Having just worked up the courage to read the feedback from Spring Quarter's student evaluations (in which one student claimed "Everyone knows you grade harder than other professors. You need to give more better grades"), and my chair's feedback to me indicating that I need to make sure my grades align with those of others in my department because I have apparently "given" too many Ds and Fs and need to give more A grades (!!!),
this article in InsideHigherEd.com was particularly relevant to me, not because I found it surprising, but because I don't understand why administrators continue to encourage grade inflation.
Is there really anyone surprised by the fact that we have grade inflation? Anyone? Is this akin to studying that people feel rested when they sleep, or that drinking water helps eliminate thirst?
More importantly to me, I wonder whether this is even possible. Do we want to find a solution to grade inflation? If so, what do you think?
In their "defense" the admin people can say "We're just following market forces; if 'C' work is the best they can do, than why not bump it up to a 'B' to make the college look good? I mean, the gas companies can charge whatever they think the people will take!"
ReplyDeleteAnd the college becomes an intellectual junk bond....
@Strelnikov: I guess it's the whole "college as business" model that we have become. I WISH we were a gas company. Then maybe we'd get to choose our students because we'd have enough money to not take anyone with a pulse.
ReplyDeleteAs an admin there were two types of teachers I couldn't stand: those who gave Fs for students who did anything wrong at all, and those that didn't bother to teach anything and passed out As like candy. Both did students a huge disservice. One admin stood in the middle of the room in a meeting once and bragged about failing students for having the wrong spacing on their cover page. Really? She then claimed this meant they "couldn't write." (It's really a problem of following directions, but regardless, if the rest of the work is solid I don't think it merits an F.)
ReplyDeleteSo the shit flows both ways. The last two institutions I worked at were constantly begging us to fail more students. Why? Students came from traditionally poor and urban areas and, in meetings, we were told our students couldn't possibly be as smart as the grades they were earning. I thought that was pretty much flaming racist classist bullshit right there.
In response, I worked my ass off to prove those other admins wrong. I mean, the students didn't deserve that rep.
At the first school I worked at, though, grade inflation was a serious problem. Our students did have pretty serious snowflake issues too. But, you know, they came from some of the best school districts in the country and out--so they had to be smart? Right? I mean, they just needed encouragement? Right?
No. They needed somebody to put their foot up their collective ass and make them do work and learn things. No I won't give you scoop on the test. No you can't have a study guide. No you can't have an extension. Yes I will throw you out of my class for saying this class "fucking sucks" from the back row at least three or four times per class period since the very first day you little twit, nor will I let you give a presentation about how much you hate black people because your whiteness kept you out of your school of choice.
Um hrm. I seem to be a bit feisty tonight.
ANYWAY. Grade inflation (or its opposite) seems to be a symptom of something else. Teachers feel inadequately supported, in some way or another, or else it probably wouldn't occur. Peoples' priorities got jacked somewhere along the way or it wouldn't happen.
Or... as in the second school I worked in, even if you spend the right amount of time with students to get lots of them doing good work and really learning, you're told that you should be spending more time on research as having high performing students was a clear sign of spending too much time on your teaching.
Fuck it. We can't win.
@MLP, I don't THINK I arbitrarily assign Ds or Fs for students who don't follow directions, but then again, I feel like at this point, I'm being told NEVER to fail anyone... I teach several remedial courses and am pretty sensitive to differences in learning and accommodating everything from real disabilities to imagined ones, and, for the record, I actually only had one F last quarter (from a student who had turned in two things all quarter, and who I repeatedly encouraged to drop the class), so it's not as if my chair's directive was actually warranted (in my opinion).
ReplyDeleteBut... I don't assign an A grade to someone who simply shows up and turns something in, which apparently is what students now believe an A indicates (simply BEING in class and turning SOMETHING in). I've had students ask me why they didn't get an A on an assignment they had submitted on time, but which was only half completed. Somewhere, they are learning that if they complain enough, someone will pressure the teacher/professor to change their grade.
It sounds like administrators are also being pressured from SOMEWHERE to also make professors 'toe the line.' So... who wins? Anyone?
I am at an institution with a relatively publicized "grade deflation" policy that I can't describe because it would link me to the specific institution.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I have two feelings about grade inflation. I am not denying that a problem exists, but I do wonder if it exists on the scale we think it does. I was once shown a graph of the grade inflation curb at one of my previous institutions which matched exactly the curb of the rise in women in the student body.
My frustration with some of the "impose a bell curve" schemes is that I don't think grades are a bell curve. Grades are a measure of mastery of the subject. If I have 6 students who have shown a mastery of the subject... an honest to goodness mastery... is it fair to the 6th person that I have to give them a B because I'm only allowed to give 5 As?
I'm not talking about people who hand out A's to 80% of their class.
I, too, am as skeptical of the (relatively rare, I think) flunk-'em-all (or even flunk x% of them) types as the given-them-all-As ones.
ReplyDeleteReading through the comments on the article, I was struck by how many people believed it's perfectly okay to give a substantial proportion of a class As, either because doing so reflects "effective teaching" or as the result of some sort of A-is-for-effort (or, a bit better, improvement) grading scheme. Admittedly it's a self-selected group (who's reading a higher ed publication during the 2nd week of August? Other than us, I mean), and a small sample to boot. Still, I'm pretty distressed to find more than one person arguing that lots of As are A-okay (there's always going to be one).
I'm firmly in the camp that grade inflation and the growth of contingent labor are causally linked (though I'm sure that's not the only cause). I'm pretty sure that there's even at least one study that found as much (though I'm not going to hunt it down right now).
At my own institution, the messages are mixed: the director of the program in which I teach would clearly like to see a tougher grade curve (definitely more Cs, and probably more Ds and Fs, though realistically, in the mid-level course I teach at a somewhat-selective school, a lot of the Fs we give are for work that was never handed in and/or plagiarized). However, I'm hearing no such message from the Dean, who does not, to my knowledge, look at grade distributions, but definitely does, to my certain knowledge, look at student evaluation scores. And it's the Dean, not the Director, who ultimately decides if I get to keep my job.
So, yes, there's an incentive for me to inflate my grades -- or at least a little anxious voice in my head during grade conversations with students reminding me of the realities of the situation, and of just how much straight zeroes or ones from one student can skew a batch of 15 or so course evaluations (which is about how many students usually respond out of the c. 25 in a class). That's too bad, because I'm actually pretty good at holding to the "B is satisfactory; A is something extra special" line if I feel safe in doing it, and even being reasonably cheerful and pleasant while doing it. I have a fairly thick skin, and as long as they can't cost me my job, I really don't mind if they're (usually temporarily) mad at me. I did it all the time when I was a grad TA. Paradoxically, thanks to the present structure of higher ed, I've become less rather than more confident of my authority during such conversations, because it's not at all clear that the institutional structures in place actually recognize or support that authority (though I'm sure that, if you asked the Dean or anyone else, they'd absolutely insist that they're all about quality and standards and all those good things.)
Make that the first week in August. I really don't want it to be the second week in August, really I don't.
ReplyDeleteDammit! And I was hoping to get a grant for the water thing, but you ruined it for everyone!
ReplyDelete@Contingent: you've expressed it well. I'm not sure there is any such "institutional standard" established at my school, but when evals are out and everyone can see norms in classes, I know I am going to be emailed to meet with the chair because I happened to have an F when everyone else didn't. It doesn't matter whether the student DESERVED the F. I'm OBVIOUSLY not doing what everyone else is by allowing a student to fail, therefore, I am doing something wrong. I think my colleagues assign Ds for such students.
ReplyDelete@EMH, I'm guessing you can STILL get a grant. Just have a really confusing title with 25 or more words and anyone will fund that, especially if you call it "dihydrogen monoxide." :o)
ReplyDelete@New England Natalie: I wonder what the numbers really mean! Is it even comparable to examine grades when courses have changed and methods aren't the same? Perhaps a better indicator of inflation would be whether we have a better-educated populous than 30 years ago.
Contemplative Cynic,
ReplyDeleteEspecially when there were plenty of stories in the 1960s of male students telling professors that they have to get X grade or they're going to Vietnam.
One of the points I'd like to make is that there are a lot of factors in the change of the college population during the time that we are measuring grade inflation. It reminds me of a not unrelated conversation I once had with a Nobel Prize winner who told me that he thought the fact that there were so few women at the top of the NIH and CDC in the 1980s was proof that they weren't good in the sciences.
What I didn't know at the time because I was a sixteen year old high school student was that the reason there were few women in the upper ranks of the NIH and CDC during the period was because during the 1960s working for those organizations exempted you from the draft. It was seen by many of the people hiring at the NIH that giving a job to a woman was "condemning" a brilliant young (male) doctor to service in Vietnam.
What will stop grade inflation is every professor on a particular campus having access to the knowledge of what grades are given in every class, and by every teacher, correlated with drops and withdrawals.
ReplyDeleteSo, everyone will know if you give out candy grades, or hold the line. It will be embarrassing, but tough toenails.
As I'm a state employee, everyone in the state could get access to my salary. I can easily get access to any other state employee's salary, if I look. Faculty salaries are not transparent at my university, and I think that is a good thing.
I wish the same information was available about faculty grades. It will shame some people into working harder to enforce standards.
"So the shit flows both ways. The last two institutions I worked at were constantly begging us to fail more students. Why? Students came from traditionally poor and urban areas and, in meetings, we were told our students couldn't possibly be as smart as the grades they were earning. I thought that was pretty much flaming racist classist bullshit right there."
ReplyDeleteReminds me of "Stand and Deliver" (you know, the movie about Jaime Escalante).
Maybe I don't have it so bad after all...
ReplyDeleteMy classes are always pass/fail and our department expects about 60% of the students to fail in those classes (based on prior history). I was scared at first, but the students in our area are VERY flakey. It turns out I don't even have to try to conform, as the students bring the failure upon themselves. I was down to about 4 people showing up to class at the end (except for that one day). Oddly enough, those same people ended up being the only ones who passed (and I didn't do that on purpose either).
P.S. My class sizes are about 9 people.
@ Strelnikov,
ReplyDeleteThose same people also justify adding extra zeroes on to their salary.
My college has a standard of 70%. They want to see 70% of students enrolled in a class as of the day of recording complete the class with a C or better. This is an edict from our board of trustees. Our college admins privately tell us they know certain courses are never going to meet that average, yet they've also been ordered to label any class that doesn't meet it as "high risk" and ask the offending department to come up with an "action plan" to improve the numbers.
ReplyDeleteWhen a course is the first in a required sequence or teaches material that's mandatory in order to do well in courses throughout one's higher education, that course by definition becomes a gatekeeper. I simply do not believe, particularly at a community college, that 70% of the students who sign up for freshman comp or college algebra are consistently going to make it through. That doesn't mean I'm not going to try my hardest to make sure my students do their best and learn as much as they can or that I won't hope for the very best outcome, but realistically, 70% or better for every single freshman comp class is not something I can achieve and still sleep at night with a clear conscience.
At the for-profit I teach for, they claim to care about both student teaching evals AND grade inflation. When it came time to consider people for one-year (instead of course-by-course) contracts, I got confronted for mediocre evals. Knowing a gave relatively low grades (a pretty decent curve from C to A with a few Ds too), I asked about that, hoping that would count in my favor. They didn't know about my grades and had to go fish through the course records for the raw data. In other words, they weren't paying attention to grade inflation at all when the chips are down. It makes for nice talk, but it doesn't really matter.
ReplyDeleteI get a report that shows the average grades for each class, the historical average for that class, and the (generic) average for the dept/school/university (?!?; how they can compare classes outside the department is a little odd). Usually, my grades are slightly below the average, but… no one has ever said anything.
ReplyDeleteAnd... why? I think it's because the others are too easy (but don't like to own up to it) and/or my averages help bring down the aggregate (just a little).
I think this is an issue that elicits a lot of hyperbole (see MLP above). I suspect the people who hand out candy are outliers, just as the hard-asses who fail all the brown people are also outliers.
ReplyDeleteThat grade inflation exists is undoubtedly true. I think some kind of proffie peer pressure--publishing averages by instructor--might help. Beyond that, there isn't much that we can do without some kind of institutional backing.
All of that said, there are also specific contextual factors as well. In a big lecture class my grades are slightly below the institutional and departmental averages, but in a senior capstone seminar they tend to be higher. That is, I suspect, as it should be. Seniors in the major should outperform the hoi polloi, otherwise we are doing something wrong.
I'd also mention that while I know that everyone sees a strong correlation between candy and high evals, I am a demonstrably hard grader in those lecture courses, but my evals are also consistently high. It is possible to pull it off.
@Stella: I'd definitely sign on for greater transparency in grading. For a while, at least for my institution, you could see individual grade distributions at koofers.com . I think they were FOIA'd (it's a public institution). i haven't checked lately to see whether that's still the case, but it was interesting. At the very least, I wish I knew that my Dean was looking at both a grade spreadsheet *and* a student eval spreadsheet. I've worked at places where we got back reports with our grade distributions placed in some sort of (anonymous) context, and it was helpful (though yes, Dr D, it does need to be some sort of realistic/useful context).
ReplyDeleteI think the norms, and student expectations, also vary by class. I'm pretty sure that the engineering students I've taught would riot if the grade distribution in my writing-in-the-disciplines course resembled the one in some of their intro courses. And, frankly, I see no need for it to do so, since most of them *can* write to some extent (maybe not the A level, but B or C), while some people pushed toward engineering by family members, etc., really can't do physics and math at the necessary level.
@Archie: not in any way to downplay your achievement, but I think it helps to be white and male (i.e. look like somebody who should have the authority to grade hard), and it definitely helps to have a lecture class (which dilutes the impact of any one unhappy student's evaluation). Of course, it also helps to be a good teacher/lecturer.
My school doesn't share grading or evaluation information, so I have no idea where I fall in comparison to other faculty. I do know, however, that my grading curves never look anything like a bell or a ski slope (like the ones in the article did). I get boobs: a couple of As, lots of Bs, a few Cs, lots of Ds and a couple of Fs. I also know that my bosses consider my evaluations to be excellent. More transparency would be nice so that I could see for myself how I'm doing.
ReplyDeleteI'd also like to see more consistency in classroom policies which I realize is a different topic. But I was sincerely suprised last semester when I learned that some professors won't allow hats in class while others permit the use of smartphones. No wonder kids try to eat lunch in my class while updating their Facebook status and wearing their hat sideways.
And my perpetual problem:
ReplyDeleteStudents who screw up at some point during a semester to the point that they destroy their grades.
I've had A students who fucked up a midterm (oh no! they got a B!) who end up with A- grades; no A grades in that class that term because of it.
I've had straight C students who plagiarize on the final paper. Automatic F. Get a few of those students and you get a handful of F grades in one class.
I've had B students who failed to hand in an assignment or 2. Guess who gets a C or C-?
We as instructors can explain why students received the grades they earned, but those stories get lost when someone (like an admin) cares only for the aggregate. Sooooooooo many of my students screw up their own grades...why should I (or you) be responsible for ignoring their mistakes and just raising a grade because (aw, shucks!) they made a boo-boo?
A chair once gave the dept. a directive to "Fight Grade Inflation!" I designed my class with a variety of assignments to allow students with different expertise to do well in their best educational "style" (mc tests, essays, projects, etc.). Basically, the students had to bomb them all to fail. I got 2 complaints: a C- students who could do neither essays nor mc tests and a D student who was absent 9 times over the term, missed quizzes, and didn't hand in work. Both grades were raised by committee because I needed to "lighten up" (as one committee member repeated about 7 times). I know for a fact neither student learned much that term and the grades they had earned under my elaborate grading method were generous. The committee's grades were far more generous because they presumed the students had basic mastery of the material (and that was not evident in any of the testing materials I had created). Not that they cared.
@Cassandra: Sure, that is always a factor. Only a fool would deny it. But there are also exceptions that give me hope. Mrs. Archie's school has a bell-curve requirement that most faculty just ignore. She has always stuck to it, and still won the top teaching award in the university.
ReplyDelete@The_Myth: that just plain sucks! But really, you need to lighten up! ;P Kidding... Kidding!!! I know what you mean. That's my experience.
ReplyDeleteBecause my department is so small, while names are not attached to the grades, course listings are, so we can see what grades really are, and who assigned them... but this still hasn't resolved the grade inflation problem. These professors don't seem embarrassed that they gave everyone in the class an A except for the guy who was signed up and who never showed (he got a C). Students openly talk about taking class from "Professor Easy A" instead of from others in the department (aka: me) who don't hand out A's. They say, "I love you, but I need an A." Even when we KNOW who gives the "Easy A," they don't seem embarrassed.
@Myth: expecting any one class (or, to be more precise, every class) to fit the same bell curve is absolutely ridiculous, all the more so if the sections are small. Such a standard could only be propounded by people who have no experience whatsoever with teaching multiple small sections of the same class, in the same semester, or semester to semester. Sadly, that probably describes many administrators today.
ReplyDeleteAs for having to go up against a board that changes grades, and tells you to "lighten up" to boot? There are times when I'm grateful that my institution supports professors in some ways (enough so that, despite the fact that there are procedures for grade appeals in place, I've never had things get further than my directing students to the relevant directions, which require them to write -- horrors! -- a letter describing why they deserve a higher grade. Since I teach an advanced writing class, the fact that that puts them off probably says a lot.)
@Archie: there's always hope, and I'm not at all sure that if I were white and male, or teaching lecture classes, I would be getting teaching awards, or even dramatically better evals. I'm much more sure that the emphasis on evals as a method of measuring teacher quality is goosing my grade distributions a bit from the bottom (and probably leading to a few As and A-s that should have been B+s as well).
Oh, Cassandra, I agree. That's why I gave my examples! It's impossible to predict how students will perform, whether by outperforming our expectations or crapping out by the end.
ReplyDeleteAll we can do (which is what I tried) was give them the best opportunity we can for them to show us they know the material/skills/whatever.
I mean, isn't that an attempt at fairness? You know, instead of fudging the grades at the end, which is what a lot of us end up doing anyway (despite good intentions not to do so).
And LOL@Cynic! That's why I always mention my experience. It was deeply humiliating to be so casually and structurally dismissed like that, and whenever I mention it, SOMEONE has had the same experience. It's shameful that it happens at all, let alone with some regularity.
I receive a report after each term showing average grades for each class, averages of my colleagues in the department, and the overall averages of the university. I have lots of explaining to do if my average should fall below my colleagues and the university average. Failing students is also highly discouraged. I think it is the "university as as business" - students are the paying customers and we are the customer service representatives.
ReplyDelete