was task-oriented. The bad habits learned in twenty years of not having to work at it are very, very hard to undo.</p>
<p>My son was deciding on grad courses as a junior and he sent email to the professors asking about the classes and most of them were open ended. The students looked at current literature and gave presentations and picked their own project and implemented it. I told him that this is how it works - it leaves the professors lots of time to do research. They do teach some material but a lot of the course is run by the students. He selected a more traditional (coursewise) grad course for the spring that is mostly lectures, homework and exams and I think that’s a good way to take his second grad course.</p>
<p>REUs are a good place to learn about the open-ended stuff. So are real jobs.</p>
<p>I think that this is an interesting edge point for college grads - success in the real world is quite different from success in university.</p>
<p>I see a lot of posts on boosting grades with extra credit works. Is this more prevalent now than before? If so this could be a big contributor to grade inflation.</p>
<p>Son saw extra-credit points in large lecture halls. He scooped up so many that he could have skipped the final and still passed. The impression that I got was that extra credit points were to keep large numbers of students from failing the course.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I just finished reading ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell. He has two whole chapters on how one psychologist (in the 1920s, his name was Terman)identified and followed a large group of people with extremely high IQ’s (130 and above) for decades. He hypothesized that these people would do significant things and, to his disappointment, only a few did anything out of the ordinary and quite a few were, in his eyes, total disappointments. </p>
<p>Another psychologist then took a group of people but with a random distribution of IQs and found that they achieved at the same rate as the ‘geniuses’. The first psychologist (Terman) later went on to write that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.</p>
<p>I know that IQ and SAT are not the same thing - although one would think there was some level of correlation but my point is, I don’t think it’s possible to safely predict anything about anybody based on their SAT score or GPA. Some of the biggest duds I have known in life were 4.0GPA/1600 SAT students. Great students who simply figured out how to study and get perfect grades - which is not the same thing as being successful out in the real world. In real life, they didn’t have the smarts or the social skills to achieve at that same level. </p>
<p>As Mantori.Suziki points out - those of us who went to grad school know that you often need a different set of skills for Grad school than UG. Same for the work world. What works in HS, UG or even Grad school isn’t necessarily what works in the work world. This is why, IMHO, so many ‘less than stellar’ students go on to have great careers. There’s not always a perfect correlation.</p>
<p>Here is the link to the NYT article on Princeton’s grade deflation, which I think is relevant to this thread. There are interesting comments to the article on the website as well.</p>
<p>[A</a> Tougher ‘A’ at Princeton Has Students on Edge - The Choice Blog - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/princeton/]A”>A Tougher 'A' at Princeton Has Students on Edge - The New York Times)</p>