No, it shouldn’t. We are assessing a number of things: knowledge, skills, ability to follow directions, projects that aren’t necessarily about demonstrating attained knowledge, and a bunch of other things. I just marked a paper down because it was very badly written: the student demonstrated knowledge, but not professional communication skills. We had talked about the issue before hand, so part of the downgrade was also for failing to follow directions. These are minor parts of the grade, but in my opinion education is more about building skills and learning how to learn and communicate professionally than it is about the stuff. If I were a math teacher, I might feel differently.
As Sam mentioned, if no one is getting a reasonable score on an exam the problem is the professor, not the class. When I taught data structures at a not very good university my first test was something more reasonable for the much better university I had come from. I graded that one on a curve because I didn’t want to penalize the students for my mistake. And my other tests were more about knowledge than understanding. (And even there one student got everything right.)
Any university that gives 50% Cs either doesn’t screen students well or uses the Jack Welch school of grading. I have no problem giving out Cs, but not as the standard grade.
BTW, when I went to MIT freshman year was pass fail, and no one had a problem getting graded in later years. Most people were obsessive about school work all through high school, some had difficulty in adjusting, and a lot were top dogs in their small schools but middle of the pack there. It saved a lot of stress and likely some lives.
Failing an MIT class was possible, but it took some effort.
I may be biased by my experience in STEM and engineering, but if someone passes a structures class with an A, I expect them to understand the material in that class, because I don’t want my structures falling down. It doesn’t help me to know he’s a great talker if he can’t do a stress calculation.
If I hire someone because I need a whiz-bang engineer to do complex math and I’m willing to pay for a really smart person, it really doesn’t help me when all the candidates have straight A transcripts. And the values that a school might grade for (class participation, speaking ability, ‘effort’, etc) are irrelevant when I need someone who really knows their finite element analysis.
In the computer industry, it’s common to give coding tests and other tests that are thinly veiled IQ tests to applicants. They do this because they are no longer getting that information from a transcript. And most of them don’t require degrees at all any more, as they are finding that degrees aren’t actually a big differerentiator any more, and the transcripts close to useless.
This will hurt the university system over time.
I think not everybody is cut out for every field and it seems better to weed people out ahead of time before they actually put dollars into an education that’s not going to get them the job they want. So I’m okay with it. I took the course because it’s generally a pre-requisite for graduate school in social work. I enjoyed the class, I got an A- in it, I found the material pretty challenging, but I am really proud of that final grade because it took a lot of work to get it.
It’s very easy to be happy with the grading system if you are good at it. But I can see where this system breaks down. I don’t know if my son is going to be successful at school. He has a wide range of challenges that may get in the way. My son is a math genius who is probably at least one order of magnitude smarter than his parents. He’s shown conceptual understanding of square numbers, cube numbers, exponents, negative integers, and calculating the area of rectangles and volume of cubes. The other day he was trying to figure out the area of his round waffle, and I thought, “He’s probably not ready for pi.” (He really is not ready, because he hasn’t shown an understanding of even basic algebra or decimals yet, but do you hear me??? I have actually tried to teach my three year old basic algebra.)
So because I live with him, I know exactly what he’s capable of. So far, his teachers have caught on that he’s very bright, but they don’t live with him and they aren’t exactly teaching kids about negative numbers yet, so they really have no idea what he’s capable of. What they know is, he’s extremely mentally rigid, perfectionistic to the point of self-sabotage, only interested in one thing, and can’t write very well. The idea that this enormous potential of his would not be reflected in his grades keeps me awake at night. My son for all I know will not give a shit about grades, or more probably, won’t give a shit about any subject other than math, and if that’s the case, there’s going to be a problem. It could prevent him from finding work that he really finds fulfilling, which I presume, based on his current interests, is going to be something like engineering or astronomy, fields in which grades really matter.
I don’t know what to do about it. I am barely only beginning to grasp the problem.
(And I am not a math genius. It’s hereditary, but not from me. So I am a bit out of my depth here.)
I think you misunderstood me. I don’t mean that course knowledge isn’t the dominant portion of the grade, just that it isn’t the only thing being assessed.
I do enjoy the irony of engineers obsessed with turning vectors into scalars.
My kids’ elementary school doesn’t do grades (they do have something that is grade-like on the report card, where they report on whether various common core skills are being worked on, reasonably mastered, or excelled in – but a given skill could be tagged as “worked on” this term and “mastered” next term, so it’s not a grade in the usual sense of the word), which I admit has been really great.
There have been times when I’ve been worried about whether my child is learning the material, but it’s all focused on “does Child have the skill?” rather than “did Child get a good grade?”
I also like Art of Problem Solving’s philosophy on grades. (They do in-depth math and science courses for bright kids – kids who would in most cases be getting easy A’s in a regular math class.) I was struck by what they say about how “The trouble comes when we generate data that’s designed to motivate and guide students’ actions, and then try to reuse it to evaluate students.”
Yeah, I don’t get it either. What is an A grade supposed to indicate? If it indicates a certain level of mastery of the material that the class covers, there should be no upper (or lower) limit to the number of students who could earn an A.
And, should an A in, say, Differential Equations from Harvard indicate the same level of mastery as an A in Differential Equations from a much less prestigious college or university? I don’t know; but if the answer is yes, it would be reasonable to expect a higher proportion of A’s in Harvard’s Diff Eq classes.
Grades do matter for some workplaces, but my perception is actually that, to a reasonable degree, tech fields tend to care about whether you can do the work more than what your grades are (though good grades always look good), and also that tech places are much more likely to discount bad grades in non-major subjects.
I worry about my kid a lot too, though in terms of her future work, I tend to worry about things like whether she’ll have the soft skills to interview in a way that people will actually hire her and not be turned off, or that she’ll be able to get along with her coworkers.
(Though we have the opposite problem – my kid is such a perfectionist that I’m worried that once she has grades in high school, she’ll obsess over them and that it will be bad for her mental health; I’m not nearly as worried that she’ll get bad grades, both because I don’t think she’ll let herself but also because I don’t think it’ll hurt her future prospects too much if she does.)
Public universities, especially the top tier ones, generally grade on a curve. I very clearly remember my first day International Relations class at the University of California, Davis, where the professor answered a class policy question with “I will guarantee that achieving 94% will guarantee an “A” no matter what the curve works out to be.”
I have worked in global 100 corporations, investment banking and high tech for 30+ years. It’s a pretty harsh awakening for these upper middle class participation private university students with cushy summer internships when they get out in the real world with serious competition with others just as smart, educated and a whole lot more battle hardend. IMHO, you’re not helping your kids by being a snow plow parent.
I worry about that stuff too.
I probably worry more than I should. It’s like I want to solve all the problems now rather than taking things one step at a time. I am constantly trying to remind myself, “He’s three. This is hard because he’s three.”
I guess what I’m saying is I see where someone’s grades may not reflect their real ability.
What’s the point of going to an Ivy League school if you learn exactly the same thing you’d get anywhere else? I mean, aside from helping to propagate class privilege and connect with fellow privileged people?
I would have assumed that if I had gone to Harvard instead of the University of Alberta I would have been expected to learn harder, or at least more enriched material.
For example, I first went to a community college, because I was poor and it was all I could afford (no engineering schools in my city). I took university transfer calculus courses - Differential calculus, integral calculus, differential equations, PDEs,etc. I aced them, and I got full university credit for those courses.
When I got to the U of A, I took the next course in the series, and it was really hard. I went back and got the university texts for the calculus courses I already had taken, and yep it was the same material, but it aoso required some analytical understanding, there were some proofs, more abstract problems that required more stepts to figure out, etc. A lot less handholding and specific application questions, and more theory and absrtact questions. I had to re-study what I had learned to get up to speed.
I assumed that there would have been even more background or high level concepts required in the same course at Harvard. If not, why pay $70,000 per year to go there, when I can go to the U of A, a fine institution, for $6,000?
I did engineering physics. In certain courses, an A meant you were in the top 5% of the class. This may be meaningless or needlessly harsh. But no one in my program had an expectation of getting an A simply due to attendance and doing the required homework, more like a C for that; passing the course showed you worked hard at it. In these courses, one had to be able to apply hard concepts in novel situations that combined many different topics. There was nothing to memorize, you understood it from first principles or you did not.
Maybe this approach was too hard. It caused a lot of anxiety and good students I knew lost scholarships which had real impact - marking can sometimes be too hard. But I can still use the stuff I learned in those courses decades later, since it did not rely on regurgitating anything but understanding it well. My university, frankly, cared little for esteem and highly positive student experiences, maybe too little. I’m not sure grades are helpful or needed in many courses, but if not going that route, they should perhaps indicate degree of mastery and so have some meaning.
As the saying goes, “It’s hard to get an A, but it’s even harder to get a C!”
Okay, actually, I suspect that’s more appropriate for a masters program than a top law school. Not preparing at all for finals might well get you a C—and that’s if you did the reading for each class.
Anyway, I am fine with a generous helping of A/A- grades at an elite school. One thing I hated about law school was the idea that my success was someone else’s… not “failure,” per se, but… milder success. Which could have implications for those seeking a Big Law gig after graduation.
Anyway, I just missed out on magna cum laude (top 10% at my school) by not being able to bring myself to pass/fail an A- in Property (seriously, I did the math: if I’d just pass/failed, and effectively erased that four-credit 3.7 from my GPA, I’d have been just inside the 10th percentile. Bullshit. But then again, going public interest, no one ever asked to see my transcript…).
Whose pandering? I’d say great students should be graded based on how they performed, not how they performed relative to someone else. Forced distribution of grades is the real villain.
Exactly. Forced distribution to emulate a bell curve is downright pseudoscientific, IMHO.
I can’t say, except in regard to law schools. Employers are impressed that you got into a top school. They don’t assume you learned anything different than if you went to University of Dayton School of Law. There is a chance to meet some truly interesting professors, but I don’t know if that makes anyone a better lawyer. The top schools are feeders for judicial clerkships (and ultimately academic positions) but for actually practicing law, I don’t think Harvard or Yale gives you much of a leg up over anywhere else.
I agree if you put in the effort and understand the hard stuff well you deserve a good grade regardless of how others do.
But if 80% of people receive the top grade, is this because all had mastered complex material? Or were professors encouraged to make tests easy, or was administration unsupportive if students or even their parents complained about being given a B; even when this was merited because of mediocre understanding, because it might limit future opportunities? Was popularity more important to profs and universities than academic rigour? Or is the role of a university merely to cheer and support?
If your university inflates grades, the grad schools certainly know that and adjust for that.
(My own belief is good universities teach largely the same stuff and in general are more similar than different. If you have to write professional exams one supposes your program must prepare you for that, and these exams can be pretty hard. In Canada, most folks don’t care that much where you went to school, which is generally a good thing. There are at least a dozen very good universities here.)
People were impressed by my having gone to an Ivy for a grad degree. It was ever so much easier than my top-tier undergrad-only liberal arts bachelor’s, which they’d never heard of and whose reputation they don’t know. Grad schools knew it, though. Other than school applications, I’ve only had to send transcripts to a professional licensing board. They cared that I had been awarded the degree I said I had, not what my grades were. As an academic program head involved in hiring, I cared about the degree. If there were poor grades in the subject area for which we were hiring, I’d ask about that if the person made it to interview.
For the sake of argument, there are other ways that could be true. You might be expected to take more advanced classes, as opposed to learning more or harder or more enriched material in the “same” classes you’d take anywhere else. Or you might learn more, but in ways that are not reflected in your grades.
(I’m not arguing that any one of these is what is, or should be, the case. As I said, “I don’t know.”)
It looks to me like you’re conflating two different kinds of standards. Being in the top 5% of the class need not have anything to do with being able to apply hard concepts in novel situations in ways that go far beyond mere memorization. Theoretically, that could be true of 90% of the class or of 0%.
I agree that this is an important signal. Or was. But how many graduates from those schools got in on merit, vs the people that got in as legacies or diversity enrollees? I would have thought that the second thing to ensure the elite status of Harvard grads would be courses so hard that even legacies or diversity applicants would have to have the chops to pass really hard courses.
But if the signal is just getting in, and the university actually isn’t more challenging than any other, it will start to degrade in value as the degree itself doesn’t help determine who is truly outstanding, and getting in won’t signal as much because there could be reasons for acceptance that have nothing to do with your personal abilities.
Maybe theoretically. It’s not like I set those standards. In those courses, in practice, I’d say anyone who got B or better had a pretty deep understanding of that material. And one third of the class really did fail the hardest weeder course, and have to take it again. I’m not defending the practice, merely describing it. At the time it seemed pretty harsh.