@NotverySmart I don’t think it’s an issue of students being “smarter”, but more that students at selective universities are better prepared and that some Universities have become much more selective.
Let’s look at UF, one of the schools in the study. When I enrolled in the 1980’s, I was a “B” student who had taken one AP class (Chemistry). I didn’t even know what an AP test was, only that this AP Chemistry class sounded cool. I never took my books home to do homework and just winged my way through my well respected (or at least popular!) public high school. The state had a population of 10.75 million. I didn’t have any issues getting accepted into UF.
Today, the state’s population is close to 20 million, almost doubled. Rigorous programs, such as IB, AICE, AP, and Duel Enrollment has become wide spread (due to generous state funding) throughout the state. For example, Florida leads the way in schools offering IB Programs with 144 or over 10% of U.S. IB World Schools. Over 50% of Florida HS graduates have taken an AP exam (second, as a %, only to the District of Columbia).
Today, UF is far more selective (and has switch to “holistic” admissions). The admitted class of freshman have far better study habits (thanks to far more rigorous high schools in Florida), and have already proven they can handled college level work. Back in 1988 and 89, the average GPA in the college of engineering was 2.86, today it’s 3.24. I would think student quality/preparedness (in UF’s case) explains much, if not all of the grade inflation.
The students also have access to better tutoring and can leverage the internet. I wish I could have had the option of watching videos, versus trying to stay away during a 7:15 am physics lecture….blah.
@Zinhead No, you can’t add 0.35 to your GPA. You earned that 2.1, so own it!
I do have to wonder how much of the “my kids are smarter/more prepared for college than I was” sentiment is the result of changes in syllabi. A majority of parents on CC graduated from HS quite literally in another millenium, and the things HS students learn now are very different. Maybe we kids are slightly smarter, but (in light of the above quantitative evidence) I doubt it justifies large increases in GPA.
Yes, if you had measured most parents’ ability to do the coursework their sons/daughters face, back when the parents were 18, the kids would come out ahead. Your average HS senior with a keen interest in computer science may well know more than his mother/father, and HS biologists are learning concepts that Nobel prizewinners couldn’t fathom 30 years ago. However, if you asked the sons/daughters to tackle the coursework from, say 1986, they might fare less well than their parents. I may be learning more advanced biology than my parents did at 18, but they’d run circles around my Latin.
It’s also possible that my generation really is a bunch more prepared for college than any before us, in which case it may be that standards need to be adjusted. By 18th-century standards, we should all have 8.0 GPAs by virtue of our mind-boggling scientific knowledge. Since this is neither the 18th century, nor Lake Wobegon, half of college students will be below average. If we reach a point where telling the other half apart by their grades is impossible - and that’s likely to happen in our lifetimes, if current trends continue - that’ll be a problem.
I know that the Texas legislature had been looking to pass a bit that would have required institutions to include on students’ transcripts, alongside the grade earned in a given course, the average or median grade awarded in that class.
Not sure if that ever got put in place, but that seems to be a new trend.
I remember finding it fascinating that my grandmother, who had 8 children, had memorized the periodic table. I never even took chemistry in high school (or college).
IMHO one of the struggle for today’s students is that there is so much information out there, it’s almost as bad as no information. I was always harping at my students to double-check sources, look at original source material, etc.
That being said, I did not read the original source material of the topic of this thread. Do as I say not as I do.
There’s no value to do same. For one, the students then flock to the ‘easy’ courses, once the grade lists are published. Secondly, employers and professional schools just don’t care. Law Schools, in particular, are grade-focused due to rankings. They’d much rather the applicant earn an A in a course where the mean was an A+, than an A where the mean was a C-.
Is it? High school math is not all that different from a generation ago, although teaching methods and topic organization may differ (though some here have reported a decrease in emphasis on proofs in geometry). English literature and history are broadly similar, though there is slightly more of it due to adding a few decades of history and a few new literary works since a generation ago.
Agreed. The big differences that I see/saw is in the proliferation of AP courses (our HS had none), and in the Bio curriculum. Due to microbiology(?), the standard AP Bio text is huge (yuuuuuuggggge?) in comparison to my college Bio text.
The question in grading is this: are students being held to a standard of a basic mastery the material? In that case a Pass/Fail grading system is adequate.
But if students are being held to a higher standard, that is, who in this class knows the subject brilliantly, above the rest of the class, then a bell curve grading system is the way to go.
One could have the usual system (F = failing, D = barely passing, C = passing, prepared for the next course, B = better, A = outstanding) without requiring that the grades be distributed on a bell curve.
The original complaints against inflation suggested that either the course was too easy or the testing. So was that A truly outstanding to too easily obtained?
I think you can’t really discuss whether grade inflation is good or bad until you decide what the goal of grading is.
It is amusing how people have strong views about this, but can’t agree about what they are useful for.
What is the goal of grading? What information does it really provide to students, parents, employers, and graduate schools? How does that compare with what they think it provides?
Why? What if half the class knows the subject brilliantly? What if only one kid does? Why punish the kids in the former group and reward the ones in the latter?
I am not at all a fan of bell curve grading unless there is some scarce resource that requires knowing which kids in a particular class are better than the rest. Not testing their knowledge of the material or their brilliance with the concepts, just their performance relative to the others. There aren’t many situations where that makes sense to me. Maybe civil service exams with limited #s of jobs, fire fighters, police, like that. Majors at universities where the U just can’t afford to add capacity so must limit the # of majors to a certain amount.
I am not a fan of rigid curves, but I continue to believe that many of the problems stem from the use of letter grades, which lump together students who may have performed very differently. Imagine if everyone who ran the 100 meters in under 10.00 were given an Olympic gold medal. That is what our system does. There are many good reasons for distinguishing the top performers. It provides more informative signals to graduate schools and to employers. It also provides an incentive to do one’s best work rather than doing just enough to get the desired grade.
At many institutions, grades in the sciences and the more quantitative social sciences have stayed relatively constant over recent decades while grades in the humanities have risen. My friends in the humanities say it is harder for them to defend a low grade than it is for faculty members in the more quantitative fields. Some combination of a consumer mentality among students and a desire to prop up enrollments have led some humanists to acquiesce.
Here is what Achen and Courant found when looking at 25 years of grade data from the University of Michigan:
Yale found that the departments whose majors entered with the highest academic indexes gave out the lowest grades. So, there was a negative correlation between perceived quality of majors (students) and grades.
@Massmomm Hmmm…sounds like a little misunderstanding going on. Students doing A work but being given a B- or lower because too many students were doing A work is deflation, not “just not inflation”. And while Wellesley’s work to put humanities and STEM majors on similar ground is noble and has good intentions, much still needs to be addressed, particularly how effective having a policy that appears to stunt the academic achievement of students is when other schools with just as much or even more prestige graduate students who are intelligent and accomplished without the hindered GPAs.
But in many cases, “A” work is subjective. In cases where it isn’t, then a student scoring a 95 isn’t going to be given a B just to avoid inflating her grade. And no one at Wellesley has a hindered GPA or gets dinged in the grad school admissions process.
I agree A work is subjective in many cases. 95? Maybe not. 92? Maybe. Though there are many very high achieving Wellesley students with stellar GPAs because they are just that great, a lot of students suffer from a GPA that would have been higher if they had have gone to Harvard (just using Harvard an example for a high achieving prestigious school w grade inflation, because Harvard and Wellesley academics are different). When a Wellesley student with a lower GPA because of grade deflation (or even, “just no grade inflation”) is compared to a student of an equally renowned college with a higher GPA because of grade inflation, grad schools choose the higher GPA student (assuming experience and fit are the same for both applications). This isn’t a hypothetical situation, as it actually happens. And many grad schools do not give much thought to the letter explaining the policy Wellesley sends. However, thankfully the W Network evens out the playing field a bit when it comes to post-grad job searches.
