<p>apprentice, I only mentioned the SATs because someone else cited a NYT article that did so. (And believe me, you don’t have to sell me on the idea that it takes actual talent AND actual work to achieve actual excellence in the humanities, despite the STEM-heavy bias around here.)</p>
<p>Dartmouth students get PLENTY of Bs, I can assure you. (The question of why you care is another matter.)</p>
<p>Perhaps the STEM professors who insist on grading on a punitive curve for no reason whatever and boast about their introductory “weeder” courses should shut up and stop bemoaning the fact that more students don’t choose to enter their fields. When a perfectly capable student receives the forceful message that they should quit immediately, they apparently tend to believe it.</p>
<p>Lest my posts appear to be self-contradictory: it’s not that the students with A’s only have a handle on 80% of the material. Rather, it’s that they can only garner 80% of the points on the exam questions, within the exam time frame. The questions often focus on the “upper end” of the course content–a rough analogy would be to an SAT exam consisting only of level 5 questions.</p>
<p>Re bovertine’s post: I think that engineering operates somewhat differently from other STEM fields, in that many of the skills it requires are not explicitly tested in college. Also, re GPA’s in engineering: My niece at the University of Wisconsin belonged to the Facebook group “My GPA is lower than yours because I am in engineering.”</p>
<p>Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s imagine that you are the head of Dartmouth’s English department. Each year, you graduate, say, 30 English majors who want to go to graduate school in English. 5 of them are truly outstanding, and the rest are all accomplished, smart students. (Those who didn’t do well are discouraged from trying to go to grad school in English.) Your goals are to get the best results for your students, and also to maintain Dartmouth’s prestige. How would you like the grades for these 30 students to appear? How important is it for the 5 top students’ grades to stand out? I suggest it’s not very important. You will give them prizes, and really good recs, etc. You don’t need to downgrade the others to help them.</p>
<p>That’s not the point, which was/is, a Prof CAN differentiate between excellent and just good (in response to your post #58). Whether s/he should is a different matter.</p>
<p>But what I’m suggesting, Hunt, is that it wouldn’t be downgrading others. It would be giving them the grades they deserve.</p>
<p>I agree that the “A” doesn’t have to be reserved only for the outlier, although I’d question whether 4 students in a class of 30 is really an outlier or not. But when you are being told as a TA that 2/3rds of grades have to be A range - which would include papers that were fairly shallow and some that totally failed to consider the nuances of the texts in question - you’re not grading based on real standards. And by the way, the course I’m talking about has a reputation for being difficult.</p>
<p>Most of these papers were good, by which I mean they were competently written and demonstrated intelligent, if not necessarily particularly sophisticated, consideration of texts. To me, that’s a B+. Given that 1/3rd of my students were clearly doing something more than that, I don’t see why it is a problem to give that third A range grades and give B - range grades to everyone else. Whatever 4/30 is, 1/3rd is certainly not an outlier, and there was a clear difference between that third and everyone else.</p>
<p>Among most STEM Profs and some HS teachers I’ve known/had…especially those who started their teaching careers in the early 1960’s and before, if it’s a lower-division course having everyone get As or even mostly B+/A- level grades is a distinct sign your class’ academic level is set too low and you’re too lenient on grading. Do it in departments with mandatory curves and the department chair and more senior Profs will be having a heated chat with you about your grading policies.* </p>
<p>This way of thinking is one reason why grade inflation at elite private universities has become such an issue within academia and in the popular press. I recalled an old Boston Globe article sometime in the mid-'00s lampooning Harvard for having around 80% of their graduating seniors qualify for Honors. If the vast majority of folks gain “honors”, then the designation is no longer considered a mark of distinction and starts to resemble the stereotypical “every special snowflake gets a trophy” mentality whether said stereotype is deserved or not. </p>
<ul>
<li>Personally, while I don’t agree with an inflexible mandatory application of the bell curve when everyone is actually demonstrating mastery at 85-90% or better…especially in upper-division courses, I have known of some departments/Professors who have given exceedingly generous grades to avoid bad student evals, students avoiding taking their classes, and irate college admins/students and/or their parents. Giving everyone a B+ or better…especially for newly hired Profs on the tenure track in departments/colleges with no mandatory curves is often viewed by them as the path of least resistance so they can concentrate on what they need to do to get tenure.</li>
</ul>
<p>You are downgrading others. You’re hurting students from schools that don’t practice this sort of inflation. Probably not the tippy top students (such as the 5 in your example), but all the other students that may have gotten a lot of hard fought A- instead of B+.</p>
<p>I agree grading shouldn’t be punitive, and students at “top” schools probably should get a little bit of boost versus ones at Podunk U. It’s not fair that students here at Caltech wind up “failing in” without the option to transfer because their GPA winds up so low nobody else will take them. However, I honestly think some of the best learning experiences in my educational career were from taking tests where the average was a 60%. You typically grew in your understanding of the material, and you realize you don’t understand everything, even though you might have studied your butt off. This is an important lesson for when you go out and become a real engineer, since you’ll quickly realize how little you’ve actually learned and how important it is to be cautious with your certainty.</p>
<p>With all due respect, while I will not judge your comments about grading in the classes you are teaching, I will call you out on your comments on the SAT. Put simply, your comment shows a blatant ignorance about the SAT verbal. It is not essentially a vocabulary test. Fwiw, one could make an extremely hard test based on extremely simple looking words such as table, rank, or low by testing the secondary or tertiary meaning of such words --think rank smell, tabling a motion, and a cow for low. The vocabulary part is not that significant on the test, and this explains why people who think that it is and spend hours slaving on moronic lists of words do not do very well. The ones who have learned to read and interpret easily overcome an imperfect vocabulary. </p>
<p>The difficulty of the SAT verbal is that it is tests critical reading and comprehension plus a healthy dose of reasoning. All elements that seem to continue to befuddle most students, if looking at the scores offers any indication. </p>
<p>Finally, regarding the ease of humanities classes and grading, should we wonder why STEM majors try to avoid the “easy” classes with such passion, just in the same way the fuzzies might want to take “Intro to Stat” to avoid a Calculus requirement? Here is a hint. STEM majors have to work very hard to pass those easy classes, and do not do as well as their academic superiority might imply. </p>
<p>For the record, I always found “objective” classes a lot easier to ace than those “easy” lit classes, and immensely less taxing in terms of time and effort.</p>
<p>And, if that mattered, I happen to think that this explosion of easy classes and easy grading is entirely mythical. I am not sure where those examples come from but my experience (and my friends’ and sibling’s – sorry no cousins’ tale here) tells a very different story. Just as the stories about college being easier than high school. </p>
Were you told this as a matter of policy, or was it the result of you giving consistently lower grades than the other TAs for the course?</p>
<p>
If I’m Dartmouth, why would I care about this?</p>
<p>
Again, this is a differenct between STEM subjects and humanities subjects. Well, I guess there is the common experience of being shocked that a paper that would have gotten an A in high school won’t cut it in college–but I think fewer and fewer students at the most elite schools are having that experience now, because they write so much more in high school.</p>
<p>" (Those who didn’t do well are discouraged from trying to go to grad school in English.)"</p>
<p>Don’t they just move onto law school or sell securities? :p</p>
<p>“For the record, I always found “objective” classes a lot easier to ace than those “easy” lit classes, and immensely less taxing in terms of time and effort.”</p>
<p>xiggi - You have STEM major trying to get out of you but you did not listen.</p>
<p>The Ivy League athletic conference exists to set uniform athletic recruiting standards for the member schools, and the NCAA serves a similar purpose nationally. If American universities took academics more seriously, they might coordinate to reduce grade inflation across the board.</p>
But why would Dartmouth want to do that? I don’t think Dartmouth people think the school doesn’t take academics seriously. I can understand why some other schools might want Dartmouth to do it.</p>
<p>Well, I don’t know where you are TAing, but it probably isn’t D, since they rarely have TAs.</p>
<p>At D, they have this thing called a “citation,” which indicates truly outstanding work in a class. I gather that it is not uncommon for the val to graduate with 4 or fewer. Reputedly, some STEM professors routinely give one to whomever did the best in the class. Humanities profs hand them out much more rarely. If it makes you feel any better, my S at Dartmouth had a professor who gave him a citation --and gave him a B+ in the class. Yeah, in one of those humanities classes. How does this supposedly rampant grade inflation account for that?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>A) In that case, what you should be getting upset about is the “scandal” surrounding the reportedly low AI of some of Harvard’s basketball recruits, and B) IMNSHO if American schools and universities took academics more seriously THEY WOULD NOT GIVE NUMBER OR LETTER GRADES AT ALL.</p>
<p>I think this concern about grade inflation at the Ivies is a form of puritanism, defined by Mencken as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time.”</p>
<p>Re: Hunt’s question in post # 71: Nope. I am not the only TA I know who has been told before the first papers come back “this is what the grading distribution should look like.” I’ve also known people told at the end of the semester to jack up their grades because there weren’t enough As. This includes courses with only one TA. There’s a real (and merited) concern that students will not sign up for courses known to give lower grades. And again, we’re not talking about "C"s. </p>
<p>And xiggi, while I may have downplayed the value of the verbal SAT, I don’t think getting in the 700s on CR means a student is automatically likely to do A - level work in a college literature course, any more than getting the same score in math means he’s likely to do A - level work in multivariable calc.</p>
<p>You know, when I was at Wellesley, the most common grade was a C. We were officially told that. There was no “shopping” period, no pass/fail. Eventually they changed the rules to allow us to drop a class during the first few weeks, but if there hadn’t been any graded assignments yet they would put “dropped failing” on your transcript. Nice. Meanwhile, 70% of Harvard students were graduating with honors. Some people I knew took certain classes at MIT for the easy A. MIT students who signed up for English classes at Wellesley routinely dropped out when they realized that they were going to have to write a number of papers, do a lot of reading, and probably get a C. I distinctly recall the first paper I wrote for the first English class I took. Among 15 students, I received the sole A-. There were no As. At some point during my time there, the administration sent out a memo telling us that there was no such thing as an A+. This caused great hilarity amongst the student body: they might as well have sent a memo saying there were no unicorns on campus. Very few students got into PBK, fewer than 10 per year I would say: you had to be the favorite student of a prof who played politics. (Meanwhile, at other elite schools, everyone in the top 10% or so got in.)</p>
<p>So what did this all mean? One thing, I think, was that W grads were less competitive for major fellowships such as Rhodes and Fulbright. (Although that may have been sexism, too.) Another thing was that it had no affect on the actual education we received. Math was still taught much better at MIT, and English was the real thing at W and a joke at MIT.</p>
<p>I just don’t believe in the sanctity of grades. I’ve seen far too much unfairness, even in some quantitative classes, at all levels of education.</p>
<p>Just going to say as a STEM person that I found most of my humanities classes to be considerably easier. I remember one class where I was embarrassed for the people giving presentations with how poorly they seemed put together. If I had given my lab reports that way (yes, we had to give presentations for our lab reports in addition to written) I’d have been worried about not passing.</p>
<p>Which semester do you honestly think was harder. The one where I had thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, crystallography, and dislocations in materials was easier than half those courses plus History of Urban America and Introduction to Philosophy?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I agree. Once you’re at the top, there’s no reason to not give easy grades. It reenforces the idea that your students are all high caliber. </p>
<p>Maybe the NCAA should move to this sort of model. As long as you get into a school with a strong athletic program and you try, you should automatically win most of your games.</p>
<p>While I think this conversation seems to be more of a general discussion of grade inflation, I would certainly say that Dartmouth’s median grades are ridiculous. I didn’t scroll all the way, but the lowest I saw was a B-, and I only saw a few. How can one discern between good and great students when everyone is making A’s?</p>
<p>And as for the idea that all the students are great, I find that hard to believe. Either a) the school is artificially/purposely bumping grades, or b) the classes are far too easy for the students. Students who are being challenged and growing academically should not be making A’s in all their classes.</p>
Yeah, in one of those humanities classes. How does this supposedly rampant grade inflation account for that?</p>