I would also support ditching grades altogether, because there’s some good evidence that that is a better system, but continuing to grade with grade inflation is no good.
Then I’d argue if you’re running a class with a C average, that’s way too low. I expect B averages for institutions of that caliber. Same with grad school. If you get a C in grad school, you’re really just barely making it.
The students (or their parents) do pay the bills.
If anyone ever did look at our lawschool grades and saw some C’s on the transcript, it would be a serious red flag about the student’s performance. I understand why you’re getting pushback. If I were teaching, grades would mean essentionally this: Understand the course material = B. Excellent grasp of the material= A. Not getting it but putting in effort = C. Not putting in effort and not getting it = Fail.
It does depend on the class. Large first-year classes I expect a C+ / B-, in practice, but fourth-year classes are typically much higher. Language classes have lower averages than other Humanities courses.
I agree with this completely.
I didn’t feel like there was any meaningful difference in learning between my classes that were graded and the classes that weren’t. But if that’s the way the evidence points, then out with grades.
See, I think “C” is that basic understanding — or it was. “D” is not getting it. “B” is solid, good work. “A” is superlative.
Generally, 10–20% of my students get “A” range grades. Depends on the group and course. Mine generally average to a low B, even though I think they should average to a C.
The system I use, which I think is inflated about 2/3 of a letter grade, is consistent with what my colleagues do (we check).
I think that’s a good idea. The consistency part. I don’t have an opinion on the “inflated” part. (other than I’m not bothered by grade inflation, due to my belief that grades are pretty unimportant indicators of ability.
I remember in my Stats 350 course, the professor offered to take out for lunch anyone who got an A in her class. So it can’t have been that many people. It was a “weeder” course, which meant if you couldn’t cut it, you were probably not cut out for some subset of specific majors and would not be encouraged to continue in that field.
Is there any system of cross-university testing? Some college equivalent of high school standardized tests? That would give us meaningful data on how well universities are teaching in comparison to other universities. We could look at the data and compare, for example, what a third year law student earning B’s at Harvard knows to what a third year law student earning A’s at Pepperdine knows.
But that’s nothing like saying “Most of you would have made As at a less selective school, but at Yale, you won’t.”. Thats the implied logic of “Yale kids should have an even distribution of grades”.
I just can’t see how this lesson is worth hijacking the entire education system for. People think grades are the POINT of school, from Kinder on. Its all transactional. I’ve never had a parent concerned with anything, really, except grades. Take kids on 504s or IEPs. The attitude is never “how can we make sure this kid is learning in this system that doesn’t really suit them?” Its always “How can we make sure this kid isnt unfairly punished with a bad grade?”.
And they are so rotten and inaccurate. We chop with a hacksaw and measure with calipers. You cant tell me a kid with a 92 in a class is meaningfully more accomplished than a kid with an 88, but we live and die by that distinction.
How do you feel about this?
No. The exams were sufficiently hard that very few people got all of the questions. In a few engineering courses it wasn’t possible to fully complete some questions (instead getting a perfect score for reducing the answer to, say, seven equations in seven unknowns). I remember one exam where nobody got a complete answer to any of the four questions posed over three hours (but that doesn’t validate that approach).
That said, on reflection I am unsure this is a better approach overall. I know many talented people who worked hard and lost Canada Scholarships, which ain’t right. If you work hard, know the material very well, are reasonably proficient at putting it on an exam, you probably deserve at least a B. I have had hard-ass teachers who don’t want to give good marks to anyone, which also isn’t right. There are plenty of badly written questions and exams, and professors who don’t teach or write tests very well. We’ve all taken tests that don’t fully reflect the material studied. Small classes don’t necessarily merit the same approach. I don’t have trouble with as many people who thoroughly master difficult material and succeed on a hard exam getting an A. But no way this is a majority of the students in most courses.
Although I think grade inflation to be excessive, it is not like it makes a difference to me personally. In many cases doing away with grades completely might be reasonable. I’m not really trying to play ego games, or say things were better in the old days. I suspect students are about as smart as they ever were, but seem to have far more distractions now. But I suspect it now occurs because professors don’t want to argue with students or their families or an administration courting future alumni dollars - which also doesn’t seem right to me.
Each year the paper has brief reports on the students in the province with the highest averages. It doesn’t mean that much since it is hard to compare different schools and course programs. But this year there were maybe twelve students with 100% averages and seven of them were from the same small school. Does that cheapen even the admittedly limited value of such an accomplishment, in your view?
We do have a (rough) way of measuring that: bar passage rates.
(And just to nitpick: Harvard Law School switched from letter grades to a modified pass/fail system in 2008.)
IANAL (which is applicable here even if it’s not the usual context) but I thought each state had its own bar exams. So my hypothetical Harvard student and Pepperdine student would probably not ever take the same bar exam.
Very rough. The bar passage rate is probably more arbitrary than the grades in law school. Washington did away with the Bar exam for graduates during the first year of COVID. The world didn’t end.
The letter grade system should map to the actual knowledge attained by the students.
If a student who is slightly above average and a student who is the best student in the class both get A+, you have lost information about the relative differences between the two people. If all your students are crowding up in the ‘A’ grade, you have no way of discerning between them, and neither do the people looking for grad school contenders, scholarship candidates, etc. And employers can’t tell who the real superstars are. I suspect that’s in fact what’s going on - an ‘equity’ push to make sure everyone comes out of university relatively indistinguishable from each other.
When I went to college, it was common in engineering and physics to get exams that were legendarily hard. Hard as in there were whispers of a guy years ago so smart that he actually *finished the exam.
I once got 27% on a physics exam and it got me an 8 on the Stanine system, equivalent to an A. It was one of the top marks in the class. To me, that was wrong, and it was an extreme example. Some profs will use the bell curve to normalize horrible exam questions and hide the fact that the exam was poorly done. Or, they grade to a curve in a class with 20 people, leading to inaccurate grading. I shouldn’t have gotten an A if I couldn’t anwer questions the course was teaching. But the prof did throw a lot of curveballs on the exam.
The bell curve certainly had its issues. In physics we had to take an honors linear algebra course as mandatory in second year. But the same class was mandatory for Engineering Physics majors in fourth year. So they came into the class with WAY more math background than the lowly physics students, and Engineering Physics was the hardest faculty to get into and to stay in. So that course always had bifurcated grades - the Eng Phys guys pulled up the average by getting straight A’s, while the physics people were generally significantly behind. That wasn’t really fair.
If we are going to get rid of letter grades, we’ll need to lean more on things like the GRE or professional certification tests. And if we’re going to do that, we might as well scrap the degree itself, make everything optional, and rely on exams and work experience when hiring people.
That’s actually happening. Degree requirements are being dropped all over the place in favor of other ways of evaluating applicants. This is fallout from things like grade inflation and a general decline in academic rigor in many universities.
Heh, given our discussion in the AP thread I figured you’d have something to say about this thread! 
I can attest to this. I went to a selective college and got good grades there. But I was definitely completely humbled by the experience and lost all of the thoughtless self-confidence I’d had when I was one of the top kids in my high school and knew it (and without knowing anyone else’s grades, either – in fact I’m pretty sure I assumed all the other smart kids were getting A’s).
Honestly, I wish I hadn’t had grades – maybe I would have learned more if I hadn’t been chasing the grade. (Which I was very good at.)
This is the heart of the problem. It is a problem at levels of education. More particularly college students should not pass any class without having achieved an acceptable level of skill or knowledge based on the course. Failure to do so should most often be remediated in the simplest way possible like retesting or redoing a term paper. That is the point of a college course. Getting a higher grade than other students in an arbitrary rating system is not. It is much the same from kindergarten on (seriously…grades in kindergarten?)
There’s plenty of opportunity to note high achievement in school without using grades and their destructive side effects.