I feel that I has been successful in destroying grading practice in my
graduate classes. In my undergraduate classes I think I'm about 1-2
semesters away from the success I dream about. Maybe I'm a too big optimist
(or overconfident) but I saw a lot of progress with students who are grade
fricks. By the "success," I mean giving A all the students at the beginning
of the semester.
I'm also responsible for admission students with very low GPA to our
graduate school. I really believe that education is for those who needs it.
This position is not without problems and concerns (e.g., lack of resources
for all who are in need, transformation of instruction to address needs of
all students, lack of institutional support, institutional/cultural
incompatibility), -- but which position is without some problems or
concerns? I personally prefer dealing with these problems and concerns than
with others.
What do you think?
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu]
> Sent: Monday, May 31, 1999 2:28 PM
> To: XMCA LISTGROUP
> Subject: GPA's
>
>
> Counterpoint.
>
> Having served on a committee to examine grading practices across
> departments, and had access to the figures in some detail, I can
> agree that
> SOE GPA's are relatively high.
>
> Compared to Chemistry majors, Accounting majors, even Psychology majors,
> grades are high. Higher grades are given.
>
> I don't see this as a fact about students, so much as fact about the
> grading practices of SOE faculty. Long before my service on that grading
> practices committee I'd served on another one, with a different agenda and
> at a different university. In the first case a university was worried that
> its faculty graded too low and that this was affecting the self-esteem and
> future prospects of its highly selected students. The worry was slightly
> exaggerated (as most issues involving grades are), but there was research
> evidence to support the conjectures. In the second case, I was appalled at
> many of my colleagues' grading practices. It was in fact pretty clear that
> the less academically prepared and sophisticated students were being given
> higher grades compared to students in other sub-programs within the SOE.
> And that much, not all, of the SOE was out of line with grading practices
> in the university as a whole for comparable course levels.
>
> The adminstration was not eager to admit to over-doing grade
> inflation, and
> while it took behind-the-scenes steps to curb some of the worst abuses,
> publicly it argued that SOE faculty devoted so much more individual
> attention to students that they were in fact performing at the high levels
> indicated by the grades. Maybe in some cases there was such increased
> attention (e.g. in student teaching courses or very small seminars), and
> maybe it occasionally made the difference between a B+ and an A-, but for
> the most part the official account was airy speculation.
>
>
> In this season of grades, guilt, and fast getaways ... it might be worth
> asking how faculty members are supposed to have a clue what the grading
> standards of their departments or colleges are? I mean statistically, not
> lists of pieties about what is supposed to constitute quality work. Since
> in many cases there are no entirely valid comparisons between different
> courses or different departments' programs, has anyone ever thought to
> organize a comparison across similar programs in different universities?
> (I've never heard of any such project, maybe others have.)
>
> Setting aside the dubious proposition that we all have some loosely shared
> and reasonably arguable notions about what students in our field should be
> expected to do, just how are any of us supposed to know how to map those
> qualitative standards onto traditional letter grades?
>
> Are grade distributions for particular courses public in your institution?
> are they known or easily available to faculty? what about aggregate
> distributions for departments? Have you ever seen such data for another
> department or a comparable program at another university?
>
> I used to enjoy playing darts. JAY.
>
> PS. Just for openers and not based on the actual data, here is my sense of
> a typical grade distribution for a large-ish (60 students), introductory
> educational foundations course (upper sophomores and lower juniors,
> undergraduate) that I would consider a bit inflated but not extreme and
> relatively acceptable in my institution. Real distributions are often
> skewed a fair bit higher.
> A's 30%, B's 55%, C's 10%, D's and F's 5%
> Within the B's, since we give plus-and-minus now as well, about half would
> carrry a plus or a minus, with substantially more B+ than B-. Within the
> A's, I personally insist on mostly A-minus grades, and very few full A's
> (and one A+ every year or two) as the last sop to my sense of standards. I
> have had a number of students try to appeal an A-minus. No doubt my
> colleagues would have given them the full A, but none of these students
> have even been the strongest the of A-minus group, and none have won their
> appeals (which are usually truncated informally).
> My university is a large public urban university which does not
> have highly
> selective admissions, though my campus would tend to get students in the
> top quarter of the overall university intake, but still with a very wide
> range of backgrounds, including many who take one or more remedial courses
> in their first year. In analyzing a grade distribution like the one above,
> one should probably also take into account that typically 2-3
> students drop
> the course, with perhaps a 50% chance that they are dropping for academic
> reasons. There are other alternatives to F's as well, such as
> asking for an
> additional term to complete required work (usually a term paper),
> and never
> doing so. (The computer assigns an F eventually, but I never have to see
> it.) In general however most students who take additional time
> get the same
> grade I would have predicted if they had finished normally.
>
>
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
> CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
> JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
> ---------------------------
>