I read recently that Princeton is limiting professors to giving out an A to no more than 33% of the students in any class.
I don’t think this is such a great idea. From what I hear Princeton, with the exception of athletes and other highly desirable types, pretty much limits itself to students in the top 1% of academic ability. Assuming that most of them will continue to work their butts off for another four years, isn’t it fair for them to get an A most of the time?
Let’s say I’m in the 97th percentile coming out of high school. And let’s say I know I can get into Princeton because of sports, or legacy or something else. Let’s also say it’s important for me to get high grades - perhaps I want to go on to medical school. I think I’d be crazy to choose Princeton. I’ll be up against the best and brightest competing for a limited number of A’s. Why not go to a respectable school where I’ll be one of the brighter students and have a fair shot at an A in every course?
If people value an Ivy or other elite university degree then people will (and should) be willing to work hard to get it. People in the business world rightly or wrongly value degrees from those schools. I think the schools are doing their best to ensure that those degrees still mean something.
Grades are (should be anyway) given relative to the people in your class or school. Unfortunately, in the USA today, they are not.
If everyone is very smart and the majority do “A” work, then I submit that the standard bar for this particular group is being set to low. In order for grading to have any meaning, you have to segment the population in any group. Some are going to do “A” work, “B” work, “C” work, etc. If most of the people fall into the “A” group, then the system has failed and is useless.
As Telemark said, WHAT school you go to figures a lot in the value equation, as perceived by potential employers and the general populace.
I think law school is a perfect example when discussing grade inflation.
At the majority of law schools, classes are graded on a curve. What this means is that MOST law students don’t have an A average. There is no grade inflation.
I can tell you that this is a scary situation for most 1Ls - since the majority of them are used to straight As from their college experience.
So what happens eventually is that employers look at your grades and your university. A C average means more if you got it from Yale than if you got it from Aunt Petunia’s Backyard Law Academy. In fact, when giving out interviews at smaller schools, firms often place restrictions on who can apply for interviews: e.g. only 10% percent of class.
I guess my point is that NOT inflating grades seems to work in the legal world. Although it makes it harder on law professors who are forced to differentiate between very qualified and eager students. That’s why they give those freaking hard tests!
No reason that it cannot work for regular colleges.
Here’s some interesting reading on the subject from Princeton University. They clearly recognize the grade inflation is a problem and are trying to do something about it.
Grades are a short hand form of evaluation. These evaluations are useful for decisions about what programs of the school the student should be allowed into. They may have some use for employers familiar with the institution. If grades are used properly it often makes sense to limit As. After all in situations like law and medicine quality in comparison is more important than an absolute value. On the other hand there are situations, such as introductory courses, where a measure of how much information was absorbed seems more important. Even so as long as the method of grading is known relevant information can be extracted.
All this would be fairly trivial except that grades have taken on a life of their own. Students pursue grades and use every tool they have to get them. This helps create an environment where grade inflation is a reasonable policy for professors. As long as the education system works the way it does grade inflation will occur. No matter what fixes are put in place grade inflation will happen again, either by other means or because students will find a way to have those fixes undone.
I think grade inflation is bad on the whole, because without using a subtantive part of the grade scale you lose the ability to differentiate between the good and bad students. On the other hand, I would prefer schools to keep up with the trend, because otherwise the students at the schools that don’t wind up looking like morons. I went to Georgia Tech, which doesn’t inflate grades in the least. I pulled a 3.2, which put me in the top 15% of my class, and which involved spending four years studying and working my ass off without even a hint of the drunken orgy you’d get at other schools. You could count the people who got a 4.0 in my class on one hand, without using four fingers.
But when I got out, recruiters would look at my 3.2, look at a guy who got a 3.9 at Florida (and still had a hangover) and think he was the better engineer.
I also went to Georgia Tech, and I graduated with a 3.3. I was crushed because I missed “high honors” by only a hundreth of a point.
When I later discovered that you have to graduate with a 3.5 just to receive “honors” at most other schools, I was shocked.
In my experience, many folks (in the South, at least), know how tough it is to be a wrambling wreck. My advisor still brags to everyone that I went there (it’s kinda embarrassing), even though my undergrad GPA was probably not as high as other grad students in the lab who went to other schools.
Why is grade inflation any more an issue than any other inflation? If Princeton is limiting A’s to 33%, will they also charge the same tuition that they charged in 1980? No one suggests that $5,000 is a great salary, like it was in 1954, we recognize price inflation. Whether one likes it or not, grade inflation has occurred, and it’s silly to pretend you can turn back the clock.
What I don’t understand in your whole education system is this unreal fixation on something so utterly stupid (to me) as sport.
What on earth has an academic degree to do with how good you are in any sort of sport ?? (Unless of course you want a degree in a sport discipline.)
Salaam. A
One effect of limiting the number of available "A"s: wouldn’t students become more competitive and less cooperative?
Would you help a classmate study or give her the notes from the day she was sick if it might mean that she would get your A?
What about different years? If you grade on a curve, how will your employer know if your A was equivalent to an A in the next batch? Maybe your cohort were all brighter on average, and next year’s A could only have gotten a B if he had to compete with your cohort?
Would the employers be expected to know the relative strengths of each year?
Not really; grades are not a currency, they are (in my view) information. Grade inflation doesn’t just make the numbers bigger, it makes the information fundamentally less worthwhile. Price inflation is balanced out by wage inflation; there’s no natural balancing factor with grades. Here in the UK this can be plainly seen with the grade inflation in A-levels; 40% of students now get an A in Maths; the inevitable result is that universities are beginning to set entrance exams, and A-levels start to be ignored. How do you distinguish between candidates who all have 4 'A’s?
This is the difference between currencies and grades - a devalued qualification simply gets replaced. In this sense your suggestion about Princeton’s prices is backwards - they need to prevent grade inflation precisely to protect the monetary value of their course. They sell the gold standard in education; if it is no longer seen as such, they may as well go back to 50’s prices.
Furthermore, grade devaluations affect more people than those taking the exams at this moment in time. I took my A-levels 6 years ago, in which time considerable grade inflation has occurred. To the casual viewer, my qualifications have decreased in value, and I have no opportunity to gain more. To overuse the monetary inflation analogy, it’s as if I’m being paid in 1950s dollars and buying bread in the 21st century…
For large enough class sizes, I’d expect that these sorts of variations are negligible next to the variations in, say, test difficulty. If tests are graded against absolute percentage scores, don’t you stand to be far more disadvantaged by an ill-judged question, or a syllabus mistake? While I can’t back this up, I’d be very surprised to discover that the variations in student intelligence year-on-year were greater than variations in question standard. For small class sizes, certainly I’d expect class-to-class variations to become considerable, and the grade curve needs to be used carefully, with this in mind.
One of the big problems with grade inflation at Princeton is that it’s not consistent across departments. Liberal arts profs give out 60% As while science and engineering profs stick to a more typical bell curve. Given that engineers already have a much heavier course load (lots of advanced math and science, more required courses, one extra course per year), they tend to get screwed when competing against English/economics majors on the basis of GPA.
Fortunately:
Nobody seems to care much about GPA besides entry-level recruiters
Engineers do better on GREs
The engineering degree is held in high esteem, long after grades are forgotten
The Princeton name by itself opens a lot of doors
On a side note, I always thought it was unfair that we had “Math for Plants”, “Rocks for Jocks” and “Physics for Poets”, but no “Nerd Lit” or “Greek for Geeks”. If English majors could get credit for learning how to browse the web in CS 111, then engineers should have been raking in the As for examining the inner meaning in Star Trek or Stephen King.
Here, the question is slightly different. The A levels serve to determine which people get to go to university, and in this respect, what they know is less important than how good they are compared to the rest of the cohort. What they know is probably irrelevant to what they will be studying in the university, and how intrinsically good they are at the subject they studied (which may be a criteria for admission) is more important a gauge to determine if they will be able to make the best out of a university education. In this situation, perhaps grading on a curve is acceptable.
This is in contrast with a university education, where real world skills are being learnt, and knowledge is valued as much as innate ability. To say that only the top 10% should apply for a job when the top 20% have the skills neccessary to do the job is not productive, especially when someone in the 20% might possibly have non-academic skills to make them superior to the top 10% for the job. There is also the question of different standards from different schools and years.
Grading on a curve only gives the relative position of the student in comparison to his cohort, and says nothing about the skills/knowledge of the person.
In addition, the cohort of one A level exam is neccessarily large. If you include all the commonwealth contries (as I am from), it may well be that even if they grade on a curve, the number of people obtaining As in the UK will exceed possible top university positions. The solution is not to grade on a curve, but to increase the difficulty of the exams.
The A levels are also a standardised exam, and what each person obtains is directly comparable to another person’s achievement for the purposes of determining university places, especially since they will likely enter the university at the same time.
In the university context, small cohort sizes are the norm, especially for professional degrees such as Law, or Accounting, or Acturial science. Perhaps for Engineering less so, but even then, knowledge and skill is still more important than relative ability.
I disagree that A-levels are fundamentally different from university courses in nature; some people leave education after A-levels, and for them they represent real-world skills that employers will care about. In addition, grades aren’t a barrier to applying for jobs in the sense you suggest; they are simply a tool for employers to differentiate between applicants. What happens when this tool becomes useless? Employers, too, set their own standards. To gain a graduate job in the civil service here, one must fill out an online personality questionnaire, followed by a detailed application form. This is followed by a telephone interview, followed by a half-day on-site assessment. This in turn is followed by a full day assessment and interview. This is becoming the norm, and it is because graduate employers are finding it difficult to distinguish between the array of applicants with 4 'A’s and a first class degree.
A non-curve grading standard doesn’t provide any more detailed information on an applicant’s actual skills, either. Quite the reverse - as we see, the effects of grade inflation make it impossible for quality assurance processes to maintain a meaningful standard. What does an A in Maths mean, here in the UK? They’re clearly not grading against a curve, and they claim that standards are maintained - yet 40% of students taking it will get the best grade there is.
I believe it is the solution, mainly because the incentives in the system militate against maintenance of standards, particularly in a nationalised course such as the A-level. When the government is judged by its performance based on pass rates, there is inevitably a vast amount of pressure built into the system to raise those rates. Certainly, this can be achieved by increasing teaching quality, but that’s very difficult. By having competing exam boards supplying a supposedly unified qualification to different schools, the motivation is clear - a school interested in boosting its rankings will pick an exam board that gets good grades. The exam board in turn makes more money the more schools it serves. The motivation is thus overwhelming for the exam boards to lower standards. I can personally attest to this - in reviewing past papers prior to my exams, I found tests from only 6 years previously were of a completely different standard, despite no major syllabus changes. It’s no good trying to keep difficulty levels normalised if the whole structure of the system it’s not in the interest of the major players.
I guess in this area the difference in experience between UK degrees and US degrees might be significant - for me, the concept of a grade average is unusual, as my institution did no such thing - we took year-end exams and got a percentage mark. Grade boundaries were set by an examiners’ board, taking into account various factors, but with the intention of keeping grade proportions roughly constant year on year. In this context grade curves are fine, since the class size of 400 is statistically large enough. For a degree composed of numerous autonomous courses with a lot more variety, I’d certainly agree that a lot more care needs to be taken if a grade curve is to be used.
Honestly, though, with regards to many top grades, I don’t see why it’s such a bad thing. Exams and qualifications shouldn’t be a test of comparative ability, but rather of a standard of understanding. So what happens if a whole cohort, by fluke, understands Physics to the standard of Newton? Should we grade on a curve and fail 50% of them? I agree that it is a contrived example, but it clearly shows the weakness of grading on a ccruve.
I think the extra criteria of interviews and such is a good thing, though. Between candidates of similar ability, extra tests should determine the job, not simply tests of comparative ability (which may not be accurate, especially when dealing with cross cohort applicants). An objective standard of ability is necessary.
That said, so far I have only put forward an argument against grading on a curve. As you may have noticed, an objective standard should mean that grade inflation should not exist. Which clearly is not the case. The reason why grade inflation occurs is simply due to market pressures for greater number of top grade students. It cannot be stopped. Grading on a bell curve certainly prevents this market pressure from having any effect, at the cost of losing all objectivity to the result. If losing objectivity is acceptable, then it is a very good way of doing so (for example, granting limited funds for scholarships).
However, I don’t think the worth of my knowledge and skill should be determined relative to my cohort. Again, if I have the skill needed for the job, I should not be denied the possibility of obtaining it simply because my cohort was smarter than the previous, or because my university had a smarter cohort than another traditionally similar standard university.
Clarification: If employers differentiate based on grades, then they will be differentiating of unequal grounds with respect to cross cohort applicants from the same university, as well as rendering all cross university comparisons meaningless based on grades alone.
