In the US, high schools and universities typically use the A B C D F grading scale. When I was a wee one, documentation that would come with report cards would indicate that a “C” meant “Average” achievement or performance, a “B” represented “Above Average” and an “A” meant “Excellent” performance or achievement. This was never the reality for us. Acceptable, parent pleasing grades had to be A’s and B’s. The “Average” student who got mostly C’s (because they were average, duh!) was some nobody who would grow up to flip burgers all their life.
To what extent does A=Average, B=Above Average, and C=Average have any real meaning in academia? Are there schools somewhere out there in TV land where most students get C’s (either by grading on a true curve with no boost or by setting expectations appropriately in advance), and only the really and truly-o star, exceptional students ever get an A and that your average, hard working student has no reasonable shot even if they put in a decent amount of effort? My experience was that grades were, to a big extent, driven by effort - if you got in to school then you could do the work, and a “C” often meant “slacker”. If you really and truly wanted to get an A, you could often do so by sheer effort. Was giving "C"s to students who were typical for their peer group a common practice in the distant past and the terminology has been retained? For example, did an “A” at Harvard in your grandparents’ time really mean, “Congratulations, this is one for the ages and something to tell your grandchildren about - the day grandpa got an “A” in Introduction to Important Stuff”.
If such a meaning exists, who is the student being compared to? Does giving a student a “C” mean that their achievement is average for students who actually take the course (e.g. grading on a curve or by setting criteria based on past classes), average for students qualified to take the course (e.g. admitted to the school and who has passed the prerequisites), average for the person on the street (e.g. if you went downtown and grabbed a random guy off the subway and put him in Advanced Hyperbolic Trigonometry 535, he would, on average, get a C). I don’t see any easy way to quantify anything except the first one so I wonder how close the instructor’s actual practices would mesh with what they hope to measure.
One thought on #2 is that because graduate schools often set the minimum GPA in their program to be 3.0, which is a B, is that they may intend the meaning of their grades to relate to a hypothetical “average” person on the street who is not grad school material, implying that a typical, average person can’t hack it - you have to be a cut above the rest to even make it.
A college’s catalog may include a translation or indication of what its letter grades are supposed to mean. I have an old catalog on hand that indicates they mean “Excellent / Good / Fair / Poor (but passing) / Failure.” Under such a standard, the student isn’t being compared to anyone else; rather, the student’s performance or mastery of the material is being compared to what it ideally should have been.
IIRC my college newspaper years ago had a discussion on grading policies and mentioned that “C” was normal (or, iIRC, marks Belled to 70, the middle C). The goal was set to avoid grade inflation. One prof had gotten a “talking to” because his class marks were too high. The exception noted was that for advanced classes, where the majority of the stiudents were expected to be experts specializing in the field, the college would tolerate a high B average. If you qualified to enroll in a 4th year quantum physics class, they hoped you were at a B level at least.
There is the thought that ‘bell curves’ are decent representations for entire populations or for truly random samples. WHich means that a bell curve grading system is incorrect for Harvard, since it isn’t a random sampling. Essentially by definition Harvard students have been selected as the top of their class, so I’m not surprised that so many of them get top grades.
Now if you want to compare students to each other, instead of the population as a whole then you can try to force some kind of wider grade distribution.
When I was a college teacher, I nearly always had a bimodal distribution of grades. A bunch of D’s and F’s, few C’s and a lot of B’s with some A’s.
It turns out that the D’s and F students nearly always dropped the class before completing the term. So I rarely gave out D’s and F’s. In a class of 25 original students, I might wind up with 2 D’s, 3 C’s, 8 B’s and 3 A’s.
This is called “grade inflation” and IMHO it came in due to the high importance some colleges put on high GPA’s, which meant parents put pressure on Schools to give higher grades, and since more kids getting into college make a school look good they went along with it.
When I was in HS, in three year we have exactly ONE “straight A” student. Made the front page of the local pager, full article, etc. last time I check, there was a column now, released with the dozens and dozens of names of straight A” students.
We also didn’t get a bump to our grades being in a Honors class, etc.
I once had a Calc III class which only had 8 students but they were all great students and mastered the material. They all got A’s. Telling me some should have gotten C’s would have be…wrong in my opinion.
On the other hand, I once had a Algebra class of 50 in which 45 received D’s or F’s or dropped out. Should many of those have gotten C’s?
Duck’s guide to grades:
A - Student appears to know the material and can demonstrate it on evaluations. Student may even be able to use the material well after the class is over.
B - Student appears to get the gist of the material but stumbles now and then. Student may be able to use some of the material after the class is over but will take more time getting back into being able to use it than the A student.
C - Student doesn’t really know the material all that well but is not completely useless. They can demonstrate SOME knowledge of the material although that will most likely be gone 3 days after the class is over. If the student is exposed to the material in the future it will be like they didn’t take the class, though they will relearn relatively quickly.
D - Useless grade. Given by me so that students do not need to take the class again. Essentially an F.
F - Student didn’t learn much. If exposed to the material in the future it will be like they never took the class.
All I think you can really say is that an A is better than a B and so on on down the line, with “better” being an explicitly vague term. Grades don’t really line up in any meaningful way with anything, really. The fact that grade inflation exists is evidence for this. (IMHO)
Grade inflation exists because it is easier to deal with happy students than unhappy ones.
If you are hired into a system and you are a tough grader than students will be less happy with you which causes complaints which gets to administrators which can affect you negatively.
If your college uses student evaluations to reward or punish teachers or even just have them no matter what they do with them then you want good evals. When I was teaching I did a study of evals versus what grade the student received. The correlation between grades and student evaluation was .91 iirc. This means the grades you give out is essentially how you will be evaluated…so give all A’s.
Even if the college does nothing with student evaluations and encourages teachers to hold the line on grades, some grade inflation will exist because some people just want to be liked. Giving high grades means you are more liked. Moreover, giving higher grades means less work and hassle dealing with students.
In the end when a teacher is isolated and doing his job for years with salary falling behind inflation, Conservatives calling him a freeloader etc…he will realize that being a tougher grader isn’t doing him any good and is actually negatively impacting him. If cynicism sets in he may just decide to give high grades for his self interest.
That said, my mental grading system is quite similar to Duck’s, which I have changed below, to make it more cynical, because that is the mood I am in today.
A - A smart student can get this grade with a minor effort, a “run of the mill” student can get it with a solid effort, and a dim student can get this grade with extraordinary effort (This last is rare, but it does happen.)
B - A smart student can get this grade by slacking off, a “run of the mill” student can get this grade with a minor effort, and a dim student can get this grade with a solid effort.
C - A smart student gets this grade when consistently drunk and perhaps blindfolded, a “run of the mill” student gets this grade by slacking, and a dim student gets it with decent effort.
D - A smart student pretty much cannot get this grade with any effort at all, an average student gets this grade by slacking too much, and a dim student gets this grade when they fall behind and can’t catch up.
F - All students who simply do not care get this grade.
It’s interesting that I relate grades to effort, but there you go. Also, I am taking the “official system” backwards. Given that I know the students, I know their intelligence (at least as it relates to my class), and the grades go from there, instead of the other way around.
This is most certainly true. My point is that because grades refer to nothing other than a vague but nonetheless real sense of “goodness,” such a correlation to evaluations is possible.
Grades are meaningless. They always have been. Their only “meaning” is that they were the result a particular teacher wanted to assign to the combination of demonstrated learning and co-operation/effort in learning that occurred for a given student in a given class. They can be manipulated without too much trouble, even by teachers/professors who try very hard to turn them into seemingly objective results. I know, because as a high school teacher, I do this regularly.
I have never seen a student evaluation system in which the identity of the student was visible to the teacher. (Indeed, to my recollection, every student evaluation I’ve seen keeps the student completely anonymous.)
I think you’re misunderstanding. High grades = happier students = student feels happier about the course = students feels more generous when evaluating it = teacher gets high evaluations. There are certainly a few students who will say “I got a C, but I really learned a lot and the teacher was wonderful!” But for the most part how a student feels a teacher did is directly related to what grade they get.
I started school (kindergarten) in 1970 in the Northeastern US. They gave us letter grades at first, but not A, B, C rather ones like E for excellent, G for good, and euphemistic ones like NY for ‘not yet’ (IOW an F!) But beyond first or second grade (once that, finally, even the dumb kids could count!) I remember we got number grades, 0 to 100 with 65 being minimum passing. We got these on individual tests, but still got the goofy letters for cumulative grading (i.e. report cards).
But from middle school on thru high school all grades were numbers, on tests and on quarterly report cards. Getting letter grades seemed decided childish to us. It wasn’t until I attended college that I saw they used the letter grades A, B, C etc.
I see letter grading as just a simplification, and a sensible one. I mean what’s the difference between an 82 or an 86? Not much, they’re both essentially B’s. In fact:
[ul][li]A = 90 to 100[/li][li]B = 80 to 89[/li][li]C = 70 to 79[/li][li]D = 65 to 69[/li][li]F = <65[/li][/ul]
In any case, it’s bad reasoning all around. Correlation is not causation etc. Could be that students who tend to get good grades also tend to have a positive affect toward teachers, for example.