In my personal experience, teachers who don’t care about grades and are more generous with them tend to just plain be better teachers. Let me preface this with saying that I’ve never gotten below a “B” in college, so I don’t feel I’m simply reacting to the grade I got (but this also isn’t a formal study, so grain of salt and all that).
Almost every teacher I’ve had that started the class with droning about about how the modern college institution is a sham, a business where you pay money for a piece of paper with no effort, but they’re REAL teachers and give REAL grades so people almost certainly WILL fail because DIFFICULT MATERIAL IS DIFFICULT blah blah blah were usually piss poor, with one or two exceptions (also, I had no trouble getting an A or high B in most of these classes, though the average was generally a lot lower so maybe I’m just smarter than I think).
In contrast the ones who are like “oh, sure, no problem, the submission is a couple minutes late but no biggie.” Or “I’ll give you all a chance to redo your first assignment because apparently I wasn’t clear enough on the material” were almost universally good teachers, because they valued teaching us the course material and used our grades more or less because they had to.
Again, small sample size, YMMV, there are exceptions all around the board, blah blah, but it is what I’ve experienced in general.
College Engineering Professor here. One source of trouble is the reluctance on the part of universities to provide any grading guidance whatsoever. There seems to be a feeling that any sort of quota system would infringe on the professor’s academic freedom. So any sort of “official” guidance is strictly verboten. (this may not be true everywhere, but it has been at the three universities I’ve been on the faculties of.) Hence, every professor comes up with some scheme that he deems “best,” which is generally a compromise between his personal ideals, and making his life easier. Personally, I would welcome some sort of mandated curve. It takes the heat off me.
I’ve lost count of the students who come to me and say, “Professor, I *need *to get an A in this course.”
My response is, of course, that grades are not based on need, but on performance.
They then inform me that they got a C in XXX 301 last semester, and need an A to “balance it out.” I roll my eyes and tell them to talk to the Prof who gave them the C!
Bottom line: it’s a complicated situation, and there are no easy answers. Not that that contributes much to the discussion, but there you have it.
I went to college starting in the mid-70’s. I dropped out and returned to finish my degree in the mid-80s. IMHO during that time, what had happened was the profs cared less (it was an era of cutbacks).
In the 70’s, they tailored tests and material to the class. In my advanced calculus class, probably 1/3 of the class got D’s or flunked (I barely got a C-). In Linear ALgebra, the overall result was worse, and I was one who flunked. I took the next-to-hardest course the following year and got an A+. None of the courses that I recalled had the marks Bell-curved. It was just very very challenging material - and students who had been used to being the brains in the high school class (like me) found out suddenly they were just one of many in the same boat.
In the mid-80’s many of the courses were trending either high or low. The highest one, it was the prof who got a talking to after the mid-term about too many A’s; the second term test was a killer. I scored 45% on that and was near the top of the class after the marks were belled. Several others, marks hovered around 50% and were bell-curved so that the average was 70%. The profs could not be bothereed adjusting the test difficulty to the class progress; many were not good teachers of advanced material. (Hopefully their star was research, then)
It was discouraging for many students to be specialist students and have low marks, and have no idea what that meant their final mark would be. Several that I knew dropped the difficult courses on the drop date (no penalty), before they made the drop date too early for such tricks. Several of these guys would sign up for 6 courses, drop 2 or 3, and take 5 or 6 years to get their degree…
Wow. For several early grades, the grades were O (Outstanding), S (Satisfactory), and N (Needs improvement). We also got effort and conduct grades, so you could get an N in History Achievement but an O in History Effort, basically meaning that the teacher thought that you were trying really really hard but still weren’t there yet. Eventually we switched over to A B C D F in third or fourth grade or something.
Note that this depends on the school. I do some private tutoring for high school students, and a couple of local schools have a 4-6 point range, instead of a 10 point one, so you can fail with a 79%.
A = 93-100
B = 85-92
C = 75-84
D = 70 - 74
U/F = <70
Plusses and minuses were awarded only for the cusp grades (e.g., 85 was a B- and 92 was a B+; everything in between was a solid B). However, I’ve never seen an A+ on a report card; just on individual tests, even in classes where I and other students had over a 100 average (due to a wacky curve.)
Even “a 79%” doesn’t mean all that much on its own. There’s no reason why an evaluation couldn’t be set up with “a 20%” demonstrating mastery of the material. One teacher’s 79% might be another’s 60% or 70%.
This grade inflation is happening in a lot of places, but not that much in the Netherlands. We score on a 1-10 scale with 6 or higher being a passing grade… grades above an 8 are rare. Whenever I have new international students I warn them not to expect ‘straight 10s’ and that they’ll probably learn to be happy with a 6 (like the dutch students :P). A joke that goes around sometimes is: an 8 is for a good student, a 9 is for the Professor and a 10 is for god:D.
I’ve really always wondered about the point of those scales, though. There was actually a scoring rubric in my state (or maybe district, but I swear it was used on the state test) that ranged from 1-6 in 6 different categories when grading writing papers. Nobody got a 6, ever. The best fricking writers in a given year may have gotten a single six in a single category in their entire careers, if they were lucky.
It always reminded me of teachers who said “getting 100% on an assignment means perfection and NOBODY is perfect.” Gating stuff off due to some philosophical notion of “somebody is always better” or “perfection is unattainable” always seemed silly. If it takes some kind of unbelievably freakish Einstein-level genius to even approach a score, why bother having the score? IMO the number is on the scale for people to use it.
I mean, in reality it’s no big deal. If everybody there has adjusted to that being the case, it doesn’t affect anything, it’s just from a philosophical standpoint it feels like the government announcing a new type of all-access VIP ID that can only be issued to Jesus himself. Why go through the effort to devise such a thing if it’s not going to be used (April Fools jokes aside)?
O, but these scores do happen…just not often. If you take an exam and all answers are correct, you get a 10. But for essays and the like, this is very, very rare. But not impossible. The fact is that students very rarily give a perfect answer (that covers all the points) on exams, so they often get partial credit.
Interesting. I actually had a job where employees were supposed to do self-evaluations (I hated that!), and we were told in advance that the highest rating represented godlike perfection and meant that you never ever ever (not just hardly ever) had problems in your job. I wonder if it was some sort of woo psychological thing.
For an anecdote, a few years ago I started taking serious, non-Mickey Mouse undergraduate classes on the side locally. I found that if I did all the assigned reading, showed up on time to class every time, and actually make a serious good faith effort to include every listed requirement in my essays (length, subject matter, sources, etc.), it was dern hard not to get an A. In fact, I haven’t gotten anything other than a final grade of A at all since receiving my BS. Part of my success could be that I did my bachelor’s degree years ago and that my maturity, discipline, and knowledge are higher now, but I’m not sure if it’s the only reason.
Considering the idea that an A in a university class that you are qualified to take (you have the prerequisites) is often driven by sheer effort, is there any process or structure in place to reward (or even just identify and acknowledge)* truly exceptional performance* that goes above and beyond reasonable effort? For example, has a student in Survey of American Literature 380 ever been recommended for advancement to Masters’ or PhD candidacy because their essay on allusions in Little Women not only met, but so surpassed the expectations of the course that the professor is flabbergasted at the student’s extreme ability and knowledge?
IME This is only true in a certain subset of courses where the grade is based almost entirely on writing, and varies wildly on the teacher and crop of students in the course/major. Back when I was taking English 101 (yes, 101), with my teacher doing this would have netted you a B. To get an A you were required to have a “creative thesis” meaning it had to be “a point about the work that nobody else would come up with.” (Which, IMO, translated to “bullshit like the best of them”) I got B’s and B+'s on my first two papers, to get an A on my last paper I literally just made up the most random point I could think of* and wrote normally as if I believed it. That netted me an A. So while “meet all the requirements” is true, at least in my English classes it required a bit of fuzzy subjectivity to meet them.
I also took a philosophy of the mind (consciousness etc) course. In that course we were given absolutely no guidance other than “write a 6-page essay arguing some viewpoint about something related to the course.” I got an A by writing what was, in my opinion, the worst paper of my life. However, I may be underestimating myself, or overestimating others, because the average score on papers in that class was like a 40%. I have heard from later teachers that psychology majors (the course was cross listed philosophy/psychology as well as a gen ed) can’t write for shit in general, so that may have been part of it. But it does support what you say.
However, it takes a lot more than effort in math, science, and computer science courses. That tends to take actual understanding and the ability to follow through on it. I’ve had plenty of criticisms of the courses I’ve taken in STEM fields, but at the very least they’re not effort based. Well… I used to think the computer science courses were effort based until I TA’d one and actually talked to people who were really, really trying and couldn’t get it.
For the curious, the point was that WOPR in WarGames represents androgyny and the whole movie is about a fear of entities without clear gender labels. Within said paper I wrote a whole paragraph (with references!) about the color teal as it relates to genders.
I certainly can see that classes that are non-writing focused and are based more around math or science problems are more difficult to truly shine in, in the sense that the professor can clearly see that you are clearly an above-average performer compared to other students doing well in the course. If you are told to find the integral, other than finding the integral in a new, never before proven way, there’s really no way to exceed the expectations of the problem set by a wide margin. With an essay, there’s a lot more leeway to develop a thesis to a greater extent or synthesize more sources than the professor requires. However, there’s a diminishing returns factor and a reasonable student will reach the point where they believe they have met the expectations and that further effort is not worth the one or two additional points it would give since most classes don’t give a reward for surpassing expectations (e.g. an extra 0.5 boost to grade point value, paid scholarship, automatic admission to grad school, or a medal).
With multiple choice/scantron type tests, there’s really no way that the professor could know that you have exceeded or can exceed the expectations of a typical “A” student.
Grade inflation is, in my experience, more directly related to “student evaluation” than to parent pressure. I never experienced any parental pressure, but there was a clear correlation between the midterm marks and my student evaluations.
I think evals are more often based on how the student felt about the teacher - this may or may not be related to grade; it’s more likely based on (basically) how well the prof taught. If he explained the material well, and made the course fun to be in, even a C student will give the guy a good review in general. Whereas a student taht recognizes they were being BS’ed and bribed with marks will likely know that - they are college students, not completely stupid - and reflect it in the evaluation. (Or more likely, they will see - “I got an A for that crap? This prof is out to lunch!”)
Can someone settle a Brit’s idle curiosity? Are the A, B, C, etc grades - both at school and at university, based primarily on the teacher’s subjective assessment of overall performance or do they directly relate to marked assessments - either exams or course work (essays, write-ups of experiments, dissertations etc)?
In the UK all grades after the age of 11 are based on exams or course work. For ages 16 to 18 the big debate is about the use of course work and there is move to go back to soley exam based grading on the grounds that teacher marked course work is too subject to grade inflation.
They are based on exams, homework, essays, laboratory experiment write-ups, various course-long projects, etc. The most subjective thing that sometimes is used is “class participation,” which is how well the student participated in class discussions. The teacher will generally describe at the beginning of the course how the grading will be decided. Most frequently an exam at the end of the course will be the biggest part of the grade.
For the purposes of this response, I’m talking about high school and university instructors, and in my response below, ‘teacher’, ‘instructor’, and ‘professor’ are interchangeable.
Here in the US they are primarily based on performance and assessments, but there is a lot of leeway for instructors to use their own professional judgement and it is difficult to appeal a grade you think is ‘unfair’. It isn’t nearly as objective as a standardized, multiple choice exam would be. Professors who grade essays may pretty much use any reasonable criteria that they deem to be appropriate and that has been adequately disclosed to the students via the syllabus. They may not discriminate, but this means that the teacher can’t knock you down from an A to a B because you are a racial minority, not that the teacher can’t use unorthodox grading techniques that just happened to affect you. Sometimes, attendance and class participation factors in to the grade, but the student must generally be informed that this will be the case. Most instructors combine the marked assessments (exams, papers, attendance records) and sum them up to get a final grade - it isn’t a vague, “Oh now let’s see robert_columbia did pretty well on the exams, I forget how good but pretty good, but he didn’t participate much in discussions, uhh, <prays to a god>… I think a B is fair”.
To appeal a grade, you have to show some sort of favoritism or discrimination, e.g. “He gave Suzie an extra 10 points because she was Mormon. I got knocked down 10 points for being Muslim”. You can’t just allege that the course wasn’t graded the way you think would have been best.
I assume it’s generally the latter, though for all I know there may be instructors or departments or schools or districts that allow the former.
At the college where I teach, which I believe is fairly typical, each class has a syllabus which states the “means of evaluation”: how the student’s grade is determined. The details of how the grade is determined are left up to the individual instructor (e.g. what percentage of the overall grade the final exam counts for; whether class participation counts for anything), though if a grading system seemed inappropriate it might get vetoed by someone like a department chair.
If a course grade were simply a subjective assessment of overall performance, I would anticipate a nightmare of students contesting or protesting their grades.