When I mentioned GPA's it was under the assumption of a GPA upon entering
of School of Education (SOE) with a general liberal arts education in which
all students no matter what their specialty received.
I would add that a lot of what goes on in SOE is more difficult to grade.
So much is journaling and similar final assignments that are difficult to
grade. One cannot really say your feelings deserve a B.
Practicums/student teaching were ungraded and at our SOE they were a
majority if not more of the courses one had to take. There is also a price
to pay for the lack of grading, I think Foucault calls it the confessional.
In all honesty, the lax of grading also works to the benefit of SOE
faculty. How much or how different would the students confessional be if
it were graded.
In reference to other schools, Chemistry, Math, Psychology at our
University they are required to grade on a curve to such an extent even if
students performed above average so many would get A's, B's etc. One Math
professor mentioned this practice and said while she felt all had done
excellent work she was required to use the required grading scheme. I
guess rather than saying one school is lax and others aren't I would look
towards outside pressures (mandated curve), teaching styles (journals,
multiple choice etc.). What and how you want students to learn seems like
it would have a strong impact on the grading. Chemistry, Psychology, and
Accounting are very different profession than education and ones it is
often assumed education should be more like in matters other than grades.
In particular the are diciplines that are strongly based on the built up
idea of knowledge which SOE tends to resist. Because of this their grading
is based on students knowing "knowledge", rather than transforming
knowledge. I wouldn't say this is good or bad, only that it isn't fair to
judge professions based on assumptions of knowledge that differ SOE.
Nate
----- Original Message -----
From: Jay Lemke <jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu>
To: XMCA LISTGROUP <xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Monday, May 31, 1999 1:27 PM
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>
> ---------------------------
>