Tuesday, October 29, 2013

An Early Thirsty on Grade Distribution from Atua Bear.

A colleague of mine informed some of our newer TAs what average we should aim for when grading the midterms. He stated: "The standard grade distribution is shockingly right-skewed (87-88 average, with about 30% of students getting some variety of A)." That is, a high B is what we should aim for when grading our exams.

I'll admit that I'm at a top university in the nation for some programs, though not all. The university is private and thus expensive--that's about all I can say without giving away my identity. Prior to this appointment (still a doctoral student), I was at another university (public and cheaper) where the average was about a high C; the university was ranked much lower than my current private institution. I'm actually surprised that the public institution had lower grade inflation than the private university... of course, the private, elite institutions have a reputation to protect (thus they inflate grades), but shouldn't public schools be doing the same in order to compete with private universities? I haven't noticed my private, elite students being smarter than my students at the public university, so I don't think the inflation discrepancy is a consequence of smarter vs not-as-smart students.

Q: What's the grade average that you aim for, or that you are told to aim for? Do you consider this average as grade inflation? When you were untenured did you worry more about having a certain average? Do ivy/elite universities or lower-tier universities have more incentives to inflate grades? Have any solutions to the problem of grade inflation?

33 comments:

  1. My department expects a more-or-less normal distribution centered around the C range. C is average, we tell the students. C means you did exactly what I asked you to, no more, no less. We're also given charts to compare our distribution to the rest of the department for any given semester so we can see if we're radically off. If one semester skews up or down, it's no big deal; our chair understands that off semesters happen. It's a constant skewing across multiple semesters that might get you a talking-to.

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  2. Lotsa questions here.

    I was told when I was hired that an average grade in the C+/B- range (yes, we do half-grades) was fine, and that's what I stick to; it didn't appear to affect my tenure process at a teaching-oriented SLAC. My mainstay course is redacted chemistry, and the class GPA is pretty much always in that range. I also teach gen-ed science courses now and again; the class GPA trends a little higher there, but that's because I'm really teaching middle-school science.

    Last I knew, ivy/elite universities have bigger grade inflation problems than community colleges or lower-tier schools, and private schools inflate grades more than public ones. Overall, 43% of all grades awarded nationwide are "A."

    On the other hand, that's not true of my courses. I sometimes wonder whether I ought to give "real grades" and "ironic grades" -- with the ironic grades being posted to the student's GPA -- just to get our students a better chance of making the various honor societies in competition with their grade-inflated peers.

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    1. omg..."scare-quote" grades. A gold mine of an idea.

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    2. Wouldn't a university with relatively high admissions standards have stronger students than a less selective school? If so, then the fact that brighter students with better study habits get better grades is not an issue of grade inflation, it's just a case of better students doing better.

      I work at a private high school with very high admissions standards, and our director has lately been fretting about "grade inflation," which I think largely misses the point. We have very high academic standards, and most (though definitely not all) of our students meet those standards pretty well. That is, we have a lot of "A" students. Our students are measured according to many external standards such as SATs, ERBs, and Advanced-Placement exams, and they do very well on those, too, so it's not as though we're living in our own fantasy land--our students DO tend to be above-average compared to the American student population as a whole. And our weak students are weak across the board.

      The more relevant question seems to me to be "do we have appropriately high academic standards, and do the students' grades accurately reflect how well the students have met those standards?" If the answer is yes, then it makes absolutely NO difference how many students get As. Deliberately trying to create an average that we deem acceptable is absurdly dishonest and pointless.

      One thing that has always pissed me off about the College Board's AP History test is that they fuck with the statistics so much that the numbers don't really tell us anything. AP grades are simply rankings of how well a student did on that year's test relative to the other 300k students who happened to take it that year. Thus, we don't really know whether students were better prepared in history 20 years ago than they are now, because the tests aren't held to any uniform standard. The Educational Testing Service is trying to sell a product that satisfies both families and colleges instead of designing a solid test with reasonable standards and letting the grades fall where they fall. Hell, one year I worked as a grader and halfway through scoring one of the essays, my whole table was told that the scores were coming in "too high" and we needed to "get the scores down" into a lower category. Sucks to be the kids who were graded later that week.

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    3. If you give all your students As, how do you differentiate between the stellar and the merely very good? How do you get your students to try to perform better if they're going to get an A anyhow?

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    4. Anyhow, I don't curve -- not formally. My standards are high -- though not as high as they could be if I had better students -- and most of my students don't come up to the mark. If they did, I'd given them the grades they deserved. I'd be perfectly happy if everybody earned an A or a B, but if that's happening routinely, then you need to raise your standards -- your student body isn't being challenged.

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    5. I don't give all of my students As. My point was that a large percentage of them are legitimately earning As because of the particular nature of our student population (e.g., highly motivated and academically well-prepared). When I worked at a rural university with open admissions standards, I experienced a much wider range of quality in student performance, and therefore grades.

      What I don't understand is identifying an average (let's say a C), and then saying that I expect some number of my students to fall into the C range. Then manipulating my grading criteria to ensure that a certain number of students earn Cs, Bs, and As, and then getting all upset if the "numbers are off." That seems unfair and counter-productive. For example, I usually have one section that is demonstrably more talented than the other two or three, and for a while I thought this was odd. Then someone pointed out that the kids in that high-performing section all happened to also be in Honors Physics and some college-level math class that dictated when they could fit my class into their schedule. Thus I had a section of very, very bright kids. I wouldn't expect any of them to earn a B in my class much less a C, and sure enough, they perform very well. What am I supposed to do, make the class "harder" for them to force them into the lower grade ranges? What does that prove?

      All I'm saying is that grade distribution is affected by many variables, and pre-determining average grades seems weird.

      I have a rubric that articulates the level of content mastery and analytical sophistication that is required for each letter-grade range. By the end of the year, I would hope that most of my students would have the ability to work consistently in the A-range. They don't, of course. There are always many B and a few C students. But if every single student in class demonstrated high-level mastery of the subject matter, I would be delighted to give them all the A-grades that they duly earned, and I shouldn't have to worry about some imaginary "average" that is nothing but a contrived and arbitrary standard.

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    6. Our pre-determination of a reasonable average generally has the purpose of boosting student grades rather than retarding them. We can't afford to set our standards too high; we're a tuition-dependent institution. And we don't curve, as I said; the idea is that if the average falls too far down it's because we're operating under the illusion that our students are better than they are.

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    7. I think Surly has a great point about comparing across institutions. Another scare message we often hear is comparing across time, as in "the average grade at Harvard used to be a C." Sure, when it was a place where rich men from the East coast learned the classics. Now it's students from all over the world who've been tutored since they were in diapers. Not terribly comparable.

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    8. Y'all are missing the point. The purpose of grades is to allow outside auditors to tell which students were better than which others.

      If the grading scale is compressed to the point that the typical grade is "A", grades become useless and we're back to standardized tests and letters of recommendation in which everybody walks on water.

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    9. I wouldn't say that the grading in that instance is useless. Regardless of what the distribution of grades, the evaluator needs to have an idea, at least generally, of the quality or expectations of the instructors. A grade of B in a Cal Tech chemistry class is better than a B from the same class at my school. Their academic standards are likely higher.

      Now, comparing different grades or grade distributions from different schools is tricky. An A at my school may be comparable to a B from Cal Tech. It's a tough call.

      A grade distribution of all As may mean that your standards are too low for your students or that your students are much better than your standards are designed to detect. Neither case is ideal but, again, you need to know the quality of the school or instructor to make that determination.

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  3. A further thought: if your school is good, and known to be so, a "B" or "C" should count for as much or more than an "A" from a poor school.

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  4. I don't understand people who don't understand distributions. It's all about the distributions. The average doesn't matter.

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    1. "You need to distribute more A grades."

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    2. "The average doesn't matter."

      - as long as everybody is above it.

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  5. Some days, the only thing that keeps me from polishing up my CV is the fact that nobody within my university, college or department administration has ever asked me or my department colleagues to change our requirements or expectations of students. They frown, sigh and grumble about how we can help students more so that more pass our general chemistry course but they've never implied that we make the course easier or boost grades artificially.

    The average GPA from our freshman chemistry course is 1.9 - 2.3, depending on the semester with about 20% withdrawing at midterm. As a side note, we don't see much variation among faculty, though some work overtime to help students and others don't seem to give a shit.

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  6. We are somewhat encouraged to have an even distribution rather than a specific GPA. And by "somewhat encouraged," I mean that once every 3 years, the chair brings in data and shows us how we "fit" with the rest of the department or college and tells us to remember that if our distribution indicates that everyone is getting an A or everyone is getting an F, we should reconsider our expectations.

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  7. There is much fighting over this information where I teach. Some folks want to not talk about it all; others, it's all they want to talk about.

    We have one chap who used to pair up student evals with grade distribution to prove that he was getting hosed on evals because he was too tough. He stopped a couple of years ago, but not before creating a hostile environment from a special "snowflake mom" in our department who gave out all As and got sterling scores.

    I personally feel as if none of this is the college's fucking business. HIred me? Well, then you've got me. You don't like what I do? Then start some review and let me go. But stay out of my class and my gradebook.

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    1. I'd love to write this in one of my self-evals when I'm up for review. :)

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  8. When I was in the U.S. Navy in the late '70s and early '80s, the mantra was "two-five, survive." In other words, a grade of 2.5/4.0 was considered passing. That of course is 62.5%. (I got a 98% in Navy Nuclear Power School, widely considered the most demanding academic program in the U.S. military. Admiral Rickover liked it.)

    Here at Middlin' State, 68% of first-year undergraduates need writing remediation, with an increase from 57% to 68% between 2000 and 2010, and that's a matter of public record. In my general-ed intro astronomy class for non-majors, I use the increments 85-100% = A, 70-84% = B, 60-69% = C, 50-59% = D, and 0-49% = F. The total average for most classes is about 65-70%, slightly lower than the borderline between a B and a C. This corresponds to a class average between 2.1 and 2.3. This corresponds to 5-10% grades of A, 25-30% grades of B, 40-50% grades of C, 15-20% grades of D, and 5-10% grades of F.

    I think this is about right, since for any given class past the 4th week of the semester, 1/3 to half the students attend class seldom to never. It is impossible to get about 10% of them to stop texting in class, not that I don't try. My average undergraduates read and write about at 6th-8th grade level, with about half the graduates unable to write at 9th-grade level, and do math? HA! Most can't do fractions, which used to be 4th-grade level. So, I think I'm being very generous, really overly so. When my students meet Ivy-League graduates, my students will have a word for them: "Boss."

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  9. I assign a ridiculous number, and proportion, of Bs, and believe that I should be assigning more grades in the C range, especially since my salary and renewal reviews are not overly dependent on student evaluations. However, given the number of students I teach, I'm not sure I have the energy to deal with the level of complaint that would arise. It also seems that a B- or below induces a level of panic in some students that makes it hard for them to concentrate on anything but the grade itself. But that's an excuse; really, I should be assigning more C level grades (and probably some Ds as well. I do assign Fs, for the simple reason that some of my students never do the assigned work, and a subset of those plagiarize it).

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    1. You sound a bit like me, Cassandra, although I sometimes end up assigning a considerable number of Cs as well as Bs.

      My grade distribution tends to look like a compressed bell curve, with lots of grades in the C/C+/B-/B range, and not many As and Ds. There's always a spike on the F end of the curve, mainly because some students fail to complete the assigned work or stop showing up for class, and there are usually one or two plagiarists in there as well.

      I always tell my students that I have no pre-determined curve. If everyone earns an A, everyone will get an A. And if most of the class earns an F, I'm happy to given out plenty of those as well. The distribution also tends to depend on the type of class. I teach a freshman class that is required for all students as part of the general education component of their degree, and the median grade in that class is often in the C or C+ range. In an upper-level class full of majors in my field, the median grade will likely be higher.

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  10. Many students know that if enough of them complain loudly enough about the texture of the hamster fur, they can get their teacher fired, simply because of the noise and not because of the validity of the complaints. However, we have to be willing to not cave to that.

    I get the same kind of hamster poop from students.

    "But I'm graduating!"

    My favorite response: "Then you understand how important it is to EARN a passing grade in this course."

    "But this course has nothing to do with smearing poop on a shingle!"

    My favorite response: "You chose to take this class."

    "But I have to in order to graduate."

    Me: "Good, then you understand how important it is to earn a passing grade in this course."

    Ad infinitum/nauseum. One of us eventually gets tired and it's never me.

    A collegue of mine was quite the smartass with students who were performing poorly. He would meet them after class and inform that they obviously love the course a great deal to want to have to take it all over again. That usually got the point across.

    And this idea of GIVING grades? No. You don't give SHIT! They earning their fucking grades, and I tell them as such on the first day of class. All I do is report the facts, and I remind them as such throughout the semester when they want to bitch to me about having "given" them a C on the test. I always love to tell them that I didn't give them a C, just to see the look of confusion on their faces.

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    1. However, their idea of EARNING... that's an entirely different animal.

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    2. Someone like this could easily get lost in an "illogic loop." What fun! :)

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  11. No matter how I slice it, my average always comes out to a B-. I never aim for it; that's just where it lands. I like this because when I get a grade dispute I can say brightly, oh, the average grade on this was a B- ! (Translation: most people did a lot better than you; your C+ is actually a C- because my grading is on the high side; now go away).

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  12. At both the incredibly non-diverse CC where I used to teach and the SLAC-that-pretends-to-be-better-than-it-really-is where I teach now, my leadership has been totally hands off on my grading. The biggest concerns at both places seem to be that my admin is orderly, students non-complaining and final grades turned in before they are due.

    This conversation is interesting, because it parallels one that takes place at the Big Government Agency (tm) where I spend my full time working hours.

    Like many organizations, we like to periodically keep the employees uninformed about leadership perceptions of their true worth by restructuring the evaluation system. The current system is now about five years old. We have now reached a point where managers essentially have just two points on a five point system to evaluate their peeps.

    Almost nobody gets the lowest two scores. Those who do are probably on their way to termination (or, easier for all, resignation in lieu of termination). Very damned few get the highest score (I've never given or received one as an overall score, although some of the contributing subcategories have had this shiny happy number appear on both those I write and those written about me). I can't prove it, but these are probably reserved for the very special rising superstars who are clearly destined to advance faster than the very best of their peers...for whatever reason.

    So the rest of us live in a world where what is analogous to Cs and Bs are pretty much the total assessment tool kit. Organizations monitor their averages closely, and after several years of the new system, this year we got the message --in writing-- that our averages were just too high. Even though we hire very special people, and charge with with doing very special things to serve the citizens, we simply can't be too far above average. So many managers were forced to just lower their scores in order to satisfy the average trackers.

    Why am I telling you this? It started out this way: I was in the navy at the same time as Froderick (and beyond). He is quite right about the demands of the USN's nuclear power school. HUGELY challenging. But, he forget to mention three other important truisms of the navy (and probably joint service) classroom domain:
    (1) It's called a "standard" for a reason: and even the minimum is good enough...or it wouldn't be a standard.
    (2) It's only a lot of reading if you do the reading
    (3) You will see this material again (often accompanied by a stomping of the instructor's foot during a pre-test review of the most recent subject matter.

    I'm now teaching a feedback-intensive writing class. Happily, this term its populated by a majority of students who have apparently learned to write somewhere else before showing up in my class. To which I say: "YESSS!"

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    1. But my 98% in nuke school, based on reading I did do, did serve me well, when it was time for me to MEET Admiral Rickover himself. He just said, "SO! You think you're so SMART? Well, I have people who are MUCH smarter than YOU!"

      Then there was an uncomfortable pause, which of course means that I needed to say something. So I said: "Yes, sir, I'm sure you do."

      He liked this. All he said then was "You think you can lose 15 pounds in the next 6 weeks?" I said, "Yes, sir!" and he said, "NEXT!"

      (Rickover said he interviewed all the nukes in this way because on paper, they all looked good. He wanted to see how they'd respond under pressure. It worked: they still have a perfect safety record.)

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    2. As a non-nuke, non-sub navy guy, I only know of RIckover through apocrypha. Like the nuke power candidate who was dismissed from consideration during a lunchtime interview with Rickover for salting his food before tasting it. Or the ones he simply sent to closets to ponder the errors of their answers. He was a naval figure full of real and legendary awesomness!

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  13. My students earn the lowest average grades (according that review site...) in my department. I sometimes curve the grades, which pains me, but it allows me to put an end to the otherwise endless cries for extra credit, and it's slightly more fair to account for the legions of passive snowflakes at our institution who seem afraid to engage me. I'd hate to reward only the most vocal.

    Oh, the reason I have the lowest average is that a majority of my colleagues give grades based solely on attendance.

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