So if you start out as a B student and it takes you a year to figure out what a Yale A requires, graduating with honors is almost impossible. This isn’t so much of a problem if you are a striver who went to a top prep school where 12th grade is already conducted at an Ivy League standard. But if you were the star student at an average high school, it sounds like a problem.
This might have led me to be very cautious in course selection.
Yale tries to give an out here by allowing classes to be taken pass fail. But the more you do that, the greater impact of a single B rises.
The bar exam should not exist. Or at least, it shouldn’t be the only path to licensure (and in Wisconsin, it isn’t—too bad I’m not in Wisconsin).
For the record, I kicked the shit out of the bar exam. But I never should have had to take it to begin with. I actually think the forced distribution on the bar exam is even worse than the grade distribution in law school, because at least in law school, the professors weren’t required to fail 30% of all students (which is how the math for the bar exam works out: if you are in roughly the bottom 30% you fail, with slight variations by state, and that’s after having endured three years of law school).
Well, I picked an Ivy for grad school because I thought it would be a better school than my other options. I thought because it was an Ivy it would be better than my incredibly thorough undergraduate education. It was partly logistical - the cheapest of my top-tier options. It was partly because it had the best social work program, and I loved the old-school campus - I mean there are old buildings, how could this not be my greatest option?
I think I was very naive for thinking an Ivy League school would be an inherently better education. It seemed like an inferior school on basically every level. I do think I had a great program despite all that, but I did not feel particularly challenged in the coursework. It seemed old, stodgy, not really knowing what to do with its own diversity, and extremely classist. This affected me because I did not come from a high socioeconomic status myself.
In Michigan, where I’m from, few people have ever even heard of the grad school I went to, but in the NE, whoa does it matter. I’ve gotten at least two jobs because of the assumptions certain people make about you based on the school you attended. I did not stay in that area, but it got my foot in the door, so I’d say it paid off in terms of my actual career.
But it was my enormous pubic university that taught me how to think.
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.
But is there any reason to think performance in this one class, to a standard this professor determined (which may be different from the standards other set, or that she herself set a different year) is a practically effective predictor of who is or is not cut out for a field?
Frankly, I’ve worked with a lot of people who were in a position to assign grades over the years, and had a lot of conversations with people about grading, and over and over again I’ve been shocked by the amount of variation in people’s personal philosophy about grades, and even more about how many people had no philosophy at all: they just assigned grades and the chips fell where they fell.
Even then, I’d argue it’s bad for kids. It’s very often bad information about how you are doing. If high grades are part of your sense of self, you approach your education as about fulfilling expectations: reading the rubric to make sure you earn the points, not actually doing your best work. Risks are unattractive. And the worst is that kids learn to believe their grades are far more meaningful than they are: when you do get bad grades–quite possibly because the teacher is stupid or evil–you don’t believe it, and you feel worthless or incapable. Good kids who trust authority and the system are especially sensitive to this. When you get good grades because you cheated or managed to find a minimal path through the assignment or because the teacher was hung over but really needed to get these tests graded, you think you succeeded, even if you didn’t learn.
I knew a lady one time who gave a 9th grader a failing grade in a course during which the student had watched her 12 year old sibling intentionally hang themselves. That grade had a permanent impact on the student’s future. But in the teacher’s mind, it would have been unethical --unfair to the other students–to give the student a passing grade when they had not completed the work the other students had. I had a student two years ago that missed Jan-March because he was in a horrible car accident that broke several bones in his body and killed two members of his immediate family. When he came back, I told him that no matter what he had an A in the course and he could do whatever he felt up to, for my class or any others. I know people who think I’m literally a bad person for doing that, a liar. I am going to posit that any system where compounding personal tragedies like that is considered the morally superior option is just bad.
Finally, I think it is absolute bullshit to expect me to be both coach and referee. The roles are inherently in conflict. Why is it my job to rank kids for colleges and employers? I didn’t go into this field to spend my days hunting down cheaters and arguing about whether an essay is “A work” and or"B work". I got into this to talk about how this line of reasoning could be strengthened or why the relevance of this evidence is unclear or if this interpretation of a work is supported.
When I was in grad school, a C was a failure and you were out. You could apply for readmission and it was almost always granted, but it was a failing grade. A few B’s were acceptable, but mostly you were expected to learn the course. I should have gotten a B in one course, but lucked out. We were given a list of 50 questions from which maybe five would be the final. I learned about 10 of them and, as luck would have it, they were all among the ten.
When I was still teaching, I didn’t grade on a curve. What I did was write down all the marks and look for clumps, which always happened. A clump at the top, they got A’s. One distinctly above that, A+. The next clump got B’s. In between, maybe A- or B+, depending on which clump they were closest to. And so on. There were always some well below the rest of the class and they failed. If everyone was in a big clump at the top, I was not averse to all A’s. This could happen in an advanced honors course in which everyone was a top student. That is not grade inflation.
Around 1990 we had a new hire who had spent a year or two as an instructor at Harvard. He told me that the dept. chair had warned him not to give any mark lower than B+; else he would have to write an explanatory note. So this is not, even though the Times’ article claims otherwise, a new phenomenon.
I started teaching a course for science students, and after the first semester, I changed a huge chunk of their grade to participation points. They needed room to fail, and thus learn, and the only way many of these students could do that was to have a guaranteed “A.”
Why yes, that does defeat the whole purpose of grading them. But I’d rather have them learn.
Ideally, learning is its own reward, with graduation honors, and where you want to school, both mattering little. And here’s a case for eliminating graduation honors: Improving from being a B/C freshman, to upperclass straight A’s, is more noteworthy than having gotten A’s all along. But if the school has graduation honors, they should be something students can work towards without having to avoid all B’s.
When I went to college in the 1970’s, social science and humanities grades were much more based on essay-writing ability than mastery of material. This points to another grade inflation disadvantage – students will not be motivated to improve their writing if given A’s and A-‘s, on their term papers, right from the start.
If a freshman writes like an academically successful senior, fairness dictates their receiving the A. But the more common experience should be that you improve as a writer over the college years, seeing your grades rise accordingly.
This is like my whole strategy–and I have plenty of AP data to show it works. They learn better when they aren’t being threatened by a grade.
Only if you are relying on grades as the sole motivator. Cover their papers with criticism, they will want to do better next time, whatever the grades are. If they don’t, especially in college, that means they don’t see an inherent value in the learning at all. If that’s the case, fix that.
There was one math course i took in college that i totally failed at. I mean, i learned some stuff, but i ended the course with no mastery at all. It was a graduate course. So I got a “C”. Because that was the failing grade in graduate courses. As far as I’m aware, a “C” has always been a failing grade for graduate students.
A friend used to do the review teaching for our square dance class, which is far, hard, has a lot of drop outs, and a few failures. When we gathered to decide who would pass, he always came, but he never made any recommendations. He used a gardening metaphor, “it’s my job to nurture them, not to weed them”.
I can’t speak to Yale, but i interviewed for Harvard until this year. And all the students, including the legacies, athletes, etc. get in on merit. Harvard accepts a couple percent of it’s applicants. I’d estimate that 60% of those applicants merit admission. So Harvard can do all the selection for racial, geographic, and socioeconomic diversity, musical talent, sports ability, etc. within that 60% who are qualified.
It’s a weird notion that you can somehow rank every person in a group in a unique and useful way for a goal like “qualified to attend school X”. You can’t. And the admissions department doesn’t attempt to.
A statistics class is a pretty objective measure of ability. We’re not even talking about subjective assessments like “How good is this essay?” It’s either right or it’s wrong. I don’t think, for example, someone who failed that class would make a good clinical psychology PhD candidate, because psychological research entails a bunch of statistical knowledge.
In general, I don’t think it’s inherently bad for people to fail at things sometimes. Nobody is entitled to be a clinical psychologist, you know? If they want to go into family practice, they can go get a MA.C degree and have the same job, with the added benefit of being a more desirable hire because PhDs are expensive employees. In fact I’d probably recommend that to a lot of people, because the less grad school, the better.
That doesn’t square with my experience at all. A student’s relationship with their grades can be a lot more complex than that. I can’t even describe to you how much academic performance got me through some of the worst periods of my life. If I didn’t have anything to work for, I’m not sure I would have improved my mental health.
Never at any point did a professor’s rubric keep me from doing my best work. In general it seemed like a pretty good guideline for how to do my best work. I didn’t outperform in every class, but the ones I was passionate about, you can bet I did.
I’m also confused about what’s wrong with a rubric and expectations, that’s literally what I get paid to do. I read a list of funder’s expectations, I fulfill them, and then I get money.
Not really though. At the university level, the approach taken is also very important. It’s not binary. If you accidentally come up with the right “number” at the end, but it’s by faulty thought process, that’s not better than the student who who used the right thought process, but maybe made a typo.
But how much and which statistics should you have to master to be qualified to go on? I know math teachers that stop grading at the first mistake. As far as they are concerned, it’s just wrong. Others give partial credit. That difference in philosophy could determine a person’s whole career path? That seems ridiculous to me. College courses never allow retests, but it’s easy to imagine a student who bombs a mid-term, realizes they know less than they thought they knew, and can go home and study, and be ready to pass handily a week or two later. Why is allowing that considered to somehow be a dilution of rigor?
Sure, but the reason they fail should be rational. It shouldn’t be because they needed an extra week to learn something. Or because their teacher gets a feeling of power from holding students to a standard that is in excess of what they will need in later coursework. But these things happen all the time.
Did you work for the grades, or for the feedback and approval? If it was the former, that sounds awful. If you worked for the latter, grades truly get in the way of that by grossly oversimplifying what a student has done. I never put a grade on an essay for anything other than completion. But I write tons of notes. In my class, you can honestly make a perfect grade doing very little, but you are going to get a ton of critical notes, I’m going to take you out in the hall and nag you, I’m going to keep returning things and suggesting they could be so much better if you just whatever. If you try, you’re getting lots of praise and specific notes about improvement, and they are increasingly turning into conversations, not criticism. Would that really have been demotivating for you? When you saw that none of that attention and praise affected the report card, would you have checked out? Because I will tell you, that doesn’t square with my experience at all. My students generally work. Not all, and certainly not all as hard as I’d like, but way more than ever did when I used grades as both carrot and stick, and acted like only the best of the best would ever win my approval.
I’m glad you outperformed rubrics. I did too, in college, which is why they seemed really stupid to me. There’s nothing wrong with guidelines and expectations, but when it starts to be “10 points for this” and “12 points for that”. it turns the whole thing into a transaction. I shouldn’t be spending my time worrying about whether this student “generally followed standard English conventions” or “had lapses in standard English conventions, but they did not interfere with understanding”. Any time I’ve graded on a rubric, especially ones with multiple lines, I’ve ended up having to fudge it–because there are times when the work is clearly A work, but “according to the rubric”, it’s a B or a C or whatever. And I’ve had to give As to students who clearly gamed the system but would be able to defend a higher grade.
If a course is a course in technical writing, then perhaps basing the final grade on a student’s ability to strictly adhere to a rubric makes sense. But if it’s a course in the Late Roman Empire or a course in Romantic poetry–or an argumentation essay in high school–the aim should be to create a high quality final product. Guidelines on what that looks like are very appropriate. But strict, itemized criteria discourage a holistic approach.
In 2003, when my daughter was at the University of Chicago, which gives out lots of Cs, someone from Harvard came to talk about grade inflation. The audience pretty much laughed at him. No, this is not new.
As for flunking with a C, I assume you were in a PhD program. I know some graduate schools which pump out Masters for money, and I suspect that they’d be fine with Cs if the money was good. Every year I’d get 100 almost identical resumes from one such school. It was pitiful.
Harvard doesn’t just admit the privileged, so others are getting the halo effect. Which is a real thing, I’ve experienced it.
And top schools academically can teach more enriched material. Almost every undergrad at MIT does research today, a program just beginning when I was there. Plus there is the opportunity to meet really top professors. My Bio 101 (or 7.01, to be correct) was taught by a Nobel Laureate. I got to have an interview with Marvin Minsky. My lab was across the hall from the office of Claude Shannon.
If you are teaching a class of kids with average grades you have to go more slowly or you’ll lose them.
There is a big difference between being able to identify data structures and really understanding data structures, as I found out when I taught it.
First, note that there is a difference between everybody getting an A at Yale and almost 80% of everybody getting an A or an A-.
Second, consider how difficult it is to get into the most selective universities like Yale today compared with how difficult it was a hundred years ago. Back then around 90% of applicants were admitted, while now the rates are around 5%. How could this be true, you wonder? It’s because the people who even thought about applying to old, prestigious universities knew perfectly well how the admissions were slanted. Those universities generally accepted people from families who were rich, who went to such universities themselves, who were of the “proper” race, religion, ethnic group, etc., who donated money to the university, etc. Other people didn’t even apply to those universities knowing how little chance they had of getting any consideration.
People knowing little about how much such universities have changed sometimes complain that such universities are accepting people of certain groups who aren’t really up to snuff for those universities. It’s not true. Even the least academically advanced applicants who get in today are better than the vast majority of the ones who got accepted a hundred years ago.