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>
---------------------------